“They say it’s like the ‘me’ generation. It’s not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It’s self-conscious. That’s what it is. It’s conscious of self. Social media—it’s just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said, here, perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time for no reason. It’s prison. It’s horrific.”
—Bo Burnham, “Make Happy Speech”
Five years after his Make Happy (2016) stand-up routine, Bo Burnham issued the above statement along with another comedy special: Inside (2021). Released by Netflix on May 30, Burnham wrote, composed, filmed, edited, directed, and produced the special by himself.
The premise behind Inside is that Burnham contemplates his isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. He’s exploring not simply himself and his mental health, but also the internet and media culture of late capitalism and, ultimately, what it means to exist as a subject, a self, in the 21st century.
There is no live audience and no crew, just Burnham, the viewers, and their many screens. The entirety of the special takes place in a single room with a keyboard and Burnham’s filming equipment. Brian Logan in The Guardian called it a “comedy Gesamtkunstwerk [‘total work of art’],” and it’s difficult to categorize the special in any other way.
Inside is also a poioumenon (a story about how something is created), as Burnham frequently talks about the process of making the show’s content, mainly skits and songs. Yet, in this story of creation, the line between fiction and nonfiction is blurred. On the one hand, we might be watching Burnham’s artistic process of generating a musical comedy special. On the other, the whole show might itself be a made-up performance or a meta-performance—a performance about how everything is a performance. Alternatively, it could be an extended reflection on how the internet, and particularly social media, makes every subject a performer, turning themselves into “content” for an audience.
In 2016, Burnham, one of the early YouTube stars, referred to social media and what it means to be a content creator as a prison where one is always performing for an audience. This comment is reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s invocation of the panopticon prison design in Discipline and Punish. Burnham pursues this theme further in Inside, describing the panoptic effect: Being knowingly and constantly visible to the extent that power structures manage us, the prisoners, via self-regulation. Without seeing those who watch us, we still monitor our behavior as if they are. Surveillance is a way of life, and that’s exactly what Burnham wants us, the audience, to be aware of.
What we have in the era of social media is not the same. Rather, it’s the choice of intentionally putting yourself forward to be watched. Throughout the entirety of Inside, Burnham is doing the very thing he’s critiquing, the thing that once gave him panic attacks. He is performing, entertaining, creating content, all the while knowing that participation in social institutions makes us docile subjects who want what’s ultimately very bad for us.
In Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality, he argues that historically the subject is constituted through relations of power and discursive practices—and he explains this through the ways people then perceive themselves as mad, sexual, sick, etc. His later works focus on the self as also self-constituting, which is maybe a better place to turn to understand the dynamic of Burnham’s Inside.
In his 1981–1982 lecture course Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault goes beyond his previous emphasis on the self as constituted and explains the self-constituting subject as included in governmentality broadly. That is, governmentality is a “strategic field of power relations” not merely in a political sense, but necessarily must include the subject, defined by the relationship of self to self. He explains that “…power relations, governmentality, the government of the self and others, and the relationship of self to self constitute a chain, a thread” thus connecting politics and ethics.
Foucault goes on to discuss how contemporary expressions such as “being oneself” and “being authentic” lack meaning, now usurped by the multi-billion-dollar self-improvement industry. These invocations of the self make it nearly impossible to constitute an ethics of the self. Nevertheless, the ethics of the self, or the relationship one has to oneself, Foucault claims, is the final point of resistance to political power.
Foucault argued in his 1979 Birth of Politics lectures that neoliberalism produces subjects that are “entrepreneurs of themselves,” which sounds very much like a contemporary content creator or influencer with a “personal brand.” Likewise, ideas such as “being yourself” or “being authentic” are familiar in contemporary discourse but are just as empty as they were for Foucault in the early 1980s. You are encouraged to work on yourself, to practice self-care, but what can such an ethic really mean in a world that runs on profit motives, where your “self” is also your “brand”?
