Summary:

Since Greek antiquity, the rhetorical tradition has proposed to conceive and apprehend the search for truth differently from the Western philosophical tradition that was born with Plato. Platonic politics wished to control the city by subjecting political expression to the philosophical concept, whereas rhetoric opposed the logocratic and universal claim of philosophy, in the name of the diversity of subjectivities and forms of life that composed the demos, and justified democratic deliberation as a form and process of agreement and democratic agency.

This symposium aims to develop a critique of the current debates against Post-Truth and fakeness, led today by Big Tech in an effort to ensure its hegemony on the process of subjectivation and to control the political expression of the demos through the control of the digital economy, which today includes the economy of creation and economy of imagination. In addition to the critical force of the rhetoric that we wish to rehabilitate, in order to denounce the illusion of a digital democracy through the current platforms of digital capitalism, this colloquium would like to suggest a different approach to the problems related to the deepfake by proposing an articulation between a Critical Digital Rhetoric and a Digital Political Economy.

Rather than censoring the new combination of Fakeness and Artificial Intelligence, called the deepfake, as Big Tech is doing today, we wish to reintegrate the production of deepfake in a digital political economy, which would exploit the rhetorical potential of deepfake in a new economy of digital democracy. The latter would face the challenge of revealing the democratic value of the deepfake through the possibility of a circulation and a reappropriation of symbolic images as well as a digital hermeneutic. It is thus a new rhetorical paradigm of digital democracy that we wish to promote as an alternative to the alienating alliance of surveillance capitalism, computational capitalism, computational sciences, and data sciences.