Parrhēsia, artisans and the possibilities for deliberate practice

Abstract

In this chapter, I have used the historical figure of the artisan to develop a critique of the limits of present health care practice. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s later works on truth telling (parrhēsia) and Hannah Arendt’s writings on action, making, behaviour and fabrication, I offer the possibility that a revised notion of the artisan practitioner may offer insights into how our practice may become more deliberate in the future. Artisan practitioners fell into decline as industrialisation, capitalism privileged fabrication over ‘hand-made’ craft—a point not lost on Arendt who argued that our culture had become tainted by ‘making’ and ‘behaviourism’ at the expense of ‘action’, which had an important self-constituting function. Foucault echoed this critique, arguing that the care of the self relied on one’s ability to speak the truth to another, and that this exercise carried significant personal risks. State authorities had learnt to use truth telling as a confessional technology to encourage docility, but Foucault argued for an aesthetics of existence that confronted and challenged the limits of this governmental and juridical response. The (post)modern artisan represents an exemplar of a practitioner that, I believe, would find favour with both Arendt and Foucault. Self-aware, critical, and comfortable with the complexity and ambiguity of health care today, the artisan is examined as a parrhēsiast and as a practitioner committed to action: the very model of the deliberate professional.