Masquerades of Truth

PARRHESIA Technologies of Truth

Masquerades of Truth
Astrid N. Korporaal
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-Cartographies, and in relation to a group of international researchers in Visual Cultures. Embarking on this project, our initial discussions 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 Foucault asks in relation to truth-telling or parrhesia. His lectures on parrhesia examine not what qualifies as truth, but what qualifies someone to speak the truth. This qualification became the central drive of this chapter, 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 aesthetics and institutions of this type of truthtelling; contemporary forms of what might be called parrhesia. Mapping these localised anecdotes in relation to Foucaults attributes of parrhesia, we were confronted with a number of complexities. Perhaps most essentially, there is the difference 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 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 political 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 theorists 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 context 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 movement, and Times Person of the Year was named The Protester, our group discussed the emergence of the term activist and its

change in meaning over time. What is the function of creating a term such as activism, and what is the difference between an activist, 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 activists? 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 Japans nuclear power stations should be shut down following the Fukushima crisisand 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 neoliberal technology. Put crudely, it shows that activism 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 government. 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-

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 important role in the neoliberal game of politics is to ensure that representation (and thus democracy) is being represented. The politician campaigns to represent, the activist campaigns 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 situation 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 political 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 Gores An Inconvenient Truth and Geert Wilders Fitna? 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 interest of his or her political role, he or she remains within the sphere of representation. Recently, the activist seems to have undergone a parallel institutionalisation in definition. This entails that activists also act within organisations 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 Greenpeace acts as a protective umbrella in the interest of the activists. The activist represents the aims of Greenpeace and Greenpeace represents the aims of the activists. This development seems to reflect another aspect of neoliberalism; that an occupation

(in the sense of a job) becomes more than labour professionalisation is the definition of a persons time in terms of their occupation. Thus, being a politician is no longer just a job, but a role, a representative role, which encompasses the whole of a politicians life. At the same time, the role of the activist appears 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 professionalisation trend is a reduction of risk in the interest of the consensus. Activists and activist organisations, politicians and political parties play a part in the political game. The politician is expected at all times to represent the interests of his/her party. Yet there is a tension been the functions of the politician as representing the interest of a party, a constituency, or a nation. Once in the sphere of governance, the politician must represent an ability to govern an ability to represent common good as well as common ground. This is where the break appears between the politician 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 parrhesia. 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

strictly separated from rhetoric; it is the unadorned truth. But as the attributes of parrhesia 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 Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to terrorist bomb plots. At the same time, while it seems that right-wing parlance is steeped in risk, the issue 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 PostFordist labour is in fact a lack of specialisation. Whereas on the assembly line everyone had one task to perform, in the Post-Fordist economy everyone must be able to understand 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 society: 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 create 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 security 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 general categories such as opposites, good and bad etc. versus the special places of lan-

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 artist 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 Occupy 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 perhaps, and the illusion of community. Once again, it is a type of security based on a conception of a common enemy. When you think of parrhesia in the way Foucault speaks of it, he refers in part to the context 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 partly 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

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 anothers 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 beauty, 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 wouldnt it be revolutionary if politicians only spoke about those truths that they knew - through the specific experiences of their lives, through their political relationships, through mutual respect, acknowledging 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 harmony between their words and their actions...

ENDNOTES
1 Foucault, M. 1983. Discourse and Truth: the Problematization 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.

Nuclear and Foucault

Masaki Yada
Masaki Yayda, Cone, Pencil on Paper, 1998

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 countrys lack of leadership and political stagnation spiralling 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 corporate 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 economic growth turned the country into what was once the worlds second largest economy. To analyse this situation, I have drawn theoretical frameworks from Foucaults notion of parrhesia, Deleuze and Guattaris non-hierarchical multiplicity symbolised as N-1, and Sassens assertion on marginalised nationstate authorities in contrast to proliferation of global capitalism. And in the final chapter, I will attend to Hardt and Negris magnum opus, Empire in order to examine a hypothesis 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.

