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ABSTRACT
This article is about a practice of “frank-talking” associated with Steve Biko and the BC movement of the 1970s. It sets out a reading of a short fragment titled “On Death” (found at the end of I Write What I Like) through the lens of the (coincidental) connection between Biko’s Frank-talk and Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia. Through an intentional mispronunciation of the concept of parrhesia, I re-member Biko’s statement “On Death,” and the scene of the interrogation that it describes, as an exemplary instance of Biko’s frank-talk and one which I show can usefully be read as a modern modality of parrhesia. With Biko, the “parrhesiatic” statement disrupts the white supremacist (bio)political order for the ways it comes to be articulated as a practical expression of Biko’s sense of his own equality as a Black subject.
Acknowledgments
This article was written under the supervision of the Spaza Writer’s Collective. I am particularly grateful for the encouragement and ideas I received through my discussions with Asher Gamedze, Kelly Gillespie, Leigh-Ann Naidoo, Efthimios Karayiannides, Zen Marie, Tumi Mogorosi, Tokelo Nhlapo, Tasneem Essop, Prishani Naidoo, Michael Hardt, Gillian Hart and the anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. In the first two issues of the newsletter, the column is signed “Frank-talk” (in inverted commas) (Frank-talk Citation1970a;Citation1970b).
2. After his death, this “name” became something like an open identity. In 1984, for instance, the Natal region of AZAPO launched their critical journal called Frank Talk and its first issue carried an image of Biko on the cover and an editorial claiming dedication to his memory and the propagation of Black Consciousness (AZAPO Natal Region Citation1984). On this side of the transition, Biko’s pseudonym was reclaimed with the launch of the publication New Frank Talk, self-characterised as a “radical journal of critical essays on the Black condition” (Mngxitama Citation2009). Even beyond these sorts of appropriations, both the name Frank Talk and the title of Biko’s column – “I write what I like” - have been taken up by a wide range of people, spawning dozens of plays on them in South African political literature.
3. This article is one outcome of a wider research project attempting to accomplish a “political reading” of Foucault from Johannesburg. One experiment in this direction has been re-reading Foucault’s statements on critique and parrhesia in relation to Biko’s frank-talking political practice. This article is, however, intentionally limited in its commentary, focusing on the fragment called “On Death,” and drawing on Foucault selectively in presenting a reading of it.
4. This ancient Greek term has been given several different spellings in English – one of them, as I have written it, “parrhesia,” Although in the most recent translations of Foucault’s commentary on the concept it is spelled “parrēsia,” I prefer the former – whose simplicity denotes an appropriation that is also a mispronunciation.
5. See, for instance, the discussion of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality Vol 1 in Slavoj Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject (Citation2008).
6. Striking in many commentaries on the parrhesia lectures is the politically charged Foucault behind the lectern, and of all his recently published courses, none has as routinely been read as response to the question, “what is to be done?” For instance, Michael Hardt argues for a revaluation of Foucault’s project and its political significance in light of these lectures. Foucault had “articulated an extraordinary critique of power and traditional forms of politics,” Hardt tells us, but his project also runs into a “conceptual dead end” (Citation2010). The source of this “crisis,” he says, was Foucault’s inability, within the terms of his theoretical project, to “advocate a new politics or propose the adequate means to struggle for a new society” (Citation2010). However, in the lectures on parrhesia, and in particular, in the discussion of cynic parrhesia, Hardt sees Foucault now setting out an example of biopolitical militancy that offers a new and rearmed model for politics and militant theory (see also Citation2011).
Hardt isn’t alone on the positive side of this reading, and there are still many more attempts at reading these last words of theory for the political lessons it holds. However, it is probably a good idea to resist the urge to project any overriding political motive onto these reflections on parrhesia. The concept is simultaneously connected to a number of themes in Foucault’s work (see also Elden Citation2016), starting out linked to the problem of confession, and then later hitched to wider questions about governmentality and the genealogy of the critical attitude. But if Foucault sometimes seems tentative about where these investigations into parrhesia were leading (see Gros Citation2011; see also Elden Citation2016), this is part of what makes them so generative. In this article, I therefore set aside the bigger questions about how these investigations fit into Foucault’s theoretical project. Hardt might well be correct that Foucault was interested in the concept of parrhesia in order to be able to formulate new political positions for struggles emerging on today’s biopolitical terrains, but this doesn’t change the fact that Foucault’s genealogy of the concept is – at it stands – not yet that. One way to think about all the recent appropriations of the concept of parrhesia, including the present composition, is as part of the necessary theoretical work needed to develop the “tactical pointers” found in the lectures for our own struggles.
