FACTS ARE FICTION
Ellen Järnefelt
23 / 09 / 2025
They told me that they have sometimes told this story in a modified way, where instead of going silent, the acquaintance just picks up and walks away. I then realized that that depiction might describe the ambience-wise reality better than just saying that the acquaintance was quiet.
***
Certain things that exist can’t be observed; they don’t exist in forms that could be considered factual or undeniable. Feelings, experiences, nuances or dispositions can obviously never be provably factual because they exist in ambiguous, omni-temporal spaces that generally can’t be properly seen from the outside.
We interact with each other through language, concepts and narratives. They are the mediators that enable specific conceptual exchange between us, the ones that set the premises for being understood. Where there are premises, there is power and influence: the post-Enlightenment period privileged empirical verification and “objective” knowledge, consolidating the idea that truth is out there waiting to be discovered: it made "fact" a kind of epistemic currency, giving some kinds of statements immense authority.
I was going through a Werner Herzog phase in the spring. What I felt most drawn to in his works was the strong blending of fact and fabrication: whether ostensibly fictional or documentary, they inhabit this ambiguous space where reality is staged, facts are mythologized, and storytelling becomes an act of existential and aesthetic exploration rather than mere representation.
Herzog’s fictional films are often imbued with a documentary-like realism, achieved through a combination of non-actors, location shooting and an almost anthropological attention to human behavior and environments; in Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film that follows a man attempting to transport a steamship over a mountain in the Amazon, Herzog famously rejected the use of special effects and had a 320-ton steamship hauled over land. Conversely, his documentaries are infused with storytelling techniques more commonly
associated with fictional cinema; Lessons of Darkness (1992), portraying the Kuwaiti oil fires after the Gulf War, is structured like a dystopian science fiction film: Herzog’s narration presents the setting as an alien world, and his use of operatic music and sweeping cinematography transforms historical catastrophe into mythic dystopian spectacle.
Herzog has openly rejected traditional notions of documentary objectivity, advocating instead for what he calls ecstatic truth—a deeper, poetic truth that goes beyond mere factual accuracy. He has elaborated this approach by citing the following quote by author André Gide: I modify facts to such a degree that they resemble truth more than reality. No one has been able to source the original phrase - when Herzog has been asked about its origins, he has often replied that he might have made it up.
Cinéma vérité, which emerged in the 1960s as a reaction against traditional, heavily staged documentary filmmaking, represented an attempt to capture reality as purely and directly as possible. Inspired by developments in lightweight camera technology and direct sound recording, it sought to strip cinema of artificiality, allowing filmmakers to document life as it unfolded without interference. Herzog deeply disliked it - he declared that Cinéma
vérité reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
***
Any attempt to describe reality requires selection, omission, and structure. Facts do not emerge into consciousness as raw, neutral objects; they arrive already mediated through perception, representation, and systems of knowledge production. Primarily associated with Immanuel Kant, transcendental idealism posits that our experience of reality is mediated by the structures of human cognition—we do not access things as they are in themselves (noumena), but only as they appear to us (phenomena), shaped by categories like space, time and causality.
The difference between fact and fiction is not one of opposition but of function: both are constructed, but they are stabilized and taken up differently. Both rely on narrative; both require frameworks that impose meaning. A scientific model visualizes data in a way that makes it intelligible, just as a historical account organizes events into coherence. Yet, while fact aspires to correspondence with an external reality, fiction operates within the realm of constructed meaning. The boundary between them is neither absolute nor irrelevant; it is simply an axis along which information is structured.
Herzog’s depictions are not just about facts and fiction in cinema—they’re a broader allegory for how we encounter reality itself. What we call facts are almost always mediated through structures that depend on fictional devices: abstraction, metaphor and narrative scaffolding. Statistics, for example, operate through compression—exclusion, prioritization, abstraction—and are structured by narrative devices, theoretical framing, and illustrative examples that render it intelligible. Fiction, on the other hand, often gets its cultural power by mimicking the codes of factuality: historical dramas insert invented characters into real events, and political ideologies wrap themselves in myths that present themselves as collective memory. The more it feels real, the more we grant it epistemic weight.
The result is a strange convergence: facts dress themselves in fiction to feel meaningful, and fictions dress themselves in fact to feel authoritative. It’s not that one deceives and the other reveals, but that both rely on aesthetic strategies to structure belief.
