IAS Lies: Editorial

Foreword by Tamar Garb. Poem by Gloria Fuertes, translation by Pamela Carmell. Editorial by Albert Brenchat, Geraldine Brodie and Jane Gilbert.

Image: Mr Savethewall, Forever, Como lake, 2016

Welcome to this first edition of IAS Think Pieces! I am delighted as Editor-in-Chief to introduce the initial publication in our twice-yearly review series.  Each issue is devoted to one of our two annual IAS research themes; we begin with the intriguing notion of Lies, which we explored in multiple ways over the period of one year. The contributions that follow represent diverse ways of thinking with the theme, drawing on literary, art historical, political, historiographical and philosophical perspectives. They offer a wonderful taste of the kind of dialogue and discussions we convened. Consideration of the theme went beyond these speculative contributions as well, bringing researchers into the IAS to debate the concept of ‘post truth’ in relation to political discourse and psychoanalysis, exploring theories of ‘bullshit’, meretricious advertising, and the mediations of social media, new technologies and the conventional press. We talked about lies and racialized thinking, about human rights and ‘false promises’, about medical ruses and cheap speech, fake news and official fibs while looking at texts, photographs, movies, para-fictions and post fictions, evidential images and contested documents. In a dizzying array of approaches and intellectual encounters, successive panels, workshops, lectures, artists’ talks, readings and discussions opened up the theme in multiple ways. 

Steered by our JRFs Joe Stadolnik and Gregory Whitfield, discussion on ‘lies’ ranged across disciplines, enabling conversations between scholars working in and across a range of specialisms and fields. What you see in these lively pages is a taste of the vibrant culture they helped to engender and host. I am very grateful to the Academic Editors, Geraldine Brodie and Jane Gilbert, for their work in bringing this collection of articles together. I would especially like to acknowledge the Editorial Manager, Albert Brenchat, for his dedication to this publication and the IAS series. The editorial team introduce the edition more fully below. Most particularly, I thank the authors of these pieces for agreeing to allow us to disseminate their stimulating contributions beyond their initial presentations. 

I hope you enjoy this first issue.

Hemos de procurar no mentir mucho.
Sé que a veces mentimos para no hacer un muerto,
para no hacer un hijo o evitar una guerra.
De pequeña mentía con mentiras de azúcar,
decía a las amigas: –Tengo cuarto de baño–
–y mi casa era pobre con el retrete fuera–.
–Mi padre es ingeniero– y era sólo fumista,
pero yo le veía ingeniero ingenioso!
Me costó la costumbre de arrancar la mentira,
me tejí este vestido de verdad que me cubre,
y a veces voy desnuda.

Desde entonces me quedo sin hablar muchos días.

We must try not to lie so much.
I know sometimes we lie not to end a life
Or create one or to dodge a war.
As a child, I told little white lies.
I would tell my friends: ‘I have a bathroom’.
(my house was a shack with an outhouse)
‘My father’s an engineer!’ (He was just the furnace man
but in my eyes he was an ingenious engineer).
Learning to extract the lie took a lot of work,
I knitted this dress of truth that covers me.
Sometimes I walk around naked.

Since then I go for days without saying a word.

Lies were at the forefront of our thoughts in 2018. The concept of ‘post-truth’ has become increasingly prevalent with reference to current political and social analysis, but at the IAS we wanted to explore the relationship between truth and lies from a broader perspective. In this issue of IAS Think Pieces we aim to continue the debates that began in the seminar rooms at UCL beyond the walls of the university, putting academics of different disciplines, writing styles, and standpoints in conversation with each other and with the broader public. Our aim is to present a diverse collection of critical and adventurous approaches, and we have not sought to impose a single (supposedly neutral?) voice on our contributors, but to convey some of their distinctive styles.

The pieces collected here draw on the arts, political sciences, and philosophy to address three main aspects of lies: freedom of speech, the lie and/as social formation, and the changing ethics and politics of lying as creative untruth over long historical periods, culminating in the present day. The authors have chosen to focus on very specific cases, disciplines, and geographical areas to make broader claims around lies, and we invite you to read the connections between their ideas across the different texts. As editors, we felt that one significant aspect of lies not included in our contributions was the intimate scale of the subject’s mind; therefore we have used Gloria Fuertes’ poem above — and its translation by Pamela Carmell — as one way of thinking through these connections.

In the translation of Fuertes’ poem, it is not clear if she would lie in order to have a baby, or in order not to have one. But this confusion is itself powerful, as lying becomes an empowering tool to defend personal agency. Fuertes told many lies. Her house was gigantic, and tiny. It had five bedrooms and three bathrooms; it had one bedroom and an outhouse. Her father was an engineer; he was the furnace man. Seen in the context of her life, the issue was not only that Fuertes’ lifestyle, class, and income were unacceptable; her sexual orientation and ideology also did not match the ‘absolute truth’ of her time. Knitting a dress of truth — or of lies — was an act of rebellious protest against the difficult reality of the Spanish dictatorship, where only one truth was allowed. Like Fuertes’ poem, Marcel Theroux and Rye Dag Holmboe’s interview shows the positive ethical and political role that self-conscious fictionalization can play. They explore Nicolas Notovitch’s rewriting of Jesus’s life so as to protect the reputation of Jews in hostile nineteenth-century France and Russia where the notorious anti-semitic fabrication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had spread.

In his text, ‘Black in Five Minutes’, contrastingly, Ashraf Jamal supports Fuertes’ opening position: ‘we must try not to lie so much’. Jamal exposes the polite, hypocritical liberal refusal to discuss the racial inequalities that continue to structure modern South Africa in spite of years of reform and (supposed) fraternity. Half a millennium of colonialism and empire cannot be swiftly and neatly swept away. In its original Spanish, Fuertes’ poem highlights how lying becomes a sort of habit (costumbre) that needs to be pulled up, as one would pull up (arrancar) a plant with its well-developed roots, or tear the skin from the body: extracting a lie takes work, and it hurts.

Jamal nevertheless also suggests that lies may be ambivalent: not only malign, but also potentially ‘enabling metaphors’. This ambivalence is further explored by Julie Orlemanski and Steve Fuller, both of whom adopt a historical approach towards explaining today’s unstable truth-cultures. Orlemanski proposes that a comparative study of what is considered ‘fiction’ will allow us to be precise about the term’s different meanings and different ethical status in disparate cultural and historical situations. Fuller, meanwhile, traces how Western philosophical views have come in modernity to regard lying as ‘the generative source of alternative and even competing truths’ — producing the paradox that everyone nowadays can ground their own assertion of ‘the truth’ precisely in the fact that others declare it a ‘lie’.

Current discussions on the limits of free speech and of ‘fake news’ face the problem of what are often presented as ‘little white lies’: whether easily falsifiable untruths circulated shamelessly for political ends or ‘truths’ officially propagated by authoritarian regimes that brook no dissent. Thus, Anastasia Denisova analyses censorship and echo chambers in Russian social media. She both shows the real effects of oppressive censorship for Russians, and debunks the myth, spread by Western media, of the Russian government’s global reach.

And so sometimes we feel naked - and want to go for days without saying a word.

We hope you enjoy reading these texts as much as we have, and we thank all the contributors warmly for their generous and collaborative spirit.