‘Truth, Fiction, Illusion: Worlds & Experience’ Conference, 2019
Mike Featherstone (editor-in-chief, Theory Culture & Society) and Tomoko Tamari (managing editor of Body & Society) as executive conference committee members, organised the 2019 ‘Truth, Fiction, Illusion: Worlds & Experience’ conference in Austria. This international conference held from May 29 to June 2, 2019, attracted more than 250 delegates who enjoyed a productive discussion for three days in Klagenfurt, Austria. For Theory Culture & Society this was the first collaboration with the Association for Philosophy and Literature, along with Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt.
Invited plenary speakers were Achille Mbembe, Stuart Elden, Bernard Stiegler, Maria Margaroni and Jeff Malpas.
Plenary sessions playlist: ‘Truth, Fiction, Illusion: Worlds & Experience’ Conference 2019.
Tamari also organised two sessions on ‘Animation’, inviting speakers, Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths), Erkki Huhtamo (UCLA), and Tomáš Dvořák, the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU) and young researchers. The sessions focused on ‘Animation’ (moving image and human perception), considering a range of moving image platforms from historical optical device to contemporary digital media. The intention was to explore various implications of moving images (mediated expressions), from production history to semiotics, psychoanalysis and neuroscience.
Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions”
— NIETZSCHE
“Thought is creation, not will to truth”
— DELEUZE AND GUATTARI
Image: Conference logo. Source: Theory, Culture & Society.
Can anything further be said about truth? While contemporary worries about a post-truth world reinforce both ordinary and traditional senses of the word, a philosophical tradition that for centuries has not failed to put truth into question or critique finds itself in a situation echoing that faced by the Greeks at the dawn of philosophy.
Few would have dreamt, only a few years ago, that we would once again have such a compelling concern with the facts, with truth. But today’s authoritarian populism has returned us to questions of the fragility of truth. These questions have cast deep divisions in contemporary life. Tensions between truth and falsity, between the fictional and the fictitious, and between reality and illusion haunt contemporary experience. Social and cultural thought have for a long period questioned assumptions of ‘objective’ experience, but such assumptions continue to predominate in the homo economicus of today’s neoclassicism and neoliberalism. As prevalent is the fragmentation into worlds, subjective worlds, national worlds, the worlds of human and nonhuman beings. Such worlds are at the same time territories, digital platforms, communities, indeed in some cases commons. To what extent are such worlds themselves constituted through truths or fictions, through narratives? To what extent does this mean a break with representation altogether, whether in art, in literature, in politics? Or to what extent does it entail a radical rethinking of what representation is?
Tracing a line of thought from Nietzsche to Deleuze and beyond, one discovers in the objection to a pervasive “will to truth” the demand that thought be regarded instead as a form of creation. The oppositions through which truth has traditionally been understood (true and false, truth and error) do not apply, for instance, when one considers the literary text, where the question of whether there exists a natural or necessary correspondence with the world event remains a matter of conjecture.