French philosopher Michel Foucault
is one of the most cited thinkers
of the 20th Century.
He died in 1984, but his work
feels particularly timely right now,
as it’s largely about knowledge,
truth and power.
“Everything I do, I do in order that
it may be of use,” he once said.
So what might Foucault say
about the world today -
where terms like ‘fake news’
and ‘post truth’ are bandied around,
and with the rise of social media
and algorithms?
Foucault’s work
is not straightforward
or easy to understand.
Unlike Marx or Freud,
Foucault didn’t believe
in all-embracing theories
to explain the world.
Life is complicated and nuanced!
He argued that language -
and the structures that underpin it -
helps shape the way we see things.
Words matter.
They frame the debate and
how we understand the world.
He called this
the ‘archaeological’ method.
But he was also interested
in understanding social structures -
like capitalism -
and the complicated
power dynamics at play -
in particular, the relation between
these power structures and knowledge.
He called this the
‘genealogical’ method.
So the ‘archaeological’ Foucault
would be fascinated by social media,
and how the original author of a post
can so quickly disappear from view,
as the text takes on
a self-replicating life of its own.
The more politically engaged
‘genealogical’ Foucault
would focus on how it can offer
a voice to marginalized groups -
immigrants for example -
and, in some cases,
even stir up revolution.
And the later Foucault,
profoundly influenced by
Ancient Greek and Roman theories
about how we can
best care for ourselves,
would look at how
social media can open up chinks
in conventional power structures -
gaps where we can transform
ourselves for the better.
But he would also say "wake up!"
Foucault - both the careful scholar
and the cultural rebel -
would sound the alarm
about how social media
can trap people in echo chambers.
He’d argue that we have
imprisoned ourselves
in a system of constant surveillance
giving away so much
personal data about our lives
to Google, Facebook, YouTube and the
rest, with barely a second thought.
He’d be analysing how data
harvested from our profiles
is being used to control
us without our knowing -
to influence not just what we see
and buy, but also how we vote.
He would show how
social media can function
as yet another form
of micro-management -
and be all the more
pervasive and powerful
because the operations underpinning
it, algorithms, for example,
are near-invisible -
although they make us highly visible.
And he would be warning us that,
as our awareness grows
that we may be being observed
and controlled as objects,
we will be increasingly likely
to monitor ourselves -
we will become
self-scrutinizing subjects.
"Remember the panopticon,"
he would say.
This was an inexpensive way
of old-school crowd-control
proposed by philosopher Jeremy
Bentham in the late 18th Century.
Picture a central tower -
in a prison, for example.
The prisoners can’t see in,
so they never know whether
they’re being watched or not.
The result?
They effectively internalize
the surveillance
and modify their own behaviours
as if they were.
Our self-imprisonment becomes
even more insidious and damaging
when the walls are, in fact, fake -
when we are controlled by fake news,
replicating at terrifying speed,
often unwittingly
through our own actions.
If we believe the news to be true,
then the power
to shape our lives lies not with us
but with those who
know it to be false.
And if in time we come to think
that all news is fake,
if we become entirely cynical,
then we no longer
have the vital tools we need
to create ourselves as individuals
or develop our communities
as we’d like.
But is Foucault in fact part
of the problem here?
Did he prepare the ground
for the rise of fake news?
The charge here is that he denies
the possibility of objective truth
and this has opened the way
for claims of competing truths
and ‘alternative facts’
in Trump’s America and
Brexit Britain, for example.
Sometimes he’s even accused
of helping to dissolve the boundary
between true and false altogether.
But this charge is itself fake news.
Foucault would both relish the irony
but also call it out loud and clear.
Foucault challenges
specific social sciences
about their underlying assumptions -
he does not question
all claims to objective truth,
like those in maths, for example.
As an activist, he campaigned
for accurate, factual news reporting.
Indeed, his very notion
of the ‘care of the self’
is based on ancient
Greek and Roman thinkers
who viewed philosophy as a way
of life committed to truthfulness.
So Foucault would be fascinated by
the opportunities created
by social media to give a voice to
the voiceless and to fight tyranny.
But he would also be shouting from
the barricades:
“Don’t become a slave
to the invisible forces!”
