“Piercing This Wall”: Truth-Making in a Fascist World

Parrhesia—An Overview

I have written on the intricacies of parrhesia (a form of truth-telling formally enacted in Ancient Greece) in the past (Kuntz, 2015, 2017), and so, my aim here is not so much to detail the meaning of parrhesia (its definitional properties) but instead to situate parrhesia as orienting our new inquiry work in important ways, given our contemporary moment. In this regard, I seek to think with ⁴ parrhesia to understand its effects on inquiry specifically and materialism more generally. As an ontological engagement with present circumstance, parrhesia relies on a contestatory way of being that seems important to any inquiry project enacted to effect change or otherwise generate (a) difference.

To begin, Foucault (2011) recognizes parrhesia as incommensurable with Cartesian claims on duality and privileging of epistemological encounters with an external empirical reality. This extends from the ontological focus of parrhesia as an engaged becoming—“a stance, a way of being”—that is “always starting over again” (pp. 14, 68). Furthermore, parrhesia works for change through critiquing existing society such that learned practices are no longer repeatable amid this newly articulated truth. Critical truth-telling alters the world and standardized convention no longer holds, repetition stutters.

As I have noted elsewhere (Kuntz, 2015), enacted parrhesia draws upon three overlapping elements: citizenship, responsibility, and risk. These three elements articulate uniquely, given our present circumstance, and thus require ongoing critical reflection. As enacted concept practices, citizenship, responsibility, and risk draw from and reflexively affect the material contexts that grant shape to any contemporary moment. Consequently, interrogating the shifting material relations involved in citizenship, responsibility, and risk is, itself, an important element of parrhesiastic practice.

To begin, parrhesia requires a citizenship-within. That is, a parrhesiast operates as a citizen within the very spaces and relations that truth-telling critiques. This is to say that the parrhesiast does not operate from some external location of critique. Instead, one recognizes an intimacy with that which undergoes critique—truths told implicate the truth-teller as much as anyone else. This citizenship-within requires that the parrhesiast occupies a fractured space within normalized relations, inhabiting a space of contradiction and difference to articulate a truth that is otherwise unseen (or, perhaps, otherwise synthesized into normalized meaning). In this way, the truth-teller works with normalizing processes (bent on repetition) to effect difference.

Furthermore, parrhesia extends from an ethical responsibility to challenge and change the exploitive status quo. Parrhesia is enacted as an ethical obligation to contest the confines of the present to effect a future derived of different relations such that contemporary forms of governance no longer hold. Thus, parrhesia is usefully understood as extending from a philosophical tradition of ethics, articulated through constructions of difference. Truth-telling enacts an ethical engagement with the world, one that refuses to concede a possible future to a determining past. As such, responsibility articulates as the simultaneity of refusal and creation.

This ethical obligation of challenge, change, and relation leads to enacted risks, generated to contest the systems that manifest our citizenship. Simply stated, without risk (to oneself or one’s relations with others), one cannot engage in truth-telling. Of course, not all encounters are risky, even if one imagines oneself as “taking a risk.” To illustrate this point, Foucault (2011) counters the example of a teacher preparing students for an examination (an activity that, upholding institutional values and logic, poses no risk) with a philosopher who tells tyrants that their actions are unjust (an act that risks challenging the governing relations of the day). Importantly, parrhesiastic practice risks the relations that grant one citizenship through calling to question the predetermined conditions of governance that seem a requirement of conventional existence. And yet, our daily practices of living do not always provide such stark differentiation of risky (or not) behavior (after all, one rarely is in the position to choose between being an examination-prepping teacher or tyrant-challenging philosopher). Consequently, truth-telling articulates differently in select circumstances, with consequential effects. Sometimes truth-telling occurs in the blurry in-between of living—the subtle challenges to convention that might otherwise go unrecognized. This is why inquiry as a means to enact difference is so important: It maps a space for resistance and creation.

Such articulated difference leads Folkers (2016) to emphasize a “reflexive insolence” that undergirds parrhesiastic notions of citizenship, responsibility, and risk. Within this arrangement, Folkers (2016) notes that the truth-teller does not act from an institutionally verified positioning: “the truth-speaker takes a right that he [sic] doesn’t have” (p. 8). This taking-of-the-right to speak extends a risk of change—the challenge of critique brings with it the risk that uttering truth will forever alter the relational effects of the immediate now (thus is the risk of difference, or difference-making). By refusing the comforts of convention, the truth-teller summons a courage to enact change, and such practices are not buffeted by the normalized logics or evidence upon which institutions are sustained. As Folkers concludes, the end result is “not the schoolmasterly, ‘What are your reasons?’ but the tyrannical ‘How dare you?’” (p. 8). ⁵ Here, parrhesia evokes a response that is beyond reason, the outrage that so often accompanies any challenge to normative ways of being.

