know thyself

"Foucault’s last two lecture series at the Collège de France, in 1982-83 and 1983-84—published in English as The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of the Truth—offer a series of interpretations of ancient Greek texts to examine the relation of the “self” to public truth-telling. What did it mean to “know thyself,” as the Delphic oracle advised? What procedures guaranteed the truth of such knowledge? And why would telling the truth about the self be a precondition for having a self in the first place? Here’s how Foucault describes what he hoped to do in these lectures (poignantly slipping into the subjunctive; he knew he wouldn’t get the project finished):

“What I would like to recover is how truth-telling, in this ethical modality which appeared with Socrates right at the start of Western philosophy, interacted with the principle of existence as an oeuvre to be fashioned in all its possible perfection, how the care of self, which, in the Greek tradition long before Socrates, was governed by the principle of a brilliant and memorable existence, […] was not replaced but taken up, inflected, modified,and re-elaborated by the principle of truth-telling that has to be confronted courageously, how the objective of a beautiful existence and the task of giving an account of oneself in the game of truth were combined …
The emergence of the true life in the principle and form of truth-telling (telling the truth to others and to oneself, about oneself and about others), of the true life and the game of truth-telling, is the theme, the problem that I would have liked to study” [Feb. 29, 1984, lecture].

I’ve bolded the parts that jumped out at me in that passage, the ones that reminded me of social-media practice. The archive social media compiles of us could be seen as an “oeuvre to be fashioned in all its possible perfection”; it allows us to live with that ideal of the self as a kind of artwork much more concretely in mind. Social media also give us an opportunity to “confront courageously” the principles of truth–telling—how much to share, with whom, and with how much concern for our and others’ privacy—that are activated by the various platforms.

According to Foucault, that aim of living a “beautiful existence” has not been traditionally understood as something that can be achieved through a passive documentation of what we’ve done—-escaping reflexivity does not make life more beautiful or pure, as those who make a fetish of spontaneity insist. Instead, he argues that the “beautiful existence” came to hinge on playing “games of truth” that reveal the self to itself, as courageous.

The “true life,” then, is not given automatically to ordinary people as a reward for their ordinariness. We too must prove our lives are true, are real, are legitimate, to the -audiences we marshal on social media. That is, we must demonstrate the productive value of our uniquely wrought subjectivity to garner social recognition; we have to build the community (that once was a geographical given) as an online audience and hold it together by performing for it perpetually. The truth test becomes a way to ascertain one’s own reality, to register a “true” or “real” self that exists apart from the flux of contingencies that seem to shape us in real time. A self is not a sum of content; a self is a practice.

But what is that “productive value”? What sort of performances, or “games of truth,” reveal it? How is it translated into status? What defines that “truth”? How does our notion of the truth about the self modulate to fit the sorts of truths social media are optimized to confirm and disseminate? When does “sharing”—adding to collective knowledge—becoming “trolling,” a zero-sum challenge over who can control what is regarded as the truth? Is there anyway to keep those concepts cleanly separated?

At the very least, these questions help reframe social media use—sometimes dismissed as merely narcissistic attention-seeking—as the attempt to live the truth courageously in a perpetual provocation of others, in the mode of the ancient Cynics. The Delphic oracle told Diogenes of Sinope not to “know thyself” but to “deface the currency.” What are our social media platforms asking us to do?

Throughout the lectures, Foucault is chiefly concerned with the concept of parrhesia, a mode of plain-speaking truth marked by provocation. It signals an individual’s willingness to tell the truth as that individual perceived it, with a minimum of rhetorical flourish, in the face of whatever customary, tactical, or ideological “truths” might be circulating at a given moment and whatever force might be deployed to suppress dissenting views.

