REKLÁM: Cancel Culture or the Realpolitik of the Participatory Turn

 publikálva itt: https://folyoirat.ludovika.hu/index.php/kome/article/view/7621/5972

Háttérinfó: az alább idézett részben Éber Márk szerepel. Aki szeretné, megnézheti a videót itt. Részletes sztori a régebbi blogposztokban. Röviden új olvasóknak: Éber Márk egy baloskodó szélhámos, aki majd elmegy a gyártósorra a Samsungban, és mondja a Józsinak, hogy hé Józsi, változtassuk meg a magyar társadalom osztályszerkezetét! A Józsi kortyol egyet a Hellből, és néz, hogy heee? Józsi is tudja amit bárki tudhatna, aki nem teljesen ostoba vagy agymosott- az absztrakciók csak absztrakciók. Részletesen a témáról a publikációban.

I had no idea about the realities of a political movement, and it would have never crossed my mind to join one. I sought to make tactical media art, inspired by feminist literature. Together with a friend and other collaborators, through NGO funding, my first project was abortourism.com, a tactical media site showcasing the differences between reproductive healthcare policies and providing fictional travel packages for women in need of such healthcare. My co-author (a friend from art school, who nowadays runs a sustainable urban mushroom farm) quit as soon as we started to get involved with the media and NGO networks. As she told me, reflecting on that social milieu: “I thought I was getting into feminism, but that was hell.” It should have been a wake-up call. I did not quit but got involved ever deeper within this entangled network of lobbyists, journalists, politicians and academics.

As expected, both myself and my work were attacked, but that was all manageable – until I drew the ire of a local intersectional community. Then it was a standard and predictable case of cancellation, a string of disproportionate and sadistic personal attacks. What happened on the level of stories was absurd and petty, but the dynamic was psychopathological: scapegoating, with aggressors posing as victims, made-up legal threats, gaslighting, stalking, lies and slander. Some of my so-called collaborators were worse than the mob – they wanted me to bear this like a saint (or rather a doormat). I was expected to cease to be myself, but instead to think of myself as a representative of the local feminist movement, whose interests were supposed to supersede my own sense of self-preservation and basic moral compass. In hindsight, I realised if the left means anything, it means a modus operandi, a networked mode of collectivity that surpasses individual autonomy and free will. When I first encountered leftists and leftism, they did not bother me because I thought the whole concept of the left was so vague that it did not mean anything. The concept might indeed have been vague, but the network-building activity behind it was real and top-down. In the lead-up to the 2014 Hungarian election and beyond, broadly unpopular left-liberal opposition politicians formed a coalition (Összefogás, literally meaning ‘coalition’) entangled with the largely transnationally supported and left-liberal NGO – civic network, strategically centred around female politicians. To compensate for their lack of popular support, they sought symbolic legitimacy by aligning with progressive causes such as feminism through collaboration with NGOs. Both my so-called collaborators and cancellers were part of this network, or at least the network tried to assimilate them, so that when I attempted to establish boundaries and defend myself, I only added to my list of supposed offenses.At some point in 2018, I reported one of my cancellers for plagiarism. This was not a simple case of plagiarism but involved a reading of a 20-minute conference speech straight out of Google Books (translated from English into Hungarian), and running a column based on unreferenced Jacobin article translations. Bringing this to attention would have meant disturbing the network-building efforts and tarnishing the image of the feminist–leftist activist network. So instead, I was castigated and not the plagiarist. At that point, I realised that only representations of moral superiority or acceptable positions mattered. A researcher was not expected to produce knowledge, they only had to be a representation of a researcher and, above all, an obedient node in the network. I was bullied out of a so-called research group, whose members organised the conference where the plagiarist gave a speech. I was accused of being “unsafe” and “threatening” and, as a consequence, a fellow member of this organisation (who sat on stage next to the plagiarist whilst she read her speech from Google Books) wrote a letter about me, besmirching my character, yet failing to mention the cause of the conflict, that is, the plagiarism. The letter contained a paragraph about how I was allegedly asked not to participate at events (to quote verbatim) “in the art field”, as if that were an objectively existing entity and not an analytical tool. I have never heard of this ever happening before. It would never have occurred to me to ask this of anyone, and I had facilitated, visited and taken part in many art events before, unlike my self-appointed prosecutor (who is a macrosociologist of world system theory and an aspiring leftist movement leader). I realised then that he was projecting his own modus operandi onto the aforementioned art field. As if, from a ceramics workshop to the Budapest branch of the Ludwig Museum, cultural workers were consciously investing in the art field in the same way aspiring leftist politicians build their network, as emerging politicians forge platforms out of local grassroots movements.At this point, I realised that the structuring axiom of this whole milieu is not shared belief, but shared interest. Through their donors and networks, they construct a parallel reality, an alternative to alternative, grassroots cultural infrastructures. Then through constructing and embodying identities, people become personally invested in a false consensus and protect this consensus to be able to maintain their identities and their aggrandised conceptions of self (see also Bajusz, 2019). Participatory arts projects are a means to recruit new people, subjectify them into this consensus (through assuming group identities) and also to spatially and temporarily extend the milieu. These are political, and not artistic goals.1Leftism in my experience has meant the group subject, or the platform, the brand so to speak, through which individuals could acquire the power of the collective.