How We Got Here - notes from viewing

You can't have truth without untruth.
How strange that the truth should depend on a gust of wind.
- Martin Heidegger

Truth isn't truth.
- Rudy Giuliani

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1851, Melville. 'Moby Dick'.
God is everywhere, but if God is everywhere, does that also mean he's nowhere?
The novel opens with fifty pages of contradictory quotes about whales.
The signal gets lost in the noise. The white whale can't be found.
No one knows anything.

1855, Whitman. 'Leaves of Grass'.
"Whatever satisfies the soul is truth."

1859, Darwin. 'On the Origin of Species'.
Natural selection, the big blow to religious certainty.
Not only was there no Adam and Eve, but also humans aren't special.
We're just animals like all the other animals.

1850s - 1890s.
Telegraphs, railroads, photographs, factories.
Machines are replacing workers.
French impressionists break painting down to dots of colour.

Monet - "A landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment".
Degas - "One sees what one wants to see. It is false, and that falsity is the foundation of art".

1880, Dostoyevsky. 'Brothers Karamazov'.
"'But what will become of men then?' I asked him, 'without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like?'"

1882, Nietzsche. "God is dead and we have killed Him."
"There are no facts, only interpretations".

1890, Emily Dickinson. "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant".

1891, Oscar Wilde. "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth".

1894, Paul Valéry. "One must have some distrust of books and explanations that seem too clear. We are deceived by what is definite."

1895, Freud. Our perception of reality is bent through the prism of our unconscious drives and instincts.

1898, false journalism pushes the USA into the Spanish-American War.
William Randolph Hearst, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war".

1902, William James. "The Varieties of Religious Experience".
If all religions are possible then none are true.

1906, Cézanne. "We live in a rainbow of chaos".

1910, Virginia Woolf. "On or about December, 1910, human character changed."

1910s, Matisse and Picasso break apart the subjects of their paintings and see them from multiple points of views, often breaking subjects into geometric forms. No more trying to paint reality as it appears.

1915, Einstein says our experience of time is relative. "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

1914 - 1918. The horror of World War 1.
By the end of the war, many in western culture have had enough of enlightenment era reason, logic and objective truth. Post-WW1: Surrealism, Dada, stream of consciousness narratives. Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Proust.

Duchamp, "As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences, everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good. I use it because I have to, but I don't put any trust in it. We never understand each other."

1918, Tristan Tzara. Dadaist Manifesto.
"There is no ultimate truth."
Everything is incoherent. There is no logic. The acts of life have no beginning and no end.
"I am against systems".

1920/1, Wittgenstein. "Language disguises thought."

Niels Bohr, "When it comes to atoms, the language that must be used is the language of poetry."
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."

1927, The Observer Effect. The perceiver alters what's perceived.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - we can either know how fast a particle is going or we can know where the particle is located, but we can't know both at the same time.

Heidegger, 'What is a thing?'.
"Strange that the truth should depend on a gust of wind."

1931, Virginia Woolf. "I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me."

1933, Hemingway. "Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name".

1935, Schrödinger's Cat.

1936, TS Eliot. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."

1938, Orson Welles broadcasts "War of the Worlds". Fiction is indistinguishable from reality. Some listeners believe an alien invasion is occurring.

1939, Orwell. "It is possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will equal five when the Leader says so."

1941, Abstract Expressionism. Art as chaos, chaos as creation. There's violence in the nothingness.
Picasso, "All acts of creation begin with an act of destruction".

Borges, 'Garden of Forking Paths'.

1942, Camus. "There is only one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide".

1945, Auschwitz and the closing of the iron curtain inspire Orwell to write 1984.
Thought police. Ministry of truth. The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

1946, Sartre. "I am the architect of my own self, my own character and destiny... I am the things I have done and nothing more." We are all completely free. "There is no reality except in action".