Limiting Transgression/Transgressing Limits: An Interlude

What does it mean to be transgressive, to contest the limits of convention with the aim of enacting a new approach to some future? What does it mean to transgress, to move beyond preestablished limits toward some as of yet unknown? And, how might parrhesia articulate as a philosophical means of transgressing our contemporary moment as a form of critical inquiry? Such questions are perhaps best engaged through a philosophy of difference, one bent on creating a challenge to the status quo through engaging the very material circumstance of our contemporary moment.

In his “Preface to Transgression,” Foucault (1977) productively situates the “mad philosopher” as engaged in transgressive practices, acting to push through the limits of being to become otherwise:

the philosopher who finds, not outside his language (the result of an external accident or imaginary exercise), but at the inner core of its possibilities, the transgression of his philosophical being; and thus, the nondialectical language of the limit which only arises in transgressing the one who speaks. (p. 44)

Through transgressing the normalized speaking subject, the “mad philosopher” engages in more than linguistic wordplay, locating the limit of being within a contemporary fold and contesting—provoking—such constraint to create unique spaces for difference. Furthermore, such transgressions emanate from an ontological level of change—not simply knowing but enacting a transgression of “philosophical being.”

As Foucault goes on to note, this philosophical work extends from “the figure of being in the act of transgressing its own limit” (p. 45). Here, Foucault seeks a nondialectical philosophy that transgresses limits (not synthesizing them) toward difference. To do so, Foucault locates a transgression within a limit itself—not outside or acting upon, but inside and acting with. This “challenge from within” component of transgressive practice is often misunderstood in contemporary criticisms of the status quo as an external force or pressure for change. As a result, scholars seem want to produce or otherwise envision some possible future without doing the work necessary to examine the potential housed within the immediate now. Frustrated by contemporary limits, they mistakenly conceive of transgression as fully external to our immediate moment and seem to operate in a space that is dangerously relativistic—lacking an ethical orientation to the production of difference. This is the “anything goes” sense of transgression that has crept into qualitative inquiry (often, unfortunately, under the guise of materialism or posthumanism) and seems to mistake philosophies of difference for ethically vacuous claims on meaning-making. ⁸ Given the overt systems of exploitation that so dominate today, we need inquiry projects animated by the force of ethics, experimental enactments of difference that contest and create. This begins with the laborious practice of mapping our current relations to generate a potential future of difference.

An extension of this transgression-within-limits relation is found in my earlier overview of the citizen-within positioning that is a key element of parrhesia. Philosophical truth-tellers seek to contest and change the very relations, processes, and practices that generate their citizenship in the first place. To do so, of course, they must first develop a means to know them, to force them to bear the weight of critique. As such, critical citizenship articulates as a generative orientation that manifests difference—new ways of becoming that are not bound by the conventional trappings of citizenry.

As Foucault (1977) articulates, a transgression and a limit operate in a mutually defining, yet symbiotic, relation:

The limit and the transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. (p. 34)

A limit must define something (more than illusions and shadows) and thus must exhibit a “density of being” not often recognized by analyses that posit a limit as simply a line of demarcation. Furthermore, a limit contains the possibility of its own dissolution, its capacity to become no longer a limit (via transgression). Through its encounter with transgression, a limit generates its capacity to conclude, to no longer be. In some ways, then, we might borrow from Deleuze a question of potential limits, asking, in turn, “what can a limit do?” Well, a limit might become otherwise. A limit carries transgressive potential, always potentially exceeding itself to become differently and ceasing to be as it once was. This can only happen, of course, if a limit is understood as more than a line marking something else (something internal, contained by its demarcation).

As such, the relation between a limit and a transgression remains markedly more complex than a simplified binary relation. Thus, Foucault goes on to note the means by which a transgression constitutes and imprints with the limit—the two create in relation. Transgression changes the very nature of the limit, its constitution:

Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes (perhaps, to be more exact, to recognize itself for the first time), to experience its positive truth in its downward fall. (p. 34)

In this way, a transgression reintegrates a limit into a relation with that which it seeks to differentiate. This reconstitution (of a limit through its transgression) significantly alters what once was simply a differentiating relation:

Transgression, then, is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust. (p. 35)

Through their spiraled relation, transgressions and limits develop the potential to become something else even as that becoming generates the possibility to know itself (as a limit, a transgression): “to experience its positive truth in its downward fall.” It is through transgressions that limits are known (even as they are exposed as never complete, never a full and thorough limit) and through enacted transgressions that a limit ceases to hold, its raison d’etre forever changed. Limits and transgressions are insatiably incomplete, always partial.

