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Led by Dr Joe Stadolnik and Dr Gregory Whitfield.
The IAS examined this theme in collaboration with the Mishcon Academy at Mishcon de Reya, and established a programme of events around these particular areas:
- Technologies of deception and denial, digital developments and the fabrication of facts, fictions, factoids and fibs
- Alternative facts, post-truth, fake news, double-speak and misrepresentation
- Ethics and honesty, withholding information and economising with the 'truth'
- Veridical evidence, witnessing, perjury, oaths and testimony, lying and the law
Listen to the Lies Sound Archive on Soundcloud.
Read or download the Think Pieces Issue on Lies here.
Editor-in-Chief: Tamar Garb
Academic Editors: Geraldine Brodie and Jane Gilbert
Editorial Manager & Graphic Designer: Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
The following events were organised by the research group:
Public Lecture Series: Ashraf Jamal on 'Art & Lies' (5 October 2018)
The IAS welcomed Ashraf Jamal for this talk.
What's Your Type? The Strange History of Myers-Briggs (5 September 2018)
The IAS welcomed Merve Emre for a talk drawn from her new book.
Myths around the public sector and whose interests are served by the underlying lies (17 July 2018)
The IAS welcomed Mariana Mazzucato (UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose).
What conditions breed innovation and entrepreneurship? Most people seem to agree that the state playing a large role in the economy is not one of them. Indeed, burdensome government bureaucracy is typically juxtaposed in opposition to the ambitious, risk-taking entrepreneurs who have driven the technological revolution of the past few decades, and now operate the world's largest and most dynamic corporations.
There is no Silicon Valley in Europe, so the argument goes, because Europe lacks America's free market capitalism and minimal state intervention. This assumption, says Mariana Mazzucato, is not only factually wrong but dangerous for the future of innovation and increases inequality. The false dichotomy between "the public sector" and "the private sector" leaves out the vital role that government has played - and must continue to play - in acting as financial backer and risk-taker in the most important innovations of our time that can help tackle the grand challenges facing us. Furthermore the lie ends up causing a situation by which risks are socialised while returns are privatised.
'Trust Me' - A Symposium on the Language of Medical Expertise and Imposture in English, 1400-1900 (25 May 2018)
'Trust Me' was an interdisciplinary symposium on the long history of medical publicity. How did medical practitioners craft a language to cultivate confidence in their knowledge and abilities in English? The conversation traced how the assurances (and overassurances) of expertise-expressed in mountebanks' medicine shows, print medical advertising, bedside manner, and training literature-adapted to new paradigms of knowledge, media technologies, and regulatory regimes to win the trust of patients and authorities. The event explored the history of that language, as well as the forms of its dissemination in literary and public culture: how did this language circulate as a dramatic genre, a political problem, or style of speech? In this, the event followed this set of professional medical practices as it was translated into social life and the popular imagination, and how these practices shaped broader cultural attitudes about medical expertise and the people who claimed it.
M. A. Katritzky (Barbara Wilkes Research Fellow in Theatre Studies, Open University) delivered the plenary lecture. This symposium was organised in partnership with Elma Brenner and the Wellcome Collection.
Seminar: Democracy and (dis)trust in the experts (24 May 2018)
The IAS welcomed Alfred Moore (University of York) and Zeynep Pamuk (University of Oxford) for this seminar.
Alfred Moore: Dynamics of Trust and Distrust
How are trust and distrust related? Distrust is often - at least implicitly - framed as the mere absence of trust. Yet some important strands of liberal and democratic thought (e.g. Bentham) suggest a more complex relationship: we might trust in authorities to the extent that we believe there are mechanisms in place to make them trustworthy. Specifically, the active distrust of some might generate the conditions for the trust of others. Although various theories of institutional and political trust have emphasised the importance of monitoring and vigilance to minimise the risks of trust, less attention has been paid to ways in which trust and trustworthiness can arise from practices premised on distrust. In this paper I set out to give a fuller account of the dynamics of trust and distrust, which I will elaborate with some examples from science, the economy, and politics.
