The Ideology Technology of Infinite Interpretation: On Michel Foucault, Elizabeth Holmes, and the Lives of the Truly Infamous

“It’s heartbreaking. The whole thing is very wild,” Amanda Seyfried remarked of Elizabeth Holmes in the documentary You Can See Everything. What struck us about this observation was not its sympathy, but the possibility of sympathy itself. Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, has become an object of seemingly inexhaustible interpretation. Was she a grand manipulator, a delusional entrepreneur, a product of Silicon Valley’s mythology, or a woman whose ambition exceeded her capacity to realize it?

Whether Holmes is any of these things is ultimately beside the point. Nathan Fielder’s immersion into Holmes’ world makes this quite clear, as he reveals to the public still more layers of her identity. She is presented as a mother, a wife, a victim of her own love, a star-crossed romantic, a courageous devotee of a professional vision, a person incapable of lying, a person incapable even of understanding double meanings. These interpretations need not be reconciled. Indeed, their contradictions only compound her narrative, each new characterization offering another opportunity to discover some supposedly essential truth about Holmes.

Amanda Seyfried, however, begins to question whether Fielder himself has been drawn into Holmes’ world, suggesting that there may be something protective about his reenactments of their encounters. A Reddit user, Michaelarobards, interprets this possibility through the psychoanalytic concept of countertransference, in which a therapist’s emotional responses to a patient, shaped partly by the therapist’s own experiences and unconscious associations, begin to influence the therapeutic relationship. Although Fielder is not Holmes’ therapist, the analogy is revealing.

His prolonged immersion in her life may have complicated his ability to distinguish observation from emotional investment. Yet whether Fielder has actually become protective of Holmes is no more essential to our argument than whether Holmes herself is performing a character. What matters is that the possibility of his countertransference becomes another occasion to interpret her, extending the narrative beyond Holmes’ actions to encompass the psychological relationship between investigator and subject.

And to be clear, this is not a clinical interpretation of the psychological dynamic between Fielder and Holmes, but rather another example of how possibilities for interpretation are seemingly infinite.

Holmes’ narrative is sustained in its complexity by what we would call an ideology technology of infinite interpretation. It is the social and cultural mechanism through which certain individuals are consistently furnished with new interpretations of their identities, allowing their public narratives to exceed the institutional judgments made against them. To be clear, this ideology technology does not require favorable interpretations. It requires the continued availability of competing interpretations.

The technology is potentially self-perpetuating because each interpretation can itself become the subject of further interpretation. The question is no longer simply who Holmes is, but why Fielder represents her as he does, why Seyfried questions his relationship to her, and why audiences interpret those questions through still other frameworks (including this essay). The identity under investigation becomes the occasion for an expanding network of interpretations, none of which necessarily brings the inquiry to a definitive conclusion.

This ideology technology exists because of social and cultural reality, but it is not endowed to all persons in all contexts. For clarity, Michel Foucault asks (165) in his essay, “The Lives of Infamous Men,” “Why this emphatic theater of the quotidian?” The question emerges from his examination of obscure individuals whose lives survived in historical records because they encountered institutional power. Their existence was preserved not through literary achievement, political influence, or extraordinary social standing, but through accusations, petitions, police reports, and administrative judgments. These were people whose lives became visible precisely because institutions found reason to condemn, confine, or otherwise intervene in them.

Foucault distinguishes (163) these individuals from historically notorious figures such as the Marquis de Sade, whose existence cannot be reduced to the institutional documents recording his transgressions. Sade possesses an independent literary and historical identity. His life can be interpreted through his writings, philosophy, relationships, and cultural legacy. The obscure individuals Foucault examines are not necessarily afforded that privilege. Their lives reach us through the institutions that have already interpreted, classified, and transformed them.

Where Foucault examines the institutional circumstances through which otherwise obscure lives become historically visible, the question here concerns the conditions under which an individual’s public identity can remain interpretable beyond any particular institutional encounter or judgment.

This distinction becomes particularly revealing in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, who, despite her public disgrace, is not infamous in Foucault’s particular sense. Her identity is not confined to the institutional records of her transgressions; rather, she is endowed with the ideology technology of infinite interpretation.

Consider the difference between Holmes and an ordinary individual appearing on the television program Cops. Holmes receives documentaries, dramatizations, biographies, and extended investigations into her character. The person on Cops may receive only a few minutes of footage documenting an encounter with law enforcement. One becomes the subject of a biography; the other becomes the subject of an incident report.

Looking at a specific Cops moment, Season 16, Episode 18, titled, “Not Your Papi” features an interaction between Officer Damiano and a suspect named John ducking into an apartment building hallway to smoke crack and marijuana. When the suspect repeatedly calls him "papi" (or "poppy") while pleading for a break, Damiano famously shuts it down with: "I ain't your papi!" and proceeds to call him out for previous run-ins.

Now, the viewer here typically isn’t running through a maze of interpretation about John. Of course, interpretation is possible, but the show itself and the dynamic of the officer and the potential perp do not encourage this. There is a sort of comedy that comes at the expense of John’s “papi” usage and the response of the police officer, but beyond that there is little character afforded to John.

What is happening here is that while John is visible, he is not readily interpretable. Or rather, the conditions of public interpretation are largely absent; there is no inherent lack of interpretability. His identity is framed largely through his encounters with the police. The viewer learns almost nothing about the life that exists beyond those encounters. Holmes is obviously visible too, but her visibility is accompanied by a proliferation of competing characterizations.

For all intents and purposes, the Holmes documentary endows her with the missing types of characterizations that other interpretations did not afford. In particular, the notion that she may be a victim and her mental idiosyncrasies allow for a certain effusion of those parts to escape the whole of her legal and criminal troubles in a social and ideological sense.