Let us pause a moment to examine the implications of this limiting-transgressive relation within the context of “new approaches to inquiry” I examined earlier. In a similar fashion, the “new” pushes convention to its limit, reconfiguring it in such a way that convention is recognized as such for the first time through its very dissolution (“its downward fall”). Thus, there remains an important element of a critical engagement within the “new,” one that manifests as a challenge from within. All new approaches, then, are animated by the force of critique, the stark recognition of convention’s failure. This point remains important for parrhesiastic practice as truth-telling insatiably reveals the limits of convention such that they no longer hold; truth-telling generates the “downward spiral” of the status quo—and all becomes different.

And yet, for Foucault (1977), transgression plays a specific role: “to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to arise” (p. 35). From this perspective, a transgression does more than simply illustrate a limit or destroy any containing force effected by a limit. Instead, a transgression reveals the workings of a limit—its formations and practices. As such, transgressive practices locate that which generates the need for convention—the assumed disarray, for example, that requires conventional ordering—and exploits such relations as a generative force for change. Within the field of inquiry, this requires that “methodologists” depict (or, to invoke Foucault’s terminology, “measure”) the limits of research through contesting the assumptive values and beliefs that uphold select inquiry practices as reasonable, even desired. Herein lies the generatively transgressive force of “new approaches to inquiry”: through mapping, contesting, and refusing conventional limits of inquiry, new potential manifests and alternative ways of becoming generate.

Indeed, Foucault (1977) links the revelatory work of transgression with practices of contestation: “to contest is to proceed until one reaches the empty core where being achieves its limit and where the limit defines being” (p. 36). Through contesting the limits of our contemporary moment, transgressive practices generate a visible limit and, recognizing the defining properties of such limitation, refuse to accept such constraint. In short, acts of contestation reveal and refuse limiting properties. This revelatory work of transgression (revealing, as it does, a limit) should effectively do away with concerns that we produce “transgressions for transgression’s sake” (as it were). Enacted transgressions are meaningful—they engage a limit as a means to contest that which “causes the limit to arise.” Thus, it is not enough to simply strive to break a limit: One must use the material of the limit to generate something else. This is a creative or experimental relation to limits, one that manufactures difference where once was only repetition.

As an overview, any transgression manifests through a limit. Part of the transgressive process entails revealing that which makes a limit possible and contesting its normalization through enacting a potential future. To engage the “new,” then, is to use the limits of the previous to contest contemporary formations of governance—a radical act of contesting how we come to be. It is my sense that inquiry can create the conditions necessary for such productive insubordination, especially enacted as an element of philosophical parrhesia.

Foucault thus examines practices of truth-telling and ethical engagement as material enactments of transgression, virtuous practices of contestation toward an unknown future. Thus, one transgresses a limit through an ethical determination to enact difference such that the conditions and relations that govern a limit no longer hold. Perhaps, then, we need to similarly strive for transgressive acts of inquiry. Through inquiry, we might engage in contestatory practices of forcing limits to collapse into transgressions not previously possible. We perhaps do so because our current circumstances are untenable—we need a different future.

It is this generative process of recognition and refusal that brings us back to notions of truth-telling, critique, and the force of becoming other than we are (and have been). Philosophical truth-telling is, indeed, a transgressive act, recognizing as it does the limits of the norm and refusing to abide by such constraints. Parrhesia is bound with the incessant spiral of transgression-limit relation that Foucault raised as an important element of becoming more than the limit. Here, we perhaps find select practices for a new approach to inquiry as a truth-telling: the cartographic work of mapping toward our limits; the contestatory work of refusing the constraints of our being; and the revolutionary act of making truths that create a future unknown.

Returning to the Previous: Parrhesia and the Critical Tradition

These three elements of mapping, refusing, and making remain important to constructions of parrhesia as a new approach to inquiry. These are the methodological practices invoked in the revolutionary project for change. As such, though newly enacted within our contemporary moment, such practices situate parrhesia within a tradition of philosophical critique, one that generates change through an ongoing challenge to the status quo and extends an ethical philosophical positioning.

Judith Butler (2013) differentiates criticism from critique, noting that while the former “usually takes an object,” the latter focuses instead on identifying “the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears” (p. 103). The object orientation of criticism aligns disappointingly well with conventional research and associated fixations on the procedure of method. Conversely, because critique needs no preformed object, such practices are often more in line with inquiry. Furthermore, as Butler points out, Foucault conceived of critique as pushing toward an unknown future, not returning “to already established frameworks and norms” (p. 108). Through this future orientation, critique articulates “as a mode of living and even a mode of subject constitution” (p. 108)—an ontological formation that aligns with parrhesia.

