Persona & Parrhesia: Research Notes on the Dialectics of the Real

Matteo Stocchetti

doi:10.21153/ps2017vol3no2art647

Authors

Matteo Stocchetti Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/ps2017vol3no2art647

Keywords:

parrhesia, persona, dialectics of the real, post-digital, post-truth

Abstract

If reality is socially established through practices that, directly or indirectly, depend on communication and therefore on some notion of truth, the idea of a post-truth communicative regime or “age” may seem not only bizarre but also worrying. The dissolution of the real, announced by the prophets of postmodernism in the form of either a “perfect crime” or a “liquid reality”, has been interpreted as the effect of the crisis of truth and legitimation that Jean-François Lyotard (1982) referred to with his notions of “performativity” and “legitimation by force”. From this perspective, reality depends upon truth, and the possibility of truth depends, in turn, on configurations of power that seem too elusive and ephemeral to be effectively engaged with in either theory or practice. In this paper, I mobilise the notions of parrhesia and persona in an effort to establish an alternative standpoint from which to discuss the epistemological and ontological implications of the postmodern condition and the crisis of truth associated with it. The main point can perhaps be summarised in the idea that, if the new regime of truth (or post-truth) relies on persona expressing the roles/characters compatible with it, the notion of parrhesia may gain a critical relevance for the normative evaluation of these personas and the social implications of their truth. Famously reintroduced by Michel Foucault (1999) in his analysis of truth and its discursive conditions, the notion of parrhesia has a heuristic potential that has not been fully exploited. While challenging the social construction of reality on practical grounds in fundamental ways, the digitalisation of social life also presents theoretical challenges, some of which can be addressed by the reconceptualisation of parrhesia in relation to the social role of the persona rather than the individual. In my paper, I present some preliminary research notes in this direction.

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Author Biography

Matteo Stocchetti, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, Finland

Matteo Stocchetti is Associate Professor in Political Communication at Åbo Academy, Associate Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Helsinki, and Principal Lecturer in Critical Media Analysis at Arcada University of Applied Sciences. He is the initiator and main coordinator of the program Media and Education in the Digital Age (MEDA). His recent publications include Storytelling and Education in the Digital Age. Experiences and Criticisms (ed.) (2016) and ‘The way forward: The dawn of the post-digital age in education’ in E-Learning: Practices, lessons learned and the way forward (2016).
http://rdi.arcada.fi/meda/en/
matteo.stocchetti@arcada.fi

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