7. When Foucault defines parrhesia in these seminars he makes it clear that it had a long history and comes to operate in a number of different contexts. In Arnaldo Momigliano’s reflections on “Freedom of Speech in Antiquity” (Citation1973), he (like Foucault) traces the first appearance of the concept in ancient literature to Euripides where it is associated with the political life of the city, but also (although this was a less common use of the term) as freedom of speech in private matters. The ancient Greeks did not, however, just have one word associated with “freedom of speech.” The second term they used was “isegoria,” which has a more specifically juridical meaning of an equality in relation to freedom of speech, and could apply equally to the rights of members of an aristocratic council as to that of the citizens of the democratic assembly. Arlene Saxonhouse, in her study Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens, for instance, differentiates “isegoria as the practice that gave all citizens an equal opportunity to speak in the Assembly once the herald had asked, ‘Who wishes to speak?,’ and parrhesia, which was the opportunity of every citizen not only to speak but ‘to voice frank criticism’” (Citation2005; 94). To sum up, in the specifically political sense of the term in the fifth century BC, parrhesia presupposed the equality of citizens and their right to speak in the assembly, but it is also going to involve “something more;” something described as “frank criticism.” It is worth noting as well that parrhesia as “the free mouth of the citizen” finds its other in the figure of “the slave mouth,” and being able to use parrhesia was part of what being an Athenian freeman entailed.
In Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia he goes on to show how, after the fifth century BCE, parrhesia shifts beyond the citizen-city game. This extending field of parrhesiatic practices is also what the Berkeley seminars and courses are working to bring to light and part of the important genealogical work that Foucault does there is to show how, following the decline of Athenian Democracy in the late fifth and in the fourth century, parrhesia shifts ground, taking root now also in more autocratic systems of government and crucially, in philosophy. This movement, from what he describes as the “Periclean moment of parrhesia” to the later “Socratic-Platonic moment” (Citation2010; 340), is going to also involve a shifting of parrhesia from the problem of the “government of others” to “the government of the self,” and in this way also towards conceptions of different ways of life.
8. “The political profession of truth” as frank-talk is doubled in Biko’s discourse, split between two scenes, and addressed to specific subjects. On the one hand, Biko’s frank-talk is going to be addressed to the institutional forms and representatives of white power. This scene is, in many ways, analogous to the one described by Foucault of the philosopher speaking truth to the tyrant/sovereign, and the text of Biko’s testimony at the SASO/BPC treason trial, or the scene of the interrogation that he describes in “On Death” are good examples in this respect. The second scene is, however, different and is constituted with Biko’s discourse addressed to those on the same side (or at least potentially on the same side) as him of a political struggle; those he calls Blacks. Although one can draw on many other examples from his writing, speeches and public statements, his “I write what I like” column in the SASO newsletter might be taken as a paradigmatic instance.
9. Biko spoke the truth, but we should not forget that in the 1970s this truth remained paradoxical and polemical: statements whose identity as truth were the object of a political dispute. The discussion of the implications of this fact is one of the objectives of the broader research project where I show how Biko’s frank-talk works towards and is necessarily articulated with the constitution of the BC movement and a Black collective political subject. And it is the immanence of Biko’s frank-talk to the processes through which a Black collective political subject is constituted that is the condition of possibility for his statements being received as truth.
10. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1, published in 1976 (1990), Foucault defined biopower in relation to two poles. The first pole, described as an antomopolitics of the human body, indexed the mechanisms of disciplinary power that were established from the late seventeenth century onwards, and discussed in Discipline and Punish (Citation1977). Part of what characterised this modality of modern power for Foucault was its focus on the individual body. Bentham’s Panopticon, as “the diagramme” of a disciplinary power established across society, is, for instance, seen as geared towards the spatial distribution of individuals within a calculated and optimised field of visibility that opens up the possibility for the functional co-ordination of the bodies power takes hold of. The second pole of this new biopower is what he called a biopolitics of population (Foucault Citation[1976] 1990). And where the disciplines take as their object and target “man-as-body,” biopolitics is applied to “man-as-living-being” in so far as the latter forms part of a larger mass determined by “overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on” (Foucault Citation2004, 242–243). However, the opposition between the two poles of “biopower,” between an individualising anatomopolitics and a massifying biopolitics, does not exclude the simultaneous and complementary operation, and in Security, Territory, Population (Citation2007) Foucault showed how disciplinary mechanisms came to be inscribed in biopolitical frameworks. However, in the same set of lectures, the concept of biopolitics is also eclipsed by the introduction of the concept of governmentality, which will set the framework now for his ongoing research into the relationship between politics, population and the government of life.