Such enactments of critique are generated through an ethically laden engagement with change, causing Foucault (1997) to situate critique as “akin to virtue” (p. 43). Here, critique extends as virtuous practice, refusing present conditions and animated through an ethical force for future difference. As Boland (2014) notes, critique is a generative practice as it “produces rather than reveals truth in historically specific ways” and is thus the “ethical foundation to counter-conduct, which is not simple disobedience but a deliberative indocility” (pp. 110, 111; original emphasis). Thus, as a form of inquiry that refuses the conditions that make the status quo possible, parrhesia manifests as a practice of critique, challenging “established frameworks and norms” for the promise of living differently. As a result, practices of critique such as parrhesia resist the limits of their immediate context; as a transgressive practice, critique can never be contained by some established limit. ⁹

This transgressive practice causes Folkers (2016) to note the means by which critique and truth-telling remain unbound by temporal convention: “critique and parrhesia are not reducible to their historical contexts of emergence, because it is the very activity that transcends the socio-historical situation” (p. 7). Practices of critique and parrhesia exceed their contemporary moment, transgressing the limits of the now. Thus, thinking with such concepts necessarily extends one toward a future not-yet that productively contests the immediate now. As a consequence, though there certainly exist echoes of parrhesia as a truth-telling invented centuries ago, those echoes meet our contemporary time differently, creating new relations and effects. Thus is the power of philosophical inquiry—producing another now, another potential future.

Yet, as Folkers (2016) goes on to write, “It is only in relation to concrete historical situations and specific problems that critique gains traction” (p. 7). Thus, if parrhesia is to be a practice of critique, it must necessarily begin by explicating its relation within “concrete historical situations and specific problems”; parrhesia must be enacted as a materialist practice. To my mind, such work is necessarily cartographic and requires a sustained engagement with those material relations and practices that draw their visibility through attending to a governing rationale and those that escape, even exceed, such confines. In this way, parrhesia is decidedly materialist, engaged with the concrete problems of history and contemporaneity.

As noted earlier, parrhesia is antimethod and must not be misinterpreted as a series of techniques employed in practiced succession across time and space. Parrhesia “always begins again” because it works within and through the material relations of the immediate now, refusing the distanced extraction of convention. Thus, I now turn in this concluding section to a consideration of enacted parrhesia as an orienting shift from truth-telling to truth-making, a unique formation of materialist inquiry-critique that is especially important, given our contemporary context.

Contemporary Parrhesia—From Telling to Making

Because parrhesia marks a material intervention into the status quo through enacting an insubordinate truth, truth’s telling is actually a making—a confection of a different sort. In the interest of conceptual clarity and in following Foucault’s differentiation of philosophical from political parrhesia, I thus understand the contestatory practice of parrhesia as a truth-making. ¹⁰ If we take seriously the arguments above concerning critique as a generative process that exceeds the present, then critical processes such as parrhesia must make something new—arrangements or assemblages that had not previously existed—and cannot simply tell what previously existed (the all-too-conventional notion of some eternal or a priori truth). As a materialist practice, parrhesia does not speak such confections into existence (as the phrase truth-telling might imply). Nor does parrhesiastic practice involve an order given from one to another (“I tell you to do this”). Instead, parrhesia generates new relations that had not previously existed through an experimental stance toward becoming otherwise (the potential for citizens to be governed in new ways, for example, or more to the point of this article, for inquiry to enact a difference). In very real ways, parrhesiasts are materialist artisans, making new configurations through their ethical engagement with the production of truth.

In similar fashion, Lorenzini and Tazzioli (2018) emphasize the role of subjectivation as a series of “practices of freedom that subjugated subjects can enact in order to resist and contest the mechanisms of power trying to impose on them a certain identity as well as a definite conduct” (p. 72). Importantly, such practices entail both elements of critique and invention: critical engagements with normalizing contexts as well as generatively new formations of becoming that exceed the governed limits of standardized conduct. It is perhaps in this double move of critique and invention that truth-telling shifts to truth-making; parrhesiastic practice is resistive through critique and becoming anew in excess of governing norms. Parrhesia, here, is the force that explodes the limit with transgression.

Furthermore, the term “telling” is perhaps overly saddled with the linguistic assumptions of post-structuralism that have rightly been critiqued through the materialist or posthuman turn (philosophical engagements with difference that I term relational materialism [Kuntz, 2019]). “Telling” is too easily conflated with language, with the literal articulation of meaning via words (and word choice). Parrhesia implies a truth-making that extends beyond language to an affective way of becoming that exceeds linguistic definition.

