I remember the exact moment when I noticed things changing. It was in a festival in 2016, I was talking to an artist after their show. I had written my critical piece about their work, which is always a beautiful task for me: trying to reproduce the show in my mind, trying to feel it together with the audience, and then to reflect this feeling in language. It often feels like casting a magic spell, like you’re ‘channelling’ the energy of the show. I remember reading criticism written about my own first performance: how it felt like a real gift, to put the artist’s work on the page, where it might live forever as a document. For many whose work will never otherwise be written about, it is their only chance to look closely at their own reflection – to see their own ego, that has been necessarily so magnified by the process of developing an artistic persona, hardened by the stage.
But in this case, the Artist was angry.
There is a reason I could tell she was angry, and that was because she looked at me like she wanted to kill me. I felt as though in a silent contest: that she was emotionally steamrolling my version of the work. Which is fine for me: people have different perspectives, including the Artist. But this specific situation seemed unfortunate. The Artist, I was pretty sure, was angry about a specific word I chose to describe her work. That word was to me perfect, and something I had worked hard to achieve: many hours of thought, actually, cycling through different options, before finally finding exactly the right one in a moment of “Eureka!” that is so satisfying in critical writing. But the word had some slight ambiguity. Was it positive or negative? Was it an attack, or praise? This also made it perfect: it perfectly mirrored the ambiguity of the performance itself, where the Artist had made gestures that were provocative to the extent that they left the viewer in such doubt (something I had also written about in my piece).
I navigated myself around this fragility, and stood behind my writing. But the intense, awkward feeling stayed with me. There was something unusual: less a contest of public discourse or what the work meant, more a personal battle for emotional control. This itself was not totally unusual, and you get a lot of egos in the arts, and a lot of fragility. But there was something new. Some deep wound was present, as though I had touched on a trauma through my writing. Not the trauma of being discussed, exactly. But the trauma of meeting a context, of encountering a discourse outside of yourself, of being placed within a larger situation, the trauma of ‘being read’. The trauma of criticism itself.
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Lately I’ve got more interested in what I call “para-psychology” on the internet. I joined Instagram one year ago, mainly as a way to stay connected with colleagues in Ukraine because the platform is very popular there. A lot of Instagram surprises me, and I think this platform is, in principle, a horror show. But the torrent of para-psychological “coaches” is a particularly disturbing feature: these people, mostly dudes, staring into the camera and saying “You feel like this, right? Well, the answer is this.” A lot of this is around attachment theory and dating (but this might just be what the algorithm sends me, after working out that this is where I am vulnerable). And, together with the normal self-belief paraphernalia, “You’re at your best when you overcome your worst” or similar, they form a strange one-two punch that targets your sense of self perfectly, playing to those fears and insecurities, and offering solutions that seem generous.
But what’s the most disturbing part of these coaches? They work!
But why do they work? And what do I mean when I say “they work”?
I will answer the second part first, but I want to put a brief disclaimer.
My favourite coach: the dreamy "Coach Ryan" coach_ryan_h
Attachment theory is real psychological theory (as much as psychology can be real, and there are some within the sciences who think of it as already para-scientific, as opposed to something like neurology) developed out of the 1950s. The “coaches”, however, are often not trained in anything except PR. The most honest of them admit this in their streams, specifically stating their training. But many don’t, understanding that the users of the platform don’t care, and are only looking for their own truth, confirmation, reinforcement, or to stop the noise inside their heads. You can choose your own coach, one where you like what they say (and how). What matters then is just the optics: how authoritative does the speaker look? How is their delivery, their stance, their frame? Are they ‘relatable’? Are they delivering their content in a way that’s addictive? And so on.
