Anwen Crawford: I just want to clarify something with regard to this discussion about ‘going public’, from my own perspective, because there seems to be a misunderstanding that what I’m in favour of is not being read, which also implies having no real ambition regarding the quality of one’s work (because who cares if it’s any good, if no one will read it?). I want to draw a distinction, because it’s an important distinction, to me, between having one’s work published and/or circulated, which of course implies a ‘public’ (and I count the self-publishing models of zines and blogs as forms that imply a reading public; indeed I agree with Simon that all writing implies a reader and I would include both diary and letter writing in this, too), and being a
public figure.
To me, desiring the former does not mean you have to want the latter, or that you should be made to feel like you
should want it. Carl put it very well [in the previous instalment] as the ‘desire to speak and be heard but not to be seen, to be central to something without being the centre of attention’.
But it makes me quite cranky when the distinction between public work and public fame is collapsed, i.e. if you don’t want the latter thing, fame, then you mustn’t care, really, about whether your work is any good. To my mind, nothing could be further from the truth. I believe in self-effacement, in the sense of being able to choose to be ‘faceless’ to the public, of masking, pseudonymity, anonymity, all those things that blogs did so well — but I don’t think it means having to shrink one’s political and artistic ambitions, nor do I think it necessarily means giving up on ‘competition’ in the sense of being spurred on to do better things by argument, discussion, other people’s work, and so on. It’s not the only model, but it’s
a model, and to my mind perhaps a more promising model than the left trying to find itself some ‘charismatic’ TV stars. The logic of personal fame — and social media is owned and engineered by people who fetishise the anti-democracy of fame — will only ever trap us within a dull, reductive model of everyone-as-their-own-brand. I don’t think that strategising through/about swarms, masks, crowds or ‘facelessness’ is at all trivial, given the context we’re living in with regards to the mass surveillance machine of the current internet.
I’m still interested in the project of a counterculture for the
present, not just as a substitute or a consolation for the failure of political projects, but as something connected
with a political project? And I don’t think pop music, per se, is the vehicle for this — I don’t think it was ever able to be, not in the 60s, or 70s, or now; not as an art form wholly produced by, and within, the logic of capitalism, alluring as the dream of revolution-through-pop might be. But music outside of the pop machine, theatre, visual art, writing, film, architecture — all of these have potential to be reimagined by us, reinvigorated by us. This is the
popular culture I’m thinking of, though I’m also thinking, here, of the Situationist line that art as a ‘specialised field’ must be overcome….
Rhian E. Jones: I did particularly want to second Anwen’s distinction between placing importance on finding a reading/viewing/listening public and being a public figure, and there being no need for one to follow on from the other.
I do wonder if the current inability to separate the reading public from being a public figure is a result of not only the apparent generational loss of the idea of the public intellectual (not that that tradition was without its problems), but also the loss in the 90s, and after, of the idea of political writers, activists, spokespeople, etc. having a representative function that was wider than themselves. With an elected position like trade union leader it’s fairly obvious from where you derive your authority, but when you’re an individual left/liberal pundit it’s less obvious and so — increasingly, at least in the last decade — there’s a tendency to appeal to personal validity and integrity to explain where you’re coming from through an articulation of the circumstances that have shaped you personally, rather than a materialist appeal to the section of society you’re seen to represent. You couldn’t merely be doing an ‘ordinary’ job and be an ‘ordinary’ person — or be dissatisfied, alienated and struggling financially in the fairly mundane way common to millions under late-stage capitalism — and just think socialism was a good idea.
Some of this has eventuated in what’s now called ‘
authentocracy’ but, like all of this, it’s been a long time coming. We now have almost the reverse of that desire to be heard but not seen; the first principle of media recognition or attention for individuals who [now] attempt to say something political is: ‘is this person interesting enough to be seen?’ rather than ‘is what this person is saying interesting enough to be heard?’, and individuals often seem to have internalised that in how they approach both traditional and social media. Even before social media, decades of the mediatisation of politics also meant a concentration on charismatic individuals at the expense of mass involvement with party democracy. The media’s huge emphasis on individual charisma — and when it isn’t present, the insistence that it is — when pushing particular political figures or pundits has intersected really destructively with this. I seem to recall Novara’s roots were broadly Situationist (were they part of the
Deterritorial Support Group, or am I misremembering?), so I tend to cut them a bit of slack, but I also regret their turn from research and analysis to punditry. How well Mark could have fitted into this media landscape, or attempted to alter or subvert it, I don’t know.
How much Huel does he have in a day? I think we need to know.
