"The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is"
About this Quote
Sontag is needling a comforting fantasy: that truth sits out there like a clean rock you can pick up, inspect, and finally possess. Her provocation is grammatical as much as philosophical. By insisting truth is something "told", she relocates authority from private certainty ("known") to public articulation, where claims have to be shaped, argued, narrated, and contested. Truth, in this frame, is not a stash of pure facts but an event in language.
The subtext is a warning about how much power hides inside the act of saying. Speaking and writing do not merely transmit reality; they carve it into meanings, priorities, and causal stories. "If there were no speaking or writing" is less a thought experiment than an indictment of the naive realist position that language is just a transparent window. For Sontag, language is the lens, and lenses distort as they clarify. That does not make truth fake; it makes truth made.
Context matters: Sontag wrote across eras obsessed with authenticity yet saturated with mediation - Cold War propaganda, the spectacle of images, the moral theater of politics, the rise of mass media. Her line anticipates a world where "what is" (raw occurrence) gets instantly converted into "truth" via captions, hot takes, headlines, and archives. The sentence "There would only be what is" is the sting: without narration, reality remains brute, uninterpreted, and socially unusable.
The intent is bracingly democratic and deeply skeptical at once. Democratic because truth becomes something we negotiate in common space; skeptical because whoever controls the telling controls what counts as true.
The subtext is a warning about how much power hides inside the act of saying. Speaking and writing do not merely transmit reality; they carve it into meanings, priorities, and causal stories. "If there were no speaking or writing" is less a thought experiment than an indictment of the naive realist position that language is just a transparent window. For Sontag, language is the lens, and lenses distort as they clarify. That does not make truth fake; it makes truth made.
Context matters: Sontag wrote across eras obsessed with authenticity yet saturated with mediation - Cold War propaganda, the spectacle of images, the moral theater of politics, the rise of mass media. Her line anticipates a world where "what is" (raw occurrence) gets instantly converted into "truth" via captions, hot takes, headlines, and archives. The sentence "There would only be what is" is the sting: without narration, reality remains brute, uninterpreted, and socially unusable.
The intent is bracingly democratic and deeply skeptical at once. Democratic because truth becomes something we negotiate in common space; skeptical because whoever controls the telling controls what counts as true.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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