40 years after his death
Michel Foucault’s philosophy
still speaks to a world
saturated with social media
Published: June 24, 2024 9.07pm BST
Author
Cameron Shackell
Sessional Academic and Visitor, School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology
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Forty years after his death in Paris on June 25, 1984, many of Michel Foucault’s
once radical ideas now seem self-evident. Even critics like Noam Chomsky, who
derided Foucault’s moral theories as “incoherent”, find themselves in a world
wallpapered with Foucauldian terms like “discourse”, “power-knowledge”,
“biopower”, and “governmentality”.
Today, who could thrive without knowing how to “control the narrative”, call out a
“social construct” or navigate “power dynamics”?
After contributing so much to this way of seeing the world, however, a lot of
Foucault’s effort in his later years went to the idea of the self.
The decades since he died have witnessed the rise of a gladiatorial institution –
social media – in which the desires and vulnerabilities of the self are played out. So
we should ask: are we putting our “selves” at peril online? Can a genuinely
Foucauldian perspective contribute to a better understanding of our situation?
Fictions with a truth value
Foucault did not claim objective correctness for his ideas. He called them “fictions”
with a “truth-value”.
“I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word,” he said; “I write a book so
that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.”
By his own account, Foucault’s influence endures because his work (and his
entangled biography) serves some function in the bigger picture of here and now. It
is discourse that provokes more discourse. In contemporary terms, he remains
influential because he “went viral”.
The underlying idea of historical contingency – that things rise and fall in line with
the systems and cultural assumptions of their times – is so commonplace in the
social sciences and public discourse today that, ironically, we can’t conceive why
Foucault had to come along and point out that it applies to things like madness,
prisons and executions, sexuality, and even philosophy itself.
Given Foucault’s focus on change, it is not hard to see how evolving technology
has played into his appeal, though veneration of his books in universities during the
“science wars” of the 1990s – fought over the extent to which scientific knowledge
was shaped by social and cultural factors – also helped.
Foucault’s relativising philosophy serves as the background to the internet going
mainstream, the rising social connectedness that resulted, and the subsequent
debates over issues like freedom of speech, online rights and regulation – none of
which he had a simple opinion on.
Michel Foucault debating Noam Chomsky on Dutch television in 1971. YouTube.
Who are we?
The philosopher Todd May argues Foucault is always asking one question: “Who
are we?” Indeed, in one of his last lectures, Foucault summed up his work this way:
My objective for more than 25 years has been to sketch out a history of the different
ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves.
Knowledge, for Foucault, is not just what we know. It is who we are. It defines our
options, not just intellectually, but in all respects, including morally and spiritually.
We can’t know something and then step back to be something completely different.
Foucault’s “self” is inscribed with knowledge, not simply coloured in.
There is little doubt this idea resonates powerfully today. Is there anything more
enviable than a powerful self, which is also to say a knowledgeable self?
Curation of the online self has become a mass preoccupation, projecting it an
obsession. We now live in an attention economy built of competing selves. Likes,
comments and reactions mean status, and in many cases its ready equivalent,
money.
So how would Foucault counsel us to look after our selves in the competitive
environment of social media? He definitely would not prescribe, but I feel he
would urge attention to three aspects.
1. Take a detailed view of power
Foucault saw that knowledge and power are the same thing. Social media (and now
AI) are seductions to knowledge. They give us the sense that we can become
powerful through knowledge and stand in a privileged position over others.
Knowledge and power constantly move in and out of us, creating the self. With
each avid acquisition of knowledge, we change ourselves a little bit. We change
what we can do, what we think it is rational to do, what is important to do.
The spike in the tail of knowledge-as-power today is that knowledge is cheap.
Everyone feels they have it in their back pocket. That is perhaps why so many are
driven to publish images of their food. It is a kind of knowledge-power projection –
just not a powerful kind.
Power has shifted away from owning knowledge towards renting it, with attendant
focus on selection, discrimination and manipulation. That is why so many
companies and individuals now study the algorithms that allocate images and texts:
to better harvest the attention of the still naive.
Whether or not we understand the intricacies of how social media works, one
question we can always ask ourselves is: who am I if I spend my time on this? The
answer should give us some inkling of what power is at work.
2. Be aware of surveillance, especially self-surveillance
Foucault’s brilliant analysis of the panopticon – a prison design conceived by the
English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in which prisoners can be observed at all
times and know they can be observed – is highly relevant to social media.
Foucault argued that, in modern society, we regulate our behaviour according to
whether we believe we are being watched. We take this further when we internalise
that feeling to become good citizens – or, less generously, “docile bodies” – even
when we are not being watched. This translates into self-surveillance.
On social media, we curate our posts, comments and interactions, knowing they are
visible to others. But it doesn’t stop there. How many of us roam the real world
with an eye to a good background for a selfie?
Is that the mark and purpose of a unique, non-docile self?
3. Resist prefab identities
Foucault disapproved of biography, which he saw as an attempt to determine him
as a subject and confine his work to a prison of common opinion and intelligibility.
We can see a similar attitude today in people who do not have Facebook or
Instagram accounts and can’t be found on LinkedIn. Such inscrutable people are
increasingly cast as strange. In fact, it is almost at the point where such anonymity
seems unsafe or immoral. Every procedural police show now turns on tracking
criminals via their online identities. How shady are those who don’t even have one?
Foucault’s work emphasises that our identities are constructed through social and
cultural forces. On social media, we are often presented with prefab identities:
idealised versions of success, attractiveness and happiness. Avatars are an obvious
example. They are invitations to fantasy, propagated by influencers, advertisers and
platform algorithms.
We should ask ourselves how our online personas might be shaping our
self-perception and behaviour. Prefab identities create unrealistic expectations and
place pressure us to conform to standards that may not lead the self in good
directions.
Foucault said it was good practice to let go of ideas and send them out into the
world to live or die so that we no longer have to recognise ourselves in them. This
could mean opting out of social media. Or it could mean using the online world as
a place for identity experimentation. But it definitely means not investing too much
in any identities created.
A self-proving philosophy
My own work in semiotics is a formal treatment of an underpinning theme in
Foucault: the idea that thought is a systematic but limited thing. For me, this simple
idea explains so much about conflicting accounts of reality in the contemporary
world.
I also think it is the core of Foucault’s complex relationship with the Enlightenment
and its claims on universal knowledge and reason. He admired the inquiring spirit
of the Age of Reason, but detested its reductive, rule-bound view of thought. He
claimed the Enlightenment invented, for sometimes sinister and unacknowledged
purposes, the idea of “man” as a subject worthy of study.
That is probably why, when I first read Foucault’s early work The Archaeology of
Knowledge, I was confused and made a little seasick by its style. It seemed to
describe and never judge, reach but never get to the point – never trust itself to
reason.
Partly, this was the notorious French academic style, but I now think it was also a
key element of Foucault’s modus operandi. His writing never alienates, never turns
anyone away with bald assertions or a single frame of reference. He invited
everyone to look at what fascinated him, draw their own conclusions, and respond.
The difficulty and opacity of Foucault’s work has become a “feature not a bug”,
making it adaptable – even essential – to all situations calling for high academic,
well, discourse. Anyone wanting to argue into the weeds that everything is relative
always has Foucault to fall back on, even if it was a position he probably thought
absolutist and trivial.
Foucault’s philosophical politeness, though often tedious and infuriating, has paid
off. Even if he was wrong – or not even coherent enough to be wrong, as Chomsky
claimed – his influence has nonetheless made him useful and an asset to the 21st
century. His genius, it seems, was to invent a viral philosophy that is socially
self-proving. He has left us wondering if there is any other kind.