Finally, the three elements of parrhesia (mapping, contesting, and making) I identify in classifying “new approaches to inquiry” imply resistive activities that remain ensconced in a philosophical tradition of materialism that refuses the simplifications of “telling.” Simply stating truths (new or not) is never enough: Parrhesia requires a different ontological engagement with the status quo. In this sense, recall the quotation from Gilles Deleuze that opened this article: “We don’t revise a theory, but construct new ones; we have no choice but to make others.” The emphasis here is on construction and making: parrhesia as enactments of truth-making. This (re)construction of parrhesia also signals a shift in how we might understand the role of inquiry and that of the intellectual inquirer.

In his conversation with Deleuze entitled “Intellectuals and Power,” Foucault (1977) notes a shift in the role of the intellectual away from “enlightening” or “awakening” the masses and toward enacting practices that “sap power” from normalizing institutions. In this shift, the notion of “truth-making” necessarily takes on different forms, enacted not to enlighten others to some previously unknown truth but rather to enact parrhesia such that normalized formations of power can no longer function seamlessly. It is the practice of parrhesia—its enactment—that remains important, practice over content. And, of course, this making signals a break from the productions of the past—a transgression of habitualized limitation.

Conclusion: Scaling Down—Truth-Making as Daily Work

As Shammas (2019) points out, Western perspectives often value (and legitimate) grand gestures of parrhesia—those who are nominated for Nobel Prizes or lauded in media as stirring challenges to despotic rule. However, in my overview of truth-making as transgressive inquiry, I remain more interested in small moments of parrhesia, those activities that might occur in the interstices of the everyday. Truth-makers employ parrhesia as a way of differently becoming, an ontological orientation of working with the world that begins with ethical enactments of refusal. This has led me to consider the means by which parrhesia might articulate as a process of inquiry (or, in counter form, of inquiry articulating as a parrhesiastic practice).

As Deleuze and Guattari (1988) claim, “Even the most overt fascism speaks the language of goals, of law, order, and reason. Even the most insane capitalism speaks in the name of economic rationality” (p. 367). Thus it is that even political forces of hatred and exploitation articulate in often-mundane terms, appealing to the rationale of the times. Indeed, it is in mundane, nearly banal, manifestations that fascism and hyper/late-capitalism are most dangerous, most insidious. They continue on because they are so easily overlooked, and through their normalized obscurity, they take on the force of the norm.

Thus, it remains important for me to recognize that parrhesiastic practices of mapping, refusing, and becoming difference need not only happen in gloriously large or macro-level events (the instantaneous revolution of capitalism that is the stuff of Marxist dreams, for example). Instead, such work can occur in smaller, more micro moments of daily practice. Indeed, this is why I find such a creative philosophical orientation so powerful—it is through daily events of becoming difference that radical change can occur. We cannot become lost to the monotony of normalization, the limit of the everyday.

As Deleuze astutely notes, “the masses were not deceived; at a particular time they actually wanted a Fascist regime!” (Foucault, 1977, p. 215). What Deleuze offers in his critique is the notion that deception is not what leads to totalizing forces such as fascism, but instead the normalizing desire for fascism. Thus, the role of the truth-maker amid fascism is not to reveal deceptions in our midst, but perhaps instead the means by which our ways of being collude to enable a fascist perspective, the momentum of which is difficult to stay. Yet intervention into the force of fascism, as Foucault responds, comes from a struggle born “from the system of power itself, from all the forms in which power is exercised and applied” (p. 217). Transgressions extend out of limits themselves, enacted by citizens-within; this is our work.

In closing, “new approaches to inquiry” are necessarily transgressive: mapping the limits of convention, contesting the normative claims that maintain such boundaries, and generating difference through experimental practices of becoming. Such a stance refuses the prescriptive claims of method, pointing to a future unknown, a potential not-yet, realized. In this way, such new approaches take on an ethical dimension, the virtuous positioning that things must change and we have a responsibility, an obligation, to enact a difference in a world otherwise bent on repetition.

Parrhesia is a “new approach to inquiry” because it requires that we always begin again, making new truths through an ongoing critique of our contemporary moment. Parrhesiastic practice dwells within the breaks, disjunctures, and contradictions of daily life to produce something new—living difference. As a transgressive practice, parrhesia is animated by an ethical determination to contest the exploitative relations that maintain the status quo. Those of us who claim an interest, even a scholarly expertise, in inquiry would do well to enact a type of critical truth-making such that the easy hum of repetition shudders at such new construction. We do so, as Deleuze reminds us, because we have no choice.