***
The field of fact and fiction is a spectrum many entities try to map and colonize for their own benefit. Who gets to determine what’s considered factual?
Within the naturalizing essentialism of market capitalism, empirics has been put on such a comprehensive pedestal that it seems to cover the entire surface of the earth: empirics no longer feel like an approach, but rather an air-like, meta-neutral understanding. When it comes to measuring certain characteristics, it surely comes closest to correctly portraying what’s measured, but it conditions us to believe that the full truth lies in parameters and reportage; in cinéma vérité, the truth of accountants.
Empiricism itself is a genre with aesthetic commitments. Empiricism follows a set of narrative codes: it privileges observation, measurement, causal sequencing
and verifiability. It idealizes clarity, coherence and reproducibility. It favors the visible, the countable, the operationalizable. These aren't just epistemic preferences—they're aesthetic values. Empiricism makes the world legible by casting it into a particular representational mold. In that sense, empiricism is an aesthetic regime: it builds its authority by conforming to certain formal and aesthetic expectations. What falls outside that genre often becomes illegible, inadmissible or emotionally unintelligible.
The empiricist ideal of direct, unmediated access to reality, data as brute fact, contains many underlying fictions to make its logical ends meet. It constructs the knowing subject as neutral, objective, free from positionality and able to extract truth without distortion, and assumes that the world offers itself in a form that can be cleanly registered if only the method is correct. It presumes that observation is separable from interpretation, that measurement is prior to meaning, and that knowledge can exist without the contingencies of language, culture or desire. The idea that reality can be objectively measured presupposes that we can define what counts as real in the first place.
To call these assumptions fictions is not to accuse them of falsehood but to recognize their constructive role. It’s not to say that empiricism is a bad method of exploration and observation: there are many things and phenomena that are best portrayed and understood through empirics, but also a multitude that gets stomped by its format requirements. Verification itself is a narrative practice that naturalizes certain framings.
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A statistic is a truthful representation if it holds across cases; a story can be a truthful representation if it discloses a structure of experience that no measurement could register. When a writer invents a character to embody a social contradiction (or when Herzog invents a quotation to anchor an argument), the fiction is not a distortion but a disclosure device. It reveals dynamics—the humiliations of poverty, the delusions of intimacy, the atmospheres of war—that are otherwise illegible to factual reportage. The invention is what allows the truth to appear.
To call fiction factual is not a metaphor but a recognition of its infrastructural role in how we know. Political ideologies, collective memories and even market behaviors rely on fictions: origin myths, imagined communities, shared narratives of growth or decline. These are not add-ons to reality; they organize it. A fiction that is collectively inhabited has the same operational force as fact—it structures expectations, coordinates action and legitimizes power. Fiction and fact share related functions: they create a common world within which people can move, connect, argue, and believe.
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To frame fact and fiction as separate domains is therefore misleading. They are devices that depend on each other, that borrow authority and resonance from each other, and that cannot be disentangled in practice. The silence of a situation can become legible through the fictional elaboration of a departure; the fabricated quotation acquires its force because
it anchors a factual argument. Fact without fiction would be empty formality, a sterile accounting; fiction without fact would be untethered invention deprived of weight. Their convergence is what grants them their power.
The function they share is not only epistemic but connective. By staging the world in communicable form, they make it possible for people to inhabit a common frame. This is not a minor role but the very condition of contact. A fact convinces because others accept its frame; a fiction resonates because others recognize themselves in its staging. In both cases, what is at stake is not accuracy alone but the capacity to establish contact, to generate a horizon of mutual intelligibility.
What empiricism provides is one such relation—its strength lies in the efficiency of its compression, in its ability to circulate stable claims quickly. What fiction provides is another—its strength lies in the articulation of what cannot be stabilized, the intensities and contradictions that resist quantification. Neither is sufficient on its own. It is their interplay that generates the conditions for mutual intelligibility.
The argument that facts are fiction, and fiction is factual, is not a paradox but a description of this interdependence. Each borrows from the other: facts dress themselves in narrative to gain resonance, fictions dress themselves in factual codes to gain authority. Together they establish the grounds upon which connection becomes possible.
What follows is simple but non-trivial: the work of truth is always constructive, and it is always relational. Facts and fictions are not rivals but partners in this work. They enable us to inhabit a world in common, to orient ourselves within it, and to recognize one another inside its frames.
Fiction is like a spider’s web... attached to life at all four corners.