Foucault and the Meaning of a Resignation

I could hardly have planned a better start to the week than the scandal surrounding the splicing together of parts of a Trump speech and the response from the BBC. This news story goes to the heart of Michel Foucault and his warning to the world about institutions. Tim Davy resigned from the BBC after pressure built around recent internal mistakes and questions about how the organisation had handled them. The BBC presented the decision as a natural step to restore confidence and keep the institution steady.

The official explanations were brisk and tidy: standards, process, trust, accountability. Events like this always arrive pre-wrapped in the language of order, as if a clean narrative can settle the public mood. But the more interesting question is not what happened, but why institutions respond the way they do. A resignation is never just a resignation. It is a moment where an organisation tries to steady the ground beneath it.

Institutions fear uncertainty more than error. Removing a figure at the top offers a sense of stability, a way of saying: nothing is out of control, the structure still works, something has been done. It also creates a manageable story. Without an act like this, the narrative is diffuse, unpredictable. With it, we get a beginning, middle, and end. One person becomes the symbol around which the whole event can be organised. The system itself remains largely untouched.

This is exactly the kind of moment Michel Foucault found fascinating. He never cared about individual scandal; he cared about the machinery humming quietly behind the scenes. He would look at this episode and see a ritual, a method by which an institution purifies itself in public. The resignation becomes a performance of transparency. The BBC signals accountability, but the deeper structures driving decisions, relationships, and norms stay out of sight. The act resolves the tension without exposing the mechanism.

Foucault would also see how the story narrows onto a single figure. When something goes wrong inside a complex organisation, the problems are usually widespread, multi-layered, and shared across departments and habits. But modern institutions prefer to personalise fault. By placing everything onto one individual, they convert systemic ambiguity into a neat tale of responsibility. The “subject of fault,” to use a Foucauldian phrase, becomes the lightning rod through which pressure is discharged. The institution survives by concentrating blame rather than distributing it.

Perhaps most interesting to Foucault would be the language the BBC and others use in moments like this. Words like “professionalism,” “values,” “unacceptable behaviour,” or “independence” sound neutral, but they create a framework that guides how the public interprets the event. They define what counts as an explanation and what doesn’t. They shape what questions are legitimate to ask. For Foucault, this is not accidental. It is how modern power works, not through censorship or force, but by constructing the boundaries of acceptable sense-making. Power operates by shaping what feels like the normal, reasonable conclusion.

A different philosopher would see this in a gentler light. Someone like Hannah Arendt (she is never far away) might focus on the fragility of public trust, the need for responsibility, and the civic importance of restoring faith in shared institutions. Where Foucault sees systems defending themselves, Arendt sees people trying to preserve the space where public life can happen at all. The contrast is not about politics but about what each thinks is at stake: Foucault looks for hidden structures, Arendt for the moral architecture of community life.

Strengthening the Foucauldian view means stepping deeper into his way of analysing events. He would ask where the current standards came from, how earlier controversies shaped today’s responses, how certain behaviours became visible and others invisible. He would note that institutions regulate conduct not only through explicit rules but through managerial expectations, unstated norms, and subtle pressures that guide people long before any crisis occurs. He would listen to the language surrounding the resignation and treat it as a map of where power sits and how it moves.

This kind of reading isn’t about taking sides. It’s about noticing the quiet mechanisms that sit behind public events. A resignation like this is the surface. The more interesting story, Foucault’s story, is the structure beneath it: how institutions preserve themselves, how narratives are shaped, how responsibility is allocated, and how power works most effectively when it appears simply to be maintaining normality.