ARKive post 4 — Kamini Vellodi
It is thrilling to see this relaunch of ARK, with the new name of Parrhesia. Could there be a more fitting title for our turbulent times?
Parrhesia (from pan (everything), rhema (that which is said)) is speaking frankly, fearlessly, saying everything without hiding – the speaking of the truth. It is when individuals speak out, even at risk to themselves. Parrhesia takes courage, because something is said that is different to what the majority thinks. It is necessarily difficult.
Michel Foucault tells us:
“Parrhesia is the courage of truth in the person who speaks and who, regardless of everything, takes the risk of telling the whole truth that he thinks, but it is also the interlocutor’s courage in agreeing to accept the hurtful truth that he hears.”
In that sense the value of parrhesia is not only in the telling of truth to power. It is in the receiving of this truth, and the transformation of the self/other through listening. In other words, its value lies as an experience of alterity.
Parrhesia can of course be misused. When Foucault studied parrhesia in the context of the crisis of democratic institutions in 4th Century Greece, he called attention to how everyone saying everything they wanted to, without qualification, even ignorant and immoral things, could lead to stupidity and tyranny.
From our vantage point today, this insight seems uncannily prophetic. Today – with the complicity of social media – the forums that appear to enable everyone, including those in power, to say everything and anything “without qualification”, with the tyrannies shaking the world – “Truth Social” – what counts as critique is seriously threatened. Our current global crises are marked by the polarisations and divisions, the identity politics that separate and draw ever harsher borders, fuelling extremisms, authoritarianisms, vengeful nationalisms and fanaticisms. As we struggle to make sense of what defies sense, amidst the unhinging of western liberalism and its institutions, the rise of the far right and the politics of ignorance and hatred driving resurgent injustices, systemic violence, erasures, and abuses, alongside intensifying censorships, the urgency of an ethics of alterity that refuses to be silenced presses upon us.
There is an urgency to emphasise that truth-telling is less about telling (and then defending) “my truth” or “your truth”, but the relational act, the spaces of connection, where truth becomes a site not of absolutism but of negotiation, exchange, dialogue, translation, listening. Of making spaces for difference, human and non-human. Of inhabiting the between-spaces, living in the interstices, forging the interstitial sites of a planetary community.
Our educational spaces are vital sites for this affirmation. And today they must be fiercely defended. As we witness the threat to universities racking the United States and the United Kingdom, parrhesia as a pedagogical value has never been more urgent. It is incumbent upon us to affirm our educational spaces as sites of dialogue, of learning in relation to others, of self-interrogation as a collective act; the necessity of posing difficult questions, of dissensus.
As artists and educators in an art school we have the opportunity to continually affirm art’s distinctive relation to parrhesia. Art opens the spaces for the interrogation of received truths and facts; it invites us to look closer, see what is ordinarily unseen, think again, feel differently. Art may invite us to dissent, to risk, to resist, to bear witness, to pay attention, to inject the unexpected into the normative, intervene in the sensible; to embrace multiplicity, otherness and interstitiality, and to remind us of what we share, our being-in-common. Art may be the vehicle of conveying the memories of the present, and the invitation to imagine things otherwise, imagine futures.
These are not academic questions, but experiential and lived conditions. Neither are they unfamiliar, as the global histories of art, and not only its 20th-century avant-garde moments, insistently remind us. Here at the RCA, we are so fortunate to be an extraordinary plural, transnational community of multiple voices. Listening to each other, being open to changing ourselves in relation to the work others make, collaborating across borders, we can keep striving to instil a practice of relationality grounded in an ethics of alterity. ARK always stood for experiment, radicalism, creative freedom, and a spirit of collaboration. Launching with an aim to “cut through the noise”, this first issue of the revamped ARK couldn’t be more timely.