No, this does not mean that she escapes her prison sentence. Rather, it means that doubt can be cast on whether her legal and criminal troubles constitute a sufficient interpretation of her character. Within this maze of interpretation, her criminal identity becomes one characterization among many, rather than the definitive account of who she is.

What has yet to be explored is why Holmes receives the ideology technology of infinite interpretation and people like John do not.

Holmes was a celebrated entrepreneur before becoming a convicted fraudster. Her proximity to wealth and professional institutions helped make her someone worthy of investigation.

For example, the film reveals that Ryan "Egypt" El-Hosseiny has taken it upon himself to champion Holmes and Theranos through billboards in Los Angeles under a venture called Just Blood.

John, on the other hand, enters the public narrative through a police encounter.

The distinction is not simply that Holmes is wealthy and John is not, but rather that Holmes enters the public imagination with an established identity that her conviction—and people’s understanding of the conviction—must compete against.

This is one of the reasons why the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has a maze-like quality to it that is separate from the classified or redacted information. Even without presenting a list of the individuals accused of having engaged in illegal island activity, many of these individuals have established identities that bestow upon them the ideology technology of infinite interpretation.

But this ideology technology, when confronted with the British royal family, appears to have its limits as King Charles III strips Prince Andrew of titles and evicts him from his royal residence over Epstein ties.

This might suggest the limit of the ideology technology, but it is rather an example that people can remain the subject of multiple competing narratives while losing titles and institutional standing.

What, then, is the factor that determines who is afforded this ideology technology? Social class is an easy answer, but it is not the precise one and it is not the one that will be extended here.

The central factor is an individual’s proximity to institutions capable of sustaining a public identity beyond any single event or judgment. This proximity enables a technology of interpretation through which journalists, filmmakers, cultural commentators, and other social actors continually produce, circulate, and renew competing characterizations of an individual. It is a technology not in the mechanical sense, but in its capacity to reproduce a particular social outcome: an identity that remains open to interpretation even after an institution has rendered its judgment.

Its ideological character lies in the assumptions governing whose identities are considered worthy of sustained interpretation and whose identities can be sufficiently understood through a single institutional representation. These assumptions need not be consciously held by any particular individual; they operate through the ordinary practices by which certain lives become subjects of continuing cultural investigation while others remain confined to the circumstances of their initial public visibility.

The ideology shapes the technology, and the technology reproduces the ideology.

It is not a rigid class entitlement but rather a socially structured privilege.

Although social class influences an individual’s proximity to institutions capable of sustaining public identity, it does not fully explain the distribution of interpretive privilege. What matters is the broader social organization of recognition. This raises a further question: How might interpretive complexity be democratized without reproducing the institutional scrutiny through which it is currently made available? To begin answering that question, we must recognize the complexity of those whom Foucault describes as truly infamous rather than accept the limited representations through which their lives become publicly visible.

What Holmes and the extended investigations into her character reveal is the ideology technology that functions as a pharmakon—both poison and cure, as explored by Jacques Derrida in his analysis of Plato’s Phaedrus (70). The cure here lies in the possibility of recognizing an individual beyond the institutional judgments made against them. Holmes is afforded opportunities to be understood not merely as a convicted fraudster, but as a mother, a wife, an entrepreneur, and a person whose motivations and experiences cannot be exhausted by her criminal conviction. Yet the poison emerges from the very process that makes this recognition possible. Each additional interpretation invites further scrutiny, speculation, and the commercialization of her identity, transforming the complexity of a human life into an inexhaustible public spectacle. The same ideology technology that allows Holmes to exceed the institutional judgment made against her also subjects her to new forms of interpretation over which she may have little control. What appears to be an expansion of her humanity may simultaneously become another means of appropriating it.

Fielder’s prolonged immersion in Holmes’ life further illuminates this pharmakon. His proximity to Holmes creates opportunities for a more intimate understanding of her experiences, yet that same intimacy exposes her to additional scrutiny and speculation.

And yet, the privilege of this ideology technology is not in the favorable character of its interpretations, nor even in their consequences for the individual, but in the socially sustained possibility that no single institutional judgment will exhaust their public identity.

John, on the other hand, is afforded no comparable opportunity within the program for his experiences to become the subject of sustained interpretation. Where Holmes’ understanding of language, personal relationships, and motivations becomes material for further inquiry, John’s alleged substance use and previous encounters with law enforcement largely define his public representation. This does not mean that John lacks the capacity for reflection, nor that his personal life is devoid of relationships, resources, or opportunities for rehabilitation. Rather, these dimensions remain unavailable to the viewer.

The answer, then, is not to furnish John with an endless succession of documentaries, investigations, and competing psychological portraits. Indeed, different events do warrant different degrees of public investigation. Further, such attention might merely expose him to additional forms of institutional power. The answer, rather, is to recognize that the absence of these interpretations does not signify the absence of complexity. If Holmes’ public identity can continually exceed the institutional judgment made against her, there is no reason to assume that John’s identity begins and ends with his encounter with law enforcement. The possibility of sympathy that initially struck us in Seyfried’s remark should not itself be a privilege reserved for those whose lives have already become objects of cultural fascination.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. "Plato's Pharmacy." Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 61-171.

Foucault, Michel. "Lives of Infamous Men." Power, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley and others, vol. 3 of Essential Worksof Foucault, 1954-1984

Michaelarobards. "The new Elizabeth Holmes documentary is the best depiction of unexamined countertransference I've seen, and the fix in the film is basically supervision." Reddit, r/therapists, https://www.reddit.com/r/therapists/comments/1x8j8ev/the_new_elizabeth_holmes_documentary_is_the_best/.

"Not Your Papi." Cops, season 16, episode 18, 2004.

You Can See Everything. Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, A24, 2026.