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 Negris notion of the multitude.

2. Resignation of the Prime Minister as a result of his fearless speech against Neoliberal governmentality Soon after the earthquake and the tsunami tidal waves struck the north east coast of Japan on 11th of March 2011, which severely damaged nuclear power plants in Fukushima, the situation concerning the unclear plants remained critical as the failure of six boiling water reactors were allegedly imminent. Water reactors function as a cooling system, which keeps the temperature of radioactive materials 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 environment and radiation propagating from the plants becomes uncontrollable. Despite the nations plea, a few of the reactors eventually 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 nuclear power plants became apparent, which had long been denied and concealed by the government officials as well as relevant enterprises. A fear of possible recurrence has prevailed 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 immediate closure of all nuclear plants existing in Japan in order to prevent any further damage or recurrence of similar incidents.3 The reactors, including those that failed and exploded in Fukushima, were poorly maintained by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO): their negligence and complacency have perpetuated over decades, which inevitably encountered

severe public condemnation. The company was criticised particularly for: the failure of regular and thorough maintenance; constantly delaying repair work; and systematic false reporting. Despite the manmade disaster led by TEPCOs disorganisation and poor management, for TEPCO being the biggest electric utility in Japan and the 4th largest in the world, the companys destiny looked to be as the nations priority, rather than its own security. A substantial sum of capital is circulating around the operation of the company, making a huge contribution to maintaining the countrys economy, which spawned the corruption and the culture of complacency. Moreover, TEPCOs shareholders are not only Japanese, 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 Ministers 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 Kans scandalous past and his involvement in a minor corruption, while the country was facing issues that are far more serious. Despite his initial defiance, he was subsequently forced to resign as the pressure from the public mounted, and was replaced with a new figure with a pronuclear 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,

it appears more as the manipulative and deceptive 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 parrhesiastic. 3. Parrhesia and parrhesiastes Michel Foucault explored the notion of parrhesia 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 parrhesia is referred to as parrhesiastes.5 Furthermore, whether a person is a parrhesiastes or not depends on a risk involved in the act of truth-telling. To quote a passage from Fearless 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. Foucaults 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 Identifying 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 consequences, as it tends to invite opposing opinions.

Hence, a parrhesiastic act is pertinent to a relationship between the speaker and what he says.8 In light of danger involved in truthtelling, a prominent Slovenian scholar, Alenka Zupani s reading of Nietzsche makes an interesting contribution to identifying the characteristics 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 survival, 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, however, one should not fear death over expressing ones 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 nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction. The strength of a persons 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, sweetened, muted, falsified.(1 Even in terms of ontological ethics in contrast to a parrhesiastic sense, truth can rarely be

10

attained in that few have the courage to face the fatal consequences of discovering, witnessing, and enunciating truth, but simultaneously we cannot give up on pursuing knowledge and truth. In this respect, we can draw a close tie between epistemological desire and our pursuit of truth, which is by nature irresistible and alluring. Zupani writes in response to Nietzsches 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 dimming) 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 republican, parrhesia was exercised in the assembly often used against the majority party consisting 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 advisors 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 States dominance, the self-technologies play a crucial role in connection with the act of resistance. As a self-proclaimed historian, Foucaults self-technologies seem to be imbued with the mythical figure of Socrates who appears in a series of Platos masterpieces such as The Republic, Apology, Crito, and Pheado. Foucault makes a direct reference to Apology in a lecture given on 6th of Janu-

ary1982 at College de France. In it, Foucault identifies as a parrhesiastes. In Apology, Plato 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 legitimate.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 referring 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 Foucaults interest 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 precisely because before committing to the act of truth-telling one needs to know him or herself. This epistemic role of parrhesia is one of three parrhesiastic activities involved in what Foucault identifies as philosophical parrhesia.(6 Furthermore, according to Foucaults reading of Platonism posited on the conversation between Socrates and Alcibiades, access 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 ones soul with wisdom in order to attain truth.18 5. Problems with a democratic regime

