The Aesthetics of Disinformation
Daniel Chinellato's doctoral dissertation on pictorial and multimodal communicative acts.
How can a person or institution assert, lie, mislead, or testify with a picture? My dissertation develops an answer within the tradition of speech act theory.
Doctoral dissertation · Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
The dissertation begins from a simple asymmetry. If someone answers a question with a sentence they believe to be false, the ordinary verdict is lying. If they answer the same question with an old or manipulated photograph, many philosophical accounts classify the act as merely misleading. I argue that this difference cannot be explained by the communicative mode alone. What matters is whether the speaker undertakes assertoric commitment to the proposition presented as true.
My approach retains the distinction, inherited from J. L. Austin and John Searle, between the content made available, the force of the act, and its effects on an audience. It removes, however, the assumption that the act must be performed linguistically. A communicative act is mode-neutral. A pictorial act is a communicative act that a person, group, or institution performs with a picture or with a load-bearing pictorial component. Pictures make content available; speakers perform acts and answer for them.
The argument
Beyond saying
The first part of the dissertation argues that linguistic encoding does not mark the boundary between lying and misleading. A speaker can undertake assertoric commitment without encoding the relevant proposition in a sentence. This makes room for literal pictorial lies while preserving the distinction between lying and merely misleading.
From pictorial content to act-content
A picture normally makes far more content available than a single act puts forward. A photograph may show a location, clothing, weather, light, and many other features at once. Which proposition, then, is the content of the act? I argue that a publicly recognisable practice, applied to publicly accessible features of the act and its setting, fixes the proposition at issue. This separates pictorial content from act-content without treating a picture as a silent sentence.
Once act-content has been fixed, the practice also helps determine how the speaker stands to that proposition. The dissertation distinguishes three proposition-relative commitment relations: Free Act, Suggestion, and Assertion. The distinctions explain why the same pictorial material may be displayed without being offered as true, put forward for consideration, or presented under a responsibility to defend, correct, or retract it.
Multimodal communicative acts
In multimodal acts, pictures, words, sound, timing, and sequence may contribute in different ways. Sometimes coordinated components jointly supply content that none supplies alone. I call this relation complementation. In other cases, a component leaves act-content unchanged but affects uptake, qualifies the speaker’s commitment, or bears on the question of whose act it is. The analysis therefore keeps content, uptake, speaker-attribution, and commitment apart.
Photographic testimony under synthetic uncertainty
The final part turns to photographic testimony. Such testimony requires more than photographic appearance: a recorded-occurrence proposition must be fixed as act-content, an answerable speaker must be publicly attributable, and the proposition must be presented assertorically. Synthetic media can place these determinations under pressure by making it uncertain whether a pictorial component should be treated as a photographic record or as a synthetic construction.
I use de-forcing for the limiting case in which content-fixation, speaker-attribution, and force-fixation all fail within the same token performance. This is not a general claim that synthetic media have destroyed photographic testimony. It identifies the narrower conditions under which a purported act of photographic testimony fails to come off.
Why aesthetics?
Pictorial form is not merely decorative. Cropping, visible detail, sequence, and coordination affect which contents a picture makes available and which proposition a communicative act puts forward. Yet appearance alone settles neither whether a speaker lies nor whether testimony occurs. The dissertation’s central claim is that pictures supply material, while speakers act with that material within public practices of attribution, challenge, correction, and retraction.