1952, Beckett. 'Waiting for Godot'. The saviour we're waiting for isn't coming. Existence is absurd. The world is incomprehensible. Our senses are too feeble to find meaning within it.

1953. Joseph McCarthy's fake list of communists working in the US State Department. Always attack, never explain, never apologise, never ask for love. Accuse your enemy of committing the sin you are committing.

1957. Hugh Everett's 'Many-Worlds Interpretation' of quantum physics.

1960. French structuralists Claude Levi Strauss and Jacque Lacan say that free will is an illusion. We are just animatronic bears performing our culturally predetermined songs. Russian born sculptor Louise Nevelson, "The only reality I recognise is my own reality". Jean Luc Godard, "Sometimes reality is too complex". Pop art samples reality in new ways, adapting to a world filled with mass produced consumer goods and the ads that go along with them. Warhol, "I don't know where the artificial starts and the real stops."

1967, acid surrealism. John Lennon, "Nothing is real".
Timothy Leary, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
Self-truth can be found in altered realities.

Guy Debord, 'The Society of the Spectacle'. "In a world that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood".

Late 1960s, new journalists like Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S Thompson, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe use novelistic techniques, blending fiction and non-fiction in order to reveal the truth in a forest of facts.

1970s, Foucault. We are all puppets on strings pulled by an impossibly complex system of hidden power relations. And, since everyone feels the pulls of these invisible strings differently depending on our history, position and place in life, there is no one objective truth. We all have our own version of the truth and all versions are equally valid or invalid.

Many post-structuralists and post-modernists and deconstructionists, through their deep skepticism toward logic, reason, science, progress, grand narratives and anything that claims to be universal, and through their embrace of relativism and their suspicion of power structures, want to bring about a more egalitarian society in which everyone has a voice.

1981, evangelical Christians make up a major swath of the Reagan coalition. If you are going to believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old, you're going to need to deny a massive amount of of geological and scientific evidence to the contrary. You need to live in an alternate reality. At the same time that conservative politicians are worrying that college professors are teaching students that there is no objective truth, many of the same conservatives are creating entire industries built around self-sustaining myths.

Jean Baudrillard, "One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real." Everything is a simulacrum, a simulation.

1982. Just before he's released from a South African prison for criticising apartheid government, Breytem Bretenbach says, "There is in fact no truth. We are too fragile and volatile for that. We work with too many uncertainties. There is rather the continual shaping of something resembling, poorly, provisionally, truth."

1985. WWF stages the first Wrestlemania, watched by over a million television viewers.

1986, Umberto Eco. "The American imagination demands the real thing, and to attain it must fabricate the absolute fake where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred, the art museum is contaminated by the freak show, and falsehood is enjoyed in a situation of 'fullness,' of terror of the abyss."

1987, Alan Bloom. 'The Closing of the American Mind'.
"Where the purpose of higher education once was to enable the student to find truth, the modern university teaches that there is no truth, only 'lifestyle'."

1988, Frederick Jameson. "Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content."

Late 1980s, US and British courts allow DNA evidence, overturning previous eyewitness testimonies.

1990, Judith Butler reminds us that both sex and gender are social constructs.

1992, Joanne Bird in the Washington Post. "Objectivity ruled journalism through most of the campaigns of my lifetime. But eventually we wised up and dismissed objectivity as a pretentious fantasy that turned reporters into stenographers and produced irresponsible journalism."

1993, Slavoj Žižek. "As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency".

1994, Barbara Kruger. "Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie."

MTV's 'The Real World' airs for the first time.

1995, Baudrillard. "Our culture of meaning is collapsing beneath our excess of meaning. The culture of reality is collapsing beneath our excess of reality. The culture of information is collapsing beneath the excess of information - the sign and reality sharing a single shroud."

1996, former Nixon aid Robert Ailes is hired by Rupert Murdoch to create Fox News. 'Truth is whatever people will believe'.

1998, Baudrillard's hyperreality finds its perfect conduit when Google is founded.

Bill Clinton, "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is', is".

1999, Errol Morris. "Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end."

2003, George W. Bush invades Iraq under the pretence that Saddam has WMDs. Two years later the New York Times apologises for its misleading coverage of the buildup and rationale for the war.

2004, Bush's aid Karl Rove allegedly said, "We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying reality judiciously, as you will, we'll act again, creating new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We are history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do."

Neal Gabler, "All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus in which words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is."

Bruno Latour, The mistake we academics made "was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticise matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one's attention toward the conditions that made them possible."

2006, Twitter starts up. Facebook membership is now available to anyone 13 and older.

Stephen Colbert, at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, "We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking 'in reality'. And reality has a well-known liberal bias."

2011. Trump and Fox News team up to promote the myth that Obama was born in Kenya.

2012. Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, "We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute."

2013. Sebastian Hyde. "A proper relativist would have to say that all stories are equally valid, since all stories can always at best only capture one point of view and there is no object truth behind the narratives anyway."

2014. Putin stays in power with the help of Vladisav Surkov. Post-truth politics as performance art. "Non-linear war". Spray so much information, both real and fake, into the culture that nobody knows up from down, and the people give up trying to find the truth. The truth, they think, is unknowable.

Luke Harding calls this "version-land", the weaponisation of doubt.

Putin starts the Internet Research Agency, a social media fake news factory, that first targets Ukraine, then Europe, then the 2016 US elections.

2015, Obama. "The fights you have are never about the thing you're fighting about. It's always something else. It's about a story, it's about respect, it's about recognition, something deep."

2016, Steve Bannon. "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."

Facebook announces it will start flagging fake news.

The Oxford English Dictionary's Word of the Year is 'post-truth'.

2017, Trump is sworn in. His first act as president is to send his Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, out to tell the press that yesterday was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration. The photographic evidence of the event was wrong. Trump's crowd was bigger than Obama's. When asked to justify the obvious lie, Kellyanne Conway said that Spicer was using alternative facts.

Peter Pomerantsev, "Maybe Putin and Trump's post-modernist disdain for objective facts is part of their appeal. Facts are, after all, unpleasant things. They tell you that you are going to die, that you might not be good looking, rich, or clever. They remind you of your limitations. There's a rebellious joy in throwing off the weight of them."

Deep fakes technology hits the mainstream.

Jeet heer, "In a world where the visual has triumphed over the literary, where fragmented sound bites have replaced linear thinking, where nostalgia has replaced historical consciousness or felt experiences of the past, where simulacra is indistinguishable from reality, where an aesthetic of pastiche and kitsch replaces modernism’s striving for purity and elitism, and where a shared plebeian culture of vulgarity papers over intensifying class disparities. In virtually every detail, Trump seems like the perfect manifestation of postmodernism."

Žižek, "At it's most basic, ideology is the primordial version of augmented reality."

2018, Republican Senator Ben Sasse. "We have a risk of getting to a place where we don't have shared public facts. A republic will not work if we don't have shared facts."

Michiko Kakutani, "Relativism has been ascendent since the culture wars began in the 1960s. Back then it was embraced by the new left who were eager to expose the biases biases of Western, bourgeois, male-dominated thinking; and by academics promoting the gospel of post-modernism, which argued that there are no universal truths, only smaller personal truths—perceptions shaped by the cultural and social forces of one’s day. Since then, relativistic arguments have been hijacked by the populist Right, including creationists and climate change deniers who insist that their views be taught alongside 'science-based' theories."

Stephen Pinker, "The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, self-refuting relativism, and suffocating political correctness".

Rudy Giuliana, on 'Meet the Press' - "Truth isn't truth".

Trump - "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening".

2021, the capitol is stormed. Trump launches his own social media platform, 'Truth Social'.
Terms of service prohibit criticism of the platform. Posts to the site are called 'truths'.