11

If we return to the case of the nuclear disaster 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 complacency 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 prevent such an atrocity from occurring. As Foucault 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 Foucaults 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 governing the city-state. However, Socrates does not believe that those privileges suffice to qualify someone to be a governor of a citystate.21 The technology of the care of the self (epimeleia heatou), according to Foucault, is derived from a logic that before taking care of oneself, one cannot take care of others and ones inability to take care of others disqualifies one to enter into a political life.22 In other words, if a person neglects the pedagogical 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 refined moral values. If these ancient techniques that Foucault excavates are applied to the aftermath of the explosion of the nuclear plants, the fact

12

that the Japanese Prime Ministers parrhesiastic action forced him out of politics testifies a dysfunctional government consisting of politicians who are neither capable of taking care of themselves nor the country. When every politician engages in the politics of selfpreservation, the government is no longer capable of dealing with the politics of a country. 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 wisdom, techne and receive a good education from a competent teacher.24 This view, albeit being sensible, comes in conflict with the egalitarianism on which democracy is founded; 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 surfaces. Unlike a priori ethics such as Kants Categorical Imperatives, which posit on the power of logos and act according to the commandment of reason independently of self-interests, 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 circumstances:...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

Here is also Nietzsches remark on the difficulty of recognising ones own inadequacy to access truth, as if implying that the care of the self may be as a priori as Kants 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 representatives. 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-hierarchical 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 metaphors 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 Freuds Oedipus Complex, which has dominated the

field of psychoanalysis for decades.29 A rhizomatic structure seems to encourage experimentation and emancipatory attempts from dominance. In spite of it all, we have to be alert as to whether or not non-hierarchical structures always produce positive results. In contrast to a tyrannical regime or a despotic government that utilises state apparatuses to suppress peoples freedom, for instance in a sovereign society or a disciplinary society, a non-hierarchical institution stands, without a doubt, as its counterpart. However, in a type of democracy where every citizens representative expresses their own varying political views, there is only chaos and an entropic disorder. And uncertainty stemming from a lack of cohesion is a deterrent to reaching critical decisions 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 utilised 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 speakers 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 parrhesia in democracy in the same lecture through a Socratic dialogue from The Republic. 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 corrupting leaders to gain power, but where everyone has their own ways of living and do not share a common logos. This fallacy of 13

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 ones own style without limit.(1 In short, freedom of speech will lead to the freedom of selecting ones 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 unwelcome 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 parrhesia 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 investigation by claiming that a Socratic parrhesiastes denotes more roles of parrhesia than initially addressed. The significance of Socratic 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 ones honest autobiographic confession, but rather how one demonstrates his commandment of reasoning in order to create a congruous relation between what one says and does. Foucault 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

Socratic parrhesia, in other words, implies an ontological harmony of logos and bios, and the one that can display this is a Socratic parrhesiastes, which in the ancient philosophy, is referred to as Dorian.35 This Dorian harmony 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 mercy attesting to his Dorian harmony: On Socrates or the philosophers 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 antithesis of a dominant group in the assembly or of a tyrannical ruler in a monarchic state. Therefore, the conception of Bios, connoting ontological ethics, is the core of Socratic parrhesia. This Socratic parrhesia as an enactment 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 collective subjectivity emerging in Western postindustrial 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 mightiest ruler of Athens, who led the citys golden age and fostered arts and literature to flourish, the first democratic state became fragmented. In the wake of the Prime Ministers resignation in Japan, the Japanese government was left in turmoil, as politicians were busy engaging in not the politics of the country, but the politics of self-preservation. The government was overwhelmed by power struggles between different parties and inherent resistance to

