The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog

        Filmic language operates through juxtaposition: we interpret meaning by the proximity of images presented in succession. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Werner Herzog film in full, but the logic of cinematography is readily apparent in his The Future of Truth. Herzog’s book is a strange, little volume whose title makes it sound like it would be philosophy—and it kind of is—but it’s one that operates through association.

In the opening to the book, Herzog explains how philosophers have not been able to adequately define truth and so he has no grand ambitions for his own work. All the same, Herzog explores the idea of truth—not an objective truth, but an emotional truth that seems to govern our age. The circuitous route Herzog takes to get there is strange. The chapters are about topics as diverse as expeditions to the top of Mount Everest and Elon Musk’s mission to Mars and the plots of operas. There are a few common threads that pop up: fake identities, fake news, manipulation of reality through technology, but the way they weave together is primarily suggestive. Intuition guides us through.

Herzog shares vignettes that fit within the broader theme. For example, there is a chapter about Family Romance, LLC and Herzog elucidates the layers of deception involved in the project. (I should really watch this film). In reality, there’s a Japanese business that rents out people for special events—if you have someone unpresentable in your family (like an alcoholic father), you can rent out a stand-in, brief them on the background, and save face. In the film, which Herzog said was mistaken for a documentary, the actual owner of the business appears as a key figure in a story of false identities. At the core: everyone is lying. The hired father is a fake, but the woman he works for and her daughter share stories about a trip they never took. Deception operates throughout the film, but then also after the film there was meant to be an interview with Yuichi Ishii (the CEO) and one of the lonely men that uses the service. Yet, the lonely man selected never actually used their service and was in fact one of the rental family members. Herzog reports that it was a scandal and a loss of face. These layers of mistaken identity run through the text in an interesting way; it’s almost like the reverse of a doppelganger narrative.

Herzog also hops between moments in history to show the broader significance of ‘fakes.’ One chapter, for example, is a “history of fake news” starting with the very founding of Rome and depictions of Nero. It’s a weirdly humanizing take on the notoriously awful emperor; Herzog accounts his pleas for suicide and failed attempts. There’s a desperation in the account that’s quite moving—and then a weird account of the four other Neros who tried to take his place, linking them to the multiple Elvises romping around Japan’s downtown hubs. From there, Herzog jumps to Constantinople and competing popes and forged documents that were discovered during the Renaissance. Brief detour: Herzog talks about his meetings with boxer Mike Tyson, who—who knew—became an expert on obscure historical figures while in prison. After that, we get into Potemkin cities and the open secret of those papier-mâché towns and “Peace Village” in the demilitarized zone in Korea, a place built for 200 people with parks for families that has no occupants but is nonetheless swept clean every morning. Herzog links that to The Truman Show and the Enron sham, where they had a dress rehearsal for employees to pretend like business was going great. We hop back and forth and forward and side to side through these moments to, I think, contextualize our current moment of ‘fake news.’ There’s a chilling account, too, of Jean-Bédel Bokassa having one of his political enemies killed and eating half of him, the other half kept in the freezer.

The Bokassa section of the chapter is an incredible historical anecdote. He fathered many children, and in particular a girl named Martine with a Vietnamese woman. As an adult, Martine showed up and was welcomed by her father as her favourite. However, after that, another girl named Martine from Vietnam came forward and announced that she was his real daughter—the first was a fake. Martine2 brought forward an artefact and some knowledge that only the real Martine could have. Bokassa ends up accepting both and married them both off the same day in identical wedding dresses…well, before arresting both husbands and putting them to death. In Herzog’s account, the details are hazy: it sounds like perhaps there was a conspiracy of one husband to kill the child of the opposing Martine. The fake Martine got “sent back to Vietnam” but the private plane was back within half an hour. The power of this story is haunting and absurd to me. It’s one of those situations where the truth is stranger than fiction.

With all this about “Fake News: A Brief History”, what is intriguing to me is that Herzog shows a great deal of restraint. There could easily be a genuine political argument here, a discourse about the value of authenticity or our power to accept delusions. And yet, we are just given stories. Stories with a great deal of evocative power, but without definitive conclusions. This, I believe to be Herzog’s thesis throughout: truth is not that which is objectively provable, but some deeper core.

Towards the end of the book, there is some more discussion of Herzog’s own film projects and the implication to me is clear that he’s drawing on a different conception of truth, one he describes as “ecstatic.” The power of film, and stories more generally, is to elevate us to this ecstatic truth that reveals to us something beyond that which is easily comprehended through the lens of fact. It’s an argument that we’ve likely heard before about fiction, but something about Herzog’s presentation allows The Future of Truth to embody that argument. It’s the resonant quality of the anecdotes, the evocative power of the vignettes, the tracing of a historical thread so thin that Constantinople and Mike Tyson can appear in the same sentence. A connective tissue.

Happy reading, truth seekers!

The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld

  Years ago, I was teaching a Grade 10 English course and had some students reading The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, which was adapted into its graphic novel form by Josh Neufeld. Parts of it stuck with me for a long time. I remembered it as being an illuminating exploration of media and I was hoping to use it, at least in part, for my media studies course. I remembered the book as talking about the funding structure for media and how that impacts the kinds of messages we get to see (think: Noam Chomsky). 

There is some of that, but it isn’t exactly how I remembered. Essentially, The Influencing Machine is a history of journalism. Gladstone hops between different time periods and watershed moments in reporting and discusses the impact of the media in relation to peoples’ everyday experiences. She quotes from a range of primary sources, noting the reactions that people had to news when it became widely available in print—and then widely available on television—and then widely available on the internet. Perhaps it’s because Gladstone is a journalist that she’s able to tell it all as a story. She draws some clear parallels between different historical points in time, the most notable of which (for me) being the way journalism shifted during the Vietnam War and beyond.

There’s a lot to talk about in terms of media evolution: the changing relationship between journalists and the military, the way polls sway us or not (posting this on election day feels serendipitous…), the way that we have come to trust and distrust information. The vignettes Gladstone choose are effectively representative and the balance between her own narratorial voice and the accounts of others is nicely achieved to reflect the times and the commentary on the times. If there’s a downside to Gladstone’s historico-anthropological approach, it is that it is doomed to the marching on of time: even since the book’s publication in 2011, we have seen immense changes to journalism and reportage. While Gladstone references Stephen Colbert’s idea of “truthiness”, the book isn’t so current as to address “fake news” or living in a post-truth AI-content-generated world.

In a book like this (namely: a long-form essay turned into a graphic novel), it runs the risk of being bland, but Josh Neufeld’s illustrations add a liveliness and expressiveness to the work as a whole. The depictions of Gladstone herself are often amusingly cartoonish, transplanting her into different historical eras complete with period-appropriate garb. For a book that is intent on telling the “truth” (while “objectivity” is problematized), Neufeld does not shy away from some creative embellishment. The pages have a liveliness to them that captures the spirit of the time, if not the letter of the time (although there are specific speeches and letters that have been illustrated here).

Gladstone’s book gives us a lot of food for thought, especially as we progress into a world increasingly unchecked for factuality and manipulated into sensationalized stories. Granted, these tactics are nothing new—ever since the conception of news, there has been mis– and dis–information, but the book needs an update, a revised text that explores how the media industry is being influenced by big tech’s privatization of information and its subsequent manipulation over us. The debate of privately / publicly funded news is given an engaging voice with uncertain answers here—and it’s time to take action. Like the book itself, I’ll end this review with a reminder: we get the media we deserve. It’s time to claim it.

On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt

        This book is bullshit. Philosophical bullshit, but bullshit.

Harry G. Frankfurt’s book, On Bullshit, is an account of truth, lies, language, and, of course, bullshit. In this slim volume, Frankfurt compiles definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and scraps from other philosophers, like St. Augustine and Ludgwig Wittgenstein, to determine just what, exactly, bullshit is.

It might be a stroke of genius that the book itself feels like a joke, an exercise in bullshit. I think everyone has some intuitive understanding of the core concept, so to spend 80 pages defining it in grandiose terms and elevating it to the status of a high concept, with lengthy discussions, definitions, and meanderings, feels like an exercise in enacting the concept itself. It reminds me of J.L. Austin’s book How to Do Things with Words, which demonstrates locutionary and illocutionary acts and performs the concepts in question (he does do things with words, after all!).

After providing a methodology for his exploration, Frankfurt then goes on to discuss the definitions for a range of words that mean, essentially, the same thing as bullshit. He begins with “humbug,” noting that the words are not interchangeable but that the difference is essentially one of gentility (i.e. it is more polite and less intense than to say humbug, balderdash, claptrap, hokum, bunkum, imposture, quackery, etc.). When considering the definition offered in another essay, written by Max Black, called “On the Prevalence of Humbug”: humbug is “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.”

At its core, the book is an exploration of what kind of speech act bullshit is, as opposed to a regular lie. Frankfurt notes that bullshit is “deceptive misrepresentation” since it is designed or intended to deceive. It’s not a mistake; it is deliberate. The intention to deceive is critical, which then means that the standard for assessment is a comparison to the speaker’s state of mind: their motives and the properties of the statement work in conjunction. So, both humbug (b.s.) and lying are at least in this the same: the speaker’s mind intends to deceive.

Frankfurt then tries to add nuance to the discussion of a lie. For instance, if someone knows they have five dollars in their pocket and they claim to have ten, they have lied about the reality of things. He gives a survey of some other accounts of lying which suggest that someone could lie even if the statement is true. Once again, he relates this to the speaker’s state of mind: they think they are not reporting the truth but actually they are. For instance, they imagine they have five dollars in their pocket, claim to have ten, but then actually do have ten. As long as the speaker believes the statement is false, it is a lie—even if the statement is factually true.