Zeynep Pamuk: A Political Epistemology for Uncertain Times
We believe that decisions made with more knowledge produce better outcomes. The ideal decision-maker is typically modelled as an agent with full information. At the same time, most political decision situations are defined as much by what we don’t know as what we know. Modern societies must make policy decisions on the basis of expert knowledge that is uncertain, incomplete and subject to disagreement. These epistemic difficulties are compounded when non-expert decision-makers must evaluate complex information without sufficient expertise and under time pressure.
Neither the value of having knowledge, nor the fact that available knowledge is often fallible and incomplete should be controversial. Yet we have not paid sufficient attention to the implications of the fact of imperfect knowledge for how the use of expertise should be treated in political decision-making. Even when we recognize the limitations of the knowledge we have, we still act as if trying to obtain the best available approximation or to identify the correct expert would be the right thing to do. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this approach and to show that the recognition of the shortcomings of our epistemic condition should change our procedures and institutions of decision-making. I argue that we should adopt a “second-best” approach, which requires focusing on possible failures, raising or lowering evidentiary standards, employing strategies of deliberate ignorance, or shifting power and responsibility to different agents and institutions depending on the particular context and purpose.
Talk: Medieval Fiction and Its Contraries (18 May 2018)
When we theorise about literary fiction, we tend to define it against its contraries - against fact, truth or history; in opposition to scripture and belief; contra error and lie. In this talk, Julie Orlemanski (University of Chicago) reflected on the 'others' of medieval fiction as both a historiographic problem and a literary-critical one, and along the way argued for a comparative approach to the study of fiction in literary studies at large.
Truth, Lies, and Cheap talk - Formal studies on information aggregation (9 May 2018)
The IAS welcomed Francesco Squintani (University of Warwick).
Post-Truth Politics and the Rise of "Bullshit" (30 April 2018)
The IAS welcomed Adrian Blau (King's College London) for this talk.
To what extent are we experiencing what some people call "post-truth politics"? Several commentators have approached this question by using Harry Frankfurt's notion of "bullshit" - a particular kind of nonsense, which Frankfurt characterises as phoniness, indifference to truth. G.A. Cohen has discussed a different kind of bullshit: unclarifiable unclarity, i.e. something which is not clear and cannot be made clear. Blau showed that there are at least three further types of bullshit, and that each of the five types of bullshit violates core principles of rationality. He relates each type of bullshit to different aspects of post-truth politics.
False Promises - Human Rights and the Politics of Hypocrisy (20 April 2018)
The IAS welcomed Emma Mackinnon (Cambridge University).
When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had chaired the drafting committee, presented the new document to the American public under the title "The Promise of Human Rights." Recent historians have echoed this claim, arguing that the UDHR represented a promise from the postwar powers, and from the United States in particular, on which to found a new international order. René Cassin, also one of the document's drafters, described the UDHR in France on similar terms: a renewal of the promises of 1776 and 1789.
And yet, especially in the two decades following 1948, both countries faced accusations of hypocrisy for openly violating their promises: France for colonial violence and the use of torture in Algeria, the US for racism and white supremacy. Certain critics charged both countries with failing to put stated ideals into practice - with saying one thing and doing another - and demanded the more complete fulfilment of past commitments. But looking to the Algerian resistance, including the work of Frantz Fanon and Ferhat Abbas, as well as to African American activists, particularly Malcolm X, I identify an alternative critique. For such critics, Mackinnon argued, hypocrisy arose not from the failure to make good on a promise, but from the way the promise itself had been made. Denouncing the promises of the past as lies, they made use of the language of human rights to demand the making of new promises. Returning to this critique allows us to reconsider the meaning of hypocrisy in relation to the making and keeping of promises, and the interplay between universal ideals and imperial practices.
Lying in Early Modern English Culture - From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance (16 April 2018)
The IAS welcomed Professor Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex) for this talk.
Defamation: A Roundtable on Lies and the Law (22 March 2018)
The IAS hosted a panel discussion on the present and future of defamation law. How can the law best protect rights of speech and of privacy in a digital age? Has the Defamation Act of 2013 allowed for the publication of truths, opinions honestly held, or speech in the public interest? How has a new standard of harm respected the rights of the claimants and defendants in practice?