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anti-nuclear movements and consequently, politics became stagnant. Since then, Japans 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, TEPCO, the company held accountable for the failure of the reactors has been standing as the largest electric utility in the worlds third largest economy.37 The closure of the plants meant a further damage to the already crippling Japanese economy. The financial damage 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 energy, which was long described as clean, economical and safe. However, once the horrifying danger unfolded, the public realised that they had been buying into an utter myth. Now the government is concerned with the immediate economic loss resulting from the closure of the nuclear plants, although an economic 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 nuclear technology is too dangerous to control, it is neither safe nor profitable. Utility companies known for revenue stability are generally attractive to both domestic and foreign investors; therefore the economic injury caused by the disaster was ironically colossal. The unprecedented 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-

ships between government officials, regulators, 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 simultaneously, they are either bureaucrats or members of policy-making panels. Worst of all was Tokio Kano, who long after joining TEPCO in 1957, was promoted to a managerial position at one of the companys nuclear units in 1989. By 1998, he was elected as a member of parliament for the first time, and the biggest business lobby in the recent history of the Japanese politics was witnessed in the following years, as any form of judicious restraint between a regulator and the regulated became non-existent.40 In USA, regulators and unclear utilities are thoroughly independent from each other and it is unimaginable that regulators have such a close link to a private 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: Japans more rigid bureaucratic structures, reluctance to send bad news upwards, need to save face, weak development of policy alternatives, eagerness to preserve nuclear powers public acceptance (indoctrinated since childhood), and politically fragile government, along with TEPCOs very hierarchical 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 anecdote that two prominent Japanese report-

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ers have endured a long perpetuating pressure 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 other 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 partys key policies was indeed nuclear power. This historical backdrop was one of the biggest contributors to creating the intertwined relationship between government officials and Japans 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 Sassens 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 capitalism. She writes: The hegemony of neoliberal concepts of economic relations with its strong emphasis on markets, deregulation, and free international trade has influenced policy...(5 The series of events that I have attended so far exemplify instances of neoliberal governmentality 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 concern, and so is neoliberalism. Neoliberal governmentality suggests a shift of sovereignty from politics to economy, moreover a nation

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to global.46 This means that early capitalism, which Marx primarily dealt with, was posited on the paternal position of politics to economy or a close tie between imperialism and capitalism wherefrom the proletariat strove to be emancipated.47 And the present-day decentralised power and geographically dispersal 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 assumed 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, capitals 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 societies, as well as the coloniser and the colonised.49 On the other hand, the emergence of the world market immune to national borders 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 differently, 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 immaterial, from physical labour on the assembly 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 immaterial 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

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 emanated from, constitutive of, and immanent to the multitude.52 The proletariats desire for liberation from a transcendental enunciator, such as modern-states, broke their geographic confinement, and looked as if the immanentist ethos embedded in egalitarianism prevailed. Yet, to the proletariats surprise, it spawned another transcendent enunciator, global capital that enslaves wider strata of social members. This, however, is far from being the cause of the new proletariats 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 parrhesiastes in the Greco-Roman time and Socratic parrhesia that entails the logos-bios relation 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 governmentality, as well as the mentality of the Japanese politicians and the masses stemming from neoliberalist logic. I would like to end my essay by introducing one story and a proposition that rejects the idea that good parrhesia cannot be exercised effectively in democracy. Because if such a pessimist view does not face any objections, Foucaults endeavour to bring the ancient wisdom back to life will be in vein. First, I will bring to light a true parrhesiastes 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 truthful messages to be effectively communicated. To put simply, ways in which parrhesia is practiced will probably be transformed, in the

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 exposing his incompetence and inexperience to handle the Fukushima crisis.53 Some speculated that what underlay his radical turn may have been his attempt to regain his public image, and in response to the PMs resignation cynics jeered that Kan has been hoisted with his own petard stemming from his canning 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 Hatsui, 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 Fukushima. 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 embracing the scheme. Ohi town, north of Osaka was on the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1970s, yet agreeing to host the plants in desperation 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-

