All entries for Monday 07 June 2004

June 07, 2004

Fearless Speech, Foucault, parrhesia and blogging

Follow-up to Journalists, imperceptibility and the threat of blogging from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

The Greeks of course have 'been there, done that'.

One of the books that I am reading at the moment is Fearless Speech, a transcript of Michel Foucault's lectures on parrhesia in Ancient Greece. It's a complicated concept which, as Foucault demonstrates, evolves within the Athenian debate on democracy and good governance. He explains how, to start of with, the concept expressed how the Greeks valued most highly the speech given by an individual citizen both in a state of freedom and in defiance of the threat of violence. That threat was fundamental, for it shows that the statement of the speech was more important than the speaker. It goes so far as seeing the life, welfare and continued existence of the speaker to be of no importance in relation to the importance of the utterance, of a sequence of utterances that together form a dialiectic from which the best policy will be logically selected. The speaker is made imperceptible.

It seems odd at first that Foucault, at the cutting edge of a new approach to ethics, should have given such a scholarly series of lectures on the Greeks. He doesn't seem to be too concerned with unpicking the obvious contradictions in this concept of parrhesia, which after all was quite adequate for a long period of history. But what Foucault is really interested in is showing how a smoothely operating concept like parrhesia becomes problematic and is disrupted by a change in circumstances, by something imperceptible in its operation being drawn out from the shadows. Just as blogging draws out the previously imperceptible traits of the blogger from the journalistic process.

Foucault describes the problematic of parrhesia as it became posed for the Greeks:

Democracy is founded by a politeia, a constitution, where the demos, the people, exercise power, and where everyone is equal in front of the law. Such a constitution, however, is condemned to give equal place to all forms of parrhesia, even the worst. Because parrhesia is given even to the worst citizens, the overwhelming influence of bad, immoral, or ignorant speakers may lead the citizenry into tyranny…

So the personality of the speaker is drawn out, made perceptible, and allowed to disrupt the smoothe communication of the parrhesiastic statement. Although it is posed here as an issue of morality, it is clear that the driving force is a technical development: commerce based political organisation, which increasingly has power amongst the demos. Pushing the integrity of the speaker out into the open challenges the concept of parrhesia, and adds to it a critical function in the analysis of the role of power and money.

For us now, with the onset of blogging as a new arrangement of speech and identity, it is what comes after this crisis that is of most interest. In response to the technological drawing out of the speaker, a technics of the individual, of integrity, balance, morality and judgement develops – what Foucault calls 'the care of the self'. A set of techniques for identifying and managing the person to promote good parrhesia. Resulting in an approach to the self that, although not Christian or modern, remained influential.

The question now then is this – will the drawing out of the blogger from imperceptibility transform in some way our techiques of self? For readers of Foucault, this is of prime interest.


Robert O'Toole : 07 Jun 2004 23:44 |  Tags:        |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Journalists, imperceptibility and the threat of blogging

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

I disagree with the view that blogging is not a threat to journalists. They should be getting very worried about blogging.

The majority of journalists currently work by hiding behind a screen of anonymity created through the collective publication (newspaper, radio, TV channel). Not the formal anonymity of the un-attributable, but rather an imperceptibility in the process of mass consumption. How often do you notice the identity of the journalist when you read an article in a newspaper? Worse still, on paper you cannot easily aggregate all of the articles by that journalist. The journalist becomes imperceptible.

There is an avoidance of responsibility in journalism. But that avoidance is essential to its operation, to its movement or communication. In a way it is a freeing-up, allowing movement for the journalist, making the communication or movement happen more easily and more rapidly, without the possibility of awkward and personal questions being asked. The imperceptibility makes the traces redundant, removes their effect, and thus allows the movement to be executed more smoothely and efficiently.

The technology of blogs is tending to eliminate this imperceptibility, and that is why journalits should be worried about it. In the world of blogs you don't need to do any work at all to track down other articles by the same author. This allows you to build a larger and more personal profile of them, their opinions and viewpoints. You can track quirks in their writing that uncover the forces and subtle tendencies that influence the bias in their writing. With a newspaper you can do that critical analysis at the level of the publication, but the traces of bias are less concentrated, more dissipated into many different quirks, more difficult to pin down. In a blog, that dissipation is reversed and the traits of the personality of the blogger are brought back into concentration. The technology makes the author perceptible again, but takes away that freedom of movement. That is why writing a blog can feel so awkward. You feel yourself, your perspective and traits being concentrated and reconnected, losing their redundancy and slowing you down.

Is this erosion of anonymity a good thing? On the one hand it could be argued that it is playing into the hands of totalitarian forces, allowing them to instantly hold an individual responsible. But that is no different to the position of the journalist, whose byline tracks them down. I argue that it in fact counters a key tool of totalitarianism: the unattributable release of information, views and rumour – lightning fast communications that exploit the imperceptibility of the journalist. Blogging, on the otherhand, makes the blogger perceptible. It always raises the question of the blogger – who? why? with what authority? for what reason? what traits could lead them into being mistaken? By emphasising the personal, perspectival and conjectural nature of the information it forces us always into a critical stance. Of course that also removes the possibility of that lightning fast communication without the chance of critical analysis. And we may regret that just as much.


Robert O'Toole : 07 Jun 2004 22:16 |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem