Frank-Talking: Biko, Foucault, and the Possibilities of Telling the Truth in a Post Truth World

In 2016 the Oxford English Dictionary selected as its ‘word of the year’ ‘post-truth’, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, and chosen as a marker of “the ethos, mood, or preoccupations” of the moment with a “lasting potential as a word of cultural significance”. That same year, The New York Times published an OpEd which highlighted the prominence (and success) of a mode of doing politics that cynically spread misinformation and fake news, heralding for the author a new ‘age of post truth politics’. This apparent post truth politics nevertheless sat alongside a developing techno-politics – with its own regime of truth claims - that establish, fix and reproduce the practical systems which organise social life and in which we are formed as governed subjects. What we call post truth politics has in fact settled in a context characterised by a deepening chasm between the public-political realm and the field of practice of modern governmentality. In this context, does is still make sense to speak truth to power? My interest in this paper is less to mark the significance of a post-truth politics for the futures of liberal democracy, but instead to begin thinking about the kinds of critical practices that might serve as effective support to political struggles. In so doing I work at fictioning a relation between Michel Foucault’s final two courses at the College de France, focused on the theme of parrhesia, and Steve Biko’s last public statement delivered during his 1976 court testimony, as a way of rethinking how our critiques of the present might establish new modes of truth telling that simultaneously work at constituting forms of subjectivity and epistemological frameworks.