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astes in respect to not only speaking a truth but also in saving the lives of thousands of residents. Zupanis philosophical statement seems to sum up this concisely: We go through life relying on all kinds of problems and beliefs; we rarely have the certainty 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 journalists, 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 Japanese citizens are reluctant to face changes and are apathetic to the criticality of the nuclear 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 multitude qua a multiplicity of individual singularities has, in fact, an embedded historical reason. After the economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, many employees of large corporations 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 guaranteed lifetime-employment. This affected their general outlook of life and its culture traditionally characterised as group orientated, which has gradually shifted towards individual-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 individualisation, and such a mentality that subverts national solidarity has unfortunately manifested on the plight of national security. On the contrary, there has been the emergence of new collective parrhesiasteses thriving on their individuality, whose presence is felt predominantly in the realm of the World

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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 Negris notion of the multitude. Its conception is imbued with Hobbes and Spinoza contrasting with the notion of people. For the philosophers, the conception of people in the context of modernisation is regarded 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: ...after the establishment of the State, there is the One-people, endowed with a single will. The multitude, according to Hobbes, shuns political 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 discuss is crucial in this context. It implies that whilst the subjectivity of people seems to be the product of social engineering, the multitude still retains their individual singularities pertinent to parrhesiastic enactments. In the past, the individuals truth could hardly be manifested or cultivated as conveniently and instantaneously as it is now due to the security apparatuses (despositif) and biopower that interested Foucault early in his academic career. They were deployed by the modernstates 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 ones view is not a surprise. Foucaults endeavour to excavate the ancient ethics such as a self-technology of the care of the self was, therefore an attempt to dispense the lost wisdom of individuation marginalised since the Cartesian moment.59 Although this contradicts Fou-

caults 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, discerning a truth, to the dissemination of it. There are more means available for ones freedom of speech to be exercised and apparatuses that can counter the state-apparatuses. Insofar as dispotif has become so sophisticated that it operates on a molecule level, there are engendering ways of exercising individuals parrhesiastic freedom that have become as subtle and inconspicuous. Deleuze and Guattari would say that deterritorialisation accompanies the decoding of a system that allows reterritorialisation. This was evident during 2011 as the government officials and TEPCOs reluctance to reveal the truth triggered the number of anonymous journalists and online bloggers to disseminate information that contradicted what was already published by those stakeholders.60 Although reckless misinformation and rumours also stirred up confusion and an unmanageable panic amongst the general public, in terms of raising their political awareness, which was almost nonexistent 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 progressive at the moment of Kans resignation. In this respect, the general public as a collective subject seems to be actively taking a risk of accepting an immediate economic loss that will strain taxpayers in the hope of the longterm ecological and sustainable economic stability. This seems to reinforce Antonio Negri and Michael Hardts faith in the potentiality of the multitude to revolt against the neoliberalist 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 immaterial productive power whereby they code

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 Guattaris non-hierarchical multiplicity N-1 where an authoritative figure is subtracted due to an egalitarian principle, the figure of a parrhesiates does not have to be confined in a charismatic and highly influential public speaker, like Socrates. Instead of such a candid speech that is prone to micro-fascism, ordinary people 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: neither assemblies nor monarchic states are the locus of parrhesiastic praxis any more.

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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 Village 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 Zupani, A. 2003. The shortest Shadow: Nietzsches Philosophy of the Two, Troubles with Truth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 92. 10 Ibid., 91.

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 Angeles: Semiotext(e), 33-39. 29 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 1984. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism 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. Pearson. 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 Japans nuclear 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, dont verify. The Washington Times. 41 Amory, B.L. 17 March 2011. Learning from Japans nuclear 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.

