GSA 2025: Panel Series “VERACITY”

Panel Series

VERACITY

GSA Annual Conference, Sept. 25–28 2025

Call for Papers

[T]he surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism—an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established. – Hannah Arendt

In the anthropology of totalitarianism . . . the speaking animal is above all the credulous animal. – Alexandre Koyré

Increasingly, the public sphere is becoming a space in which any communication, no matter how factual or impartial, is likely to be discounted as an attempt at manipulation, as influencing rather than informing. Institutions that not long ago could still be held up, despite their many failures, as “refuges of truth” (Arendt)—the university, the judiciary, the independent press—have lost their privileged status as sources of unbiased judgment and now find themselves treated as producing just one more partisan form of speech among others, like advertising or campaigning. 

The flip side of this generalized or facile skepsis are new levels of uncritical credulity. In one and the same gesture, the well-documented results of climate science are declared a hoax while fantastic tales that defy all reason become items of bedrock faith (Latour). Blind suspicion goes hand in hand with an excessive demand for certainty, pushing doubt and belief into opposite corners and ruling out any possibility of mutual encounter, of submitting conviction to doubt or of tempering doubt with confidence. As though that were not enough, the de-facto need for critical reflection grows more urgent even while it loses force. The election result that is falsely presented as false is thereby rendered liable to being hijacked for real, and a slandered judiciary soon finds itself defenseless against political influence, eventually lending substance to its bad reputation in a grotesque hysteron proteron. 

In such a situation, the 20th-century traditions of “critique” find themselves faced with new tasks and new challenges. Strategies that question claims to objectivity—by exposing, say, the interestedness of cognition, the contamination of reason by the commodity form, the power relations subtending discourses of knowledge, truth as an army of metaphor etc.—would appear to lose their purchase when all pretentions to disinterestedness or unbiased judgment have been abandoned anyway. Nor is it evident how appeals to the solidity of fact (scientific or historical), an insistence on the distinction between truth and opinion, indeed any attempt to return to Enlightenment ideals could provide a viable alternative. What, then, can be done? This series of panels will endeavor to find answers to this question. What forms of language, discourse, reading, performance, or indeed critique can be effective when it has become difficult if not impossible to make evident the distinction between critique and its simulacrum? What practices or strategies can defend against threats both old and new: against lying and manipulation, against uncritical credulity, against truth’s perversion into dogmatism or orthodoxy, against the “common desire not to think” (Lefort), but also against veracity’s loss of credibility in the face of an inflationary cheapening of doubt? 

Scholars of literature and culture have unique and valuable contributions to make in the attempt to answer these questions. Literary and philosophical texts offer a wealth of positions and perspectives not always available to many forms of political, historical, and scientific writing. Precisely because they deal in contrafactual language—fiction, conjecture, thought experiment, the open subjectivity of lyric, memoir, diary, etc.—they can situate themselves outside of factual discourse, and the gap or distance thus opened, while susceptible to abuse, offers potentialities that factual discourse may not have at its disposal. While by no means immune to deception, such texts and the methods of reading that have been developed in studying them may be in a position to show or make obvious dynamics or functions of the distinction between truth and falsity not readily observable otherwise. This is all the more important given that, arguably, no form of language or discourse can simply opt out of distinguishing truth from lie.

• the theme of lying in literature—from Gryphius’ Catharina von Georgien to Kleist’s Der Zerbrochene Krug to Jurek Becker’s Jakob der Lügner, to name just a few examples
• in philosophical texts (personal or political)
• aesthetic truth; sincerity and authenticity
• parrhesia and telling truth to power
• facts vs. truth; truth vs. veracity
• lying to the masses and mass credulity
• totalitarianism and lying (Arndt, Koyré, Lefort, etc.) [1]
• conspiracy
• lying as condition of consciousness and/or action [2]
• lying vs. fiction: conjecture, thought-experiment, the hypothetical
• undecidability vs. the need for certitude
• history/histories of truth and facts [3]
• history/histories of mendacity (and its impossibility) [4]
• theory and critique of ideology: new challenges
• “The facts turn left” (Koschorke) [5]
• scientific fact and epistemic things (Rheinberger) [6]
• Science and Technology Studies (Latour) [7]
• ethics of truth and lying (Kant, Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil . . .) [8]
• facts and opinion
• the role of distinction and judgment [9]
• dissimulation; illusion; deepfake [10]
• the concrete as the true, abstraction as falsification (Hegel) [11]
• half-truth [12]
• the “post-factual”? [13]

References

[1] Alexandre Koyré, “The Political Function of the Modern Lie” (1943); Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” (1967) and “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the The Pentagon Papers” (1971); Claude Lefort, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism” (1981) and “La croyance en politique—La question de la servitude volontaire” (1996).

[2] E.g. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Le Mensonge” (1940).

[3] See e.g. Barbara Shapiro, “The Concept of ‘Fact’” (1994) and “A Culture of Fact” (2000); Lorraine Daston,“Baconian Facts” (1994) and “Scientific Error and the Ethos of Belief” (2005), and, from a different angle, Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (1994); Peter Brooks, “The Facts on the Ground” (2019) and Chenxi Tang, “Making Facts, Using Facts” (2019).

[4] Jacques Derrida, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” translated by Peggy Kamuf (2002) and e.g. Lorella Cedroni, Menzogna e potere nella filosofia politica occidentale (2010); Ethel Matala de Mazza, “Politik und Lüge” (2018).

[5] Albrecht Koschorke, “Linksruck der Fakten” (2018).

[6] Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things (1997).

[7] E.g. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”        (2004).

[8] Simone Weil, “Note sur la suppression générale des partis politiques” (1950).

[9] E.g. Susanne Lüdemann, “Vom Unterscheiden” (2001).

[10] E.g. Nina Schick, “Deep Fakes: The Coming Infocalypse” (2020).

[11] G.W.F. Hegel, “Wer denkt abstrakt?” (1807).

[12] Mary Dietz, “Working in Half-Truth” (2000); Nicola Gess, Halbwahrheiten (2021).

[13] E.g. Emmanuel Alloa, "Who's Afraid of the Post-Factual?" (July 2017) or Lee Mcintyre, Post-Truth (2018).

Please submit a 350-500 word proposal and a short bio to David Martyn (martyn@macalester.edu) and Christiane Frey (cfrey9@jhu.edu) by March 2, 2025.

Please note the GSA rules: all applicants must be current members of the GSA; no individual may apply to more than one “presenter role” (giving a paper, convening or participating in a seminar); no individual may participate in any role in more than two sessions. Individuals may present a paper in one session and serve as commentator, moderator, or roundtable participant in two different panels.

More Information regarding the conference can be found on the GSA's website --https://www.thegsa.org/conference/current-conference#submissions.  

Contact Information

Prof. Dr. Christiane Frey
Associate Professor of German Studies,
Modern Languages and Literatures
Co-Director, Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought
Johns Hopkins University
Gilman Hall 408, 3400 N. Charles St, Baltimore, MD 21218
Current Fellowship:
https://www.imaginarien-der-kraft.uni-hamburg.de/fellows/fellows-2023-2027/senior-fellows/frey.html
 

Contact Email

cfrey637@gmail.com

URL

https://krieger.jhu.edu/modern-languages-literatures/directory/christiane-frey/