Conversation with a Dead Man: Foucault on Facebook and Confession
by Mitchell McInnis

Recently, I found myself in one of those pleasant, Saturday-afternoon pub conversations with a friend. Both of us tired and stressed out, we turned to constructing the perfect dinner party of folks both dead and alive... mostly dead.

Leaving the conversation, I then found myself having a conversation with a dead man. I conjured Michel Foucault. In my feverish, whiskey-nourished skull, I had a quiet yet engaging conversation with the philosopher about that oh-so striking online force, Facebook, and our seemingly joyous inclination toward confession.

Foucault, as many of you know, was a French-born philosopher who ended up finding a new home in the Bay Area teaching at Stanford University. While there, as the apocryphal reports go, he took an acid trip with students and friends that transformed his philosophical vision to one of Nietzschean bent. His celebrated, multi-volume series, The History of Sexuality, was a spelunker’s (no, that’s not a pun) delight on the relationship between power and sexuality from a social archaeologist’s point of view.

Foucault dissects the urge to confess in Western culture. Confession, like so many things for Foucault, is an observable expression of power dynamics. (He had a unique understanding of power, and while I won’t go into that side of his work too much here, I recommend further inquiry if you’re curious.) Examining the urge to confess, he observes our more recent urge to confess without being compelled to do so. One needs look only as far as the great Mother Confessor herself, Oprah Winfrey, to recognize the validity of his claims.

Long before Foucault, talk shows and Facebook, Sigmund Freud observed the urge to confess as it related to Christianity. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud called out Christianity’s function of installing a cop in the head of each individual. A father in the sky always watching, the individual has the ability to then confess all wrongs, seeking forgiveness. The ultimate soft power structure enabled by the terrifying fiction of hell.

Fast forward to a more secular and technology-driven culture, this urge to confess hasn’t diminished. Talk shows have flipped the notion of confession to a public rather than private phenomena, the host, live audience and viewing public providing novenas by way of understanding, applause as well as jeers. Add the American lust for celebrity by any means necessary, and we have a very powerful cocktail.

If talk shows offered confessional celebrity via that 15 minutes, Facebook is the vast democratization of the same. Add an ongoing tally of how many “friends” are watching, and we now have a means by which folks can compete for the privilege of divulging the minutiae of their respective lives.

To look at this a different way, recall the movie “Brazil.”

Early on, there’s a scene at the Ministry of Information. Sam Lowry (played by Jonathan Pryce) is saving the bacon of Mr. Kurtzmann (played by Ian Holm), unraveling a technical difficulty surrounding a mistaken arrest. Sitting in Kurtzmann’s office, Lowry is staring into the computer, seemingly manipulating it toward a solution. But the camera shifts, moving the view from in front of the screen to behind the computer’s screen. Mr. Lowry isn’t just manipulating the technology to find a solution. He’s being watched.

Watched indeed.

Gilliam further envisions a scenario wherein Sam Lowry ends up being tortured by the same Ministry, strapped to a chair beside an ominous array of torture instruments. This type of scene, unfortunately, is all too familiar. But this is not the type of confession I’m talking about, of course.

Returning to the above notion of a soft power superstructure, let’s call it soft confession. Remove the torture devices and replace them with throngs of Internet users convinced their moment to moment “status” is actually interesting and relevant. Users diligently increasing their “friend” tally, lending to such awkward face to face conversations as “Are you on Facebook? Are we friends?” Or, in other instances, it leads to the dreaded “de-friending” choice, wherein users choose to block other users from viewing their account.

Imagine high-school cliques automated and given a slick user interface, and you’ve got it.

There’s no denying the phenomenon that is Facebook. It’s so powerful that large advertising agencies require fluency in all aspects of so-called “second life” from all new employees. My own disdain for this so-called second life is not as interesting as ruminations on its cultural byproducts.

I’ll leave it to others to discuss the larger implications to privacy, which, of course, is at the heart of this argument regarding Foucault. When we chose cyber-popularity over privacy, it’s its own malady. Sitting with this lately, I’ve been thinking more about how this affects the notion of the American West.

Another question often posed to me upon explaining my dislike of Facebook et al is, “Don’t you want to reconnect?” No. Not really. I’ve been very diligent about keeping in touch with the folks I want to keep in touch with... the rest? Not so much.

Going back to the core notions of the American West... think of how many have moved to the American West since the 1860's in search of starting over. In search of reinventing themselves. It’s not solely the tale of the American West, though. Having grown up in Montana, I moved to New York to do exactly the same thing. I joined a long train of individuals from all over the world who’ve done exactly the same thing.

Transformation. It’s the quintessence of our American experiment, and it’s the heart of becoming an artist. I wonder if those who grow up with this hyper-connectivity can ever feel the opiate-like joy of packing their car and moving to a new town and becoming someone new. Of giving birth to themselves anew in a newfound place.

At risk of invoking an archetype tending toward cliche, I think of Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt moved to North Dakota in his mid-twenties after his mother and wife died on the same day. As a rancher and working cowboy in the solitude of the West, he gained a unique perspective he credited with changing his course in life:

"I do not believe there ever was any life more attractive to a vigorous young fellow than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine, healthy life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision...I enjoyed the life to the full."
[....]
"I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota."

The point is not the cattle ranch, the point isn’t being a cowboy, and it certainly isn’t being a ‘vigorous young fellow,’it’s about the transformative experience he had given the advantage of separation.

Separation is harder and harder to achieve these days, thus making such transformative experiences more and more rare.

To bring it back to art, think of Paul Gauguin or Georgia O’Keefe. Both escaped to extreme locales and solitude to find unique visions. Separation and solitude were essential to these examples, as well as countless other painters, poets and musicians.

Are we undercutting the transformative nature of art by suffocating solitude?