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11 Nietzsche, F. 1998. Beyond Good and Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 37. 12 Zupani, A. 2003. The shortest Shadow: Nietzsches Philosophy of the Two, Troubles with Truth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 95. 13 Foucault, M. 2001. Fearless Speech. Edited by J. Pearson, 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: Palgrave 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. Pearson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents, 93. 24 Ibid.

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 Protester Turns Hero in Japan. Bloomberg (14th July 2001). Available from < http://www.bloomberg.com/news/201107-13/kan-takes-on-japan-s-nuclear-village-in-renewableenergy-drive.html>. 55 Ibid. 56 Zupani, A. 2003. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsches 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. Whos to blame for the Fukushima Nuclear 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.

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Curating (as) Parrhesia?

Gonalo Sousa Pinto
From the courtyard of the Kunstwerke (KW) building in Berlin, I entered a corridor where the text of Stphane Hussels Time for Outrage 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 corridor, 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 mijewski and his associate curators Joanna Warsza and the Russian collective Voina, to activists and occupiers to use in a self-organised manner for the duration of the Biennale. I couldnt 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 dtre, but also converted me into an unwilling tourist in a theme park of radical politics. The desperate naivet of a cardboard sign saying Dont stay here! Go downstairs! Take part! tied to the handrail of the elevated platform from which visitors contemplated the occupied ground only made it worse. For many of us who saw the occupation 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 didnt feel right. In the Biennales newspaper, 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 spectacularisation 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 autonomy of art, advocates for the dissolution of the boundary between politics and art, and contends that artists (or rather artists-politicians) 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 didnt have it and didnt request it, but also does not seem to help furthering that agenda. Even if unintentionally, by giving those groups the immunity of an art space, mijewski 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 activities organically emerging from the real occupation 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

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Occupy Global Square, Berlin Biennale 2012

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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

politics may not have a clear distinguishing boundary, but reality and its simulacra certainly do. I guess I was mostly disappointed at this Global Square because, much like mijewski and Warsza, I believe there is an enormous field of possibilities in the con-fusion of art and politics. When reading mijewskis preface to the BB7 reader Forget Fear, or the curatorial texts in the newspaper published for the biennial, 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 different political scales, but I do agree that this biennial makes sense, as it radically addresses 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, mijewskis 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 neoliberalism and that, as if moved by a sense of duty, mijewski formulates into a curatorial strategy. It is the publics prerogative to share or reject that truth and to put it into perspective. This is, after all, one amongst hundreds of art biennials (spanning geography and time) and includes but a small number of artistic and political proposals. Yet, it is a pertinent truth that has, in the least, the value of its impertinence. mijewski distances himself from the professional curator who has become a travelling producer of exhibitions () who speaks of social issues in the soft language of pretended engagement and who administers art objects, fishing them out of an artists 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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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 mijewski 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 understands curating as a form of cultural activism, as a guerrilla strategy that undermines practices that reaffirm boundaries and perpetuate cultural and political hegemonies. It produces the conditions for raising and sustaining urgent questions rather than offering answers (even though mijewski claims that hisv aim was precisely the opposite), for engendering doubt and self-questioning rather than producing 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, multiculturalism and social peace. The curatorial entails a redefinition of the role of the curator, from an outside position in relation to the issues at hand, by which such issues are objectified 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 Rogoff calls criticality. It seems to me that the strategy followed by mijewski, 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 dialogue with them the works that were then presented at the Biennale, is a form of productively 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

Jonas Staal, New World Summit Model 2012

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Mobinil Ad, Berlin Biennale 2012

Institute For Human Activities, a Gentrification Programme, 2012

outside the territory of art, but whose effects may be sent off way beyond that territory. The New World Summit is, as per Jonas Staals 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 naf or oblivious of important dimensions of the issues they dealt with, and still others tended towards a certain spectacularisation and aestheticisation which contradicted the artistic pragmatism announced by Artur mijewski. 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 interventions 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 nonetheless 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 outspokenness of truth. The title of the BB7 reader, Forget Fear, seems to be reminiscent of Foucaults Fearless Speech. mijewskis 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

