Masquerades

of

Truth

PARRHESIA Technologies of Truth

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in order to create ‘masquerades of truth’? Although parrhesia as a term is rarely used, its attributes appear to be more and more pervasive elements of the contemporary po-litical sphere, with assertions of risk-taking, truth-telling and fulfilling a moral duty slipping into the vocabulary and aesthetics of political speech, campaigns, activism and institutional critique.

This emphasis on the symbolic languages of politics in relation to truth is in itself related to the subject of qualification. As art theo-rists and professionals, how are we qualified to speak about political truth-telling? What vocabulary do we have at our disposal? And how do we position ourselves within this con-text of theoretical (and institutional) speech, and as speakers ourselves? Is it necessary for us to become activists? Can anyone take on that role, and how do we recognise who is qualified to speak the truth? Is this a question of aesthetics… or ethics?

“My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity. By this I mean that, for me, it was not a question of analyzing the internal or external criteria that would enable the Greeks and Romans, or anyone else, to recognize whether a statement or proposition is true or not. At issue for me was rather the attempt to consider truth-telling as a specific activity, or as a role.”

Professional Risk?

As 2011 was the year of the ‘Occupy’ move-ment, and Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ was named ‘The Protester’, our group discussed the emergence of the term ‘activist’ and its

This ‘chapter’ started with a map. Perhaps that is not so strange, as the authors were struggling to position themselves within a course on ‘Topographies and Counter-Car-tographies’, and in relation to a group of in-ternational researchers in Visual Cultures. Embarking on this project, our initial discus-sions on the complex relationships between education, politics and institutionalisation were based on a felt urgency to visualise and question our own role(s) within this equation. As artists, art theorists and curators, working from within an educational institution, what qualifies us to speak about neoliberalism, let alone politics?

This, in a way, is also the question that Fou-cault asks in relation to truth-telling or par-rhesia. His lectures on parrhesia examine not what qualifies as truth, but what qualifies someone to speak the truth. This ‘qualifica-tion’ became the central drive of this chap-ter, the attributes of truth that we wanted to map out in relation to neoliberalism and to our own practice. The case studies we identified, therefore, emerged from encounters with aes-thetics and institutions of this type of truth-telling; contemporary ‘forms’ of what might be called parrhesia. Mapping these localised anecdotes in relation to Foucault’s attributes of parrhesia, we were confronted with a num-ber of complexities.

Perhaps most essentially, there is the differ-ence between truth-telling as a qualification, and truth-telling as a role. Frankness, truth, danger, criticism and duty, for Foucault, are attributes of the activity of the truth-teller. But in a neoliberal society of appropriation and incorporation, might these attributes be used

Masquerades of TruthAstrid N. Korporaal

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sibility of a common ground, of consensus, of agreement; they represent representation. They stand for the possibility of representing all aspects of society, all views. Their most im-portant role in the neoliberal game of politics is to ensure that representation (and thus de-mocracy) is being represented. The politician campaigns to represent, the activist cam-paigns for a change to the system.

Yet both function within the same system. Politicians such as Geert Wilders can take up a radical position as long as they stay within their role as representatives. This situ-ation becomes more complex when the field of representation is expanded, to include not only the political sphere but also the personal sphere. An example of this could be the politi-cal campaigns in the US, where the personal life of presidential candidates becomes an object of scrutiny. Or advertising campaigns for individual candidates, autobiographies and even documentaries made by politicians. What is the difference between Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and Geert Wilders’ ‘Fit-na’?

Perhaps it is an issue of the production of subjectivity. After all, a politician always acts from within his or her interest as a politician. As long as the politician acts within the inter-est of his or her political role, he or she re-mains within the sphere of representation. Re-cently, the ‘activist’ seems to have undergone a parallel institutionalisation in definition. This entails that activists also act within organisa-tions or unions, and in the interest of these constellations: the activist who acts in the interest of Greenpeace, for example. At the same time, an organisation such as Green-peace acts as a protective umbrella in the in-terest of the activists. The activist represents the aims of Greenpeace and Greenpeace rep-resents the aims of the activists.

This development seems to reflect another aspect of neoliberalism; that an ‘occupation’

change in meaning over time. What is the function of creating a term such as ‘activism’, and what is the difference between an ‘activ-ist’, a ‘protester’, a ‘lobbyist’ or a ‘terrorist’? What are the attributes that set them apart? For example, consider the political campaign: a strategy that can be used in different roles – politician or activist. Would our view of politics change if we considered politicians as activ-ists? Is it possible to be both an activist and a politician? By considering this question, we might be better able to reveal the truth of the position that the activist is assumed to hold within the neoliberal system; as someone who takes a risk to speak a truthful ‘criticism’ of the system.

As a case study we have, for example, the anecdote of the Japanese prime minister, who recently took up a radical position more in line with environmental activists –that all of Japan’s nuclear power stations should be shut down following the Fukushima crisis- and who was subsequently deposed. Why is it such an impossibility for a prime minister to take up a radical role of truth-telling? Another anecdote is that of Al Gore, who emerged as an environmental activist only after having lost the presidential elections in the United States. Thus it seems that the vocabulary separating activism and politics may in fact be a neolib-eral technology. Put crudely, it shows that ac-tivism has a particular role to play within the system; the role of the activist is to produce an intensity, which is then defused by the gov-ernment.

The politician cannot be an activist, because the politician represents the consensus that is the basis of governability. Politics presents the possibility of a common ground. But if we consider this analysis through the modes of parrhesia, we might discover another layer of complexity to the problem. If we question the duty of politics within neoliberalism, then that duty is to assure the governability of society. Politicians do not merely represent the pos-

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strictly separated from rhetoric; it is the un-adorned truth. But as the attributes of parrhe-sia begin to take increasingly prominent roles in the self-representation both of activists and of radical right-wing (and left-wing) politicians, it becomes necessary to take a closer look at these masquerades of truth. The ‘truth’ which must be uncovered is everywhere; from Ju-lian Assange and WikiLeaks to terrorist bomb plots. At the same time, while it seems that right-wing parlance is steeped in risk, the is-sue of security is very much on the tip of their tongues. They are risking their lives, for ‘our’ safety…

In ‘A Grammar of the Multitude’, Paolo Virno argues that one of the symptoms of Post-Fordist labour is in fact a lack of specialisa-tion. Whereas on the assembly line everyone had one task to perform, in the Post-Fordist economy everyone must be able to under-stand everything, and operate everywhere. We have now truly become replaceable parts of the machine. Every moment of our lives is about productivity. As a result, we all share the alienating fear of losing our place in so-ciety: there are no longer communal places shielding us from threat. We long for security, but according to Virno, there are only two types of security: one which poses a threat to one part of the population, in order to cre-ate a ‘safe’ and protected community for the others, and one which is a security precisely from this threat. In other words, there is no place free from risk, but the first version of se-curity is very tempting (and akin to right-wing immigration rhetoric) because it suggests that the way out of Empire is by reinforcing the boundaries of inside and outside, insider and outsider. This is of course only attractive for the ‘insiders’.

Virno suggests that this lack of specialisation has also entered into our language, which is becoming more and more dependent on gen-eral categories such as opposites, good and bad etc. versus the ‘special places’ of lan-

(in the sense of a job) becomes more than labour – professionalisation is the definition of a person’s time in terms of their occupa-tion. Thus, being a politician is no longer just a job, but a role, a representative role, which encompasses the whole of a politician’s life. At the same time, the role of the activist ap-pears to be expanding – literally ‘occupying’ public and private space (as well as speech). So would it be possible for a politician to be an activist – or a parrhesiastes? These are two different questions, of which the latter is perhaps more interesting – and challenging.

Part of the consequence of this professionali-sation trend is a reduction of risk – in the in-terest of the consensus. Activists and activist organisations, politicians and political parties play a part in the political game. The politi-cian is expected at all times to represent the interests of his/her party. Yet there is a ten-sion been the functions of the politician – as representing the interest of a party, a con-stituency, or a nation. Once in the sphere of governance, the politician must represent an ability to govern – an ability to represent com-mon good as well as common ground. This is where the break appears between the politi-cian and the parrhesiastes…

Harmony and Dissonance: The Grammar of Truth

For Foucault, to take a risk is to understand something differently, to play outside the rules of the game. This is the only way to bring about the transformation Foucault speaks of as the possible consequence of parrhe-sia. This truth-telling always emanates from a moral imperative, a sense of duty which is not driven by personal interest, but is grounded on a conviction that this other knowledge is the truth. It is a criticism that departs from the notion of a battle of truths. It is not about that which is said, but about the act of speech and the belief in this truth.

For Foucault, the practice of parrhesia is

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anything, it is a very specific truth based on a personal relationship to that truth. And it is communicated in a way that is true to that person, and the relationship to the addressed. I would say that respect is also an important part of parrhesia - the respect that is related to entering into the parrhesiastic contract of trust, and putting oneself at the risk of anoth-er’s judgment, or even punishment.

So perhaps all art is not political, but good art is truthful, in the sense that it is made in harmony with the truth it conveys and which the artist knows - not feigning to know more than he does, or to have all the answers, or in fact any answer at all. An artwork may be critical without being political, or oppositional, or pointing at an enemy or evil. It may just be about the choices we make and the life we live. It may just be about the question of beau-ty, which, after all, is akin to the question of harmony. And this perhaps is a more valuable example to contemporary politics than politics could give to art. Because wouldn’t it be revo-lutionary if politicians only spoke about those truths that they knew - through the specific experiences of their lives, through their politi-cal relationships, through mutual respect, ac-knowledging the risk in their words not only of losing votes, being deposed etc., but the risk of losing that relationship of trust (dare we say friendship) with their subjects and fellow politicians. If politicians acted in a way that showed them to be accountable for the har-mony between their words and their actions...

guage, which belonged to specific contexts and communities. This observation is relevant to consider in the light of our own position, as art professionals attempting to engage with political thought. This is a trend that should not be taken lightly, as political art has come to stand for relevant art, art that ‘speaks’ or ‘works’. Why is it necessary that every art-ist speaks the language of politics? What is the general affect being produced at these events? Is speaking in this language really the only means to be truthful, real, urgent and authentic? Or is this actually a rhetoric that masquerades as the truth?

