wer Think LiesSpring 2019 pieces the UCL IAS review ISSN: 2632-1785 (print) ISSN: 2632-1793 (online) Gloria Fuertes: Hemos de Procurar no Mentir / Pamela Carmell: We Must Try Not To Lie / Marcel Theroux and Rye Dag Holmboe: The Secret Books: Lies, forgery and antisemitism in the nineteenth century / Joe Stadolnik: Equivocation, Then and Now / Ashraf Jamal: Black in Five Minutes / Julie Orlemanski: Why Ask ‘What Was Fiction?’ / Steve Fuller: Bacon’s Truth: How the path of modernity was paved by lying / Anastasia Denisova: The Politics of Social Media in Russia Spring 2019 Editor-in-Chief Foreword Think Pieces: Interdisciplinarity in Practice elcome to this first edition of IAS Think Piec- Gloria Fuertes es. I am delighted as Editor-in-Chief to intro- Editor in-Chief Next Issues W Hemos de Procurar No Mentir Tamar Garb 02 #Laughter duce the initial publication in our twice-yearly review 03 #Turbulence series. Each issue is devoted to one of our two annu- Academic Editors al IAS research themes; we begin with the intriguing Hemos de procurar no mentir mucho. Geraldine Brodie ISSN 2632-1785 (print) Jane Gilbert ISSN 2632-1793 (online) notion of Lies, which we explored in multiple ways Sé que a veces mentimos para no hacer un muerto, over the period of one year. The contributions that Editorial Manager @UCL_IAS para no hacer un hijo o evitar una guerra. follow represent diverse ways of thinking with the & Graphic Design Instagram: ucl.ias De pequeña mentía con mentiras de azúcar, Albert Brenchat theme, drawing on literary, art historical, political, decía a las amigas: –Tengo cuarto de baño– Printing historiographical, and philosophical perspectives. Belmont Press They offer a wonderful taste of the kind of dialogue –y mi casa era pobre con el retrete fuera–. and discussions we convened. Consideration of the –Mi padre es ingeniero– y era sólo fumista, Contact instituteofadvancedstudies theme went beyond these speculative contributions pero yo le veía ingeniero ingenioso! @ucl.ac.uk as well, bringing researchers into the IAS to debate Me costó la costumbre de arrancar la mentira, South Wing the concept of the ‘post-truth’ in relation to political me tejí este vestido de verdad que me cubre, University College London discourse and psychoanalysis, exploring theories of y a veces voy desnuda. Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT ‘bullshit’, meretricious advertising, and the media- Cover tions of social media, new technologies, and the con- Mr Savethewall, Forever, Lake ventional press. We talked about lies and racialized Desde entonces me quedo sin hablar muchos días. Como, 2016 thinking, about human rights and ‘false promises’, Thanks about medical ruses and cheap speech, fake news and Joe Stadolnik, Gregory official fibs while looking at texts, photographs, mov- Whitfield, Catherine Stokes, ies, para-fictions and post fictions, evidential images Megan Vaughan, Jakob Stougaard- Nielsen, Chris Holland, Rebecca and contested documents. In a dizzying array of ap- translation by Pamela Carmell Ross, Catherine Grant and Alexis proaches and intellectual encounters, successive pan- Brown. We Must Try Not to Lie els, workshops, lectures, artists’ talks, readings, and This publication is also possible discussions opened up the theme in multiple ways. We must try not to lie so much. thanks to the collaboration of the Steered by our Junior Research Fellows Joe Stadol- IAS with Mishcon Academy at I know sometimes we lie not to end a life Mishcon de Reya. A result of this nik and Gregory Whitfield, discussion on ‘lies’ ranged collaboration was the IAS Lies over disciplines, enabling conversations between schol- Or create one or to dodge a war. Public Lecture Series that included ars working in and across a range of specialisms and lectures by Christina Sharpe, As a child, I told little white lies. Mariana Mazzucato, and Ashraf fields. What you see in these lively pages is a taste of I would tell my friends: ‘I have a bathroom’. Jamal, among others. the vibrant culture they helped to engender and host. (my house was a shack with an outhouse) I am very grateful to the Academic Editors, Geraldine ‘My father’s an engineer!’ (He was just the furnace man Brodie and Jane Gilbert, for their work in bringing this collection of articles together. I would especially like to but in my eyes he was an ingenious engineer). Pamela Carmell, translator of the poem by Gloria Fuertes on the follow- acknowledge the Editorial Manager, Albert Brenchat, Learning to extract the lie took a lot of work, ing page, received an NEA Translation Fellowship for Oppiano Licario by for his dedication to this publication and the IAS series. I knitted this dress of truth that covers me. José Lezama Lima in 2008. In 2000 she participated in the Writers of the The editorial team introduce the edition more fully in Sometimes I walk around naked. Americas exchange in Havana. She co-edited and co-translated the short the following pages. Most particularly, I thank the au- story collection Cuba on the Edge. She translated