If the utterer’s heart is in the right place, there are other characteristics that must be considered. Humbug is “short of lying” in that it has some characteristics of lies, but not all of them. Returning to Max Black’s definition that humbug appears “pretentious by word or deed,” it alerts Frankfurt’s ear to the fact that “pretentious bullshit” is a common phrase. He justifies this connection with the idea that pretentiousness is the motive of the utterer, not the nature of the utterance. So, bullshit need not necessarily always be pretentious, and again it depends on intention.

Frankfurt really targets the notion that the perpetrator of humbug is misrepresenting himself and most of the book’s details can be traced back to that idea. A bullshitter misrepresents their state of mind (e.g. pretending to have a desire or feeling that isn’t there), but they might also misrepresent something else in addition. He misrepresents what he is talking about, but also his own state of mind towards it. Frankfurt claims that that is unavoidable, which seems a fundamental distinction between lies and bullshit. The other consideration is the purpose of lying or the purpose of “talking shit.” A liar might misrepresent what is in his mind in order to persuade someone to do something. A bullshitter might have other motives, like experimentation (more on that later). 

One of the things that defines bullshit, irrespective of its truth value, is its shape. A lie, for example, might be well-crafted in order to be disseminated. Bullshit is supposedly not well-crafted. It does not have thoughtful attention to detail. It is subject to impulse and whim. If anything, Frankfurt notes, bullshit is an indifference to how things really are. Indifference is not the same, quite, as the well-structured lie. Yet, Frankfurt notes that in practice there are all kinds of bullshit that exist in marketing and politics that are extremely calculated. Both liars and bullshit craftsman are a little lax, but are both trying to get away with something. 

Thus, we continue.

Frankfurt gives an anecdote, possibly apocryphal, of Wittgenstein speaking to his friend Pascal, who had had a tonsillectomy. Pascal says she felt like a dog that had been run over, and reportedly Wittgenstein says she doesn’t know what a dog that’s been run over feels like. There’s a certain consistency in truth-value that Wittgenstein demands. The whole exercise makes me think back to J.L. Austin’s notion of statements that, when spoken, might be true but lack context and thus misfire. Frankfurt suggests that this may be an instance of bullshit—of speculation, perhaps. (Or, as Maebe Fünke says refers to it in Arrested Development: “I was just specu-lying.”) Elsewhere, Frankfurt suggests that bullshit is more like a bluff than a lie. A liar deliberately suggests a falsehood, but bluffing is not false so much as fake. Bullshit isn’t false, it is phoney—and that which is not genuine doesn’t mean it’s less true. Essentially, again, it all comes down to the idea of intention.

Much is made of this Wittgenstein story, but what I find more important is the notion of sincerity. Part of what Frankfurt suggests is that bull has a different relationship to sincerity than a lie. A bullshit artist might not be sincere, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are wrong. If bullshit is sincere, Frankfurt says, it means that it cannot be produced inadvertently. One cannot be inadvertently insincere. Thus, they might simply put forward something that is phoney in intention, but qualitatively the same as the real deal (i.e. fake it ‘till you make it!). A bullshitter can be fake while not getting things wrong.

Perhaps one of the more useful explorations of language is when Frankfurt discusses the idea of “bull sessions”---that is, informal discussions, often among men (though Frankfurt notes that this gendered aspect seems unnecessary). What is of value is the discussion that bull sessions are characterized as being “not for real.” The circumstances are such that people do not speak openly if they think they’ll be taken too seriously, so bull sessions allow them to see how it feels to say things and discover how others respond without having to commit to their purported position. It’s an experimental approach. Thus, if we think about the purpose of a lie, it seems to be to convince. If we think about the purpose of bullshit, it is to explore, to test, to experiment.

To me, there’s the important component that a bullshitter is an artist of sorts. They do not care about the relationship between truth. The truth value of statements are not of interest to him. He is not trying to report or conceal the truth. As a result, a bullshit artist can be more free to play. 

All of this is a little abstract. Especially since our world seems to be full of bullshit, there’s the question of why all of this matters. Frankfurt notes that there is a higher propensity for bullshit today because people are required to speak on any number of topics while lacking the expertise. We are all compelled towards discourse we cannot actually be a part of in a meaningful way. In that respect, much of this review is probably bullshit—I’m just trying to give an account, fake my expertise, and explain ideas I’m trying to grapple with.

I think the conversation could be continued, actually, with the full implications of intentionality. Modern discourse, especially in social justice spaces, has taken an anti-intentionalist approach to language. Misfires of language (e.g. making a racist remark) is judged by its impact rather than the intention guiding it. At one point, Frankfurt comments on how we are much harsher in doling out consequences to liars than to bullshitters. I wonder how this rubric might be applied to mismatches of language and intention.

When closing the book, Frankfurt returns once again to the idea of sincerity and posits the issue that we cannot possibly be sincere because sincerity requires a degree of self-knowledge that we rarely, if ever, have. We cannot be sincere because we can’t isolate understanding of ourselves from our context. It’s a controversial claim to end the book on—if we can’t ground what we’re saying in our self-understanding, the idea of intentions, and the idea of motivations, the book seems to end on the note that everything is bullshit.

So, there we go. Everything is bullshit.

Happy reading, I guess?