Facticity

Facticity is the condition of being a fact. More than the spread of lies (which is politically nothing new), our post-truth world is about destroying social conditions and, as a consequence, eroding our correlations with reality. What has come to count as ‘reality’ today, is beholden to the power of opinion, mimetic traction and affective uptake. Facticity is not the same thing as reality; but it allows us to soberly narrate a relation between us and a world held in common. Truth claims may be temporary, yet this impermanence is a feature of facticity and not a flaw. Fallibility, or the strong possibility we may be wrong about an account of reality is a motor for facticity, giving us the power of revision, thereby altering our accounts of the world, and our mobility within it.