Because it is already supposed to be direct, “natural,” and without figure, parrhesia’s “truth” is not measured in terms of its clarity or fidelity to what it represents. Truth is not a matter of facticity. Instead, parrhesia indexes the truth content in an utterance to the risk incurred in speaking it. In the following passage, from the February 1, 1984, lecture, Foucault contrasts the parrhesiast with the “technician” or teacher, for whom truth is indexed to “filiation,” the way speaking can build a relationship through shared knowledge:

'We have seen that the parrhesiast, to the contrary, takes a risk. He risks the relationship he has with the person to whom he speaks. And in speaking the truth, far from establishing this positive bond of shared knowledge, heritage, filiation, gratitude, or friendship, he may instead provoke the other’s anger, antagonize an enemy, he may arouse the hostility of the city, or, if he is speaking the truth to a bad and tyrannical sovereign, he may provoke vengeance and punishment. And he may go so far as to risk his life, since he may pay with his life for the truth he has told. Whereas, in the case of the technician’s truth-telling, teaching ensures the survival of knowledge, the person who practices parrhesia risks death. The technician’s and teacher’s truth-telling brings together and binds; the parrhesiast’s truth-telling risks hostility, war, hatred, and death. And if the parrhesiast’s truth may unite and reconcile, when it is accepted and the other person agrees to the pact and plays the game of parrhesia, this is only after it has opened up an essential, fundamental, and structurally necessary moment of the possibility of hatred and a rupture.'

....

Talking is not enough; it must be elevated to a display of a way of life. You know you are living the truth if others regard you as a scandal. The analogy to social media seems almost self-evident. They permit us to make self-documentation a form of confrontation, not idle self-centered chatter.

Foucault explains how cynical practice pushes honor and truth-telling to an extreme at which its radical honesty becomes indistinguishable from a “shameless life”: “Thekunikos life is a dog’s life in that it is without modesty, shame, and human respect,” Foucault says. “It is a life which does in public, in front of everyone, what only dogs and animals dare to do, and which men usually hide.” Offering that visceral personal stake itself—opening oneself to -humiliation—is key; the exposure must be intrinsically inseparable from the deed. Social media work just like that, making all exposures deeds and vice versa.

Social media concretizes that gaze of others necessary to live the ethical, dog’s life—the true life under watchful gaze of the scandalized masses. Foucault stresses that everyday life in all its banality must be observed and judged for the Cynic’s approach to truth to succeed...

Typically social-media use is seen as identity or reputation construction, narrating cultural capital into existence. But “exposing” life is not always the same as making an identity, in the sense of building a reputation. It can also be a way to subordinate or even sacrifice reputation for truth: Sharing can be a matter of volunteering the self for ridicule, purging, nullification, ritual flaying—self-branding of a different kind. It’s why people sign up for demeaning reality TV shows, as Wayne Koestenbaum suggests in Humiliation. It’s part of why we sign up for Facebook. Moments of humiliation, Koestenbaum notes, “may be execrable and unendurable” but are also “genuine” in a “world that seems increasingly filled with fakeness.” Social media neatly increase that feeling of the world’s phoniness while providing a means for the sort of self-exposure that combats it. As more behavior seems inauthentic and “performative,” we have greater need to expose ourselves and have our own authenticity vindicated through the embarrassment this causes us.

This can be seen as a fulfillment of the Cynic’s injunction to “alter the currency.” Foucault emphasizes the ambiguity and open-ended potential of this ongoing demand to “revalue” value, including that of attention. Social-media use is a way of continually modulating attention’s value according to whether it feels more sustaining to spend it or be ravished and affirmed by it. One can gain illusory control over whether one is the subject granting attention or the object receiving it, when we are always both—never more so than within social media. “Within the accepted humiliation,” Foucault claims, “one is able to turn the situation around, as it were, and take back control of it.”

Social media, by offering the dog’s life, afford a straightforward route to integrity—or at least to how the cynics saw integrity. Foucault says that “the Cynic dramatization of the unconcealed life therefore turns out to be the strict, simple, and, in a sense, crudest possible application of the principle that one should live without having to blush at what one does, living consequently in full view of others and guaranteed by their presence.” That is reminiscent of Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about integrity, or Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comment that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of.” Using proprietary tech platforms to conduct your ascetic radical disclosure and unveil your latent integrity just happens to be highly lucrative for tech companies..."