IAS Lies

by Lionel Bailly (Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL), Mairead Hanrahan (SELCS, UCL), David Morgan (Psychoanalyst), Mignon Nixon (HoA, UCL) David Tuckett (Psychoanalysis Unit, UCL), and Rye Holmboe (HoA, UCL).

As part of the 2017-18 research theme on ‘Lies’, the IAS welcomed an interdisciplinary panel discussion about the role of psychoanalysis in the age of post-truth.

Chairing: Tamar Garb (Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL)

Find more information at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/events/2018/jan/psychoanalysis-age-post-truth-panel-discussion

IAS Lies: Psychoanalysis in the Age of Post-Truth: Panel Discussion

By David Benigson (CEO, Signal Media)
Anastasia Denisova (Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster)
Lisa-Maria Neudert (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford)
Gregory Whitfield (Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL)

As part of its Lies research theme, the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies hosted a roundtable discussion on media and politics in the age of the viral post, troll farm and automated botnet. 

Find more information at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-events/ias-lies-misinformed-a-roundtable-on-social-media-and-the-shaping-of-public-discourse

IAS Lies: Misinformed - A Roundtable on Social Media and the Shaping of Public Discourse

by Dr Alex Mills (UCL Laws)
Prof Rachael Mulheron (Queen Mary Law)
Robert Sharp (Head of Campaigns, English PEN)
Dr Judith Townend (Sussex Law)

As part of this year’s research theme on ‘Lies’, the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies hosted a panel discussion on the present and future of defamation law. How can the law best protect rights of speech and of privacy in a digital age? Has the Defamation Act of 2013 allowed for the publication of truths, opinions honestly held, or speech in the public interest? How has a new standard of harm respected the rights of the claimants and defendants in practice?

The discussion was hosted by Harry Eccles-Williams, Associate at Mischon de Reya.

Find more information at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-events/defamation-a-roundtable-on-lies-and-the-law

IAS Lies: Defamation - A Roundtable on Lies and the Law

by Professor Steve Fuller (University of Warwick)

Are the moral proscriptions against lying overrated?

Find more information at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-events/a-post-truth-take-on-lying

IAS Lies: A Post-truth Take on Lying

by Mariana Mazzucato (IIPP, UCL)

The false dichotomy between "the public sector" and "the private sector" leaves out the vital role that government has played - and must continue to play - in acting as financial backer and risk-taker in the most important innovations of our time that can help tackle the grand challenges facing us. Furthermore the lie ends up causing a situation by which risks are socialised while returns are privatised.

Find more information at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/events/2018/jul/myths-around-public-sector-and-whose-interests-are-served-underlying-lies

IAS Lies: Myths around the public sector and whose interests are served by the underlying lies

by writer and teacher Ashraf Jamal.

In The Waiting Country: A South African Witness, published in 1995, Mike Nicol arrives at the core of this paper. ‘We lie to accommodate’, he says. ‘We lie because we think it does not matter. We lie because we think that in the face of so many years of misery, a lie that is for the good is not a lie at all. And we lie because we have no self-respect. We lie because we are victims. We lie because we cannot imagine ourselves in any other way’.

Nicol wrote these words in the immediate aftermath of South Africa’s first free election, intuiting then, as we all do now, the era of post-truth, and the subsequent bankruptcy of global democracy. It is all the more ironic, therefore, that it is now, in this era of fakery, that South African art, or ‘Contemporary African Art’ more generally, should assume its global ascendancy.

I will deliver this paper at the same time as 1-54, the largest trade fair committed to African Art in the northern hemisphere, is underway in London. What does this fascination with African art mean today? How real, or how cynical is its current appropriation and commodification? And what relevance does it possess today? Is it merely a new-fangled fetish, profoundly disingenuous in its inflation of the Idea of Africa? Is it a new cool exercise in miserabilism? Or is it a genuine attempt to overcome an inherited pathology?

Ed Young’s barbed word-works – BLACK IN FIVE MINUTES and ALL SO FUCKING AFRICAN, exhibited at Frieze in New York in 2016 – suggest the fake instantaneity of a new consciousness, at the root of which lies a smug inflation of identity politics. Smug because – despite Pankaj Mishra’s just observation of ‘a widening abyss of race, class and education’ – it has assumed an unthinking, inviolable, and declamatory righteousness as it modus operandi.

Art is not an exercise in art direction, it is not the sum of a problem but its displacement and overcoming. Art does not mirror existing pathology, it re-configures the possibility for its understanding. The best African art, therefore, rewires prevailing prejudices and needs, it alters the state of play and conditions for being – it emphatically refuses to lie. To do so it must challenge its relevance, refuse its commodification, rout out its cynical neo-liberal accommodation, junk its victimhood, and radically re-imagine itself differently.

Lungiswa Gqunta’s exhibition, ‘Qwitha’ – first shown at Whatiftheworld in Cape Town in 2018 – is a brilliant instance of this shape-shift. For while it reflects the on-going fatal South African human condition, it asks us to distance ourselves from pain and suspend inflammatory rage. Aberrant and chilling, hers is the kind of conceptual-and-visceral art which institutes a radical moment in this corrupt time. For Gqunta the black body in pain is not, perforce, the oracle of truth. Hers, therefore, is precisely the kind of art which refuses the ubiquitous and unscrupulous persistence in lies.

Find more information at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ias-lies-public-lecture-series-ashraf-jamal-on-art-lies-tickets-47297710726#

IAS Lies: Art & Lies

by William Davies (Goldsmiths), Emily McTernan (UCL) and Jeffrey Howard (UCL)

Is free speech under attack on campus? Are 'snowflake' students demanding trigger warnings, a decolonized curriculum, and the deplatforming of speakers with whom they disagree spoiling universities? William Davies has recently written in the guardian that such panicked talk is mostly a conservative fiction aimed at energizing one side in an ongoing culture war over university campuses. In this panel speakers will discuss this and other contentious issues relating to the politics of campus speech.

IAS Lies: The Contentious Politics of Campus Speech

The IAS is a space dedicated to intellectual freedom where disruptive thinking is not only allowed but encouraged and supported. It is a centre of advanced research, debate and dialogue across any kind of boundary, intellectual or institutional. It’s a forum where difficult, even intractable, social questions can be exposed to the scrutiny of rigorous critical enquiry from a variety of perspectives

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Note on the logo: the blue and green background is a detail of a banner (300x120cm; oil paint, oil pastel and compressed charcoal on canvas) that artist Lucile Haefflinger produced for and which is on display at the IAS.