The Aesthetics of Disinformation
Daniel Chinellato's doctoral dissertation on pictorial and multimodal communicative acts.
I defend the claim that a person, group or institution can lie or mislead by using a picture. The relevant unit of analysis is the situated communicative act, not the picture considered on its own. The dissertation develops the account needed to explain how an act performed with a picture gets its content, force and speaker, and how a speaker undertakes commitment through it.
The test case is real. In 2006 Reuters withdrew a photograph of Beirut whose photographer had cloned the smoke plumes to exaggerate the destruction. He wrote no false sentence, yet Reuters treated his submission as something to be retracted and answered for. Prominent accounts of lying can describe the deception and professional breach, but they cannot classify his pictorial submission as a lie. I argue that, on the deliberate-manipulation reading, he lied if he intended to communicate the relevant recording claim, presented it as true, undertook assertoric commitment to it and believed it false. Showing this requires revising how we think about assertion and content beyond language.
Lying beyond saying
Prominent definitions disagree about falsity, warranting and common ground, but many tie lying to saying or statement-making. They must therefore deny that a lie can be performed with a picture alone. I argue that this restriction fails within language before pictures even enter. Metaphorical lies show that commitment can outrun what is said, while presuppositional cases provide a further but disputed route beyond saying. I therefore adopt and extend a commitment-based account of the lying and misleading distinction. A speaker lies with respect to p when she intends to communicate p, presents p as true, undertakes assertoric commitment to p and believes p false. She intentionally misleads when she communicates believed-false content while avoiding that commitment. Nothing in this distinction is mode-specific. The burden then shifts to showing that pictorial acts can satisfy its conditions.
The Indeterminacy Problem
The serious objection is not that pictures lack syntax but that pictorial content is too dense to fix a single assertable proposition. A photograph makes many propositions available at once. I answer with a division of labour. Pictorial content, understood through depicted and represented content, constrains which propositions a picture can support. We must then distinguish that content from the target relative to which a picture is assessed, and pictorial accuracy from the truth of an assertion made with a picture. What I call the question at issue is the public question, practical task or presented issue a contribution addresses. Public practice, applied to the publicly accessible features of the use, determines which supported propositions the speaker puts forward on an occasion. Unlike a conversational question under discussion, the question at issue can also operate in exhibitions, sales, journalism and courtrooms. Where the public features of a use leave incompatible answers equally supported, what the speaker puts forward remains underdetermined. That is a prediction, not a defect. Some pictorial uses fail to determine which proposition, if any, a speaker puts forward, and the account says so.
Force without uniformity
Fixing the proposition leaves open what the speaker does with it. Three relations that are standardly run together must be separated. Truth-governance concerns whether the truth of p bears on its public status in the act at all; accountability concerns criticisability for a false p; and discursive responsibility concerns the duty to defend or withdraw p under challenge. Assertion requires presentation as true plus assertoric commitment; weaker truth-governed uses do not. I call the resulting possibility selective commitment. Within one unified act, a speaker can assert one proposition and merely suggest another, without the act splitting into one act per proposition. The notion explains how commitment can vary across propositions put forward in one act. Once proposition, speaker, truth-governance, presentation as true and commitment have been fixed, intention and belief determine whether lying or intentional misleading has occurred. Indifference and epistemic care answer further questions. Bullshitting may overlap with either, and it may also overlap with negligent assertion.
Joint contribution in multimodal acts
Captions, footage, voice-over and timing raise a compositional question. How do coordinated components belong to one act? I argue that a joint contribution occurs when components of a single communicative act together determine a proposition that none determines alone. The notion is deliberately narrow. Effects on uptake and qualifications bearing on commitment must not be redescribed as contributions to the proposition. Once the completed act is distinguished from its components, an accurate picture can be used in a false assertion and the same picture can figure in different acts. The completed act bears force, while its speaker undertakes commitment.
Photographic testimony and de-forcing
Photography provides a demanding application of the account. A photograph may function merely as evidence, as when it sits in an archive, or it may be used by a speaker who offers her word for the claim that the picture records a specified person, scene or occurrence. Only the second use is photographic testimony. This explains why a genuine photograph may circulate without testimony and why a synthetic picture may be used to give false photographic testimony. I call a limiting breakdown de-forcing. Participants have reason to look for photographic testimony, yet public practice does not fix a recording claim, no apparent speaker performs or authorises the completed act as one for which it answers, and the presentation does not determinately offer anyone’s word. Visual appearance, truth and reliability do not by themselves amount to photographic testimony.
Why aesthetics
Cropping, composition and visible detail constrain what a picture can support and direct attention; timing and sequence bear on how coordinated components work together and how readily an audience accepts what it is shown. None of this carries commitment by itself. Cases of disinformation can exploit pictorial form and circulation while leaving open what was claimed, by whom and on whose word. An act-centred analysis keeps persuasion and commitment apart, establishes, where the public evidence suffices, whether a pictorial use is an assertion, a lie, an intentionally misleading act or testimony, and leaves room for aesthetic and affective effects that matter even when no determinate proposition is put forward.