In a post-truth world, can we at least be honest about Raygun?

I like to imagine that Dr Rachael “Raygun” Gunn’s Olympic performance was an academic’s commentary on our current predicament in dealing with mis- and disinformation. The post-modernist academic movement of the late 20th century popularised the idea that there is no objective truth, just subjective experience. It asserts that the way that I perceive the world around me is to be privileged over an observable and external reality: the concept formerly known as the truth.

Which is what makes the Raygun breakdancing performance so on point – deliberately or not. The judges rated it as objectively, thoroughly – zero marks – awful. By taking her very special type of breaking to the global Olympic stage, Raygun demonstrated that something can be bad by a set of clearly defined criteria in a forum explicitly designed to reward excellence. And some people – a frightening number of people – will still insist that it was really actually totally good. If we fall for that, we’ll fall for anything. We can no longer discern what is good or bad, true or false.

The judges gave her zero. Gunn said the “hate” in the wake of her controversial performance had been “pretty devastating”.Credit: AP

It’s a timely skewering of the post-modernist fad. We should realise by now that it was a serious error to undermine the notion of objective reality. It has rendered us ill-equipped to deal with social media, which provides spaces for an infinite number of different realities, crowding out the shared frame of reference and forum for debate that the mainstream media once offered.

Artificial intelligence has given us the means to convincingly illustrate our “truths” with deep fakes. But not everyone has to be bamboozled by a computer-generated video. Fakes come in all forms, including tweets and personal messages. It’s enough if the new piece of dis- or misinformation fits in with your truth – something that your id and your ego hold to be self-evident. They just have to be “truthy” to the recipient to have persuasive power.

In recent times this has turned deadly serious. In the US, Donald Trump’s stolen election narrative sparked the January 6 Capitol riots, and has left a nation of gun owners on edge. In the UK, agents of chaos falsely claimed that a Muslim asylum seeker attacked and killed children, inspiring a lynch mob to try to burn down a mosque with people in it. Our “dominant paradigm”, as an academic might call it, our post-truth era, desperately needs to be disrupted. We need objective truth and it needs us to put aside our individual interpretations and agree that it exists.

It wouldn’t be the first time an academic has made an important point by creating something objectively terrible to show that people will defend all kinds of bunk. Some readers might remember the Sokal hoax, a prank on the post-modernists. In 1996, physics professor Alan Sokal authored a nonsense article which he titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, really laying it on thick. One of his pearlers was a line that argued: “The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a centre. It is the very concept of variability – it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something – of a centre starting from which an observer could master the field – but the very concept of the game.”

Sokal submitted the article to a humanities journal called Social Text, which did not recognise the balderdash and published his glorious absurdities in full. Then he revealed in another academic journal that the whole thing was a deliberate hoax. The hoax rocked the establishment. Unfortunately, it soon rocked back to its post-truth tilt.

Dr Rachael “Raygun” Gunn is first and foremost a cultural studies academic. Her articles and papers, like those of many academics, are filled with the kind of passages Sokal mocked. A standout paragraph from her PhD declares: “I use analytic autoethnography and interviews with scene members in collaboration with theoretical frameworks offered by Deleuze and Guttari, Butler, Bourdieu and other feminist and post-structuralist philosophers, to critically examine how the capacities of bodies are constituted and shaped in Sydney’s breakdancing scene, and to also locate the potentiality for moments of transgression. In other words, I conceptualise the breaking body as not a ‘body’ constituted through regulations and assumptions, but as an assemblage open to new rhizomatic connections.”

In recent papers, she expresses a more lucid concern that the Olympics will destroy breaking culture. Or, in her jargon, “alongside concerns of an increasing sportification of breaking, this trajectory points towards an increasing loss of self-determination, agency and spontaneity for local Australian breakers and will have profound consequences for the way in which hip hop personhood is constantly ‘remade and renegotiated’ in Australia”.

This makes it hard to determine whether Raygun set out to protest the “sportification of breaking” with her Olympic performance, or whether Dr Rachael Gunn is exposing our post-truth environment with a body of work that is plainly bad. I’m not sure it matters – she has achieved both outcomes precisely because we can’t tell for sure. Gunn spoke out on Thursday night about the devastating “hate” she had been subjected to, and said: “I worked my butt off preparing for the Olympics and I gave it my all, truly.”

The only thing I’m not sure about is whether we’ve hoaxed ourselves. Or whether the butt of the joke will end up being her university, the discipline of cultural studies, or academia more generally. Or perhaps the Olympic Games, the public who funded her trip, or the many, many enthusiasts who tied themselves in knots considerably more sophisticated than Raygun’s on-stage contortions. In the end, I’m not sure it matters on whom the joke was; it was so perfectly delivered that all the above stand hoaxed, even if that was never Raygun’s intention.

Breaking? Dr Gunn just writhed and hopped an interpretive dance expressing our collective post-modernist disorientation. We’re already broken.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens