Note: Over the week­end, the Prince­ton philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt passed away at the age of 94. After a long career, he became the author of the sur­prise best­selling book, On Bull­shit, which we fea­tured in 2016. Please revis­it our orig­i­nal post below.

We live in an age of truthi­ness. Come­di­an Stephen Col­bert coined the word to describe the Bush administration’s ten­den­cy to fudge the facts in its favor.

Ten years after the Amer­i­can Dialect Soci­ety named it Word of the Year, for­mer pres­i­dent Bush’s cal­en­dar is packed with such leisure activ­i­ties as golf and paint­ing por­traits of world lead­ers, but “truthi­ness” remains on active duty.

It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly ger­mane in this elec­tion year, though politi­cians are far from its only prac­ti­tion­ers.

Take glob­al warm­ing. NASA makes a pret­ty rock sol­id case for both its exis­tence and our role in it:

97 per­cent or more of active­ly pub­lish­ing cli­mate sci­en­tists agree: Cli­mate-warm­ing trends over the past cen­tu­ry are extreme­ly like­ly due to human activ­i­ties. In addi­tion, most of the lead­ing sci­en­tif­ic orga­ni­za­tions world­wide have issued pub­lic state­ments endors­ing this posi­tion.

In view of such num­bers, it’s under­stand­able that a sub­ur­ban Joe with a freez­er full of fac­to­ry-farmed beef and mul­ti­ple SUVs in his garage would cling to the posi­tion that glob­al warm­ing is a lie. It’s his last resort, real­ly.

But such self-ratio­nal­iza­tions are not truth. They are truthi­ness.

Or to use the old-fash­ioned word favored by philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt, above: bull­shit!

Frank­furt–a philoso­pher at Prince­ton and the author of On Bull­shit–allows that bull­shit artists are often charm­ing, or at their very least, col­or­ful. They have to be. Achiev­ing their ends involves engag­ing oth­ers long enough to per­suade them that they know what they’re talk­ing about, when in fact, that’s the oppo­site of the truth.

Speak­ing of oppo­sites, Frank­furt main­tains that bull­shit is a dif­fer­ent beast from an out-and-out lie. The liar makes a spe­cif­ic attempt to con­ceal the truth by swap­ping it out for a lie.

The bull­shit artist’s approach is far more vague. It’s about cre­at­ing a gen­er­al impres­sion.

There are times when I admit to wel­com­ing this sort of manure. As a mak­er of low bud­get the­ater, your hon­est opin­ion of any show I have Lit­tle Red Hen’ed into exis­tence is the last thing I want to hear upon emerg­ing from the cramped dress­ing room, unless you tru­ly loved it.

I’d also encour­age you to choose your words care­ful­ly when dash­ing a child’s dreams.

But when it comes to mat­ters of pub­lic pol­i­cy, and the pub­lic good, yes, trans­paren­cy is best.

It’s inter­est­ing to me that film­mak­ers James Nee and Chris­t­ian Brit­ten trans­formed a por­tion of their learned subject’s thoughts into voiceover nar­ra­tion for a light­ning fast stock footage mon­tage. It’s divert­ing and fun­ny, fea­tur­ing such omi­nous char­ac­ters as Nos­fer­atu, Bill Clin­ton, Char­lie Chaplin’s Great Dic­ta­tor, and Don­ald Trump, but isn’t it also the sort of mis­di­rec­tion sleight of hand at which true bull­shit­ters excel?

Frank­furt expands upon his thoughts on bull­shit in his apt­ly titled best­selling book, On Bull­shit and its fol­lowup On Truth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Schools 9/11 Truther; Explains the Sci­ence of Mak­ing Cred­i­ble Claims

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Tri­umph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the Eng­lish Lan­guage a New Exple­tive (1910)

“Call­ing Bull­shit”: See the Syl­labus for a Col­lege Course Designed to Iden­ti­fy & Com­bat Bull­shit

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Nobody who keeps up with cur­rent dis­course could fail to notice that gen­der has become a fraught top­ic in recent years. This con­di­tion can hard­ly have gone unfore­seen by the the­o­rist Judith But­ler, who pub­lished the now-well-known vol­ume Gen­der Trou­ble: Fem­i­nism and the Sub­ver­sion of Iden­ti­ty back in 1990. “Every­body has a the­o­ry of gen­der,” But­ler says in the new Big Think video above. “Every­body has cer­tain assump­tions going about what gen­der is or should be. And at a cer­tain point in life, we ask our­selves, ‘Wow, where’d that assump­tion come from?’ ” But­ler’s career has, in part, focused on the search for the roots of these very assump­tions.