Panel:
- Dr Alex Mills (UCL Laws)
- Professor Rachael Mulheron (Queen Mary Law)
- Robert Sharp (Head of Campaigns, English PEN)
- Dr Judith Townend (Sussex Law)
Christina Sharpe on 'Lies and Lying' (21 March 2018)
The IAS welcomed Christina Sharpe (Tufts University) for this talk, which was organised in collaboration with Autograph ABP.
Misinformed: A Roundtable on Social Media and the Shaping of Public Discourse (5 February 2018)
The IAS hosted a roundtable discussion on media and politics in the age of the viral post, troll farm and automated botnet. How has the new digital media environment changed the ways we form opinions, elect representatives, challenge governments, create divides and bridge them? Bringing together researchers in political science, digital culture, journalism, and social media analysis, the roundtable addressed the specific challenges posed by the ascendancy of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to democratic societies, and about the possibilities these technologies might open up.
Panel:
- David Benigson, CEO, Signal Media
- Anastasia Denisova, Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster
- Lisa-Maria Neudert, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
- Gregory Whitfield, Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL
Psychoanalysis in the Age of Post Truth: Panel Discussion (24 January 2018)
The IAS welcomed an interdisciplinary panel discussion about the role of psychoanalysis in the age of post-truth. Panellists included Lionel Bailly (UCL Psychoanalysis Unit), Mairead Hanrahan (UCL SELCS), Rye Holmboe (UCL History of Art), David Morgan (Psychoanalyst and Organiser of The Political Mind), Mignon Nixon (UCL History of Art), and David Tuckett (UCL Psychoanalysis Unit).
Marcel Theroux in Conversation with Rye Dag Holmboe about The Secret Books (1 December 2017)
Seeking adventure, a young man flees the drudgery of shopkeeping in Tsarist Russia to make a new life among the bohemians and revolutionaries of 19th century Paris. Travelling undercover in the mountains of British India, he discovers a manuscript that transforms the world's understanding of the historical Jesus. Decades later, in a Europe threatened by unimaginable tragedy, he makes a despairing attempt to right a historic injustice. This breathtaking novel by the award-winning author of Far North and Strange Bodies tells the extraordinary tale of Nicolas Notovitch and his secret gospel. It is the epic story of a young man on the make in a turbulent world of spies and double-cross, propaganda and revolutionary violence, lost love and nascent anti-semitism -a world which eerily foreshadows our own era of post-truth politics. Based on real events, The Secret Books is at once a page-turning adventure and an examination of the stories that humans are willing to kill and die for.
Marcel Theroux is a novelist and broadcaster. He has published five novels. His second novel, The Paperchase, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His fourth novel, Far North (2009) was a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award, the Arthur C Clarke Award, and was awarded the Prix de l'Inaperçu in 2011.
Rye Dag Holmboe is Fellow in Contemporary Art at UCL. His writings and interviews have been published in The White Review, Art Licks, and in academic journals.
Evidential Images (29 November 2017)
The IAS hosted a panel discussion exploring what, exactly, photography and film can prove about 'what actually happened'. What truths could the camera capture?
Our panellists discussed how technologies and genres of visual media make claims to truthfulness each specific to themselves. What kind of evidence have makers of true crime documentaries like The Jinx caught on tape? How could photography, painting and print each claim to reproduce the Dauphin's true likeness in the post-revolutionary France? How was Japanese newsreel footage of events in the Pacific screened for foreign audiences? Panellists from UCL and SOAS explored the not-so-straightforward relationship between seeing and believing through the lens of modern media history.
Speakers
- Professor Stella Bruzzi (UCL, English and Film Studies),'"Evidence verité" and some of the issues raised by recent true crime documentaries'
- Dr Richard Taws (UCL, History of Art), 'Dead Ringers: Afterimages of the French Revolution'
- Dr Marcos Centeno (Film Studies, SOAS), 'Seeing Liberators, Seeing Perpetrators: Displaced Images of the Japanese Empire'