Burnham tackles these issues in Inside. In one skit, he makes a reaction video of himself reacting to the previous video (and then reacting to the reaction video in a regress), putting himself in the dual role of performer and observer. After he criticizes his performance, he says, “I’m so worried that criticism will be levied against me that I levy it against myself before anyone else can. And I think that, ‘Oh, if I’m self-aware about being a douchebag, it’ll somehow make me less of a douchebag.’ But it—but it doesn’t. Um, self-awareness does not absolve anybody of anything.”
Not only does Burnham point out that this idea of “self-awareness” is empty, he adds that it is bereft of ethical value. Awareness of the self is not a point of resistance. The techniques of power that Foucault examined in previous works are still operative, and Burnham seems aware that he is trapped inside them. Immediately after this skit, Burnham starts singing about Jeffrey Bezos and then stops himself and says to the audience: “…maybe, um, allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit… maybe that was, uh, a bad call by us… maybe the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, um, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley… maybe that, as a way of life forever… maybe that’s, um, not good.”
The problem with subject formation emerges, Foucault explains, when systems of power treat the individual as a site of control. The modern state (i.e., in the contemporary Western neoliberal tradition) appears as a totalizing and individualizing force. In other words, the state manages entire populations and identifies individuals through domination, exploitation, and subjection. The form of power exercised on everyday life categorizes individuals and assigns them their identity. As editor Frédéric Gros explains in the course notes to Hermeneutics of the Subject, “it imposes on them a law of truth that must be recognized in them. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects.”
Through neoliberal governmentality, individuals are controlled from “inside,” and we see this in Burnham’s special. Not only are we adept at self-surveillance through social media, we define ourselves and brand ourselves using categories that come from outside, that issue from operations of exploitation. If you make a living as a “content creator,” then your livelihood depends on being observed, scrutinized, and surveilled as an individual.
As we watch Burnham producing the special, it appears that he is fully and freely responsible for himself and what he creates. But this “freedom,” too, is part of the technologies of domination and, specifically, how people regulate themselves. Indeed, this is the United States’ approach to the pandemic Burnham is reacting to. It’s an individual choice to get vaccinated, to quarantine, to socially distance, but there’s effectively no other reasonable choice when public health infrastructure is lacking.
For Foucault, the relationship with the self is our primary relationship; it is also a site of regulation, and the care of the self regulates action. In a skit with Socko (a sock puppet), Burnham asks how he can help and be a better person, and the puppet says, “Why do you rich fucking white people insist on seeing every socio-political conflict through the myopic lens of your own self-actualization? This isn’t about you. So either get with it, or get out of the fucking way.”
You could level a similar criticism at Foucault. But the ethics of the self, at least, isn’t self-actualization, because self-actualization in Burnham’s use of the term also has been usurped by power structures. Remember the care of the self is meant to be an ethics, and thus necessarily connected to politics. Liberation must be from the state and from the forms of individualization of the state, as well as from transcendent values or socially conditioned norms. Foucault points out that to try to find “true identities” or “equal rights” still means playing by the state’s rules and its restrictive institutions. The aim is to find a new style of life, one that isn’t individual or communal, but relational and transversal.
Foucault says that the care of the self involves living with a style, to create oneself as a work of art, in order to situate oneself correctly in the world. But this call to refuse the subjectivities imposed on us is a bit dissatisfying. It loosely resembles the way in which Burnham’s special ends: He goes outside, only to be trapped there, too.
Burnham doesn’t get to an ethics of the self that serves as a point of resistance. But, of course, care of the self is always meant to be a process—an action and not an ending. Maybe Burnham’s special has value insofar as it inspired him to act, to create, in a way that was novel for him.
So where does this Foucauldian analysis of Bo Burnham’s Inside leave us? Foucault traces concepts through history rather than offering guidance on what to do now. But, at the very least, we know that when Foucault said to live as a work of art, he probably wasn’t speaking to the contemporary act of creating content, a phenomenon that Burnham criticizes through his own acts of artistic creativity, or content creation.
Heidi Samuelson
Heidi Samuelson earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of Memphis in 2012 and currently works as an editor at a history museum (a job which, ironically, involves creating content). Heidi has written numerous articles for Open Court’s popular culture and philosophy series and occasionally overshares on Medium.