This expe­ri­ence places But­ler well to com­ment on the heat­ed argu­ments about gen­der being stoked even now in the polit­i­cal realm, on social media, and else­where besides. “We have a whole range of dif­fer­ences, bio­log­i­cal in nature, so I don’t deny them, but I don’t think they deter­mine who we are in some sort of final way.”

As with many con­tro­ver­sies — not least philo­soph­i­cal ones — a core prob­lem has to do with dif­fer­ing def­i­n­i­tions of words and con­cepts. At issue here in par­tic­u­lar is “the dis­tinc­tion between sex and gen­der,” achiev­ing a full under­stand­ing of which, to But­ler’s mind, requires delv­ing into all the rel­e­vant his­to­ry, includ­ing the work of the­o­rists like Gayle Rubin, Juli­et Mitchell, and Simone de Beau­voir.

Accord­ing to But­ler, the “basic point” of de Beau­voir’s The Sec­ond Sex is that “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one, that the body is not a fact.” This pos­si­bil­i­ty opened by de Beau­voir — that of “a dif­fer­ence between the sex you’re assigned and the sex you become” — has been much explored since the book’s pub­li­ca­tion near­ly three quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry ago. Some of those explo­rations have involved the idea of the “per­for­ma­tive.” “We do enact who we are,” But­ler says. “There are per­for­mances that we do in our lives that are not mere per­for­mance; they’re not fake.” Fol­low­ing on that, “what if we were to say that, in act­ing our lives as a par­tic­u­lar gen­der, we are actu­al­ly real­iz­ing that gen­der anew?” For many read­ers of gen­der the­o­ry, this rais­es a host of thrilling new pos­si­bil­i­ties, but behind it lies per­haps the old­est philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion of all: what, now, will you do?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The­o­rist Judith But­ler Explains How Behav­ior Cre­ates Gen­der: A Short Intro­duc­tion to “Gen­der Per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty”

Judith But­ler on Non­vi­o­lence and Gen­der: Hear Con­ver­sa­tion with The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life

Judy!: 1993 Judith But­ler Fanzine Gives Us An Irrev­er­ent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Struc­tural­ist Gen­der The­o­rist

A Short Ani­mat­ed Film Explores the Flu­id­i­ty of Gen­der in the Thought of Simone de Beau­voir and Judith But­ler

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

As chil­dren’s tele­vi­sion has demon­strat­ed since the begin­ning of the medi­um, some­times the best way to make an unfa­mil­iar con­cept under­stand­able is to artic­u­late it through the mouth — and the body — of a pup­pet. Most all of us alive today had some expe­ri­ence with that back when we were still get­ting our ABCs and 123s down. Yet even in adult­hood, we con­tin­ue to find our­selves con­front­ed with ideas we may find dif­fi­cult to grasp, espe­cial­ly in the domain of phi­los­o­phy, with no expla­na­tion offer­ing-pup­pets to be found — or at least there weren’t, not before the launch of The­o­ret­i­cal Pup­pets on Youtube.

Each month, The­o­ret­i­cal Pup­pets brings on a notable thinker or two, the cur­rent line­up of whom includes the likes of Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Han­nah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Fou­cault, all of them recon­struct­ed out of cloth and wire.

These pup­pets are rec­og­niz­able as the indi­vid­u­als who inspired them, and also rec­og­niz­able as homages to the pup­pet aes­thet­ic pop­u­lar­ized by a cer­tain long-run­ning pro­gram on Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion — a form of broad­cast­ing, inci­den­tal­ly, that Ben­jamin nev­er knew. He did, how­ev­er, have seri­ous thoughts about radio, the mass media of his day, some of which he — or rather, his pup­pet — artic­u­lates in the video just above.

