Foucault on the Politics of Parrhesia

T. Dyrberg

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137368348
• eBook ISBN: 9781137368355
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Foucault saw the notion of parrhesia (truth-telling) as the most important factor for how governments could and should communicate with their people and vice versa. This important collection compiles and analyses Foucault's views on parrhesia to shed new light on his ideas on the importance of truth-telling in democracies.

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Speaking Truth to Power and Power Speaking Truthfully

Abstract: Foucault’s notion of parrhesia is tentatively defined and situated in his work where it, among other things, is related to critique. His interest in parrhesia, and the reason it is politically relevant, is because it addresses critical issues in democratic theory such as those related to authorities and citizens, what is personal and what is political as well as political ethics and realpolitik. It also touches upon distinctions between input and output politics, which again are related to Foucault’s power analytics, and where parrhesia is geared to political authorities communicating and implementing their policies.

Keywords: authority/laypeople; critique; democracy; parrhesia; politics; power

Dyrberg, Torben Bech. Foucault on the Politics of Parrhesia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137368355.0003.

Political parrhesia as truthful and trustworthy communication

In this book I will be dealing with Foucault’s analyses of the politics of truth-telling as it appear in his lectures (1981–84) and other works, which revolve around the Greek notion of parrhesia. If this term could be translated into Latin, it would be libertas or licentia. Parrhesia means speaking truthfully, freely and being up-front in the sense of being open, transparent, engaging and saying everything there is to say about a particular issue in contrast to holding something back, being secretive, covert and manipulative (CT: 218, 326–7; FS: 12; GSO: 381; HS: 372, 404–5). It is a political ethics as opposed to be applied normative theory: it is practical as it is from the outset entwined with government, it is risky and takes timing and courage, it requires knowledge, a good sense of judgement and resolve.

Above all, parrhesia is important for Foucault because it operates on the axis of political authorities and citizens vis-à-vis the public realm, it connects personal and institutional aspects of politics and it emphasizes the duty to make sure that words and deeds are not disconnected. In doing so, it stresses trustworthiness and accountability as vital for democracy both personally and institutionally. Parrhesia is, moreover, associated with other themes in Foucault’s work, notably those related to the enlightenment ethos of critique, the questions of care of self, government and limits to governing as well as liberty as a practice. Finally, it is interesting to see how his focus on parrhesia links up with his lifelong academic and political interest in political subjectivation, which orbits around the triangle of power, knowledge and ethics, as well as his libertarian and egalitarian resentment against hierarchical institutional set-ups marked by domination and obedience.

In setting out to discuss parrhesia I will be dealing with a set of political issues, which are at once classical themes in political theory and topical and contested issues in today’s political culture. Parrhesia concerns an individual’s freedom to tell the truth, as he or she perceives it after getting acquainted with the facts and due reflection, which is, or rather ought to be, reciprocated by the interlocutor’s acceptance of the other’s truth-telling. Freedom goes together with courage, because the one who speaks freely and truthfully puts oneself at risk. Thus conceived parrhesia links up with public political reasoning, critical engagement, political freedom and personal integrity, which are essential components of a democratic ethos cultivated in a democratic political community. This political aspect of parrhesia has captured my attention, and is the major concern for Foucault.

Foucault elaborated in his last series of lectures an approach to political authority and freedom that broke with both mainstream and radical views of the relationship between politics and democracy. In his studies of Greek and Roman antiquity, his implicit message was that Western political discourses have suffered from a negative take on political power, which has resulted in a widespread agreement – irrespective of whether one is right or left, mainstream or radical – that power in general, and political power in particular, is antithetic to truth, fairness, freedom and individuality. This has made democracy appear as a matter of civilizing and depoliticizing the threats of political oppression by converting conflict into consensus and by shielding private individuals from public power. Whilst Foucault on numerous occasions spoke and acted in favour of protecting individuals from repressive power, and saw rights as an indispensable tool in this respect, his primary concern in the lectures was to point out that there could be no democracy unless political authorities, as well as those challenging them, possessed the ability to disconnect politics from their own partial interests and instead tell the population the truth of what has to be done in given situations. This requires that authorities and laypeople are part of a political culture marked by liberty and equality as opposed to domination and hierarchy, which is to say that parrhesia and democracy are two sides of the same coin. ‘For there to be democracy’, says Foucault (GSO: 155), ‘there must be parresia; for there to be parresia there must be democracy. There is a fundamental circularity.’