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 interlocutor 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, mijewski 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 practice 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 biennial 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

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ENDNOTES
1 mijewski, A. and Warsza, J. 2012. Berlin Biennale Zeitung (April 2012). Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 11. 2 mijewski, A. 2012. Preface. In A. mijewski and J. Warsza, eds. Forget Fear - 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Knig, 16. 3 Ibid., 13. 4 Ibid., 18. 5 Rogoff, I. 2006. Smuggling - An Embodied Criticality [Online]. Available from <http://www.eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoffsmuggling> [Accessed 9th May 2012]. 6 Staal, J. 2012. New World Summit. Berlin Biennale Zeitung (April 2012). Berlin: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 26. 7 mijewski, A. 2012. Preface. In A. mijewski and J. Warsza, eds. Forget Fear - 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Knig, 18. 8 Foucault, M. 2001. Fearless Speech. Edited by Pearson, J. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 15-16.

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Parrhesiathen what?
Ahmad Hosni
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 fascination for another expos 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, thumbing through Fearless Speech and listening to Foucaults lectures at Berkeley I soon realized that this whole parrhesia business was a disappointment. 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: frankness, truth, danger, criticism and duty, along with some other minor ones. The whole enterprise 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 Manichaeism 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 parrhesiastes (those who enact parrhesia). Its historical context of Athenian democracy is long gone, forgotten for centuries until Foucault excavated it. It is like a prehistoric mammoth genetically engineered, resurrected, introduced to life long after its habitat disappeared with not much future or, for that matter, meaning 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 books 200 pages does not seem to be concerned about the ground conditions 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 worlds 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 antique word. Choosing parrhesia as the keynote 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 concept), 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 trustmy anxiety of influence. If parrhesia is an incomplete project then that leaves more room for work. The most exciting part of Foucaults analysis it seemed to me was the section on the Cynics. That is when parrhesia starts to assume a political tint. That is when parrhesia assumes 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 usage of the word. In political context, parrhesia can be found at the peripheries of the liberal

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representational system. This is the territory where stipulations of danger are at play. Parrhesia usually arises from positions sanctioned outside the liberal political consensus. Voices from the extreme left or right, be it religious extremist groups, ultra-nationalists, white-supremacists, anti-semitesyou name itin 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 parrhesiastic form, and all are true parrhesiastes. Now, would Foucault have thought about that? This is the dilemma of parrhesia; with no ethical coordinates 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 ethical 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 discoursethe fu-

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 burgeoning 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 conversion or translation tools if we want to address 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 speculative opinion and a pre-text for what could come next; post-Foucault, post-parrhesia. We need to translate parrhesia into the parlance of contemporary political theory. There is something essentially political there. It is not listed in the concepts 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 always 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 Rancire regards 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

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voice be counted and its version of truth to be understood. Parrhesia for Rancire 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 subjects 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 notion of the political as antagonistic exercise eschews the political harmony of liberal democracy. She would see parrhesia as the bastion of true politics in a post-political world. With all these theorists truth-telling, political speech is a caesura in the hegemonic consensual political discourse. My favourite, however, is not the anarchist Rancire or the committed Badiou, but the rebel of Albert Camus and above all, Hannah Arendt. I would add Camus rebelliousness to the list in his resistance to categorical ethics, his valorisation of agency and opposition to normative constraints, and mindless revolutionary rhetoric. His rebel is not someone who says no but rather who can say no. But perhaps it is Hanna Arendt more than any other thinker who connects the pre-modern of ancient Greece with the post-postmodern with ease. For Arendt speech and action are obverse sides of the same coin: speech is the progenitor of action and a form of action. Parrhesia would be the moment when a person stands up in public and expresses his opinion. It is the self-disclosure in the public realm that through which the political subject comes to being. It is not clear which comes first in Arendts thought, truth or speech, but neither is possible without action. Action is pivotal for Arendt. She was an activist before activism became a common parlance in contemporary discourse. I might be tempted to think, perhaps incorrectly, that it

