Sunday, November 6, 2016

is truth virtuous?

the disinformation society
in which consciously manipulated statistics, invented figures and downright untruth circulate unchecked on a par with evidence.
- in the first instance, to establish a standard of truth adequate to public discourse, but rather more
- to investigate the terms of a polity in which the pretence to evidence-based policy is constantly undercut by the triumph of dogma over experience or evidence and the willingness to force constructed 'evidence' to serve argument rather than vice versa.
- and to consider whether truth in any of its manifestations still has a role in politics/the political - or whether the distinction rests, inter alia, on the status and mode of truth

such that if the management of public affairs is characterised by untruth and disinformation, information and truth belong to the unaccounted (what is left out of account, the part of no part) clamouring to govern itself. Truth as abandoned virtue of political life

positing the gulf between truth as voice and truth as representation, spoken on-behalf-of

therefore
is truth virtuous?
a historical question, administratively defunct but symbolic thus also an afterlife of truth
constructed - of necessity - not only cynically
so the question of the objective/subjective/perceptual/material moment of truth
[bad faith pervades professional life]
truth then as enjeu/gage, thus as untrue or LOCAL - truth as epiphany, exception

which is either a laudably modest ambition or a heinous abdication of political truth in order to secure a personal nirvana

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