The argument I develop in this book is that parrhesia is vital for Foucault’s sustained efforts over the years to expose and criticize the various forms of obedience – be that blatant repression or normalization – which go hand in hand with elite rule, hierarchical structures and states of domination. His interest in parrhesia taps into his experiential political inclination to widen and deepen liberty as a practice. The focus is, as it always was for him, on political authorities and their critics. As such parrhesia is located right at the centre of Foucault’s many histories, because it addresses the key axis of these stories, namely the relationship between authorities and laypeople in all kinds of institutionalized settings such as medical or penal institutions or security apparatuses. Although not formally political, they do partake, according to Foucault, in making up the political infrastructure of society. To put it in more general terms, I will hold that parrhesia, as discussed by Foucault, is vital to unlock the nature of the relations between political authorities and the wider political community vis-à-vis regime structures. This is important with regard to assessing the democratic political culture, which involves the resolve of political authorities in doing what has to be done and the political capital of the citizenry to monitor and ultimately control these authorities.

Curiously, no one has to my knowledge pinpointed the twin aspects of political power and critique in Foucault’s argument: that to speak truth to power and that power is able to speak truthfully are two sides of the same coin. However, this silence might not be surprising granted the prevailing realist mood of the political science establishment and the defeatist countercultural critical ethos. The self-professed cynicism of both strands of thinking is antithetic to Foucault’s discussions of parrhesia. Truth-telling in the face of danger, be that of public opinion or repressive authorities, holds a door open for the possibility, unlikely no doubt, that those who wield power actually are able to act in a way that focuses on what the problem at hand requires in contrast to indulging in narrow self-interests while paying lip-service to shared values and sentiments. Hence, parrhesia might be the language and practice of both powerful political authorities and their fiercest critics. Contrary to elitist, revolutionary and cynical attitudes, Foucault’s approach to political truth-telling implies that truth and power are neither antithetic nor united. And in contrast to mainstream and critical sentiments he is keen to emphasize that parrhesia as the serious, clearheaded and critical engagement accentuates that political power cannot be defined exhaustively in negative terms as conflicts of interests, domination, hierarchy and so on.

Foucault’s multifaceted discussions of parrhesia form an antidote to mainstream as well as to critical approaches. For despite the post-trends’ questioning of nearly everything from the late 1970s and up to the 1990s, they left untouched two of the most significant axioms of political science/sociology/theory/philosophy, namely that power is a form of domination, which entails repression one way or the other, and that politics is identified with conflicts over vested interests and/or identities. In both cases we are presented with end-of-politics visions of freedom and emancipation and their corollary, the defeatist ‘post’ sentiment of being inevitably entangled in cynical power politics where no escape is possible.

Foucault’s grasp of power and politics is markedly different. Politics might, of course, involve conflict just as power might involve domination. Most often they do, but they do not have to. Foucault’s alternative is twofold. First, he understands politics as orbiting around structures and exercises of the power of authority on the authority/laypeople axis; and he sees power as a transformative capacity both expressing and shaping our ability to act, which is to say that power is a dispositional concept. Second, he deals with politics and power in a way that advances beyond standard scenarios of interest group and identity politics by focusing on the output politics of how it takes effect as opposed to the input politics of, say, representation and deliberation. In addition, from a Foucauldian outlook political power can be innovative and empowering, and can help people to extend their practices of freedom and to govern themselves. This is part of the story of parrhesia addressing both political authorities and laypeople.

The politics of truth-telling reveals a surprising turn in Foucault’s thinking given his reputation for endorsing a radical view of oppositional politics and a relativistic approach to truth. If there were no other alternatives in political history than the elitist scenario of either dominating others or being dominated, the point of arguing that things could have been done otherwise would be curtailed by an essentialist frame. This would be a vicious circle of domination that would be antithetic to citizens’ practicing their political freedom. Just as the quality of democracy relies on political authorities being trustworthy and telling the truth, so the politics of truth depends on laypeople speaking and acting freely, thereby over time building up their political capital. These two levels of truth-telling are far more important than critical theory’s insistence that since political power entails conflict and domination, it has to be framed by institutionally defined rules of conduct, just as it has to be legitimate, pluralist, tolerant, respectful of minorities and so on.

Foucault’s rejoinder to this kind of argument is to point out that disciplinary subjection with its command/obedience relations is still coercive no matter how democratic state and civil society may be. This means that the idea that liberty flows from protecting personal and civic life from state power by combining a system of individual liberties (rights) with a consensual civic culture (duties) is a depoliticizing illusion, which dodges the essential political relations expressed in the two levels of truth-telling. His argument is, moreover, that disciplinary subjection, with its production of ‘docile bodies’, is not enough to sustain a politics of truth. The reason is that the latter has to deal with members of a political community who possess some degree of political efficacy and who do not simply do what they are supposed to do either because they do not want to or because they do not know how to do.