Oth­er episodes of The­o­ret­i­cal Pup­pets include Fou­cault on dis­course, Deleuze on Pow­er, Arendt on natal­i­ty (and smok­ing), and even the late Bruno Latour on actor-net­work the­o­ry. Among the chan­nel’s most-viewed videos are meet­ings of the minds both his­tor­i­cal and fic­tion­al: between Deleuze and Fou­cault, (a re-cre­ation of a 1963 radio inter­view), between Fou­cault and Ben­jamin, between Sig­mund Freud and Sal­vador Dalí (which includes a dis­cus­sion of the lat­ter’s depic­tion of the for­mer’s head as a “snail-like struc­ture”). To vary­ing extents, these dia­logues are root­ed in the words these fig­ures wrote and spoke in their life­times; like most pup­pet-based pro­duc­tions, they also take place in the realm of fan­ta­sy. There’s humor in the incon­gruity, to be sure, but then, it must have demand­ed no small amount of imag­i­na­tion to pro­duce such endur­ing bod­ies of the­o­ry in the first place.

Relat­ed con­tent:

When Sal­vador Dali Met Sig­mund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Sur­re­al­ism (1938)

Pup­pets of Dos­to­evsky, Dick­ens & Poe Star in 1950s Frank Capra Edu­ca­tion­al Film

The The­o­ry of Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein & Sig­mund Freud Sung by Ken­neth Gold­smith

The Hand Pup­pets That Bauhaus Artist Paul Klee Made for His Young Son

Albert Ein­stein Hold­ing an Albert Ein­stein Pup­pet (Cir­ca 1931)

A Young Jim Hen­son Teach­es You How to Make Pup­pets with Socks, Ten­nis Balls & Oth­er House­hold Goods (1969)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

From the site Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion comes an AI gen­er­at­ed, nev­er-end­ing dis­cus­sion between Wern­er Her­zog and Slavoj Žižek. What’s the point of this AI gen­er­at­ed con­ver­sa­tion? The cre­ator explains:

As of late 2022, it’s cheap and easy to pro­duce AI-gen­er­at­ed con­tent that is super­fi­cial­ly good and sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar to “the real thing”. This applies to videos resem­bling celebri­ties (com­mon­ly known as Deep­fakes) or, as in the case of the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion, speech.

This project aims to raise aware­ness about the ease of using tools for syn­the­siz­ing a real voice. Right now, any moti­vat­ed fool can do this with a lap­top in their bed­room. This changes our rela­tion­ship with the media we con­sume online and rais­es ques­tions about the impor­tance of author­i­ta­tive sources, breach of trust and gulli­bil­i­ty.

Will this tech­nol­o­gy lead to a mas­sive pro­lif­er­a­tion of sub-opti­mal-qual­i­ty con­tent? Should we sim­ply dis­trust any­thing we see online? As new tools are devel­oped to help iden­ti­fy gen­er­at­ed con­tent, I rec­om­mend main­tain­ing a skep­ti­cal stance, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the source/channel of infor­ma­tion does­n’t seem reli­able and when the claims seem pre­pos­ter­ous or out­ra­geous.

Ulti­mate­ly, I don’t see this as a tech­ni­cal prob­lem, but as a human one. We all share a duty to edu­cate the com­ing gen­er­a­tions about the new par­a­digm while focus­ing on form­ing com­pas­sion­ate indi­vid­u­als who would not mis­use these awe­some pow­ers.

As an AI opti­mist, I remain hope­ful that we will be able to reg­u­late our­selves, and that we will take exper­i­ments such as the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion for what they are: a play­ful way to help us imag­ine what our favorite peo­ple would do, if we had unlim­it­ed access to their minds. Art and Phi­los­o­phy, here exem­pli­fied by Bavar­i­an direc­tor Wern­er Her­zog and Sloven­ian philoso­pher Slavoj Žižek, can guide us while nav­i­gat­ing these treach­er­ous waters.

Lis­ten to the end­less Her­zog-Žižek con­ver­sa­tion here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

Slavoj Žižek: What Ful­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

Wern­er Her­zog Nar­rates the Touch­ing, Exis­ten­tial Jour­ney of a Plas­tic Bag