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Interview by Nora Circosta, 2009.

How important of a role does authenticity play in Corporate Design? Is an authentic presentation necessary for success in the global market?

It’s a paradox: The more artificial the world gets, the higher the demand is for something real. The boom of virtual worlds like Second Lives is happening at the same time that others are successfully investing in traditional firms such as Manufactum where “the good old things” and “quality” still matter. The world has become so commercialized that the customer now demands personalized, reliable, memorable goods and services. Authenticity, which comes from the Greek word authentikós, indicates this idea of realness and reliability. Being perceived as inauthentic has an immediate, negative impact on a company’s success. Corporate identity and brands are ultimately about standing out in a world full of attractions and impulses. You can pretend to be someone you’re not, and build up a Potemkin village . Or you can go to the outside world and present values that really exist in your core. A lot has changed in the last decade and because of new technology such as the Internet, companies now face customers who are well informed and who actively exchange information. It’s no longer so easy to get away with being inauthentic. Many people understand this, but others are still resting on past success, thinking: “It’s worked so far, so why should I change?”

What exactly defines a company? Does the company’s mission statement give you values that you then translate into the language of graphics? This is the question every company has to ask itself: What defines my company, my organization, my brand?

They have to ask what values are offered to the customer, and how these values are generated. Is it about the product or service itself, or is it about the experience offered by the product or service? It’s the business model – this configuration that generates value – which determines the differences from one company to the next. Each company determines these values for itself, and I find a way to present those values to the outside world.

Authenticity is a benchmark for stakeholders (i.e. customers, cooperating partners, everyone related to the company) under which any presentation and communication of the company is checked based on content and consistency. In order to achieve the authentic presentation of a corporate identity, it’s useful to regard the company as the “sender” and the stakeholder as the “receiver”. Authentic communication works on the basis of self-perceptions and individual means of expression, which are differentiated by meaning. Communication must be traced back to these attitudes. These attitudes should be assignable to the “sender” and clearly related to the sender’s “core”. As long as this relation to the core persists, the company will be authentic in its expressions and presentations. The difficulty lies in the fact that it’s impossible, and the attempt inadvisable, to dictate the perception of a “receiver”. One can only make one’s appearance as authentic as possible while in the midst of any “contamination” from the density of information. There is no golden rule for communicating the attitudes of a company. One must choose a path and stringently follow that path (as perceptions are also formed by penetration) in order to be equally perceived and accepted by the majority of receivers. Through an iterative process, authentic presentation and communication also modify the identity of the sender.

What makes an authentic presentation successful? And how do you know where to draw the line between an authentic presentation and a falsified image?

This all comes back to the existence of a “core”, a true value. For instance, last week in Zurich, I noticed a café that was closed. It was a kind of “smokers’ café” and I liked the idea of it. I’m not a smoker myself but I could imagine that a café only for smokers (who are now “homeless” due to the prohibition of smoking in public areas) was likely to represent a value, thus I began wondering why this café was not open. I found out that the owner of the bar had made a peculiar invention: a gadget as big as a mobile phone that held cigarettes that could burn without fire; the nicotine was inhaled through a filter. Though this gadget was available in lots of trendy designs – space themes, bears, flowers, imitation wood — it’s still clear why the bar closed down so quickly: No smoker would ever be satisfied by sitting down in front of a plastic box to have a cigarette. This invention also represents an inconsistency or inauthentic idea, because authentically the place would either not allow smoking or else be a place where people can really smoke. This is a simple example showing that no value, even if it has been nicely packaged and praised, will be successful for long if it is not embodied.

In my own work, I rarely encounter companies that don’t generate this value. About 90% of the companies are changing their appearance because they’ve produced a new value and have to approach a new target group, or because they’re asking themselves: “We have such a great product, so why isn’t it successful?” In such situations, we’ve specialized in moving past the limited insider view and getting an outsider view, so that we can then identify, present and communicate the core values of the company in an adequate way. There’s a clear line between authentic presentation and a falsified image, and the customer realizes quickly if his or her trust has been betrayed. Of course there’s a difference between a company passing itself off as what it’s not, and a company promising what it is unable to maintain in regard of service and production. Both are fatal. As the Czech writer Karel Capek once wrote: “A value is not a value for promising something but for meeting it.” And he’s right.

Rolf Mehnert is board member of Fuenfwerken Design AG and active in the field of Corporate Design, Brandi ng and Business Design. In this role he is intensely confronted wi th the issues of authenticity, scenery and communication. 1) Potemkin villages were, purportedly, fake settlements erected at the direction by the Russian minister Potemkin to fool Catherine II during her visit to the Crimea in 1787. According to the story, he erected facades of villages all along the Dnieper River in order to impress her with evidence of new conquests.

Is it really of benefit to give to others? A discussion with the bioethics professor of Case Western School of Medicine and director of The Institute for Research on Unlimiited Love.  Dr. Stephen Post is also the author of the book Why Good Things Happen to Good People.

Pulse: What is the main goal of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love?

Dr. Stephen Post: The main goal is simple: to bring scientific attention to generous forms of behavior and emotion that are incredibly important to a well-lived life but that generally don’t get the scientific attention they deserve. The goal is also to create a dialogue between sciences, humanities and the spiritual traditions that challenges us to abide by the ideal of a common humanity.

The basic point of your book seems to be: The more we give, the better our lives will be. Is that true?

Well that’s a generalization of course, but it is true that when you’re generous and good to people, you’re going to find acceptance and more opportunities to create things with your life. Cultivating the emotional state of love is helpful to the internal self as well. It’s like saying ‘virtue is its own reward’. Unselfish giving is a good way to live; people who stumble upon that joy tend to lead happier and healthier lives.

How big a role does intention play in this? For instance, would it be inauthentic to give because of a desire for personal gain?

I don’t think any action in life is completely pure. I think everything is of mixed motive. What we’re talking about here are actions that are predominantly genuine – there’s a sense in the person that he or she wants to give. So intention does matter. If people set about doing good things in the world just for self-benefit, it probably wouldn’t be very beneficial to them in the end. There’s a kind of paradox here, and yet the appeal is not to selfishness, the appeal is to the better side of human nature. When that better part is expressed, we flourish. It’s an appeal to the human essence and to the possibilities of love versus the possibilities of hatred, anger and fear.

Your book seems to promote action, but how does that apply to things such as race and class? For instance, if you are in a community that sees you as inferior for some reason, how can you still interact with that community with the intention to give?

I think resiliency is the key. Some of the most successful and influential people are those who are known to be helpful and kind even in the midst of very difficult circumstances. Living a creative, giving life can help people get beyond those kinds of noxious environments. Even so, there is a very real stress that people feel when they perceive themselves as disrespected by a society or a community because of race or class. It’s a response to the universal need we have for acceptance, the need to know that our lives have meaning and value. When you look around yourself and cannot see that reflected, it’s very hurtful.

In your book, you say very blatantly that there are innate differences. You say that status and rank matter. You say that nothing is neutral. Could you talk about that?

Well, everyone is different. Everyone has a unique experience of life. To some extent we all come with a set-point personality, which means people are born and hardwired to be the way they are: Most of positive psychology says that about 50% of our personality is set at birth. For instance, some babies are happy and some aren’t. It could be argued that another 25 percent of happiness is environmental; it has to do with relationships and circumstances that you’re thrown into in life. But that leaves another 25 percent or so that becomes what you make of it. We all start out at different places but whoever we are, whatever our genome type, whatever our environment, there’s still this area of control where it’s up to us.

But if we see these hardwired differences in one another, what makes us want to help one another rather than fight and compete?

I think that game theory is very relevant to answering that question: what seems to be clear from most mathematical modeling is that when we compete in ways that are respectful and compassionate towards others, we do better. In game theory the rule is that on the first move you should be trusting and kind. As the game proceeds the golden rule becomes ‘do unto others as they have done unto you’, so you begin to respond according to how you are treated. Your reaction to someone who is harsh and mean is pedagogical. You almost have a responsibility to react in a certain way.

In the same sense that I discuss courage in the book, each of us has a responsibility to have some kind of constructive confrontation with people whose behavior is really aberrant. When they realize they can’t treat you like a doormat, then good, come back to that relationship and move forward. In game theory, competitors follow these same rules of engagement: on the first move, trust, if the other reciprocates, step back and reengage. People who compete in that positive and cooperative fashion are the ones who actually win the game. Not to pretend that there aren’t some really obnoxious niches in life where things are so fear-laden and destructive that you can’t function in this way. But the problem of evil is not so much that we are wolves but that we are sheep. We tend to prefer the hierarchical virtues of obedience, which is why people have to be strong. They have to be able to buck the system if they need to, rather than go along with what they are told.

Do you think dealing with problems such as this through science is a way of trying to create a better world?

Yes. But it’s just a step. Science can only do so much. In the end I firmly believe that a better world comes when people live good lives and transmit or pass the torch of kindness to others. So it’s really a matter of transmission and modeling. There are three legs to the stool and you need to have all three of them in place to get any use from it.

Pulse: In your book, Jerusalem Calling, you make the claim that “Truth is always partisan”. This suggests that no political or ideological belief is ever pure. Do you think this purity is something people still strive for?

Joel Schalit: I don’t think anything is pure, but people do have an unhealthy desire for such things. Purity has horrible aesthetic and moral connotations. We see these in the war on terror and we saw them resolutely manifest in the 19th and 20th centuries as well. I’m particularly allergic to the notion of purity because I think to be pure is to be without contact, and no one single individual mind or opinion is formed independent of what surrounds it. The part of me that remains a committed, orthodox socialist, still believes in the absolute necessity of dialectics when it comes to talking about truth or knowledge.

If the world works dialectically, why do you think so many people cling to the notion of an absolute ‘right way’ or ‘wrong way’ of doing things?

Because they want to be free. It’s a symptom of the illness of being oppressed. People want to escape — they want transcendence. There’s nothing wrong with desiring transcendence, but it’s important that people remind themselves of its impossibility. The problem isn’t so much that we want to be pure, it’s that we believe being pure is possible.

Do you think this leads to the fundamentalist views that have been so destructive in the past few years?

Exactly. Particularly in the United States. What European progressives don’t always understand about the American left is how much American politics as a whole are conditioned by a Protestant heritage and a sense of religious purity. To talk about political freedom and social equality in this country is usually to speak about it in almost messianic terms because our language has been molded and informed by religious definitions of equality. In addition, because the political situation in the U.S. has been bad for so many years now, what is considered left is actually quite conservative: You never have anything in American left politics that hasn’t been manicured. There has always been an extreme desire for liberation from this conservatism in the United States, but the attempts at that liberation have consistently failed.

Couldn’t one make a strong claim for the history of resistance in the United States as well?

It’s true that resistance is a constant feature in American life. But because we have such an inconsequential history of progressive breakthroughs, the intellectual left tends to excoriate itself and go along with the European criticism that the U.S. left has been permanently neutered. If you look at the post-war period, between say 1948 and now, you do see periods of liberal-inspired social upheaval and breakthroughs in things like civil rights legislation and gender equality. The problem is that as soon as people resist and things change, the results get rolled back again.

I’m not sure that liberal ideas regress any more than conservative ideas. It’s like what we were talking about in terms of purity; nothing is purely liberal or purely conservative, at least not consistently so. In Jerusalem Calling, you write about the language of the 1960’s leftist movements being taken or coopted by conservatives and then used to accomplish rightwing agendas. One might say that Bush does this as well, using leftist language to sell the rightwing war on terror. Why is it that the left seems to always manufacture the language of the right?

One thing that has always conditioned my argument that you can never push for progressive politics from places of purity is that the left’s victories are frequently obscured by rightwing power. Cynically, one could say that the left manufactures the political language of the right because the left is the chief ideologist for the right: the left manufactures the right’s ideologies. Realistically, I think it’s more of a reflection of the fact that the left and the right, at least in the United States, are not as separate as one would like them to be. They tend to come from the same community and their members tend to travel back and forth between camps. A lot of the Bush people were former Trotskyites and 1960s radicals, for instance, so it makes sense that they would traffic Bush in the language of the Cold War left.

It then becomes difficult to say who is right and who is wrong.

I’m very sympathetic to postmodernist-inspired notions that politics itself is problematic, and that you can’t necessarily explain political differences rationally because politics itself, as a metacategory, may subscribe to a kind of conservative morality that does not distinguish between right and left and always pushes for conservative social and ideological solutions to problems that people face in their everyday life. Clearly postmodernism of that cynical disposition is largely attributed to derivations of Michel Foucault, but nevertheless I think on the left we’ve largely forgotten the ideological warning that such a reading can provide. These nebulous but necessary political traditions like postmodernism can serve as a reminder not to be absolutist in our convictions or in our deliberations about the progressive character of our own politics. Regardless of the side, it’s always good to introduce a level of skepticism.

Your work suggests that it’s possible to create a better present through understanding the ways we use what we’ve learned in the past.

My friends and I love to quote Karl Marx about how the first time something happens, it’s tragedy, but the second time it happens, it’s farce.

I actually think it’s more beneficial to go into the nuance though, because no thing really ever happens twice, at least not in the same way.

And yet it’s particularly important to understand the nuances of repetition itself, because we do remain trapped in the dialectics between religion and secularism. We can’t understand that social progress and social justice remain inhibited in the same ways they were inhibited 1000 years ago. It’s the same struggle between culture and capitalism.

Do you think people in power are aware of the ways they use this system? 

I think Bush and his team are aware that religion is a means of helping them culturally advance other kinds of more concrete political objectives, but it’s also fascinating to look at the degree to which members of that very same establishment also really do believe in such religious notions of equality and freedom. Bush is a great example: there is nobody more capable of articulating the anti-democratic objectives of the political elite than he is while at the same time actually believing in the ideologies they’re invoking to convince people to support their claims to power. It’s crazy. Bush is one of the more psychotic characters in that regard; he’s a fascinating study because he almost believes his own hype.

It’s almost like the better you can handle being a paradox, the more successful you’re going to be.

That’s right. The problem that a lot of folks outside of the US have is that they don’t understand what kind of spell that paradox holds for most Americans. Americans are enthralled by it because it appeals to the economic side of the equation. Americans like being a hegemonic political power on the world stage, and yet on the other hand it also appeals to their most heartfelt cultural identity, which is being a good Christian who has a sense of purpose in the world, a reason for existence.

What would you like to see happen in the states?

I would like to see some kind of renewal of progressive ideology within American popular culture and within non-institutional realms of American culture at large. Americans have very profound needs and desires for a better state of affairs that approximate a progressive political agenda; there just aren’t any cultural or institutional forces pushing them in that direction right now. There is a lot of anger about the war, and anger about poverty and anger about the state of the economy, but I don’t see people organizing or helping folks at large thematize those feelings into the kinds of real political discussions and goals that could actually influence the direction of this system. Americans don’t feel empowered to make decisions that would be best for their own self-interest in the long term. Religion plays an enormously negative role in that regard because it’s very hard to think about political freedom in an environment where people’s conceptions of freedom are already so wholly overconditioned by religious commitments. The kinds of faith Americans are taught to have don’t inspire the kind of radical negotiation of faith and politics that is necessary right now. In an ideal world, that would be one of the first things that would have to change

Interview by Andrea Hiott, from early 2008.

Joel Schalit is a writer and editor based in San Francisco. An Israeli-American pundit noted for his unique views on Middle Eastern politics and US culture, over the past thirteen years, Schalit has produced four books and contributed to numerous periodicals. The former managing editor of Berkeley’s Tikkun magazine and associate editor of Chicago’s Punk Planet, Schalit served two terms as the co-director of the world’s longest running online publication, Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. His latest book, Israel vs. Utopia, will be out in Autumn of 2009.

Interview by Anna Rohleder

Do our thoughts create our world? Gauhar wants us to look inside to understand our images.

Feryal Ali Gauhar’s professional life has encompassed many different activities: acting, writing, filmmaking and teaching, as well as serving as a diplomatic representative. She was a UN Goodwill Ambassador from 1999 to 2004, and she continues to be a sought-after participant for international panels and workshops, particularly on women’s issues. Her first novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August (2002) made the New York Times best seller list. Her second novel, No Space for Further Burials, was published in March 2007. She regularly writes op-ed pieces for Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, and teaches film at the National College of Arts while also lecturing on women and development at other universities and institutes. Feryal Ali Gauhar lives in Lahore.

Pulse: The narrator of your most recent novel, No Space for Further Burials, is an American man imprisoned in Afghanistan. What did you feel you could say or explore from his perspective that you couldn’t say from the perspective of a narrator who had a personal biography more like your own?

Ferial Ali Gauhar: I wanted to juxtapose two worlds which have been pitted against each other in the current global climate, both refusing to reveal their common humanity to each other, and both therefore perpetuating the myth that their nations are essentially opposed in terms of belief systems and behavior.

My American character is not the stereotype with which people in this part of the world are familiar – he is not the gun toting, swaggering cowboy who spits his disgust at all that is unfamiliar. Instead, he is at the edge of the mainstream, the son of a Native American farmer and a white woman, a young man who spends his time in libraries instead of chugging beer at the local football game. He is a man who dreams of being able to write, and who finds himself in a situation beyond his control. I felt it was important to explore my world from the perspective of those men and women who find themselves in the midst of a war which seems to have no purpose. I wanted to draw out the human dimension of the “enemy” or the “victor” and the “vanquished”. I felt I could do so by giving a voice to the American who comes with his own tale of sorrow, who is not always so sure of the agenda of his country, who is as vulnerable to violence and treachery and boredom and betrayal as anyone else, anywhere else.

At one point your narrator says, “I have come to understand what it means to live inside the landscape of one’s own mind, where one can create an entire new world, keeping it secret from others.” That seems true of this book in general, which is very much an interior narrative and not very visual in its language. This is surprising given that you are also a filmmaker. Is this something you were aware of as you were writing?

Yes, of course. My first novel, The Scent of Wet Earth in August, was highly visual in its language, based as it was on the script of a film I wrote and directed. This one, No Space for Further Burials, was written in the isolation of a California suburb where my only contact with the world was the bits and pieces of news I would get over the Internet. I was spending much of the day on my own, with no conversation, except that which my characters had with me. I built the asylum in my own head, I saw the characters playing out their lives, I smelt the decaying flesh and the overflowing urine, I felt the wounds and the cold and the hunger. All of this is hard to describe, but it was such an intensely real experience for me that the words just came, as much as the stories told themselves and the characters acted upon their own will. I did no drafts of the book – what was published was really the original manuscript. I never spoke to anyone at all about the book, and
I was quite surprised when a publisher asked for anything I had written recently. I still don’t know how the book was written, or whether I was just the instrument for the stories of these people who may have existed and who found me to tell their stories.

What does it mean to tell the truth of someone’s story? Is it different for an artist than for anyone else?

I don’t know what you mean by “artist”. Is a writer an artist? Is a journalist an artist when he or she puts their life on the line to “seek the truth”? I have never considered myself to be anything other than an ordinary human being, though I do have a deep compulsion to “tell the truth”… I am never conscious of the risks that I may be taking in the process; in fact, I am not even conscious of the process itself. Truth is something which manifests itself in ways which are unexpected, in the choices one makes, in the stories one tells, the songs one sings, the friends one keeps.

But what is it you feel compelled to say?

Simply that I believe it is time we were introspective about everything we seem to hold sacred: our cultural behavior, the ideologies which give rise to the policies we formulate. It is time to reach out and to understand that beneath the differences and despite the differences, there is the supreme commonality of a love of life, the love of family, country, and all things that are familiar to us in our own, separate worlds. It is time to consider that unless we reach out, unless we are willing to see the “enemy” as nothing but a reflection of our own selves, we are doomed to destroy everything we have built and learnt to love. It is time to pay tribute to the spirit of human resilience, time to resist tyranny of all sorts, in all places, amongst all people

WHAT IF WE COLLECTIVELY DECIDED THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ABSOLUTE TRUTH?

It would be disastrous, but it would never happen. Thank God, agreement is elusive, even on commonsense matters of fact. ‘There’s no absolute truth’ is an absolute statement – all statements about nothing are necessarily absolute – and therefore self-falsifying. Anyone – Cretan or cretin – who denies the existence of truth, invites disbelief. By denying absolute truth, the proposition we confront in the present exercise implicitly endorses contingent truths. But even contingent propositions can only be true if one of the conditions is that there is such a thing as truth.

Absolute truth is ineluctable. Even a truth that implies contingency, such as ‘Swans are black in Australia’ involves the absolutely true adumbration that ‘The proposition that swans are black in Australia is true.’ People who say, ‘It’s true for me’ are either gilding falsehoods or misrepresenting matters of opinion.

If we abandon the search for truth, we shall fall victim to two evils. First, we shall be hobbled in the fight against falsehood. People who deny that Nazis killed Jews, or who justify war by telling us that such-and-such an enemy has weapons of mass destruction, or who ascribe literal truth to poetic texts or self-interested dogmas will get away with their lies and evasions. Secondly, we shall make agreement depend on some other criterion, such as whether a proposition hurts anyone’s feelings, or causes offense, or transgresses political correctness, or subverts society, or challenges the state, or infringes consensus. Some campuses and some seminars are already close to being relativistic Disneylands, in which the nearest you can get to expressing outrage or denouncing lies is to say, ‘I know where you’re coming from.’ Some countries are already realms of newspeak.

To adhere to the search for truth does not mean the abandonment of skepticism. On the contrary: relativism makes us slip our guard. This does not mean that relativism is a useless doctrine. It can be a useful source of inspiration for thought experiments, such as the one we are engaged on in this exercise. In my book on the history of truth, I tried to show that different cultures, at different times, have favored, on balance, different techniques for telling truth from falsehood, and therefore may be said to have had, to that extent, different concepts of truth. In that sense, the predictions of relativism have proved valid. And it is important to remember that truth is elusive. It takes hard work, discipline, and time to approach it. Although the truth is out there we shall not grasp it quickly or easily embrace it whole. Relativism, indeed, can teach us a vital form of wisdom. The same truths look different when viewed from different viewpoints. Truth, as I am always telling my students, is like a nymph glimpsed bathing between leaves. The more you shift perspective, the more is revealed.

– Felipe Armesto

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is Professor of Global Environmental Hi story at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Truth: A Hi story as well as several popular works on history including Ideas That Changed the World (2003). Pathfinders: a Global Hi story of Exploration (2006). Fernandex Armesto is also the Principe de Asturias Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization at Tufts University.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto ist Dozent für Global Environmental Hi story an der Queen Mary University, London. Er ist der Autor des buches „Wahrheit. Die Geschichte. Die Feinde. Die Chancen.“, sowi e anderer erfolgreicher Werke zum thema Geschichte, u.a. „Ideas That Changed the World“ (2003) und „Pathfinders: a Global History of Exploration“ (2006). Fernandez- Armesto ist ausserdem der Principe de Asturias Chair für Spanische Kultur und Zivilisation an der Tufts University, Boston.

Es wäre ein Desaster, aber es wird nie dazu kommen. Zum Glück ist so ein
Einvernehmen schwer zu erzielen, auch bei Tatsachen, die die Allgemeinheit
anerkennt. ‚Es gibt keine absolute Wahrheit‘ ist an sich eine absolute
Aussage – alle gegenstandslosen Aussagen sind notwendigerweise
absolut – und widerlegt sich somit selbst. Jeder, egal ob Kreter oder
Kretin, der die Existenz von Wahrheit bestreitet, ruft Zweifel auf den Plan.
Indem die These, auf der diese Gedankenübung beruht, die Existenz einer
absoluten Wahrheit abstreitet, geht sie implizit von bedingten Wahrheiten
aus. Doch auch bedingte Thesen können nur dann wahr sein, wenn
zutrifft, dass es so etwas wie Wahrheit gibt. Absolute Wahrheit ist unvermeidlich.
Selbst Wahrheit, die Bedingtheit einbezieht, wie ‚In Australien
sind Schwäne schwarz‘, geht mit dem absolut wahren Gedankenentwurf
einher: ‚Die These, dass in Australien Schwäne schwarz sind, ist wahr‘.
Wer sagt: ‚Für mich ist das wahr‘, der verbrämt entweder eine Unwahrheit
oder stellt Dinge, die Ansichtssache sind, ungenau dar.
Gäben wir die Suche nach Wahrheit auf, so fielen wir zwei Übeln anheim.
Erstens würden wir bei unserem Kampf gegen Falschheit beeinträchtigt.
Menschen, die leugnen, dass die Nazis Juden umgebracht haben, oder die
Krieg damit rechtfertigen, dass sie uns sagen, dieser oder jene Feind habe
Massenvernichtungswaffen, oder die poetischen Texten eine wortwörtliche
Wahrheit oder eigennützige Dogmen zuschreiben, kämen mit ihren Lügen
und Ausflüchten davon. Zweitens würden wir unser Einvernehmen von anderen
Kriterien abhängig machen, wie der Frage, ob eine These jemandes
Gefühle verletzt oder jemandem Anlass zum Ärger bietet oder politisch
unkorrekt ist oder die Gesellschaft untergräbt oder sich gegen den Staat
richtet oder gegen allgemeinen Konsens verstößt. Einige Universitäten und
Seminare stehen kurz davor, sich in ein relativistisches Disneyland zu verwandeln,
in dem ‚Ich weiß, wo du herkommst.‘ das Äußerste ist, was man
sagen darf, um seinem Zorn Ausdruck zu verschaffen oder Lügen zu denunzieren.
Mancherorts ist Orwells „Neusprech“ bereits die Landessprache.

Er kann als hilfreiche Inspirationsquelle für Gedankenexperimente
dienen, wie bei dem, das wir hier gerade durchführen. In meinem Buch
über die Geschichte der Wahrheit habe ich darzustellen versucht, wie
verschiedene Kulturen zu bestimmten Zeiten letztendlich ganz unterschiedliche
Verfahrensweisen guthießen, um Wahrheit von Falschheit
zu unterscheiden, und wie man davon ausgehend sagen kann, dass sie
in diesem Maße auch unterschiedliche Wahrheitskonzepte besaßen.
Diesbezüglich haben sich die Vorhersagen des Relativismus als zutreffend
erwiesen. Und es ist wichtig, sich in Erinnerung zu rufen, dass
Wahrheit schwer zu erzielen ist. Es bedarf harter Arbeit, Disziplin und
viel Zeit, um sich ihr anzunähern. Obwohl es die Wahrheit gibt, sollten
wir nicht voreilig danach greifen oder sie gänzlich an uns ziehen. Der
Relativismus kann uns in der Tat eine grundlegende Form der Weisheit
lehren. Dieselben Wahrheiten sehen von unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln
betrachtet ganz anders aus. Wahrheit ist, wie ich meinen Studenten
auch immer sage, wie eine badende Nymphe hinter Bäumen
und Sträuchern. Je öfter man die Blickrichtung wechselt, um so mehr
kann man sehen.
– Felipe Armesto

Is truth a matter of interpretation? 

A discussion about ambivalence with Harvard’s controversial intellectual Homi Bhabha.

Pulse: Is there a way to understand truth without thinking of it as part of a story?

Homi Bhabha: I think it’s very difficult to understand the question of truth without some form of narrative because even if you assume that truth is an innate quality of something, in the same spirit that Keats said ‘Truth is beauty, beauty truth’, then truth is still going to be a form of judgment,and judgment assumes some kind of temporality in which you balance various things, and you need language to communicate that.

In what way is truth always a form of judgment?

In that truth is always a claim. You make a claim when you call something true; you are addressing something. So there is always some medium for our perception, which is a kind of judgment, which is a kind of story we tell? Well, truth always has to be mediated in some way, and narrative is a convenient way of doing that. It takes time for a person to get at the essence of something, to grasp the tree-ness of the tree or the trueness of the tree’s tree-ness, and the time it takes to do that would itself be some form of narrative.

Lately people seem more concerned with truth; at the same time, truth seems more difficult to find. For years we’ve been focused on the claims made about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and yet even now it’s hard to determine who knew what and when. Is truth contingent on whether or not the person speaking believes what he or she is saying?

First let’s go back to narrative: Did people say there were weapons of mass destruction? Yes, they did. Did they find weapons of mass destruction? No, they didn’t. So based on that, you might want to say that people were, as one famous Englishman put it, ‘economical with the truth’, i.e. they didn’t tell the truth. On the other hand, people say that in the moments leading up to the war the intelligence was not good and the evidence was enough to persuade the Blair and Bush governments to believe in it.

So they could have believed it was true?

They could have persuaded themselves of the need for war in just the same way people can persuade themselves that another person is in love with them. They could have believed in it because their desire for it was so strong. But either way, alongside the question of whether people were honest or dishonest about those things, narrative becomes very important. And whether they believed it or not, genuinely, is an issue that is left even more open because of what actually happened.

That’s what I was trying to raise by using the word ‘inertia’ I think. It’s like we relinquish truth to some movement for which we don’t want to take responsibility, and yet we’re still there moving right along with it.

But I think it’s more than just inertia. It’s a particular way of thinking, a particular style of American foreign policy that has had a long history, hundreds of years old, which is the history of pre-emptive action. It’s the idea that you must somehow take control of things before they happen, but when you take action before something has happened,you don’t know if you are hitting the right target.

But depending on whether you destroy that target, the truth might go in various ways

It’s like Michel Foucault’s idea that there is no Truth with a capital T, no transcendent quality. There is always a battle around what is the true, and it’s the function of discourse to stabilize something as true for a certain period of time, whether it’s a particular laboratory method, whether it’s a particular form of medical diagnosis, whether it’s a particular law relating to behavior or a particular norm. Truth is always a negotiation, and it always has a certain authority.

Well in other areas of society, not only politics, it doesn’t seem to be as much of a negotiation. When someone claims to be writing a memoir for instance, we read it in a different way. The meaning becomes questionable if we learn that something the writer presented to us was actually false. This usually leads to controversy, as has happened with writers such as J.T. Leroy, who claimed to be a homosexual, boy prostitute but turned out to be a 40-year-old woman instead. What is it about writing that changes people’s reaction depending on whether the author claims his or her story is true?

That’s a problem concerning different conventions of reading. Conventions of reading are always based on certain structures or conditions of credibility. If you’re looking at a science fiction piece, you expect one thing. If you were reading an allegory where animals stand for human beings, then you’d expect another. And if you’re reading a memoir that’s been presented to you as something true, then likewise you’re relating to a particular convention from the very beginning. Each piece is a different convention. And each convention has a different kind of identification, a different set of codifications.

But doesn’t it come down to interpretation? Does the writer really control it all?

Well no, one can’t control it all, but there is a difference. There is a difference between the levels of interpretation that you establish. When you are writing something that you claim actually happened to you, it’s perfectly possible to describe events truthfully, and it’s also perfectly possible that at some point later your perception of those events might change. This type of change is completely different than saying that you were raped, or that you were a drug addict, when in fact those things never really happened to you. For example, I just read a book by Elie Wiesel about his devastating experiences as a young man during the Holocaust. I hope I’m remembering the story correctly — it would be ironic in the context if I weren’t — but I think that in an early book of his which was published in French, he said that during the Nazi transport of the Jewish people to the concentration camps, there was a lot of sex going on in the wagons.

Then, in the version that I was reading, he says that he’s not so sure that what he’d written about the sex then was really true after all, that perhaps it was only his projection that perhaps he was at a point in his life where he needed some deep, physical comfort and so he may have actually invented it all. Such a situation belongs to what I meant by reinterpretation. You see he WAS in the wagon, and in that wagon bodies were probably very close to one another, lurching around; there were probably all kinds of sounds in that darkness and desperation and loneliness that might have stimulated different interpretations, one of which might have been that the people were indeed having sex. But that kind of interpretation is very different from questioning whether or not Eli Wiesel was actually in those trains and in that situation.

Do you think we create morality by what we write?

Sure. Sure we do. But how else would you create it? I mean, when you talk about writing I assume you mean écriture – you mean inscription — which includes speech, which includes visual signs; it’s not simply what you put down on a piece of paper.

Yes. All of that. Writing a book, writing a film, drawing, creating.

Exactly. Visual signs, visual culture. It’s about a system of meaning. It could be advertising. It could be the Advent calendar. It’s all of this. And how else would morality be articulated?

Articulated or generated? Because I’m talking about generation.

Well, articulated in the sense of made known, made visible, entering into the lives and thinking and speech of people, but also articulated in the sense of an articulated lorry, where what is moral has to be linked, like an articulated vehicle, to a number of other things or vehicles. Language and meaning are the ways one does that.

So being creative can be thought of as being truthful?

Well that’s a very broad thing to state but yes, of course, being creative to some extent is about being truthful to something, truthful to your fantasy, truthful to your desire, truthful to your love of language…

But there are other things to consider too, like the play of power and the desire to please.

Well, what do you mean?

If one wants to create something, he or she then has a basic impetus, but that original ‘truth’ will have to come into contact with everything external as well. There’s always the option that one might become false as a way of fitting in with what is already explicit, isn’t there?

Well, of course you’d be conscious in such a way when you were making something. You’d decide the audience you wanted to approach; you’d decide the theme; you’d decide the form; you’d decide the funding; and you’d decide the institution where you would locate the work and so on. What you would not be able to define is the way in which that work over time, or even in its own time, was interpreted or institutionalized. In different places and in different situations there are things which function as truths, but in each of these situations there is always a place from which those ideas or concepts or norms can be questioned.

There’s seems to be an ambivalence here though, in terms of the tension between what one might feel as his or her truth and how that feeling might change as they interact with the world.

Those two things are certainly at play, but there’s also something else at play and that is that as soon as you write a sentence, as soon as you invest a part of yourself in a work, you cannot be fully aware of how you are transcribing your own psychic state into it. The work is always open to interpretation, even against the grain of the author’s intentions.

In that sense, what do you think of the way your own work has been interpreted? Many of your peers, as you know, often criticize you for writing obscurely. I suppose obscurity can also mean ambiguity, and deliberate ambiguity might be a way of leaving something open to as many interpretations as possible. Do you think your writing is obscure? Do you do that on purpose?

Well I can see how certain things that I write could be difficult. When I’m working on something, there might be a time when I haven’t quite worked out the thought but I know that this gray area is crucial to the argument. In those times, I will still try my best to keep this thought in the text, even if it creates a kind of uncertainty in some way.

So it becomes more poetry than prose, leaving this space open for interpretation.

So it becomes more poetry than prose, leaving this space open for interpretation. Right. I don’t close off the space and say I’m going to stop there just because I’m on stable ground. When I’m writing it’s very often a high-wire act; it isn’t certain.

There are people who would say that the only way to find new answers is to be able to deal with uncertainty but…

Well. Well, I’m sure that’s true.

Interview by Andrea Hiott, 2007

Interview by Andrea Hiott.

It’s a mistake to say that science is true. 

According to quantum mechanic Seth Lloyd, we can trust what we cannot prove. Lloyd was the first person to discover how to build a quantum computer. He is a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and the author of Programming the Universe, a book about quantum mechanics and how the universe is a giant computer.

Pulse: Science is something people reference these days regardless of their field or discipline. Does this popularization of science bother you?

Seth Lloyd: Not at all. I think it’s natural that this should happen because the thing that makes a piece of knowledge scientific in the first place is that it can be verified by anybody or anything. Science is a uniquely public form of knowledge, so it makes sense that it is popular. It also makes scientists responsible for trying to communicate in a way that others can understand, which I see as a good thing.

Is there any way in which it can be harmful for people to believe that anything associated with science is true?

I actually think it’s a mistake to say that science is true. The normal line that philosophers of science take on this, rather than saying that science is true, is to say that science is falsifiable. That basically means that we can figure out what is false but we cannot prove what is true. The scientific results that we have are actually the ones that have been tested again and again and not proven false.
In that sense, science itself is not dangerous; what can be dangerous is the way that science is used. Which is another reason why people should understand as much as they can about it, because the way science is used is really the responsibility of a society as a whole, not only of its scientists. The people who are commissioning bombs to be built and then dropping those bombs on others are not necessarily people who are scientists; they are people who are using science for bad aims, assuming those kinds of aims are bad ones, which I do.

In school we learn that science is solid, factual, and reliable, but when you really start looking at it you realize it’s not so solid: something can be both a particle and a wave; nothing is ‘true’ it’s only ‘falsifiable’….

Actually, I’d maintain that what you learned in school is correct: Science is solid, factual and reliable. But what people don’t learn in school, and what they really need to know, is that not only is science solid, factual and reliable but it’s also totally insane. Science is crazy and counterintuitive and bizarre at the very same time that it’s solid and factual and reliable.

We don’t usually believe something can be both reliable and counterintuitive. To really understand the way the universe works, do we have to accept more contradictions?

Yes. And that’s pretty mind-blowing isn’t it? Science is crazy and yet scientific knowledge is really the only reliable stuff we have. “If you cut your finger, it will bleed” is an example of scientific knowledge. It’s knowledge everybody possesses because it is falsifiable. But when you then take that same idea and apply it to photons and electrons and black holes and the universe, then you will find that the analogous statement to “If you cut your finger, it bleeds” is “An electron can be in two places at once, and it typically is in two places at once”. It’s profoundly difficult for people to accept such a thing.

You just gave some examples of scientific knowledge. In Programming the Universe, you make a case for how the universe is a giant computer running on information. In such a universe, what is the difference between knowledge and information?

That’s a difficult question, but first let’s just try and define information. Information can be thought of as bits. It represents distinctions between possibilities, like the distinction between “0” and “1” or “yes” and “no”; it doesn’t say anything whatsoever about meaning.