To sum up, what Foucault sets out to clarify is that the egalitarian and libertarian ethos of democracy is incompatible with hierarchical structures of obedience, because they thwart practices of liberty and create a culture of conformity, fear in others and lack of trust in oneself. In addition to this ethos of democracy, Foucault also highlights that although parrhesia and democracy are two sides of the same coin, they are also at odds with each other, because parrhesia differentiates by elevating some above the rest. This raises the issues of ascendance and ethical differentiation, which take the discussion of democracy’s liberty/equality a step further by relating it to the necessity of political leadership. Thus Foucault presents us with two types of critique – and parrhesia is the archaic form of critique – operating at the authority/citizen axis: criticism of a culture of obedience in the political community and criticism of incompetent and narrow-minded leadership among authorities. Finally, in contrast to both mainstream and radical traditions, which are occupied with, for instance, constitutional set-up, representation, interests group politics, recognition and deliberation, Foucault’s discussions of parrhesia focus attention on the output side of political processes where decisions are delivered and take effect. Although the discussions of parrhesia do testify to certain changes in Foucault’s take on agency and action, it does continue his practical focus on how power works – the various technologies that go into forming normalized as well as capable individuals – which is linked up with ‘effective history’.

Beyond mainstream and radical approaches

Foucault did not see himself as a political theorist as he no doubt saw this tradition as complicit to the repressive view of power found in the juridico-discursive representation of power, which still had not cut off the head of the king (HS1: 88–9); and he praised Nietzsche as ‘the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think of power without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so’ (PT: 53). In spite of these remarks it might, nonetheless, be tempting to think that he later on began to think of himself as a kind of political theorist by moving into the terrain of political theory and changing it. In any case, what matters is that he breaks with the widespread view found in theories of democracy to think that politics must be domesticated and separated from peoples’ life by legal and political means, if they are to enjoy their individual autonomy and social solidarity in relative freedom from political power struggles.

The challenge is to conceptualize the links between the powers of political authorities and the political capital of citizens in the political community in such a way that tensions and paradoxes of democracy, such as those arising between capable leadership and the democratic ethos of equality, are played out politically, and that the political scene is granted autonomy. To put it differently, Foucault’s intent is not to insulate politics, and it is not to launch a protective view of democracy. It is to spell out the democratic necessity that public political reasoning and interaction must be, as Rawls would say, ‘freestanding’.

Foucault also takes notice of a family resemblance between mainstream and critical political theory in that they both study the relation between politics and democracy as a matter of converting conflict into consensus. As a result, their political analyses are biased towards the input side of political issues, which is expressed in two lines of enquiries. First, the constitutional and normative questions concern how to tame political power to guarantee free and equal access to political decision-making processes. The second deals with interest and identity politics. The former focuses on the distribution of values for a society and the struggles this gives rise to, which is the traditional stuff of political science, and the latter deals with creating identities in relation to more recent issue areas, which are geared to recognition and which are less marked by party politics. The post-trends from the late 1980s emphasizing difference and that everything in context belong to this last category. The point here is not, of course, to downplay the importance to input politics, but to draw attention to the fact that Foucault’s contribution to political theory is placed in the output category related to how power as a transformative capacity actually does transform society, for example, when political authorities grasp the moment of opportunity to act, when they respond to risks and crises and when they proactively do what they deem necessary.

Foucault’s analyses of political authority and power relations were not conducted independently of his understanding of what it meant to engage in critique. Whilst the critical ethos for his earlier work was associated with the figure of power/resistance, in which power as discipline was seen in terms of productive submission operating in the shadow of sovereignty, his later efforts to analyse the autonomy of politics and the political field gave way for another dimension of critical engagement. This is so because Foucault made it more explicit that he studied political power from the inside according to logics of governing instead of as a trade-off between sovereignty and disciplinary power. This inside-out approach made it possible for him to envisage political power in terms other than the juridical and bellicose models.

My angle to discussing Foucault’s parrhesia

Although there are books on Foucault dealing with critique, enlightenment, freedom and governing self and others, the book I am presenting here differs in at least three respects. First, it revolves around Foucault’s analyses of parrhesia, which it sets out to systematize and make sense of in the light of how it contributes to an understanding of the autonomy of the political terrain, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Speaking Truth to Power and Power Speaking Truthfully
• 2  Power: From Productive Submission and Domination to Transformative Capacity
• 3  The Nature of Critique: Political Not Epistemological
• 4  The Politics of Critique: Political Engagement and Government
• 5  The Nature of Parrhesia: Political Truth-Telling in Relation to Power, Knowledge and Ethics
• 6  The Politics of Parrhesia: The Autonomy of Democratic Politics and the Parrhesiastic Pact
• 7  Leadership and Community: Critique of Obedience and Democratic Paradoxes
• 8  Political Perspectives: Authority and the Duality of Power, Politics and Politicization
• References
• Index