1st Example: Climate Change Denial

Although vamped up with many billions, there is not a single proof for the hypothesis that more CO2 generates more temperature […], not even in any of the IPCC reports published so far. […]

Here and now, the AfD takes on the false doctrine of anthropogenic climate change. We demand that Germany withdraws from all related national and international treaties and committees. […] We demand to stop financing pseudo-science. […] For all these goals, real science free of ideology is firmly on our side.

Karsten Hilse in Deutscher Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 19/24 (2018), 2200 f.

2nd Example: Russia Today Germany

“What has Merkel done in the last ten years? She has killed more people than this Hitler!”

Speaker at a demonstration in Berlin after RT’s report

3rd Example: Ther German Police

A group of violent offenders tried to push a burning shopping cart in the middle of a police riot unit and fired on it massively with pyrotechnics. One police officer (male/38) was so severely injured that he lost consciousness and had to undergo emergency surgery in hospital.

Polizeidirektion Sachsen, “Mehrere verletzte Polizeibeamte
bei Silvestereinsatz” (2020)

Nothing is left of the claims made with lightning speed by the police, that emergency surgery was necessary because a police officer had been severely injured and was more or less fighting for his life. Literally nothing, and the world knows this not because the police corrected its report but because “taz” inquired at the hospital and “Kreuzer” followed up on the story.

Sascha Lobo, “Diagnose:
Vorzeitiger Nachrichtenerguss” (2020)

Thesis 1: Untruth in Politics is an Autonomous Problem

Untruth in politics is

• neither collateral damage of social and political structures and practices with no intrinsic connection to epistemic questions,
• nor a symptom of excessive power replacing facts with its fabricated reality.

Either alternative separates truth and politics.

Critical theories must instead analyze the intertwinement of politics and truth.

Thesis 2: Untruth in Politics is a Contemporary Problem

Untruth in politics is

• neither the sign of a new “era of post-truth”
• nor nothing new under the sun.

Critical theories must instead lay bare the genealogy of untruth in politics.

Thesis 3: Untruth in Politics Requires a New Vocabulary

“Post-Truth” – a new but failed concept:

• historically: when was the “Era of Truth”?
• conceptually: how do we distinguish “post-truth” from ideology, lies, propaganda, bullshit etc.?
• epistemologically: what justifies the sovreeign epistemic standpoint assumed by “post-truth”?

Thesis 3: Untruth in Politics Requires a New Vocabulary

Undermining Demagoguery: A contribution to public discourse that is presented as an embodiment of a worthy political, economic, or rational ideal, but is in the service of a goal that tends to undermine that very ideal.

Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (2015), 69

Flawed ideology: beliefs that are

• epistemically defect because they are resistant to rational revision (as are all ideological beliefs), and
• epistemologically disabling because they “prevent us from gaining knowledge about features of reality including social reality.” (198)

Thesis 4: Untruth in Politics Requires a
Non-Sovereign Political Epistemology

Political Epistemology is a field of interdisciplinary research in which epistemology, political philosophy and social sciences interrogate the intertwinement of truth and politics.

Non-Sovereign Political Epistemology denounces the sovereign conception of truth as a powerful fiction: an instance of “Absolutism” (Adorno), a “god trick” (Haraway), a ruse of power (Foucault) or an aspect of the coloniality of power in epistemology (Mignolo).

Thesis 4: Untruth in Politics Requires a
Non-Sovereign Political Epistemology

A non-sovereing conception of truth must be

• plural, so that truth can be historicized
• agonistic, so that truths are not indifferent towards each other

Truth as Epistemic Force emerges irreducibly from social practices, e.g. scientific practices.

Thesis 5: Understanding Untruth in Politics Must Focus
on its Enabling Conditions

Scientific practices align us with parts of the world in such a way that truth can emerge, transmitted and made reliable.

Practices of organized climate change denial instead systematically disguise social and economic power as truths.

The idea is not that scientific practices are free from social, political or economic power relations – but something more happens in them when truth emerges.

Thesis 5: Understanding Untruth in Politics Must Focus
on its Enabling Conditions

We should understand the Russian propaganda case within the long history of disinformation techniques without overestimating the effectiveness of propaganda.

Instead, we must analyse the genealogy of the epistemic conditions under which propaganda becomes effective.

One obvious but important factor is the systematic erosion of standards of justification in political discourse.

Thesis 5: Understanding Untruth in Politics Must Focus
on its Enabling Conditions

The false police report is a textbook case about the new public spheres in social media and their acceleration of the news cycle.

Yet more important are its enabling conditions: journalists that uncritically transmit the report and a public that uncritically attributes authority to the police.

Thesis 6: It is Not Enought to Understand Untruth in Politics
– Critical Theory Must Fight It!

The demands for an explicit endorsement of truth, objectivity and the sciences and humanities must not be permitted to reinstate the false idea of a sovereign conception of truth.

Instead, we need a non-sovereign political epistemology, a conception of truth as epistemic force in social practices and a clear distinction of the plural and agonistic force of truth from other forces systemically disguised as truth.