11. This line of research is developed in part in relation to the circulation of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Citation1998).
12. See Peter Jones account of his interrogation in Woods (Citation1991), as well as the discussion of the inquest. See also Mangcu’s (Citation2012) account of Biko’s activities in the days before being arrested.
13. For instance, riffing off Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, in one of his most famous “I Write What I Like” essays, Biko wrote the following.
When I turn on my radio, when I hear that someone in the Pondoland forest was beaten and tortured, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead, when I turn on my radio, when I hear that someone in jail slipped off a piece of soap, fell and died, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead, he is likely to be found in Pretoria.
To look for instances of cruelty directed at those who fall into disfavour with the security police is perhaps to look too far. One need not try to establish the truth of the claim that black people in South Africa have to struggle for survival. It presents itself in ever so many facets of our lives. Township life alone makes it a miracle for anyone to live up to adulthood. There we see a situation of absolute want in which black will kill black to be able to survive. This is the basis of the vandalism, murder, rape and plunder that goes on while the real sources of the evil – white society – are suntanning on exclusive beaches or relaxing in their bourgeois homes. (Biko Citation2006, 82; see also Citation2017, 59)
Later in the same essay, he adds:
There is such an obvious aura of immorality and naked cruelty in all that is done in the name of white people that no black man, no matter how intimidated, can ever be made to respect white society. However, in spite of their obvious contempt for the values cherished by whites and the price at which white comfort and security is purchased, blacks seem to me to have been successfully cowed down by the type of brutality that emanates from this section of the community. (Biko Citation2006, 83)
14. In his intervention aiming at the politicisation of theology, titled “Black Consciousness and The Quest for a True Humanity,” Biko gives the following characterisation of BC.
Black Consciousness is an attitude of mind and a way of life, the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time. Its essence is the realisation by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression – the blackness of their skin – and to operate as a group to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perpetual servitude. (Biko Citation2006, 101)
15. That there ended being an inquest into Biko’s death had more to do with the responsiveness of state authorities to international political pressure than a concern with legal sanctions one way or another. Within the context of the interrogation, it was also supposed that Biko had more protection than the average political detainee. By 1977, and especially after his shattering testimony at the SASO/BPC trial in 1976, Biko was a person with a public profile. When he was arrested in August 1977, none of those close to him feared that he would be killed. In his book on Biko, Woods, for instance says the following.
[N]one of us really feared for Steve’s life, nor even that he would be assaulted. He was, we assumed, too important a figure in South African politics, and far too well known among key figures internationally, to come to any harm. In addition, he seemed to have a way of defusing the violent inclinations of interrogators, turning aside anger with humour, calm reason and sheer personality. (Woods Citation1991, 206)
16. In his Louvain Lectures, Foucault begins by (re)defining avowal as a “verbal act through which the subject affirms who he is, binds himself to this truth, places himself in a relationship of dependence with regard to another and modifies at the same time his relationship to himself ” (Citation2014, 17). Notably, in their concluding representation of the lectures in relation to Foucault’s wider project, Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt – not unconvincingly – counterpose the structure of avowal to parrhesia (Citation2014).
17. The discussion that follows is largely based on a reading of Peter Jones’s account of his interrogation, set out inWoods (Citation1991).
18. This is almost literally what Jones was told by the same interrogators who oversaw Biko’s questioning.
19. When, during his court testimony, Biko was asked why he stepped down as president of SASO after serving for just one term, his response also references the decision to use a pseudonym for his column as an example to show a deeper political orientation.
Our belief was essentially that we must attempt to get people to identify with the central core of what you are saying rather than individuals. We must not create a leadership cult, we must centralise people’s attention onto the real message that we carried … It was also the reason why that particular column that I was assigned to write, which is “I write what I like by Frank Talk,” was written under a pseudonym, because if you tend to deal with issues all the time, people tend to relate to the person in terms of their personal affiliation of disaffiliation to him as a person. Now, we wanted them to focus on the message. (Biko Citation2017, 168, my emphasis)
It is also important to note that when the identity of Frank-talk became a legal matter, Biko goes to court and claims these statements as his own (see Biko Citation2017, 58).
20. This is not a typo and appears marked out in the same way in the August and the September issues. Notable as well is the fact that that “talk” is not written as a surname and is marked in lower case.
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Ahmed Veriava
Ahmed Veriava is a writer and researcher who works as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. His recent writing is focused on political theory and politics of infrastructure.