If everything can be art (including politics), does this not mean that nothing is art? And if everyone is able to speak the truth, then perhaps no one is... What is the function of generalising the political field in this way? It seems to me that this is partly what the Oc-cupy movement does: levelling the ground of politics so that everyone can be an activist; 99 per cent of the population, in fact! Through their policies everyone becomes equal and their demands equally invisible.... It is a force, but a force towards what? Bad parrhesia per-haps, and the illusion of community. Once again, it is a type of security based on a con-ception of a ‘common enemy’.

When you think of parrhesia in the way Fou-cault speaks of it, he refers in part to the con-text of the 1970s and in part to that of ancient Greece. And he never suggests that someone should stand up and be able to speak the truth about everything, for everyone. Parrhesia is in fact a quite specialised form of speech. Yes, it is about criticism, danger, truth, etc. but it is also about a specific relationship between the speaker and the addressed (which part-ly forms the risk - and establishes that the speaker will be listened to) and it is about the harmony been what is said and the actions of the person who is speaking.

The parrhesiastes does not speak about just

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ENDNOTES

1 Foucault, M. 1983. Discourse and Truth: the Problematiza-

tion of Parrhesia: six lectures given by Michel Foucault at the

University of California at Berkeley, Oct-Nov. 1983. Ed. by J.

Pearson (1985), Reed (1999-2006). Available from <http://

foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/> [Accessed 9th 2012],

concluding notes.

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1. Introduction

The recent nuclear crisis in Japan has been utterly apocalyptic, as the depth of its severity is alleged to be as devastating as Chernobyl disaster in 1986 and more so than the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. While the ravaged nuclear power plants in Fukushima continue to contaminate the north part of Japan with a high level of radiation, the government has not yet reached any defining decision to mitigate the situation.1 Not only has it laid bare to the absence of political will, but also the country’s lack of leadership and political stagnation spi-ralling around the powerless government due to the dominance of corporate power. This status quo has disclosed what underlies the third largest economy in the world, moreover its dysfunctional politics hailed only by cor-porate enterprises and the delusional general public who in some ways still consider their country as economically powerful as it was in the 1970s and 1980s when miraculous eco-nomic growth turned the country into what was once the world’s second largest econ-omy. To analyse this situation, I have drawn theoretical frameworks from Foucault’s notion of parrhesia, Deleuze and Guattari’s non-hi-erarchical multiplicity symbolised as N-1, and Sassen’s assertion on marginalised nation-state authorities in contrast to proliferation of global capitalism. And in the final chapter, I will attend to Hardt and Negri’s magnum opus, Empire in order to examine a hypoth-esis that an individual enactment of parrhesia will fulfill the potential of the multitude to resist the dominance of global capitalism, especially in the age of cybernetics.

Masaki Yada

Nuclear and Foucault

Masaki Yayda, Cone, Pencil on Paper, 1998

Abstract

In this article, I intend to examine a series of political events ensuing a man-made disaster often referred to as the ‘Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster’, through the lens of French Post-Structuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Gills Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and the sociologist Saskia Sassen. In conclusion, I will make a proposition by having recourse to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of the multitude.

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severe public condemnation. The company was criticised particularly for: the failure of regular and thorough maintenance; constant-ly delaying repair work; and systematic false reporting. Despite the manmade disaster led by TEPCO’s disorganisation and poor man-agement, for TEPCO being the biggest elec-tric utility in Japan and the 4th largest in the world, the company’s destiny looked to be as the nation’s priority, rather than its own secu-rity. A substantial sum of capital is circulating around the operation of the company, making a huge contribution to maintaining the coun-try’s economy, which spawned the corruption and the culture of complacency. Moreover, TEPCO’s shareholders are not only Japa-nese, as numerous foreign investors own its stakes. Hence, the closure of all the nuclear plants across the country would entail further damage to the Japanese economy, already plagued by the devastation of the disaster.

A peculiar incident followed the Prime Minis-ter’s bold announcement, which was sound and appropriate at the time in the face of countless casualties and mortalities. Despite the soundness and the public support, media suddenly began publicising Kan’s scandalous past and his involvement in a minor corrup-tion, while the country was facing issues that are far more serious. Despite his initial defi-ance, he was subsequently forced to resign as the pressure from the public mounted, and was replaced with a new figure with a pro-nuclear stance and immediately scrapped the plan for the closure of the nuclear plants.4 This, at the time, was not reported as part of spin tactics that the government together with the mass media used to avoid further economic damage. However, with hindsight,

2. Resignation of the Prime Minister as a re-sult of his fearless speech against Neoliberal governmentality

Soon after the earthquake and the tsunami tidal waves struck the north east coast of Ja-pan on 11th of March 2011, which severely damaged nuclear power plants in Fukushima, the situation concerning the unclear plants re-mained critical as the failure of six boiling wa-ter reactors were allegedly imminent. Water reactors function as a cooling system, which keeps the temperature of radioactive materi-als down, as once used, the nuclear wastes generate an enormous heat that leads to a meltdown of a plant. If the meltdown occurs, radio active materials are exposed to its envi-ronment and radiation propagating from the plants becomes uncontrollable. Despite the nation’s plea, a few of the reactors eventu-ally failed which led to the explosion of the plants.2 They triggered the permeation of radiation across the north part of Japan. As a result, the considerable risk of having nu-clear power plants became apparent, which had long been denied and concealed by the government officials as well as relevant enter-prises. A fear of possible recurrence has pre-vailed across the nation and the government was under pressure of reacting promptly. In order to tackle this critical situation, the Prime Minister then, Naoto Kan, urged the immedi-ate closure of all nuclear plants existing in Ja-pan in order to prevent any further damage or recurrence of similar incidents.3 The reactors, including those that failed and exploded in Fu-kushima, were poorly maintained by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO): their neg-ligence and complacency have perpetuated over decades, which inevitably encountered

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Hence, a parrhesiastic act is pertinent to a relationship between “the speaker and what he says.”8 In light of danger involved in truth-telling, a prominent Slovenian scholar, Alenka Zupančič ‹s reading of Nietzsche makes an interesting contribution to identifying the char-acteristics of truth.

“...truth signifies a brave struggle against prejudices, ‘false truths,’ and accepted ideas, a struggle for the purity of knowledge....it is not possible to live in truth; truth is not the adequate medium of life.”9

Further, she continues:

“Truth is not and cannot be a function of sur-vival, since it is more harmful than beneficial to life.”10

Despite the subjective nature of truth, I would like to hypothesise that we would know truth according to the risk involved in telling it to others and whether something is known to someone as true can be measured against its danger. Truth could be fatal in the sense that telling it to others could potentially lead the utterer to death as it is inclined to precipitate opposing forces. As a parrhesiastes, howev-er, one should not fear death over expressing one’s truth. Friedrich Nietzsche discerns this, as he claims that we are oscillating between lies that guarantee our self-preservation and the fatal nature of truth. To quote a passage from ‘Beyond Good and Evil’:

“Something might be true, even if it were also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential na-ture of existence that to understand it com-pletely would lead to our own destruction. The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweet-ened, muted, falsified.”(1

Even in terms of ontological ethics in contrast to a parrhesiastic sense, truth can rarely be

it appears more as the manipulative and de-ceptive nature of propaganda than the simple resignation of a Prime Minister. It can be said that the Prime Minister, Kan perhaps spoke the truth too candidly instead of smoothing it over by employing a softer and more gradual approach. Nonetheless, in the face of the price he consequently paid, his action may be considered as courageous, moreover par-rhesiastic.

3. Parrhesia and parrhesiastes

Michel Foucault explored the notion of parrhe-sia in a series of lectures given at University of California at Berkley, as well as College de France which were subsequently published under the names of Fearless speech and The Hermeneutics of the Subject, respectively. Foucault refers to the notion of parrhesia as a technique of truth-telling found in ancient literature, and a person who engages in par-rhesia is referred to as parrhesiastes.5 Fur-thermore, whether a person is a parrhesiastes or not depends on a risk involved in the act of truth-telling. To quote a passage from ‘Fear-less Speech’:

“If there is a kind of “proof” of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is his courage. The fact that a speaker says something dangerous - different from what the majority believes - is a strong indication that he is a parrhesiastes.”6

Needless to say, truth is a problematic term in that a question of whether a parrhesiastes tells what he thinks is true or what is really true remains ambiguous. Foucault’s answer to this is that a parrhesiastes actually knows the truth, and what he says is not what he thinks is true but what is really true.7 Iden-tifying whether something is true or not, as Foucault asserts, amounts to whether or not a person has the courage to face a risk as a consequence of his truth-telling act. Indeed, truth is dangerous and sometimes the act of truth-telling can lead to horrific consequenc-es, as it tends to invite opposing opinions.

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ary1982 at College de France. In it, Foucault identifies as a parrhesiastes. In ‘Apology’, Pla-to recalls that Socrates faces a trial after being accused of corrupting the youth and impiety. In front of judges, he tries to defend himself by reasoning that exercising philosophy is what he has been assigned to by Gods and he was merely investigating the truth of what an orator of Delphi told Socrates as a child; it is neither being an atheist nor believing in something other than what the polis of Athene worships. Therefore, the accusation brought by Meletus against Socrates was not legiti-mate.14 After being found guilty, Socrates prepares himself for facing the consequences and despite being given a chance to escape from the prison by his friend, Crito, in the face of death he finally decides to embrace his sentence of public execution.15 By refer-ring to Socratic parrhesia, Foucault attempts to examine an ethics that has been buried in ancient philosophy, namely the technique of the self. This pertains to late Foucault’s inter-est in subject, subjectivity and subjectivation in response to his earlier remarks on ‘the state apparatuses’, ’institutions of confinement’ and ‘dispotif’. The fact that Foucault explores the notion of self-technique in length is pre-cisely because before committing to the act of truth-telling one needs to know him or her-self. This epistemic role of parrhesia is one of three parrhesiastic activities involved in what Foucault identifies as “philosophical parrhe-sia.”(6 Furthermore, according to Foucault’s reading of Platonism posited on the conver-sation between Socrates and Alcibiades, ac-cess to truth was believed to require a right condition of spirituality in ancient Greece. To put it simply, there is a correlation between spirituality and epistemology in Platonism and Neo-Platonism.17 This, as Foucault says, is crucial as to blessing one’s soul with wisdom in order to attain truth.18

5. Problems with a democratic regime

attained in that few have the courage to face the fatal consequences of discovering, wit-nessing, and enunciating truth, but simultane-ously we cannot give up on pursuing knowl-edge and truth. In this respect, we can draw a close tie between epistemological desire and our pursuit of truth, which is by nature irresist-ible and alluring. Zupančič writes in response to Nietzsche›s assertion above:

“...truth is like an excessively strong light: if we look at it directly, it blinds or destroys us. We can approach it only by shading (or dim-ming) it to a certain degree.”(2

Another significant point about parrhesia in relation to politics that Foucault makes in Fearless Speech is that parrhesia implies various meanings depending on contexts and times. Foucault elucidates different functions of a parrhesiastes in the Greco-Roman time. As city-states in ancient Greece being republi-can, parrhesia was exercised in the assembly often used against the majority party consist-ing of ruling groups of aristocrats. Whereas during the reign of the Hellenistic monarchies, a parrhesiates was referred to as an advisor for a king, who openly says what is wrong with the current politics and what ought be done, especially when the state experiences tyranny.13 And the advisor’s danger rests on a decision of the king whether he would consider such advice, or rebuke it.4. Socratic parrhesia: “the care of the self”

Reference to parrhesia was primarily drawn from several forms of what Foucault calls, ‘self-technologies’. In the midst of the State’s dominance, the self-technologies play a cru-cial role in connection with the act of resis-tance. As a self-proclaimed historian, Fou-cault’s self-technologies seem to be imbued with the mythical figure of Socrates who ap-pears in a series of Plato’s masterpieces such as ‘The Republic’, ‘Apology’, ‘Crito’, and’ Pheado’. Foucault makes a direct reference to ‘Apology’ in a lecture given on 6th of Janu-

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that the Japanese Prime Minister’s parrhesi-astic action forced him out of politics testi-fies a dysfunctional government consisting of politicians who are neither capable of taking care of themselves nor the country. When ev-ery politician engages in the politics of self-preservation, the government is no longer capable of dealing with the politics of a coun-try. This leads us to a problem of democracy. In light of parrhesia as an act of truth telling about political, social and institutional issues, Foucault poses a question: “...the problem […] was knowing how to recognise such a truth-teller.”(3 For one to become cognizant of truth, one needs to be endowed with wis-dom, techne and receive a good education from a competent teacher.24 This view, al-beit being sensible, comes in conflict with the egalitarianism on which democracy is found-ed; hence, Foucault problematises parrhesia in connection with pedagogy. This allows us to deduce that the masses without such particular education to refine self-techniques are not in possession of adequate techne, knowledge, or wisdom to identify truth before even telling it. This is where the relevance of parrhesia to the problem of democracy sur-faces. Unlike a priori ethics such as Kant’s Categorical Imperatives, which posit on the power of logos and act according to the com-mandment of reason independently of self-in-terests, the multitude tends to act out of their own self-interests, therefore they are not, in principle, the best parrhesiasteses. Foucault champions this view in his 13th of January 1982 lecture as he points out the limitations of the self-technique as being only accessible to those who are in privileged circumstanc-es:“...to take care of the self one must have the ability, time, and culture, et cetera, to do so. It is an activity of the elite. And even if the Stoics and Cynics say to people, to everyone, ‘take care of yourself,’ in actual fact it could only become a practice among and for those with a certain cultural, economic, and social capability.”(5

If we return to the case of the nuclear disas-ter in Japan, it prevails that insofar as TEPCO and the government officials were responsible for the man-made disaster, the masses were also the culprit of the tragic accident. It is for the reason that while wallowing in their com-placency the Japanese general public have neglected their soul and self-technique to pursue the truth. They were aware, in some ways, of the danger of nuclear power, as there has been a series of signals tinkering and anti-nuclear scientists were battling for years. Nonetheless, nothing was done to pre-vent such an atrocity from occurring. As Fou-cault states: unless the soul of every society member is healthy and functions properly with the help of wisdom (techne), a state cannot be governed.19 Moreover, the application of the self-technique in the Foucauldian sense not only concerns those governing a state but also the ones that are governed.20

The importance of the ‘technologies of self’ in relation to politics is also stressed in Fou-cault’s reading of ‘Alcibiades’. In the story, Socrates teaches a self-technique called epimeleia heatou, ‘the care of the self’ to a young aristocrat, Alcibiades, whose privilege and wealth, as he believes, legitimates his drive to realise his ambition of one day gov-erning the city-state. However, Socrates does not believe that those privileges suffice to qualify someone to be a governor of a city-state.21 The technology of ‘the care of the self’ (epimeleia heatou), according to Fou-cault, is derived from a logic that before taking care of oneself, one cannot take care of oth-ers and one’s inability to take care of others disqualifies one to enter into a political life.22 In other words, if a person neglects the peda-gogical process of self-techniques (knowing truth and justice) or parrhesia (telling truths), one is yet incapable of governing a state since he does not possess techne (wisdom) and re-fined moral values.

If these ancient techniques that Foucault excavates are applied to the aftermath of the explosion of the nuclear plants, the fact

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field of psychoanalysis for decades.29 A rhi-zomatic structure seems to encourage exper-imentation and emancipatory attempts from dominance.

In spite of it all, we have to be alert as to whether or not non-hierarchical structures al-ways produce positive results. In contrast to a tyrannical regime or a despotic government that utilises state apparatuses to suppress people’s freedom, for instance in a sovereign society or a disciplinary society, a non-hier-archical institution stands, without a doubt, as its counterpart. However, in a type of de-mocracy where every citizen’s representative expresses their own varying political views, there is only chaos and an entropic disorder. And uncertainty stemming from a lack of co-hesion is a deterrent to reaching critical deci-sions in the moment of crisis. Foucault makes a point on the problem of democracy in his lecture at UC Berkley:

“The explicit criticism of speakers who uti-lised parrhesia in its negative sense became a commonplace in Greek political thought since the Peloponnesian War...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 speak-ers may lead the citizenry into tyranny, or may otherwise endanger the city. Hence parrhesia may be dangerous for democracy itself.”)0

Foucault further explores the danger of par-rhesia in democracy in the same lecture through a Socratic dialogue from ‘The Repub-lic’. It is to establish the point that for Plato the chief problem of parrhesia is not even creating an environment that allows an inexperienced government to exercise a bad politics, or cor-rupting leaders to gain power, but where ev-eryone has their own ways of living and do not share a common logos. This fallacy of

Here is also Nietzsche’s remark on the diffi-culty of recognising one’s own inadequacy to access truth, as if implying that ‘the care of the self’ may be as a priori as Kant’s moral philosophy:

“I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies.”(6

“so far one has called lies truth.”(7

Parrhesia entails a semantic entanglement as it could also be exercised negatively. In his lectures at UC Berkeley, Foucault touches on the parallel relationship between parrhesia and problems of democratic states. Foucault distinguishes two types of parrhesia, namely good parrhesia and bad parrhesia. And bad parrhesia seems to be closely connected with democracy. The fundamental idea of a democratic state postulates a system under which the whole population can participate in politics either directly or through representa-tives. A problem of democracy stems from the very virtue of the system itself, which refutes tyranny and dictatorship. A regime that privileges only a segment of a society as such is condemned for its absence of an egalitarian structure. Yet, if one attempts to create a democratic group called ‘N’, there is always someone who is befriended with or has connections with every member, such as a schoolteacher, a doctor, a leader, a dictator, etc. They are often authoritative and dominant figures; therefore, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the dominance has to be subtracted from a group in order to create a non-hierar-chical structure. The innovative philosophers call this a non-hierarchical multiplicity, ‘N-1’, as one is always subtracted.28 Deleuze and Guattari famously advocate the rhizome as opposed to arborescent structures as meta-phors for hierarchical and non-hierarchical systems. Within a rhizomatic structure or a non-hierarchical multiplicity, the flux of communication runs without restrictions or limitations inflicted by a dominant figure and schizo-analysis is applied instead of Freud’s Oedipus Complex, which has dominated the

14

Socratic parrhesia, in other words, implies an ontological harmony of logos and bios, and the one that can display this is a Socratic par-rhesiastes, which in the ancient philosophy, is referred to as Dorian.35 This Dorian har-mony distinguishes Socrates’ life from that of a sophist, who is capable of developing an elaborate discourse on courage, yet he himself is unable to show courageous acts. Hence, Socrates’ defence in Apology, which shows no sign of compromise in the face of death nor a tenuous argument to beg for mer-cy attesting to his Dorian harmony:

“On Socrates’ or the philosopher’s side, the bios-logos relation is a Dorian harmony which grounds Socrates’ parrhesiastic role..”)6

This adds to a new dimension to the notion of parrhesia previously perceived as the an-tithesis of a dominant group in the assembly or of a tyrannical ruler in a monarchic state. Therefore, the conception of Bios, connot-ing ontological ethics, is the core of Socratic parrhesia. This Socratic parrhesia as an en-actment of parrhesia unfolding in the way one lives plays a vital role in the discourse of neoliberalism, which constitutes immanently the conception of the multitude as a new col-lective subjectivity emerging in Western post-industrial countries.

7. Political stagnation:

During the time that Socrates lived, the polis of Athens descended from being an infallible empire to almost a vassal state of Sparta and Persia. After the death of Pericles, the mighti-est ruler of Athens, who led the city’s golden age and fostered arts and literature to flour-ish, the first democratic state became frag-mented.

In the wake of the Prime Minister’s resignation in Japan, the Japanese government was left in turmoil, as politicians were busy engaging in not the politics of the country, but the poli-tics of self-preservation. The government was overwhelmed by power struggles between different parties and inherent resistance to

democracy offers a possible junction where Foucault meets philosophers like Hobbes and Machiavelli, for Foucault acknowledges this situation as a type of anarchy as one can “ choose one’s own style without limit.”(1 In short, freedom of speech will lead to the free-dom of selecting one’s own lifestyle. To quote: “Freedom in the use of logos increasingly becomes freedom in the choice of bios.”(2 This insinuates that valorisation of parrhesia hinges immensely on contextual implications and its enactment could possibly invite unwel-come ramifications:

“The primary danger of liberty and free speech in a democracy is what results when everyone has his own manner of life, his own style of life. For then there can be no common logos, no possible unity, for the city.”(3

6. Logos and Bios

Now let us return to the Socratic parrhesia, as Foucault makes a crucial point, in which par-rhesia seems to entail more than the simple act of truth-telling, but an epistemic aspect, pedagogy, and life itself. In Greco-Roman times, parrhesia meant the courageous act of truth-telling in either assemblies or to a king as an advisor, but Foucault furthers his inves-tigation by claiming that a Socratic parrhesi-astes denotes more roles of parrhesia than initially addressed. The significance of Socrat-ic parrhesia lies in the transparency between his rational discourse, logos, and the way he leads his life, bios. Parrhesiastic acts are no longer contained in giving an account of one’s honest autobiographic confession, but rather how one demonstrates his commandment of reasoning in order to create a congruous rela-tion between what one says and does. Fou-cault quotes Nicias’ identification of Socrates:

“...there is a harmonic relation between...his words (logoi) and his deeds (erga). Thus not only is Socrates himself able to give an account of his own life, such an account is already visible in his behaviour since there is not the slightest discrepancy between what he says and what he does.“34

15

ships between government officials, regula-tors, and the nuclear industry. For instance, Toru Ishida, a former director of a ministry organisation that supports nuclear energy called the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, became an advisor at TEPCO in 2011. Susumu Shirakawa, who previously held a senior post at a regulatory agency is, in fact a vice president of TEPCO. Currently, 95 people are reported to hold positions at major nuclear regulatory organisations and simulta-neously, they are either bureaucrats or mem-bers of policy-making panels. Worst of all was Tokio Kano, who long after joining TEPCO in 1957, was promoted to a managerial posi-tion at one of the company’s nuclear units in 1989. By 1998, he was elected as a member of parliament for the first time, and the big-gest business lobby in the recent history of the Japanese politics was witnessed in the following years, as any form of judicious re-straint between a regulator and the regulated became non-existent.40 In USA, regulators and unclear utilities are thoroughly indepen-dent from each other and it is unimaginable that regulators have such a close link to a pri-vate nuclear firm.41 The analysis of the chief scientist at Rocky Mountain Institute, Amory B Lovins provides a succinct explanation of the nature of Japanese politics, which allowed the nuclear industry to remain unchallenged for so many years:

“Japan’s more rigid bureaucratic structures, reluctance to send bad news upwards, need to save face, weak development of policy alternatives, eagerness to preserve nuclear power’s public acceptance (indoctrinated since childhood), and politically fragile gov-ernment, along with TEPCO’s very hierarchi-cal management culture, also contributed to the way the accident unfolded. Moreover, the information Japanese people received about nuclear energy and its alternatives have long been tightly controlled by both TEPCO and the government.”(2

Moreover, Amory provides a remarkable an-ecdote that two prominent Japanese report-

anti-nuclear movements and consequently, politics became stagnant. Since then, Japan’s Prime Minister has changed three times, showing uncertainty, a lack of leadership, and no sign of significant improvement from the devastation. Resistance to the closure of nuclear plants in the crisis of national security has prevailed many issues not solely political, but the intertwining of politics with the social and the economic forces. For decades, TEP-CO, the company held accountable for the failure of the reactors has been standing as the largest electric utility in the world’s third largest economy.37 The closure of the plants meant a further damage to the already crip-pling Japanese economy. The financial dam-age caused by the earthquake, tsunami and contamination of radiation allegedly amounts to $14 billion as an initial loss.38 During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the government had been blinded by the constant economic growth through the reliance on nuclear ener-gy, which was long described as clean, eco-nomical and safe. However, once the horrify-ing danger unfolded, the public realised that they had been buying into an utter myth. Now the government is concerned with the imme-diate economic loss resulting from the clo-sure of the nuclear plants, although an eco-nomic recovery in the long run will be better achieved by creating a nuclear-free society, minimising the risk of reoccurrence of such a catastrophe. As it has been proven that nu-clear technology is too dangerous to control, it is neither safe nor profitable. Utility compa-nies known for revenue stability are generally attractive to both domestic and foreign inves-tors; therefore the economic injury caused by the disaster was ironically colossal. The un-precedented strain was felt in the Tokyo stock exchange subsequent to the earthquake, as the Nikkei Stock market fell by 11%, meaning $364 billion was wiped out.39

8. Neo-liberal Governmentality

In the face of all this, the biggest deterring factor for the country to move forward is its long history of allowing close-knit relation-

16

to global.46 This means that early capitalism, which Marx primarily dealt with, was posited on the paternal position of politics to econ-omy or a close tie between imperialism and capitalism wherefrom the proletariat strove to be emancipated.47 And the present-day decentralised power and geographically dis-persal flux of capital did not spring out of political strategies that modern states tried to implement, but rather proletarian class struggle itself.48 Although the initially as-sumed interdependency of the militant nature of politics and economy allowed expansion of capital through the imperialist invasion of non-capitalist societies so that the monetary value of surpluses could be realised, capital’s aptitude for an equalised economic condition induced discord between the Inside and the Outside. This was the case for the struggles between capitalist and non-capitalist soci-eties, as well as the coloniser and the colo-nised.49 On the other hand, the emergence of the world market immune to national bor-ders was as both a direct and indirect result of class struggles and exploitation that strained manual labourers in factories and mines in the wake of industrial revolution. To put it differ-ently, their emancipatory desire turned them into nomadic labour whose disadvantaged presence is often felt in large cities, such as New York, London and Tokyo.50 Yet global capitalism now haunts the proletariat, whose nature metamorphosed from material to im-material, from physical labour on the assem-bly lines to intellectual labour that utilises highly sophisticated language and knowledge to code complex systems.51 Tautologically, while the commodification of physical labour to be sold and traded was accounted for in the traditional Marxist rhetoric, in the 21st century we discern the commerce of immate-rial labour produced in a wide variety of sites from glass buildings in Wall Street and City to trendy urban cybernet cafes and academic institutions. In summary, on the passage from imperialism of modern-states to what Hardt and Negri refers to as ‘Empire’, governments have lost their sovereign power over mobility

ers have endured a long perpetuating pres-sure from the government not to broadcast any information about nuclear power that conflicts with what was already reported by the officials.43

The reign of the Liberal Democratic Party had solely and internally been succeeded for 55 years until 2009 without intervals of any oth-er parties coming into power. The dominant party held a business-friendly stance, with which many burgeoning enterprises enjoyed. Hence, it is not surprising to learn that one of the party’s key policies was indeed nuclear power. This historical backdrop was one of the biggest contributors to creating the inter-twined relationship between government of-ficials and Japan’s top utility, which allowed a culture of complacency to lurk in the country ‘s political bedrock without being questioned or challenged for so many years.44

To examine this situation, Saskia Sassen’s acute assessment of globalisation and its impact on local economy, social structures and politics, is extremely useful. She argues that the nation-state authorities were, with their supreme powers, traditionally regarded as sovereign, yet they have increasingly been marginalised by the economy evolving under the aegis of the expansion of global capital-ism. She writes:

“The hegemony of neoliberal concepts of economic relations with its strong emphasis on markets, deregulation, and free interna-tional trade has influenced policy...”(5

The series of events that I have attended so far exemplify instances of neoliberal govern-mentality that lies underneath the nuclear crisis. Once the surface being scratched, the complexity that emerges is not only subjected to Japan, but be of international relevance. Energy-related issues such as exhaustion of fossil fuels and the danger of unclear power have unquestionably been a universal con-cern, and so is neoliberalism. Neoliberal gov-ernmentality suggests a shift of sovereignty from politics to economy, moreover a nation

17

same way that its role altered in accordance with contexts and times in the ancient world.

An unrecognised parrhesiastes

Against all I have argued so far, there have been a number of reports seemingly speaking of a truth about the resigned Prime Minister Kan. While his political stance dramatically shifted towards being anti-nuclear in the wake of the accident, his endorsing of the idea of switching to renewable energy coincided with a rapid decrease in his popularity after expos-ing his incompetence and inexperience to handle the Fukushima crisis.53 Some specu-lated that what underlay his radical turn may have been his attempt to regain his public image, and in response to the PM’s resigna-tion cynics jeered that Kan has been hoisted with his own petard stemming from his can-ning media stunt. Parallel to that, Bloomberg published an article on 14th of July 2011 with a heading, ‘Nuclear Village’ Protester Turns Hero in Japan’. It was about Toshinobu Hat-sui, whose efforts to prevent the construction of nuclear power plants caused his friendship with his friends and family to be fragmented decades before the nuclear crisis in Fukushi-ma. The proposal for constructing the plants in his local area, Hidaka, south of Osaka was laid out during the 1970s and 1980s after the neighbouring town prospered because of em-bracing the scheme. Ohi town, north of Osaka was on the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1970s, yet agreeing to host the plants in des-peration helped rejuvenate its local economy, as 2,400 jobs were created and it increased the public expenditure of the borough as a consequence.54 Despite that, supporters for nuclear power in Hidaka gradually dissipated as they lost their confidence in the safety claims in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident. After witnessing the horror of the Fukushima disaster, the residents of Hidaka breathed a sigh of relief admitting that those who protested against the construction in the 1980s were right.55 Therefore, Toshinobu Hatsui, one of the protesters in the Hidaka region was, with hindsight, a secret parrhesi-

of capital and the proletariat whose nomadic presence has engendered the proliferating process of the global capitalism. Furthermore, a new paradigm is not necessarily what has been imposed upon the masses, but ema-nated from, constitutive of, and immanent to the multitude.52 The proletariat’s desire for liberation from a transcendental enuncia-tor, such as modern-states, broke their geo-graphic confinement, and looked as if the im-manentist ethos embedded in egalitarianism prevailed. Yet, to the proletariat’s surprise, it spawned another transcendent enunciator, global capital that enslaves wider strata of so-cial members. This, however, is far from being the cause of the new proletariat’s dismay, but rather a hopeful and encouraging fact in terms of resisting the dominance of global capital, particularly given the technology available to the multitude in the 21st century.

9. Conclusion

So far I have looked at primary roles of a par-rhesiastes in the Greco-Roman time and So-cratic parrhesia that entails the logos-bios re-lation of the ethico-ontological bind which has been juxtaposed with the political aftermath of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. From this juxtaposition, I have drawn several aspects pertaining to neoliberal governmen-tality, as well as the mentality of the Japanese politicians and the masses stemming from neoliberalist logic. I would like to end my es-say by introducing one story and a proposi-tion that rejects the idea that good parrhesia cannot be exercised effectively in democracy. Because if such a pessimist view does not face any objections, Foucault’s endeavour to bring the ancient wisdom back to life will be in vein. First, I will bring to light a true parrhe-siastes that had long been unrecognised up to the point of the nuclear crisis. Secondly, I will hypothesise that ways in which parrhesia is valorised in the 21st century will have to find alternative vehicles for fearless and truth-ful messages to be effectively communicated. To put simply, ways in which parrhesia is practiced will probably be transformed, in the

18

Wide Web. Its accessibility and seemingly inconspicuous nature allow many users to speak their mind openly on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and other social networking sites. The sudden appearance of the collective parrhesiasteses is analogous to Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude. Its conception is imbued with Hobbes and Spi-noza contrasting with the notion of people. For the philosophers, the conception of peo-ple in the context of modernisation is regard-ed as the One, and their unity renders social cohesion necessary for nation craft. Whereas the multitude is heterogeneous by nature, as constituents never conform to a unified style of living.57 Paola Virno succinctly puts: “...af-ter the establishment of the State, there is the One-people, endowed with a single will. The multitude, according to Hobbes, shuns politi-cal unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status of juridical person because it never transfers its own natural rights to the sovereign.”58 The conceptual distinction between ‘people’ and ‘the multitude’ that those philosophers dis-cuss is crucial in this context. It implies that whilst the subjectivity of ‘people’ seems to be the product of social engineering, the multi-tude still retains their individual singularities pertinent to parrhesiastic enactments.

In the past, the individual’s truth could hardly be manifested or cultivated as conveniently and instantaneously as it is now due to the se-curity apparatuses (despositif) and biopower that interested Foucault early in his academic career. They were deployed by the modern-states to control the masses and their milieus in order to secure the sovereign status of a modern nation as the One qua unified. In light of this, an ineffectual and unfruitful gesture of standing in public to express one’s view is not a surprise. Foucault’s endeavour to excavate the ancient ethics such as a self-technology of ‘the care of the self’ was, therefore an at-tempt to dispense the lost wisdom of indi-viduation marginalised since “the Cartesian moment”.59 Although this contradicts Fou-

astes in respect to not only speaking a truth but also in saving the lives of thousands of residents. Zupančič›s philosophical statement seems to sum up this concisely:

“We go through life relying on all kinds of problems and beliefs; we rarely have the cer-tainty of truth at hand, and this is precisely what endows us with a capacity for action.”

(6

Collective Parrhesiastes beyond geographic constraints in the 21st century: online journal-ists, Twitter and Facebook users: Immanence of the Neoliberalist paradigm to the multitude and their potential to revolt it.

In the moment of a national crisis, some Jap-anese citizens are reluctant to face changes and are apathetic to the criticality of the nu-clear accident. This apathy was especially apparent amongst those living in the western part of Japan, where the effect of radiation is either relatively marginal or none at all. This shift from people qua the One to the multi-tude qua a multiplicity of individual singulari-ties has, in fact, an embedded historical rea-son. After the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, many employees of large corpo-rations faced redundancy. As a result, most Japanese people became disillusioned with the long-standing tradition of remaining loyal to the same company in exchange of guar-anteed lifetime-employment. This affected their general outlook of life and its culture tra-ditionally characterised as group orientated, which has gradually shifted towards individu-al-orientation favoured in the Western world. The reason behind the apathy felt amongst the residents in the west part of Japan was, therefore, due to the prevalence of the individ-ualisation, and such a mentality that subverts national solidarity has unfortunately manifest-ed on the plight of national security.

On the contrary, there has been the emer-gence of new collective parrhesiasteses thriving on their individuality, whose presence is felt predominantly in the realm of the World

19

complex systems of global capital can be used against itself. Inasmuch as the neoliberal logic that constitutes ‘Empire’ is immanent to the multitude and vice versa, their desire to revolt is immanent to them, because there is “no mediation between them.”61

If we are to identify the structure of our modern society with Deleuze and Guattari’s non-hierarchical multiplicity ‘N-1’ where an authoritative figure is subtracted due to an egalitarian principle, the figure of a parrhesi-ates does not have to be confined in a charis-matic and highly influential public speaker, like Socrates. Instead of such a candid speech that is prone to micro-fascism, ordinary peo-ple that constitute the multitude, who are able to express their views even on the Internet, in their bedrooms, can exercise parrhesia in the 21st century. In the age of cybernetics when communication networks traverse beyond national boundaries, the ways in which truths unveil differ from the Greco-Roman time: nei-ther assemblies nor monarchic states are the locus of parrhesiastic praxis any more.

cault’s notion of parrhesia, which involves a courageous act of telling a truth in public, there seems to be the altering nature of ways in which truth-tellers enact the process of parrhesia from receiving education, discern-ing a truth, to the dissemination of it. There are more means available for one’s freedom of speech to be exercised and apparatuses that can counter the state-apparatuses. Inso-far as dispotif has become so sophisticated that it operates on a molecule level, there are engendering ways of exercising individual’s parrhesiastic freedom that have become as subtle and inconspicuous. Deleuze and Guat-tari would say that deterritorialisation accom-panies the decoding of a system that allows reterritorialisation. This was evident during 2011 as the government officials and TEP-CO’s reluctance to reveal the truth triggered the number of anonymous journalists and on-line bloggers to disseminate information that contradicted what was already published by those stakeholders.60 Although reckless mis-information and rumours also stirred up con-fusion and an unmanageable panic amongst the general public, in terms of raising their political awareness, which was almost non-existent prior to the catastrophe, it brought more positives than negatives nonetheless. Its ripple effect are also felt in the way that the general public seems to be leaning towards the idea of creating a nuclear-free society, even though their support was not so pro-gressive at the moment of Kan’s resignation. In this respect, the general public as a collec-tive subject seems to be actively taking a risk of accepting an immediate economic loss that will strain taxpayers in the hope of the long-term ecological and sustainable economic stability. This seems to reinforce Antonio Ne-gri and Michael Hardt’s faith in the potential-ity of the multitude to revolt against the neo-liberalist paradigm. Insofar as the immaterial proletariats ascended from exploited material labours during the modernisation of states, the new collective subjectivity is immanent to global capitalism. Yet, their intellect and im-material productive power whereby they code

20

25 Foucault, M. 2005. ‘The Hermeneutics of The Subject:

Lectures at the College de France 1981-82’. Basingstoke

and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 74.

26 Nietzsche, F. 1989. The Genealogy of Morals. New York:

Vintage Books, 326 -327.

27 Ibid., 326.

28 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1983. On the Line. Los Ange-

les: Semiotext(e), 33-39.

29 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1984. Anti-Oedipus: Capital-

ism and Schizophrenia. First published 1974. Tr. by R. Hurley;

M. Seem, and H.R. Lane. London: Athlone Press.

30 Foucault, M. 2001. Fearless Speech. Edited by J. Pear-

son. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents, 77.

31 Ibid., 85.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., 84.

34 Ibid., 100.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., 101.

37 Amory, B.L. 17 March 2011. “Learning from Japan’s nu-

clear disaste”. Rocky Mountain Institute

38 Ibid.

39 Phani, V.K. and Ga-Woon, P.V. 15 March 2011. ‘Tokyo

Shares End Day Down 11%’. The Wall Street Journal.

40 Kageyama and Pritchard. 2011. ‘Nuclear oversight: Trust,

don’t verify’. The Washington Times.

41 Amory, B.L. 17 March 2011. ‘Learning from Japan’s nu-

clear disaster’. Rocky Mountain Institute.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Biggs and Matsuyama. 2011. ‘Nuclear Village’ Protester

Turns Hero in Japan’. Bloomberg.

45 Sassen, S. 1998. Globalisation and Its Discontents. New

York: New Press, XXVIII.

46 Ibid, XXVI, XXVII-XXVIII and Hardt, M., and Negri, A.

(2000). Empire. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,

230-234.

47 Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000. Empire. Cambridge MA:

Harvard University Press, 251-256.

48 Ibid., 235, 237.

49 Ibid., 230.

50 Sassen, S. 1998. Globalisation and Its Discontents. New

York: New Press.

ENDNOTES

1 Kang, J. 2011. “Five Steps to prevent another Fukushima”

[Online]. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (May 14th 2011).

Available from <http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/

five-steps-to-prevent-another-fukushima>.

2 Japan Atomic Industrial Forum, Inc (27 December 2011).

‘The Earthquake Reports’.

3 Ozawa, H. (12 July 2012). ‘Japan PM urges Nuclear-Free

Future’. AFP.

4 Biggs, S. and Matsuyama, K. (2011 July 14). ‘Nuclear Vil-

lage’ Protester Turns Hero in Japan’. Bloomberg.

5 Foucault, M. 2001. Fearless Speech. Edited by J. Pearson.

Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents, 11.

6 Ibid., 11.

7 Ibid., 14.

8 Ibid., 12.

9 Zupančič, A. 2003. The shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Phi-

losophy of the Two, Troubles with Truth. Cambridge, Mas-

sachusetts: MIT Press, 92.

10 Ibid., 91.

11 Nietzsche, F. 1998. Beyond Good and Evil. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 37.

12 Zupančič, A. 2003. The shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s

Philosophy of the Two, Troubles with Truth. Cambridge, Mas-

sachusetts: MIT Press, 95.

13 Foucault, M. 2001. Fearless Speech. Edited by J. Pear-

son, J. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents, 85-86.

14 Apology. 22E – 24A. 1954. ‘The Last Days of Socrates’.

49-53, 54, 56-57, 60.

15 Critos. 1954. ‘The Last Days of Socrates’. 78-96.

16 Foucault, M. 2005. The Hermeneutics of The Subject:

Lectures at the College de France 1981-82. London: Pal-

grave Macmillan, 105-106.

17 Ibid., 77.

18 Ibid., 71.

19 Ibid., 71-73.

20 Ibid., 44-45.

21 Ibid., 33-37.

22 Ibid., 36.

23 Foucault, M. 2001. Fearless Speech. Edited by J. Pear-

son. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents, 93.

24 Ibid.

21

51 Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000. Empire. Cambridge MA:

Harvard University Press, 52-53.

52 Ibid.

53 Tabuchi, H. 2011. “Japan Premier Wants Shift Away From

Nuclear Power” [Online]. New York Times (July 13th 2011).

Available from <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/world/

asia/14japan.html>.

54 Biggs, S and Matsuyama, K. 2011. ‘Nuclear Village’ Pro-

tester Turns Hero in Japan’. Bloomberg (14th July 2001).

Available from < http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-

07-13/kan-takes-on-japan-s-nuclear-village-in-renewable-

energy-drive.html>.

55 Ibid.

56 Zupančič, A. 2003. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s

Philosophy of the Two, Troubles with Truth. Cambridge MA:

MIT Press, 92.

57 Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000. Empire. Cambridge MA:

Harvard University Press, 233.

58 Virno, P. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles:

Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents, 23.

59 Foucault, M. 2005. ‘The Hermeneutics of The Subject:

Lectures at the College de France 1981-82’. Basingstoke

and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 27.

60 Hays, J. 2008. ‘Who’s to blame for the Fukushima Nu-

clear Disaster’. Facts and Details. Available from < http://

factsanddetails.com/japan.php?itemid=1749&catid=26&sub

catid=162>.

61 Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000. Empire. Cambridge MA:

Harvard University Press, 393.

22

per, the curators state that “the purpose is not to create an ‘art installation’, but to provide a space without restrictions for activists to represent their work, advocate their positions, organise meetings and events, educate the public, and more.” However, the spectacu-larisation of protest produced through the controlled staging of outrage simply made the whole situation a pantomime and a parody of all those people occupying real streets and squares as a corporeal claim of public space, exposing themselves to the equally real risk of police ‘pacification’ measures for the urgency of their protest.

This is particularly surprising in a biennial that claims the end of the immunity and the au-tonomy of art, advocates for the dissolution of the boundary between politics and art, and contends that artists (or rather artists-politi-cians) should be “out there, wherever social and political transformation is at stake.” If this is the curatorial programme of BB7, removing activists from ‘out there’ – where they were actually performing radical politics – and into the space of an art biennial not only attributes immunity to something that didn’t have it and didn’t request it, but also does not seem to help furthering that agenda. Even if uninten-tionally, by giving those groups the immunity of an art space, Żmijewski does to them the same thing that neoliberal institutions do to any form of radical critique: neutralise them through incorporation. So, even if one may want to engage in the assemblies and ac-tivities organically emerging from the real oc-cupation of a public square, it would simply feel like a theatrical mimicry to do it at the KW while being watched and photographed by the visitors on the elevated platform. Art and

Gonçalo Sousa Pinto

Curating (as) Parrhesia?

From the courtyard of the Kunstwerke (KW) building in Berlin, I entered a corridor where the text of Stéphane Hussel’s Time for Out-rage was written by hand on the white walls in fluorescent, illegible orange ink. A door to my right was semi-open. Inside, a bunch of mattresses and sleeping bags filled the space to its capacity and made me think of a youth hostel with a “No vacancies” sign at the reception desk. At the end of the corri-dor, where the exhibition hall of KW is, I found myself overlooking a large room full of tents, banners, old sofas and chairs organised in a circle, painted signs and slogans on the floor and the walls and a few members of several Occupy movements standing next to their tent or table, talking to other people like myself. This was the Occupied Global Square at the 7th Berlin Biennale (BB7), a space offered by the curator Artur Żmijewski and his associate curators Joanna Warsza and the Russian col-lective Voina, to activists and occupiers to use in a self-organised manner for the duration of the Biennale. I couldn’t help feeling awkward in that situation. All of a sudden, Occupy had gone indoors, become institutionalised, reified and aestheticised, which not only perverted its nature and raison d’être, but also convert-ed me into an unwilling tourist in a theme park of ‘radical’ politics. The desperate naiveté of a cardboard sign saying “Don’t stay here! Go downstairs! Take part!” tied to the handrail of the elevated platform from which visitors con-templated the occupied ground only made it worse. For many of us who saw the occupa-tion of public squares around the world over the last year and a half with great hope and enthusiasm, that showcase of Occupy at KW just didn’t feel right. In the Biennale’s newspa-

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Occupy Global Square, Berlin Biennale 2012

We Are Not Anti-System, The System is Anti-Us. Occupy Global Square

Berlin Biennale 2012

Silence is Overrated, Occupy Global Square Berlin Biennale 2012

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for it to happen, to be faced and debated, and to engender some sort of disruption of the status quo. In fact, it seems to me that the way Żmijewski defines his role as curator of BB7 corresponds to the shift from curating to the curatorial, that Irit Rogoff has proposed in several of her writings. The curatorial under-stands curating as a form of cultural activism, as a guerrilla strategy that undermines prac-tices that reaffirm boundaries and perpetuate cultural and political hegemonies. It produces the conditions for raising and sustaining ur-gent questions rather than offering answers (even though Żmijewski claims that hisv aim was precisely the opposite), for engendering doubt and self-questioning rather than pro-ducing an illusory transparency, for rendering visible the tensions that are real but remain to be addressed, rather than contributing to the faux harmony of neoliberal politics, mul-ticulturalism and social peace. The curatorial entails a redefinition of the role of the curator, from an outside position in relation to the is-sues at hand, by which such issues are ob-jectified and analysed, to an inhabitation of such issues, hence producing a heightened awareness of them and an embodied sense of co-experience. This inhabitation that “brings together that being studied and those doing the studying in an indelible unity” is what Rog-off calls criticality.

It seems to me that the strategy followed by Żmijewski, Warsza and Voina, of identifying artists and non-artists that shared their sense of active and affective political engagement through their practice, and developing in di-alogue with them the works that were then presented at the Biennale, is a form of pro-ductively co-inhabiting the issues that those works addressed. In that sense, the Biennale becomes a collective endeavour that aims to expose the limits of democracy, the capillarity of neoliberalism, or the disquieting ghosts of political memory. I found it quite remarkable to see interventions such as the New World Summit (Jonas Staal and collaborators), which could hardly be conceived and realised

politics may not have a clear distinguishing boundary, but reality and its simulacra cer-tainly do.

I guess I was mostly disappointed at this “Global Square” because, much like Żmijewski and Warsza, I believe there is an enormous field of possibilities in the con-fusion of art and politics. When reading Żmijewski’s preface to the BB7 reader ‘Forget Fear’, or the curatorial texts in the newspaper published for the bien-nial, I found myself agreeing to a large extent with the axes and methodologies the curators proposed to organise this project. Not all art needs to be politically engaged with urgent social issues, or it may be engaged at differ-ent political scales, but I do agree that this biennial makes sense, as it radically address-es the pervasive neoliberal logic that largely underpins the art world and all spheres of life; and that needs to be brought into question and counteracted through different forms of debate and actions, in theory and in practice. In that sense, Żmijewski’s proposal for the BB7 is bold and relevant, and is imbued with the deeply-felt sense of non-negotiable truth that characterises radical politics. A truth that falls outside the lukewarm consensus of neo-liberalism and that, as if moved by a sense of duty, Żmijewski formulates into a curatorial strategy. It is the public’s prerogative to share or reject that truth and to put it into perspec-tive. This is, after all, one amongst hundreds of art biennials (spanning geography and time) and includes but a small number of ar-tistic and political proposals. Yet, it is a per-tinent truth that has, in the least, the value of its impertinence.

Żmijewski distances himself from the profes-sional curator who has become “a travelling producer of exhibitions (…) who speaks of so-cial issues in the soft language of pretended engagement” and who “administers art ob-jects, fishing them out of an artist’s oeuvre, transporting, insuring them and hanging them on walls.” Instead, he assumes the curatorial as a form of political agitation that, rather than eschewing conflict, produces the conditions

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Jonas Staal, New World Summit Model 2012

Mobinil Ad, Berlin Biennale 2012

Institute For Human Activities, a Gentrification Programme, 2012

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real effects and taking responsibility for them. It makes it impossible to even imagine any pragmatic formula or action. I am also afraid, but I am trying to forget fear.”

In ‘Fearless Speech’, Foucault refers to ‘risk’ as one of the fundamental attributes of the act of truth-telling, or parrhesia. The one who feels the moral duty of uttering his or her truth with absolute frankness in order to criticise an in-terlocutor in a higher plane of power, assumes the risk that this utterance exposes him or her to and, in doing so, s/he must indeed forget fear. In this sense, Żmijewski seems to define his curatorial practice as an act of parrhesia, just as the artists-politicians he invited to join him in this project understand their art prac-tice in a similar way. And yet, the fearlessness of parrhesia must not only be felt by those who utter the truth, but also by those who are addressed by this truth: it is the risk and the fearlessness of the speaker that invest the utterance with the certainty of truth and the power to produce change.

At the Berlin Biennale, risk was contained by the consubstantial immunity of the bien-nial format itself. On the warm evening of the opening at the courtyard of KW, sipping a glass of white wine while standing next to the giant Key of Return, made by the Palestinian refugees of the Aida Camp in Bethlehem as a symbol of the dream and the right to return home, the parrhesiastic radicality of the BB7 had a distinctive neoliberal tinge. It felt all too easy to forget fear

outside the territory of art, but whose effects may be sent off way beyond that territory. The New World Summit is, as per Jonas Staal’s words, “an alternative parliament for political and juridical representatives of organisations currently placed on international terrorist lists” that took place in Berlin on the 4th and 5th of May 2012, as part of the BB7. As for most of the works presented at the Biennale, the objects, printed material or films exhibited at the various venues were, in their vast majority, not art objects as such, but prompts or traces of political-artistic interventions that took (or will take) place outside the exhibition rooms.

Having said that, I think that some of the works/interventions at the Biennale lacked complexity, some were too naïf or oblivious of important dimensions of the issues they dealt with, and still others tended towards a certain spectacularisation and aestheticisa-tion which contradicted the artistic pragma-tism announced by Artur Żmijewski. It is not the intention of this text to discuss the works and interventions of the Biennale individually, but what became palpable was that some of those works, as well as some of the interven-tions by the curators themselves, were less interesting and less credible – both from an artistic and a political point of view – than the curatorial discourse that supported them could suggest. Recognising the vagueness of the comments in this paragraph, I nonethe-less feel the need to mention my perception of a certain disconnection, or even paradox, between a(n) (overly?) categorical and rotund curatorial manifesto and the experience of the Biennale itself, which, as a whole, felt a lot more conventional and biennalesque than one could expect from such a radical outspo-kenness of truth.

The title of the BB7 reader, ‘Forget Fear’, seems to be reminiscent of Foucault’s ‘Fear-less Speech’. Żmijewski’s preface finishes with him saying that the only thing than can jeopardise his mode of curatorial action as a convener of political-artistic positions is “angst, the petrifying fear of bringing about

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ENDNOTES

1 Żmijewski, A. and Warsza, J. 2012. Berlin Biennale Zeitung

(April 2012). Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 11.

2 Żmijewski, A. 2012. “Preface”. In A. Żmijewski and J.

Warsza, eds. Forget Fear - 7th Berlin Biennale for Contempo-

rary Art. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 16.

3 Ibid., 13.

4 Ibid., 18.

5 Rogoff, I. 2006. “‘Smuggling’ - An Embodied Criticality”

[Online]. Available from <http://www.eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoff-

smuggling> [Accessed 9th May 2012].

6 Staal, J. 2012. “New World Summit”. Berlin Biennale Zei-

tung (April 2012). Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art,

26.

7 Żmijewski, A. 2012. “Preface”. In A. Żmijewski and J.

Warsza, eds. Forget Fear - 7th Berlin Biennale for Contempo-

rary Art. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 18.

8 Foucault, M. 2001. Fearless Speech. Edited by Pearson, J.

Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 15-16.

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not much future or, for that matter, mean-ing in its own right except in a theme park. Foucault did not talk about the implications of parrhesia in contemporary contexts and in the course of the book’s 200 pages does not seem to be concerned about the ground con-ditions that make fearless speech possible in the first place; saying that one should speak fearlessly is one thing that skirts the fact that the majority of the world’s population is not in possession of the right to speech to start with.

It seemed to me that beyond the formal study of the concept lies a fetishisation for the an-tique word. Choosing parrhesia as the key-note for a critique of contemporary conditions of late capitalism might not seem to serve the argument that much. After all, Foucault does seem to have a tendency to concoct sexy half-baked concepts. Some time ago, I flirted with heterotopia (another Foucauldian con-cept), followed it to conceptual wastelands only to realise it was a catch-all word and blissfully relieved to leave it there.

But in my angst I trust—my anxiety of influ-ence. If parrhesia is an incomplete project then that leaves more room for work. The most exciting part of Foucault’s analysis it seemed to me was the section on the Cyn-ics. That is when parrhesia starts to assume a political tint. That is when parrhesia as-sumes contemporary relevance as a mode of critique of political and institutional hierarchy. It is better to think of parrhesia as a form of political speech. It is in the constituency of political speech that could find a topical us-age of the word. In political context, parrhesia can be found at the peripheries of the liberal

I have to confess, I was reluctant to pursue the project of writing this article and I had not one but two reasons. Firstly, I had little fasci-nation for another exposé of capitalism; not for another group of artists in their plumage to ‘un-’, ‘de-’ and ‘re-’ and preach to me the ailments of neoliberalism. Secondly, thumb-ing through Fearless Speech and listening to Foucault’s lectures at Berkeley I soon realized that this whole parrhesia business was a dis-appointment. Foucault works an interesting archaeology of the forgotten term, but leaves us with a rather monolithic definition of the word along a set of five main attributes: frank-ness, truth, danger, criticism and duty, along with some other minor ones. The whole en-terprise is rather formal: parrhesia, as a form of speech that could only be reified once all of its criteria are identified. The text holds a secular tenor of a religious creed only to be followed but not questioned, with very little critical capacity but a facile categorical Man-ichaeism of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parrhesia. At the heart of it lies a case for truth and morality. A case but not a question; for they both seem to be a priori conditions for parrhesia. In other words, parrhesia is not a theory of truth or morality but mere form. And then what? How could speech be reduced to a mere set of criteria? What to make of parrhesia? It is a word that nobody uses nor understands. You do not read it in the papers. You do not go around encountering parrhesia or parrhesias-tes (those who enact parrhesia). Its historical context of Athenian democracy is long gone, forgotten for centuries until Foucault exca-vated it. It is like a prehistoric mammoth ge-netically engineered, resurrected, introduced to life long after its habitat disappeared with

Parrhesia—then what?

Ahmad Hosni

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sion between art and politics had not been as intimately experienced before, perhaps since the interwar period. This is kairos of the times. Less importantly, but more poignantly, was the debate on the potentiality of burgeon-ing spaces of convergence in engendering knowledge production beyond institutional operations, or the ‘educational turn.’ As my professor Irit Rogoff proffers, that is where parrhesia is a possibility and it is through parrhesia that new articulations of truth, of knowledge, take place.

Yet, it is not unlike the Foucauldian parrhesia: wanting for clarification, calling for addition: a baton to relay. What is needed is a set of con-version or translation tools if we want to ad-dress the shortcomings of parrhesia and bring it to bear on contemporary parlance. Foucault was not, after all, a political thinker and his archaeology stops at the 5th century B.C. It would be better to think of parrhesia without Foucault. I take it as a pretext for a specu-lative opinion and a pre-text for what could come next; post-Foucault, post-parrhesia. We need to translate parrhesia into the par-lance of contemporary political theory. There is something essentially political there. It is not listed in the concept’s active components. No, it is not criticism. It is not duty, and definitely not a transcendental truth. It is essentially the condition of disagreement, of antagonism that marks the parrhesiastic moment. There is al-ways a moment of friction, of tension, where new knowledge stems into being, a moment of turning - against that is the true locus of parrhesia and politics. Jacques Rancière re-gards this moment of disruption of agreement as the as pivotal in the edifice of politics, that is when a group stands up and demands its

representational system. This is the territory where stipulations of danger are at play. Par-rhesia usually arises from positions sanc-tioned outside the liberal political consensus. Voices from the extreme left or right, be it religious extremist groups, ultra-nationalists, white-supremacists, anti-semites—you name it—in their usual rhetoric and ideology, pride themselves on their frankness, commitment to an ultimate truth, be it faith or race, in the political theatre of liberal democracy. It does not matter if it is Geert Wilders, the National Front, Batasuna, or Golden Dawn, Phalagists, or Al Qaida militants, the adherence to truth utterance comes with the horizon of danger, which is not always in the form of overt legal prosecution but the risk of being shunned off from political agendas under the sanction of labels like ‘extremist.’

Technically speaking, all such instantiations of political speech conform to the parrhesias-tic form, and all are true parrhesiastes. Now, would Foucault have thought about that? This is the dilemma of parrhesia; with no ethical co-ordinates what this formal notions of truth (or political speech) can do is to open the doors for all forms of unwarranted and unwanted political tendencies. If we read parrhesia as a political speech-act, how to justify the choice of a political concept that has nothing of ethi-cal purchase and without mentioning a single word on the problematics of truth?

Why parrhesia now, in the institution? The urgency could be traced to few factors: the recent surge of political discourse fuelled by recent worldwide protests, and the searing disillusionment of the neoliberal policies and the repercussions on art discourse—the fu-

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was through the Arendtian idea of action and speech that activism came to mean what it does now: denotations of engagement and responsibility to the public, to democracy. Ac-tivism itself has a long semantic history: the word moved to the English language (prob-ably from German) in the early 20th century. As propounded by philosopher Rudolf Euken, it used to denote a philosophy of life of en-gaged action and an opposition to intellec-tual speculation. It was not until the outset of the First World War that it came to acquire political weight. There it started to refer to a position taken by those who opposed Swed-ish neutrality and demanded an active military involvement in the war on the German side. Later, in the 1920s, it became associated with general attitudes towards engagement in poli-tics as opposed to quietism and pacifism.

There is something common between the po-litical extremists of the modern day and the early activists. It is not a question of political affiliation but the generic parrhesiastic sense of going actively against the current political consensus. Arendt, albeit avidly emphasising the role of action, never actually used the word activism or activist. Yet there seems to be in her idea of action the premise that differenti-ates activism from other forms of human ac-tivity, namely that field of activity which is not mandated by either work, social nor biological need. Action is the sphere of responsibility, of duty. This is the sphere of Euripidean parrhe-sia; action qua political speech qua parrhesia. She never used the word parrhesia either. Yet, there is in her notion of action an answer to the ethical dilemma of parrhesia: action can-not simply be celebrated, idealised, fetishised as such, for action is always conditioned on thinking, on imagination, or the capability and indeed the effort of seeing things from the other’s point of view. The sheer evilness of Adolf Eichmann was not in his diabolic mas-ter plan, nor could be simplistically reduced to the lack of consciousness, but to the lack of imagination, the lack of thinking. Eichmann was not able to utter a single sentence that

voice be counted and its version of truth to be understood. Parrhesia for Rancière could be a moment of disclosure; a moment of disruption of a field of visibility that unmasks exclusion and the bringing of new knowledge into the field of the visible and the sayable.

Alain Badiou has his version of parrhesia too: it is a moment of commitment to an event and it is the subject’s fidelity to the event that is the locus of truth and the nidus of politics. Change happens when a group adheres to that site of truth, and adheres to it fervently, he claims. Or take Chantal Mouffe, whose no-tion of the political as antagonistic exercise eschews the political harmony of liberal de-mocracy. She would see parrhesia as the bas-tion of true politics in a post-political world.

With all these theorists truth-telling, political speech is a caesura in the hegemonic con-sensual political discourse. My favourite, however, is not the anarchist Rancière or the committed Badiou, but the rebel of Albert Ca-mus and above all, Hannah Arendt. I would add Camus’ rebelliousness to the list in his resistance to categorical ethics, his valorisa-tion of agency and opposition to normative constraints, and mindless revolutionary rheto-ric. His rebel is not someone who says no but rather who can say no. But perhaps it is Han-na Arendt more than any other thinker who connects the pre-modern of ancient Greece with the post-postmodern with ease. For Ar-endt speech and action are obverse sides of the same coin: speech is the progenitor of ac-tion and a form of action. Parrhesia would be the moment when a person stands up in pub-lic and expresses his opinion. It is the self-dis-closure in the public realm that through which the political subject comes to being. It is not clear which comes first in Arendt’s thought, truth or speech, but neither is possible with-out action.

Action is pivotal for Arendt. She was an ac-tivist before activism became a common par-lance in contemporary discourse. I might be tempted to think, perhaps incorrectly, that it

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sional groups classified as such prior to any encounter with his or her performative action, ‘teacher’ or ‘doctor’, for example.

Professionalism is one of the tenets of neolib-eral ethos. As opposed to the common wis-dom, neoliberalism is not about deregulation by and large, it is about all forms of regula-tions, standardisation and professionalisation that guarantee the flow of labour, material and immaterial, skill and knowledge across space. The activist operates in the milieus of global-ity facilitated by a fellowship to the New In-ternational subtended by common conditions of understanding rather than the commonal-ity of embedded knowledge. He swiftly and smoothly moves from one political context to the other, one political agora to the next; flies across workshops and seminars across the globe, from one ‘Occupy’ to the other. The activist has become more akin to the cura-tor or even the artist in the globalised age: the epitome of the hyper-mobile global citi-zen. Political speech as a form of knowledge, has become commodified, action turned into immaterial labour, that probably found more home, and more market potentiality, in the world of art.

We live in a time when there is more fusion be-tween aesthetics and the political than ever. These are times of perceived global revolu-tions. The Occupy movement with its global spread, messianic mission, self-congratulato-ry speech and fashion tactics provided space for politics to expand horizontally and move beyond the spaces of parliamentary represen-tation. On the other hand, art found a chance to redeem itself from accusations of hermeti-cism and elitism. Literally speaking, more than half of art announcements are politics-related, or proclaim so (the ratio soars if we are to talk about art from the Middle East). The other day I received an announcement for an artist resi-dency under the title: “Occupy the Residency: occupy our residency with a special fee.” Now what would Arendt have thought of that? It is not the fact that you have to pay to ‘oc-cupy’ that is worth pondering—that could be

was not cliché, remarked Arendt. His vice was that he operated bureaucratically, unthink-ingly. Evil can come in not in the meditative forthrightness of action but, worse still, is the banality, complacency, unthoughtfulness and mindlessness of routine and conformity.

For Arendt bureaucratisation is uncongenial with politics and the antithesis of action. For politics is the sphere of the new and unique-ness being the quality of action. While she believed that that action only takes place in the public and in concert with others, there is a patent concern of conformity in Arendt evinced in her ambiguous position towards the events of 1968. She repeatedly ex-pressed her concern with the unknown future of uniqueness in the face of ever-expanding managerial schemes. Speaking at Bard Col-lege in 1968, she warned against the future of humanity as that of “super-civilised monkeys.” In her view, this would be the result of the as-similation of political speech action, or the vita activa, into the sphere of the social, the sphere of work, or techne. And that is when the reduction of politics to pure management takes place. What would she have thought of our post-political times where the political is subsumed into the managerial strategies of neoliberalism with its emphasis on stan-dardisation and professionalisation? Politics is relegated to the management of economic benefit. Even the zoon politikon would have seemed to be dissolved into techne. The ac-tivist who appeared to operate outside the framework of political representation is now subject to new regulatory codes of engage-ment. The denomination ‘activist’ nowadays is the bearer of two connotations: ‘activist’ is both a constative as well as a performative enunciation. It is an adjective that attributes an individual’s behaviour, i.e. an activist is one who performs the deeds of activism. It has also come to function as a nominative enun-ciation that denotes a type, or membership to a particular group defined by its common attributes prior to performance, like ‘boy’, ‘girl’, or for that matter a member of profes-

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a mere marketing gimmick or at best a smirky gesture towards the whole liaison between politics and aesthetics. The question is that what makes such an insinuation of ‘occupy’ so appealing as an utterance of invitation is the tacit categorisation of the word as art-practice worthy, hinged on a new sociality that produces new constituencies of knowledge. This is consubstantial with processes of in-stitutionalisation, and hence professionalisa-tion, and their potential for the production of new spheres of knowledge. ‘Occupy’, once a manifestation of speech-act, has moved from the conflictual (parrhesiastic) space to enter the sphere of aesthetics. This is accompanied by a semantic shift that wrenches it from the everyday understanding to weave a new sen-sorial fabric that connects a global aesthetic community of ultra-mobile practitioners, a community that transcends the local mark-ers of nationality and culture but registered in its understanding in-common. The act of occupying the residency is a creative act not because it introduces newness into the politi-cal à la Arendt (the natality of the subject), nor because it ruptures the political landscape of sayable and the do-able as Rancière would have argued, but because it encapsulates a potentiality for the cutting-edge on its way to the next round of consumption. And to this end ‘occupy’ already enjoys a currency, an exchange value. Occupy is a global currency without a need for translation in a market that keeps revitalising itself.

In Berlin the Biennale organisers invited rep-resentatives of Occupy movements to camp in the exhibition space. Visitors can watch the tents on the Kunstwerke floor from an elevat-ed corridor. What would have Arendt thought of that? After all, she did not seem to be inter-ested in art. Art would have seemed a sepa-rate sphere from the political, even if it was art that ‘works’, as the exhibition organisers stated in their disclaimer-laden statement (or rather ‘manifesto’). It comes with its official Biennale application form for occupations and other ‘actions’. Now what do you make of that?

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CONTRIBUTORSStephanie BaileyKiki ClaxtonMax DennisJodie EddyEllen FeissElif Dilara GüneşJudith HartmannJanet HallAhmad HosniDaniel IzquierdoIrmelin JoelsonGalia KirilovaAstrid KorporaalAmy Yoongyun KimLisa MazzaTiarnan McDonoughJuliane PeiserGonçalo Sousa PintoCorinne QuinAdriana RicciCansu SafakJess ShepherdLaura WindhagerMasaki Yada

PARRHESIA:Technologies of Truth

Goldsmiths CollegeUniversity of London

EDITORIALStephanie BaileyLisa MazzaJuliane Peiser Laura Windhager

PRODUCTIONAstrid KorporaalJuliane PeiserJess Shepherd

DESIGNKiki ClaxtonCorinne QuinEllen FeissJanet Hall

WEBSITEKiki ClaxtonTiarnan McDonough

THANKSDr. Simon HarveyProf. Irit Rogoff

The contents of Parrhesia. Technologies of Truth are published according to the terms of the Cre-ative Commons License unless otherwise men-tioned Attribution—Non-Commercial—No De-rivatives

All texts are published here with the full consent of their authors. Every effort has been made to con-tact the rightful owners of all content with regards to copyrights and permissions. We apologize for any inadvertent errors or omissions. If you wish to use any content please contact the copyright holder directly.

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The following publication series features source material, case studies, fictional narratives, illustrations, documentation, interviews and essays that explore the complexities inherent to notions of ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘truth-telling’. Rather than attempting to enforce a rigid ‘text-book’ approach to theory, the Parrhesia. Technologies of Truth project takes the form of a thematic collection of zines that embrace the fragmentary nature of truth and speech in contemporary society. The shape of this project developed out of the discussions and the direct experiences of a group of theorists based at Goldsmiths College, University of London. These discussions were rooted in an attempt at forming an affective, cultural understanding of the connections between globalization, spatial practices, and bio-power.

www.technologiesoftruth.net

PARRHESIA Technologies of Truth