So information is more like food?  

Right. If the cable guy comes to your house and hooks up your cable, his job is to make sure you get 500,000 bits per second coming into your house. His job isn’t about determining whether that 500,000 bits is Masterpiece Theatre or whether it’s pornography. The content doesn’t matter to him; all that matters is that you’re getting your 500,000 bits. The quantity of information can be distinct from the content.

So information is what exists with or without our awareness of it, but knowledge is the interpretation of information, and so requires consciousness?

Our consciousness certainly has to do with how we interpret information, but I’m actually very suspicious of consciousness; I think it’s way overrated. Humans tend to take a lot of pride in ‘being conscious’ and I always want to ask ‘Well, what have we done with that consciousness recently?’
We tend to think we’re the center of the universe, but most of us go around unconscious for the majority of the time, even when we’re awake.

I guess what I mean by consciousness is the extent to which we are aware of the information we use to communicate with one another, because maybe that is connected to how things change. For instance, in your book you talk about how physical systems change their information. Can you explain this?

Since information represents distinctions between possibilities, a change from one possibility to another is what distinguishes change. An electron has a bit – it has a piece of information, or maybe it’s better to say that an electron is a piece of information – which means it can spin either clockwise or counterclockwise. And every time something happens to it, that bit flips. It goes from spinning clockwise to spinning counterclockwise, or vise versa, and when it does this we say that the information has changed.

Is this what you would call de-cohering?

De-coherence is a good example of one of those things that is counterintuitive. The idea that an electron has a bit – that it can spin either clockwise or counterclockwise – is part of a classical picture of the world which is digital at bottom. But the electron is also quantum mechanical, so in addition to having this discrete, digital quality it also has its own weird funky counterintuitive properties, because actually this electron can take on both these things at once: it can spin both clockwise and counterclockwise. It can be both “O” and “1” at the same time, before it de-coheres.

Is this happening in two separate places? Or is there one place and both things are happening simultaneously?

The electron is “0” and “1” simultaneously, but you’re on the right track…

Ok. So is it like feeling happy and sad at exactly the same moment? Or wanting something and not wanting it at exactly the same time?

That’s certainly only a metaphor, and we have to be careful, but let’s pursue that train of thought. De-coherence is a process from where the electron goes from being “0” and “1” at the same time, to being either 0 or 1. When it de-coheres, the world splits in two and “0” goes to one world and 1 goes to another, and those worlds continue but they are no longer the same world. We can think of this in other ways too, to get a better idea. For example, as I discuss in the book, there’s a passage from Kenzaburo Oe’s A Personal Matter where he talks about a woman whose husband has committed suicide and she spends a lot of her time imagining this other world where he’s still alive, to the extent where this other world is as real to her as the world where she is actually living. I don’t know if you’ve ever had anyone close to you die, but there really is this way where a part of your brain continues to still think that person is living. But this is only a kind a way of understanding the idea: I don’t think electrons actually feel this way. (laughing)

It’s magical thinking. But as you say in your book, according to the Many Worlds theory, for every situation that happens there are many other worlds in which it doesn’t. You also quote Oe’s statement that “You can’t make death relative, no matter what psychological tricks you use”. Those two statements seem to contradict one another. Even so, there’s something about taking the two of them together that is useful for dealing with grief. Perhaps contradictions open up possibilities by allowing more than one thing to be true. Is it this same idea that gives a quantum computer more power than a normal one?

In a way, yes. Because when we say that computers interpret information, what we really mean is they treat the information as instructions to do things, so “0” means to do one thing and “1” means to do another. That’s what happens when human beings interpret information as well. So if I take this bit that is both “0” and “1” at the same time and I put it into the computer, the computer treats is as an instruction – “0” tells the computer to do this, and “1” tells the computer to do that. A quantum computer can do both of those instructions at the same time, rather than only one of them. David Deutsch called this quantum parallelism: it’s a matter of doing two or more things in parallel. A classical computer can typically only follow one instruction at a time, but a quantum computer can do many things simultaneously.

So what role does uncertainty play when it comes to computers and computer programming?

Good question. In ordinary computer programming, there’s really only one type of uncertainty, and everybody experiences this kind of uncertainty everyday. It’s the reason why there are bugs in computer programs, or why your computer freezes at times or does all those other funny things you don’t want it to do. The reason there are always bugs in computer programs comes from a very deep expression in logic, Kurt Gödel’s Undecidability Theorem, which shows that if you have any sufficiently complicated logical or mathematical structure, it’s not closed; there’s no finite mathematical system in which everything can be answered. So when you translate that into computer programs, it becomes something called the Halting Problem, which was proven by Alan Turing. The Halting Problem says that the only way to know what will happen if you change the instructions of a computer is to give it those instructions and see what happens.
So you can’t really prove that it’s going to go one way or the other. The only way to know if a computer program is going to work is to try it. You don’t know what is going to happen until you hit “RETURN”. This is something nearly everyone who has a computer has experienced. On top of all that, you also have this other kind of uncertainty that we’ve been talking about, the quantum mechanical one. The cool thing about the universe is that it’s using both of these in a complimentary or parallel fashion. So somewhere everything happens. Which helps us understand why life happened: if the universe is exploring all these different structures, then it’s not surprising that it’s exploring a structure like this as well.

Life is intrinsically likely then, as you say.

And certain to occur somewhere.

So we can’t prove anything is true, and we can’t make any definite predictions?

No. But we can say what isn’t true, and that’s quite a lot already.

interview by Andrea Hiott, 2007