Nancy Morejón’s With thors of these pieces for agreeing to allow us to dissem- Eyes and Soul and Homing Instincts; Antonio Larreta’s The Last Portrait of Since then I go for days without saying a word. the Duchess of Alba; Belkis Cuza Malé’s Woman on the Front Lines (recipient inate their stimulating contributions beyond their initial of the Witter Bynner Poetry Award); and work by Manuel Puig, Luisa presentations. Valenzuela, Gloria Fuertes, Carlos Wynter, and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. I hope you enjoy this first issue. Editorial Team extracting a lie takes work, and it hurts. A discussion between Marcel Theroux and Rye Dag Holmboe Jamal nevertheless also suggests Editorial that lies may be ambivalent: not only The Secret Books: Lies, forgery and malign, but also potentially ‘enabling antisemitism in the nineteenth century metaphors’. This ambivalence is fur- ther explored by Joe Stadolnik, Ju- lie Orlemanski and Steve Fuller, all ies were at the forefront one. But this confusion is itself power- Lof our thoughts in 2018. The con- ful, as lying becomes an empowering of whom adopt a historical approach cept of ‘post-truth’ has become increas- tool to defend personal agency. Fuertes towards explaining today’s unstable ingly prevalent with reference to cur- told many lies. Her house was gigantic, truth-cultures. Stadolnik testes prac- rent political and social analysis, but at and tiny. It had five bedrooms and three tices of dissimulation, cunning, and the IAS we wanted to explore the rela- bathrooms; it had one bedroom and an ‘little lies’ against a backdrop of reli- tionship between truth and lies from a outhouse. Her father was an engineer; he gious and political tensions in Protes- broader perspective. In this issue of IAS was the furnace man. Seen in the context tant Elizabethan England. Orlemanski Think Pieces we aim to continue the de- of her life, the issue was not only that proposes that a comparative study of bates that began in the seminar rooms Fuertes’ lifestyle, class, and income were what is considered ‘fiction’ will allow at UCL beyond the walls of the univer- unacceptable; her sexual orientation and us to be precise about the term’s differ- sity, putting academics of different dis- ideology also did not match the ‘abso- ent meanings and different ethical sta- ciplines, writing styles, and standpoints lute truth’ of her time. Knitting a dress of tus in disparate cultural and historical in conversation with each other and with truth — or of lies — was an act of rebel- situations. Fuller, meanwhile, traces the broader public. Our aim is to present lious protest against the difficult reality how Western philosophical views have a diverse collection of critical and ad- of the Spanish dictatorship, where only come in modernity to regard lying as venturous approaches, and we have not one truth was allowed. Like Fuertes’ ‘the generative source of alternative sought to impose a single (supposedly poem, Marcel Theroux and Rye Dag and even competing truths’ — produc- neutral?) voice on our contributors, but Holmboe’s interview shows the positive ing the paradox that everyone nowa- to convey some of their distinctive styles. ethical and political role that self-con- days can ground their own assertion The pieces collected here draw on scious fictionalization can play. They of ‘the truth’ precisely in the fact that the arts, political sciences, and philos- explore Nicolas Notovitch’s rewriting of others declare it a ‘lie’. ophy to address three main aspects of Jesus’s life so as to protect the reputation Current discussions on the limits of lies: freedom of speech, the lie and/as of Jews in hostile nineteenth-century free speech and of ‘fake news’ face the social formation, and the changing eth- France and Russia where the notorious problem of what are often presented as ics and politics of lying as creative un- anti-semitic fabrication of the Protocols ‘little white lies’: whether easily falsi- truth over long historical periods, cul- of the Elders of Zion had spread. fiable untruths circulated shamelessly minating in the present day. The authors In his text, ‘Black in Five Minutes’, for political ends or ‘truths’ officially have chosen to focus on very specific contrastingly, Ashraf Jamal supports propagated by authoritarian regimes cases, disciplines, and geographical Fuertes’ opening position: ‘we must that brook no dissent. Thus, Anastasia areas to make broader claims around try not to lie so much’. Jamal exposes Denisova analyses censorship and echo lies, and we invite you to read the con- the polite, hypocritical liberal refusal chambers in Russian social media. She nections between their ideas across the to discuss the racial inequalities that different texts. As editors, we felt that continue to structure modern South both shows the real effects of oppressive one significant aspectof lies not includ- Africa in spite of years of reform and censorship for Russians, and debunks ed in our contributions was the intimate (supposed) fraternity.