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. Activism itself has a long semantic history: the word moved to the English language (probably from German) in the early 20th century. As propounded by philosopher Rudolf Euken, it used to denote a philosophy of life of engaged action and an opposition to intellectual 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 Swedish 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 politics as opposed to quietism and pacifism. There is something common between the political 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 differentiates activism from other forms of human activity, 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 parrhesia; 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 cannot 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 others point of view. The sheer evilness of Adolf Eichmann was not in his diabolic master 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

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was not clich, remarked Arendt. His vice was that he operated bureaucratically, unthinkingly. 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 uniqueness 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 expressed her concern with the unknown future of uniqueness in the face of ever-expanding managerial schemes. Speaking at Bard College 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 assimilation 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 standardisation and professionalisation? Politics is relegated to the management of economic benefit. Even the zoon politikon would have seemed to be dissolved into techne. The activist who appeared to operate outside the framework of political representation is now subject to new regulatory codes of engagement. 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 individuals behaviour, i.e. an activist is one who performs the deeds of activism. It has also come to function as a nominative enunciation 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-

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 neoliberal ethos. As opposed to the common wisdom, neoliberalism is not about deregulation by and large, it is about all forms of regulations, standardisation and professionalisation that guarantee the flow of labour, material and immaterial, skill and knowledge across space. The activist operates in the milieus of globality facilitated by a fellowship to the New International subtended by common conditions of understanding rather than the commonality 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 curator or even the artist in the globalised age: the epitome of the hyper-mobile global citizen. 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 between aesthetics and the political than ever. These are times of perceived global revolutions. The Occupy movement with its global spread, messianic mission, self-congratulatory speech and fashion tactics provided space for politics to expand horizontally and move beyond the spaces of parliamentary representation. On the other hand, art found a chance to redeem itself from accusations of hermeticism 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 residency 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 occupy that is worth ponderingthat could be

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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 artpractice worthy, hinged on a new sociality that produces new constituencies of knowledge. This is consubstantial with processes of institutionalisation, and hence professionalisation, 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 sensorial fabric that connects a global aesthetic community of ultra-mobile practitioners, a community that transcends the local markers 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 political la Arendt (the natality of the subject), nor because it ruptures the political landscape of sayable and the do-able as Rancire 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 representatives of Occupy movements to camp in the exhibition space. Visitors can watch the tents on the Kunstwerke floor from an elevated corridor. What would have Arendt thought of that? After all, she did not seem to be interested in art. Art would have seemed a separate 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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PARRHESIA: Technologies of Truth

Goldsmiths College University of London EDITORIAL Stephanie Bailey Lisa Mazza Juliane Peiser Laura Windhager PRODUCTION Astrid Korporaal Juliane Peiser Jess Shepherd DESIGN Kiki Claxton Corinne Quin Ellen Feiss Janet Hall WEBSITE Kiki Claxton Tiarnan McDonough THANKS Dr. Simon Harvey Prof. Irit Rogoff CONTRIBUTORS Stephanie Bailey Kiki Claxton Max Dennis Jodie Eddy Ellen Feiss Elif Dilara Gne Judith Hartmann Janet Hall Ahmad Hosni Daniel Izquierdo Irmelin Joelson Galia Kirilova Astrid Korporaal Amy Yoongyun Kim Lisa Mazza Tiarnan McDonough Juliane Peiser Gonalo Sousa Pinto Corinne Quin Adriana Ricci Cansu Safak Jess Shepherd Laura Windhager Masaki Yada

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The contents of Parrhesia. Technologies of Truth are published according to the terms of the Creative Commons License unless otherwise mentioned AttributionNon-CommercialNo Derivatives

All texts are published here with the full consent of their authors. Every effort has been made to contact 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 textbook 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