From participation to cancellation- the realpolitik of the participatory turn. 4th draft
A critical claim is that participation was hijacked for political purposes, such as representing participation. If the participants never really participated (as Furedi claims), using these formats itself was a political hijacking of art. I claim that the participants participated in something, that was not art making, or political engagement as dissensus (Mouffe ibid). It was a subjectivation ritual, which was politically instrumentalized. The ‘politics’ network I encountered generally considered art as a means to political ends, such as gaining symbolic legitimacy, or at most a set of strategies for moral posturing, yet it generated much more than discourse and effects on the discursive register; performances, festivals, workshops, and other participatory formats channelled affects and subjectified their subjects. The focus on discourse, and ‘reasoned dialogue’ hid the register where these events exerted effects. Through ‘politics’, I encountered the “critical constructivists” that Bruno Latour (2003, 2005) warned us about: a social milieu with a consensus that all social relations are structured by power, and the ‘social’ is nothing but the interplay of domination, legitimization, fetishization, reification. I was constantly instructed that everything is politics. I naively thought it was supposed to mean everything has an ideological underpinning. But instead, it meant that everything is a power struggle. According to a social constructivist worldview, and the ‘all is politics’ dogma, all value came from other people, so more and more was taken. Rituals of subjectivation and representation became sacrificial rituals, just as there is an emerging discourse recognizing cancel culture as human sacrifice.
Again, I would like to stress the limitations of autoethnography, but other data is likely going to be biased as well. The Milgram experiment is very well known, but a not so well known fact is that many research subjects were traumatized, and sought compensation (Perry 2013). Both practitioners and scholars should recognize arts-based participation has the potential to extend into unpredictability and mysteries, and to such cruelty and depravity which is cancellation. I would argue that the real hijacking was channelling art through participation to the register of politics, and where participation really has led was just where art began: cultus and ritual.
