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