Flower Thrower (or Love is in the Air), 2003

Banksy’s famous mural of a masked man frozen forever in the instant before he unleashes not a brick or a bomb but a bouquet of flowers may seem, at first blush, to exemplify a pacifist’s commitment to peaceful disobedience. The work appears to echo the precepts of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha – a philosophy of non-violence that the Indian ethicist coined in 1919. Banksy’s fully flexed figure, incongruously armed with a fistful of beauty, appears to epitomise Gandhi’s insistence on wielding moral, not physical, strength. Doesn’t it? Or has Banksy slyly subverted the philosophical assertion of pacifistic force by portraying his hero as an enraged rioter? The figure’s anger has not been tempered by an appeal to the higher ideals of beauty and truth. Instead, those ideals have been weaponised by Banksy. Here, beauty and truth are not disarming, they are devastatingly explosive.

Banksy’s mural in Marseille employs a tried-and-true technique to ensure the work protrudes into the urban space in which we’ll encounter it – elevating its philosophical potential from something flimsy and flat to something undeniably urgent. It’s a tactic he used in a 2007 work that appeared near London’s Oxford Street in which he depicts a boy atop a precariously high ladder, spray-painting the penetrating observation that we are “One Nation Under CCTV” in outlandishly outsized letters. Also portrayed within the mural is a uniformed officer and his obedient police dog who surveil the young vandal, while above them all an actual CCTV camera, presumably recording everything, juts out from the wall. The endless layers of surveillance-within-surveillance to which the work attests – as we watch the state watch an officer watch the boy – captures with uncanny precision the philosophical contours of the vast and all-encompassing prison machine in which the French poststructural philosopher Michel Foucault believed everyone in society was now irredeemably enmeshed. In Foucault’s study Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, he resuscitates a blueprint for a prison proposed by the British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th Century, “The Panopticon” (meaning “all seeing”), and uses it as a menacing metaphor for how no one can escape the perniciously penetrating eye of the panoptical state.

Banksy’s witty 2014 work Mobile Lovers shines a chilling light on the state of contemporary relationships. The mural depicts a couple whose almost affectionate embrace is interrupted by the deeper fondness they have for the warm glow of their smartphones. The French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who died in 1986, may not have lived long enough to witness the emergence of mobiles. Yet her profoundly influential 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity – published exactly 60 years before the iPhone was launched in 2007 – with its exploration of the devastation that detachment and disconnection can wreak on the realisation of our truest selves, is profoundly proleptic of our modern predicament. To be free, de Beauvoir insisted, requires a deep attentiveness to each other. She believed in the authenticity of human encounters, without which life is a futile performance, dimly lit by disposable devices, rather than something profound and meaningful.