The interface as alesthesis: truth as sensible organisation

The issue of the truth has been fundamentally addressed from an epistemological perspective: in this sense, the question was that of identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions so that a truth could be postulated and accepted as such. Faced with these epistemological forms of approaching the question of truth, the French philosopher Michel Foucault proposed a different approach based on what he classified as the alethurgical forms of the truth, that is, the way in which the truth occurs as an act of ‘telling the truth’. In his reflection, the author thus explored different manners of ‘telling the truth’ all throughout history, paying attention to its principal discursive forms. However, we must ask if these alethurgical forms cannot also be analysed beyond their discursive forms in their sensible manifestation. In this sense, it can be worthwhile to explore how and to what extent interfaces –understood as “contact surfaces”– can be conceived and analysed from design in their character of alesthesis: that is, to explore the way in which they are capable of ‘manifesting’ the truth (that which is considered as true) based on a particular organisation of the sensible. From another perspective, we will approach the question of post-truth by paying attention to its forms of sensible manifestation and we will propose certain questions about the regime of truth in which post-truth functions.