04 2004 The Double Criticism of parrhesia. Answering the Question "What is a Progressive (Art) Institution?"Translated by Aileen Derieg On the day before the Euro Mayday (1 May 2004 in Barcelona and Milan), activists from Indymedia groups all over Spain gathered at the invitation of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) in Barcelona. The activists had traveled from Andalusia, Galicia, Madrid, the Basque region and the Canary Islands, and they had taken the opportunity not only to participate in the Mayday demonstration against precarious working and living conditions, but also to conduct an intensive debate during the days beforehand about their media-activist practice: issues of (non-) institutionalization, the expansion and the limitations of freedom of speech, information strategies in between communication guerrilla and counter-information were the focal points of the discussion. The dense debates framed by inputs - drawing lines from post-1968 activism to the present - from Franco Berardi Bifo (Radio Alice, Bologna 1976/77), Carlos Ameller (Video-Nou, Barcelona 1977-1983) and Dee Dee Halleck (Paper Tiger TV, USA, since 1981), and a discussion with Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis about their new film "La Toma" were interrupted by a critical objection from an Indymedia activist. Politely but firmly, the activist called attention to the fact that the MACBA, as organizer of the conference preceding the Mayday actions against increasingly non-self-determined precarious working and living conditions, is itself involved in the game of cognitive capitalism and the tendency toward precarious conditions, in which the institutions of the art field play a role that is by no means innocent. This criticism of the ambivalent role of art institutions was further discussed in the days that followed and demonstrated in a manifestation and a graffiti attack on the Fundació Tàpies (one of the more important contemporary art foundations in Barcelona) in the course of the Mayday demonstration. Following a model from Foucault, which is also frequently cited in the art field now as well, the current development of society can be illustrated with the concept of governmentality[1]: the dismantling of welfare-state forms of intervention is accompanied by a restructuring of techniques of governing, which transfer the leadership capacity of state apparatuses and instances to the population, to "responsible", "prudent" and "rational" individuals. This development relates primarily to the self-government, self-discipline and self-technologies of individuals, yet it goes beyond this. A new area of the management of microsectors is crystallizing in the dissolution of the welfare state, an intermediate zone between government by the state and the (self-) government and voluntary self-control of individuals: seemingly autonomous facilities, NGOs, which are invoked with buzz words like "civil society" and "distant from the state" as an exterior to the state, but which function as "outsourced" state apparatuses at the same time. Many art institutions belong to this category as well. In the governmentality
setting, it becomes theoretically impossible and strategically
not very promising to construct a dichotomous opposition
between movement and institution, because not only resistive
individuals, but also progressive institutions and civil
society NGOs operate on the same plane of governmentality.
In a reflection on the relations between political art
practices and progressive art institutions, it can be
neither a matter of the abstract negation of existing
and incipient institutions and micro-institutions, nor
of an acclamation of "anti-institutional"
free networks or autonomous art collectives as being
outside the institution.[2]
Contrary to a view that occasionally imputes this kind
of naïve freedom propaganda to poststructuralist authors
such as Deleuze and Guattari, disparaging them as anarchist
aging hippies, with a little good will one can read
from Deleuze and Guattari that they unequivocally identify
the pole of movement and organization/institution and
set it in a relation: in "Thousand Plateaus"
Deleuze and Guattari not only hallucinate - as has often
been imputed - hybrid streams of deterritorialization,
but also describe a permanent connection between deterritorialization
and reterritorialization. This connection relates less
to a geographical "territory", but rather
to exactly the relationship of political movement and
institutions, of constituent and constituted power,
of instituting and institutionalization. The problem of the
concept of governmentality in this context lies primarily
in the appearance of an inescapable totality, which
seems to leave a defeatist withdrawal and individual
exodus a la Bartleby[4]
as the only "forms of action" possible. Foucault,
however, also sees a possibility specifically in the
indissoluble linking of power and self-techniques. This
possibility is developed in his Berkeley lectures from
1983 in the genealogy of a critical stance in western
philosophy within the framework of the problematization
of a term that played a central role in ancient philosophy:
parrhesia
means in Greek roughly the activity of a person (the
parrhesiastes) "saying everything", freely speaking truth
without rhetorical games and without ambiguity, even
and especially when this is hazardous. The parrhesiastes
speaks the truth, not because he[5]
is in possession of the truth, which he makes public
in a certain situation, but because he is taking a risk.
The clearest indication for the truth of the parrhesia
consists in the "fact that a speaker says something
dangerous - something other than what the majority believes."[6]
According to Foucault's interpretation, though, it is
never a matter of revealing a secret that must be pulled
out of the depths of the soul. Here truth consists less
in opposition to the lie or to something "false",
but rather in the verbal activity of speaking truth:
"the function of parrhesia
is not to demonstrate the truth to someone else, but
has the function of criticism: criticism of the interlocutor
or of the speaker himself."[7] Over the course of
time, a change takes place in the game of truth "which
- in the classical Greek conception of parrhesia
- was constituted by the fact that someone was courageous
enough to tell the truth to other people. [...] there is a shift from that kind of parrhesiastic
game to another truth game which now consists in being
courageous enough to disclose the truth about oneself."[10]
This process from public criticism to personal (self-)
criticism develops parallel to the decrease in the significance
of the democratic public sphere of the agora. At the
same time, parrhesia
comes up increasingly in conjunction with upbringing
and education. One of Foucault's relevant examples here
is Plato's dialogue "Laches", in which the
question of the best teacher for the interlocutors'
sons represents the starting point and foil. The answer
is naturally that Socrates is the best teacher; what
is more interesting here is the development of the argumentation.
Socrates no longer assumes the function of the parrhesiastes in the sense of exercising dangerous contradiction in
a political sense, but rather by moving his listeners
to give account of themselves and leading them to a
self-questioning that queries the relationship between
their statements (logos)
and their way of living (bios).
However, this technique does not serve as an autobiographical
confession or examination of conscience, but rather
to establish a relationship between rational discourse
and the lifestyle of the interlocutor or the self-questioning
person. My aim is to link
the two concepts of parrhesia
described by Foucault as a genealogical development,
to understand hazardous refutation in its relation to
self-revelation.[13] Criticism, and especially
institutional criticism, is not exhausted in denouncing
abuses nor in withdrawing into more or less radical
self-questioning. In terms of the art field that means
that neither the belligerent strategies of the institutional
criticism of the 1970s nor art as a service to the institution
in the 1990s promise effective interventions in the
governmentality of the present. This is especially so
because there is no obstacle to the cooptation of political
contents by (supposedly) progressive art institutions
within the framework of these strategies. [1] Cf. Michel Foucault, Die Gouvernementalität, in: Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann, Thomas Lemke (Ed.), Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart, Frankfurt am Main 2000, 41-67. [2] See also the Discordia debate on this topic: http://www.discordia.us/scoop/story/2004/2/10/191433/396 [3] Félix Guattari, Psychotherapie, Politik und die Aufgaben der institutionellen Analyse, Frankfurt/Main 1976, p.137 [4] Cf. Herman Melville's novel "Bartleby, the Scrivener", written in 1853, and the reception of the figure of Bartleby by Deleuze (Bartleby oder die Formel, Berlin 1994 / Bartleby; or, The Formula 1997) and Agamben (Bartleby oder die Kontingenz, Berlin 1998 / Bartleby, or On Contingency" 1999). [5] In ancient Greece parrhesiastes was not only grammatically but also actually always masculine. This is naturally not the case in the present: almost directly contrary to ancient Greece, both the term and the phenomenon are increasingly addressed in feminist discourses (cf. Postkolonialer Feminismus und die Kunst der Selbstkritik, in: Hito Steyerl & Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Spricht die Subalterne deutsch? Migration und postkoloniale Kritik, Münster 2003, 270-290, and others). [6] Michel Foucault, Diskurs und Wahrheit, Berlin 1996, p.14 (cf. discussion of parrhesia in English: http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/). [7] ibid., p. 17. [8] ibid., p. 16f. [9] ibid., p. 125-139. [10] ibid., p. 150. [11] ibid., p. 92; and Michel Foucault, Die Sorge um sich. Sexualität und Wahrheit 3, Frankfurt am Main 1989. [12] This also shows that parrhesia cannot be understood here as an aristocratic, philosophical prerogative, and certainly not as a relationship of representation, for instance in being communicated through media. Parrhesia requires direct communication and mutual exchange: "Unlike the parrhesiastes who addresses the demos in the Assembly, for example, here we have a parrhesiastic game which requires a personal, face to face relationship." (Foucault, Diskurs und Wahrheit, 96f.) [13] Cf. also Foucault's analysis of Ion's and Creusa's parrhesiastic discourses in Euripides' tragedy "Ion": Foucault, Diskurs und Wahrheit, 34-58, especially 57f. (http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/Lecture-03/06.ion.html) |
Gerald RaunigAileen Derieg (translation)languagesDeutsch English Español Françaistransversalinstitution |