The media and the lie without truth
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 3, 2023
There are different kinds of lie. The most common form is that of one who, though knowing or believing to know how things are, for some reason, consciously says the opposite or in any way denies, if only partially, what he knows to be true. This is what happens in perjury, that for this reason is punished as a crime, but also, more innocently, whenever we have to justify ourselves for a behavior that we are reproached for.
The lie we have been dealing with for almost three years does not have this form. It is, rather, the lie of the one who has lost the dividing line between words and things, between news and facts, and, hence, he can no longer know if he is lying, because every possible criterion of truth has failed for him. What the media say is not true because it corresponds to reality, but because their discourse has replaced reality. The correspondence between language and world, on which once truth was based, is simply no longer possible, because the two have become one, language is the world, news is reality. This alone can explain why the lie does not need to make itself plausible and does not in any way hide what appears as an obvious falsity to the ones who still adhere to the ancient regime of truth. Thus, during the pandemic, the media and official bodies never denied that the mortality data they reported referred to the ones who died testing positive, regardless of the actual cause of death. Despite this, although being obviously false, such data have been accepted as true. In the same way, today nobody denies that Russia conquered and annexed twenty percent of Ukrainian territory, without which the Ukrainian economy is unable to survive; and yet the news is all about the victory of Zelenskyy and the now inevitable defeat of Putin (in the news, the war is between two persons and not between two armies).
The problem at this point is how long a lie of this type can last. It is probable that, sooner or later, one will simply let it drop, to immediately replace it with a new lie, and so on — but not infinitely, because the reality that one no longer wanted to see will eventually show up to demand its reasons, even if at the price of notable catastrophes and misfortunes, which will be difficult if not impossible to avoid.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 3, 2023
There are different kinds of lie. The most common form is that of one who, though knowing or believing to know how things are, for some reason, consciously says the opposite or in any way denies, if only partially, what he knows to be true. This is what happens in perjury, that for this reason is punished as a crime, but also, more innocently, whenever we have to justify ourselves for a behavior that we are reproached for.
The lie we have been dealing with for almost three years does not have this form. It is, rather, the lie of the one who has lost the dividing line between words and things, between news and facts, and, hence, he can no longer know if he is lying, because every possible criterion of truth has failed for him. What the media say is not true because it corresponds to reality, but because their discourse has replaced reality. The correspondence between language and world, on which once truth was based, is simply no longer possible, because the two have become one, language is the world, news is reality. This alone can explain why the lie does not need to make itself plausible and does not in any way hide what appears as an obvious falsity to the ones who still adhere to the ancient regime of truth. Thus, during the pandemic, the media and official bodies never denied that the mortality data they reported referred to the ones who died testing positive, regardless of the actual cause of death. Despite this, although being obviously false, such data have been accepted as true. In the same way, today nobody denies that Russia conquered and annexed twenty percent of Ukrainian territory, without which the Ukrainian economy is unable to survive; and yet the news is all about the victory of Zelenskyy and the now inevitable defeat of Putin (in the news, the war is between two persons and not between two armies).
The problem at this point is how long a lie of this type can last. It is probable that, sooner or later, one will simply let it drop, to immediately replace it with a new lie, and so on — but not infinitely, because the reality that one no longer wanted to see will eventually show up to demand its reasons, even if at the price of notable catastrophes and misfortunes, which will be difficult if not impossible to avoid.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Francisco Goya, Murió la Verdad (Truth Has Died), 1810–1814. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
No comments:
Post a Comment