Criticism and the Far Right (Reflections: Part 2)

    It's the German state of Brandenburg's elections this weekend, and as we are in the middle of this thrilling lurch to the right - where people elect Far Right governments in Europe that have not been seen since the 1940s - it's a good moment to stop and think. What's driving this?

But first, as a lot of media are skipping this point, and we have space here, we should first ask the radical questions of "what is the Far Right?", as that has a direct relationship with why I write criticism these days. Many people think they know what the Far Right is, but if they do, then few actually seem to be remembering why they are so dangerous. So I'll dedicate this first section to an ambitious brief overview.

    The Far Right

    "The Far Right" describes political movements which attempt to genereate societies of authority, control, and hierarchy. They do this though both active and passive promotion of violence, oppression, and exclusion, often through a mix of economic violence, military and institutional violence, and social coercion, using and exaggerating existing structures. Often these have heavily ideological components that inform their power structure, commonly:

- racial or ethnic supremacy (power structure favouring ethnicities, often white supremacy but not only), 

- patriarchy (or power structure favouring an idea of "man", often expressed in misogyny or violence against women and other genders), 

- xenophobia (power structure designed to exclude otherness), 

- religious supremacy (power structure that deploys religious institutions as tools to create submission), 

- nationalism (construction of an idea of state that produces submission and excludes other ideas), 

- "the family" (power structure designed for a particular image of family, especially one that favours child production), 

- ableism (power structure designed to favour an idea of the body or mind as a 'normal' one), 

- classism (here the Far Right can be a confusing mix, depending on what is convenient and to whether they are addressing workers or elites), and 

- sexual discrimination (power structure designed to favour a specific version of sexuality, commonly heterosexuality as this is most convenient for child production). 

(Centre-right or "small c conservatism", which I view as the dominant political force globally from 1991 until now, shares many of these ideas, but uses less direct means to achieve them, and focuses more on the "free market" as a tool).

All of these are normalising factors that create a version of the self that one should aspire to "fit in" to. If you don't fit into it, you are unable to share in the rewards of that structure, and may indeed - under extreme right-wing governments - find yourself accidentally sharing in its punishments. Because no-one actually fits the ideal of the Far Right, their objective is to create an 'aspiring to an ideal', and submission of the subject, who is never quite able to meet that ideal image. Their principle tool is a psychological one: shame, which is a deeply-rooted cause of human behaviour (not-coincidentally the primary tool of pick-up artists and abusers). When this shaming is seen on a wide scale, it creates systems of thinking and patterns of behaviour that define and reproduce that system of violence autonomously within societies, without the need for direct intervention from a state. Because high levels of state intervention are impractical (need too many resources), this "hands-off" approach is often the control mechanism favoured by Far Right governments, although some do make massive state interventions.

"Because no-one actually fits the ideal of the Far Right, their objective is to create an 'aspiring to an ideal', and submission of the subject, who is never quite able to meet that ideal image."

What I have just given is a really brief overview of the Far Right. I would describe this as not particularly controversial, and actually certain figures of the Far Right speak openly about using these tools to manipulate people: Donald Trump, who is a presidential candidate for re-election in the US this year (and a proto-far-right figure in the sense that he does not seem to understand the consequences of the tools he uses, only that they offer power), sometimes speaks directly about it, sometimes accidentally. The "Project 2025" document details these objectives and how it will be achieved. But they are often left unspoken, because of fear. 

Kiosk Festival Day 2.2, Day 3... and an epilogue on masculinity

Well it's a few weeks since Kiosk Festival 2024 subsided, and I'm well and truly sitting back at my desk in Berlin. The sun is shining, but beginning it's long goodbye, the trees' leaves beginning their calm twirl down to the flat floor, ushering in the empty, dark, industrial-strength refrigerator that is Berlin's winter. As people begin to wrap up their summer activities, it's a good chance to stare out the window and take stock, thinking about how the summer unfolded, making plans to protect oneself as best one can from the crisp incisions that winter brings.

I'll take the long-awaited opportunity to update on the second day of Kiosk Festival 2024 now, and in a few days, write the (also-long awaited) follow up to my original "reflections" post in July, this time on the theme of the Far Right and Criticism. It should be noted that Kiosk Festival this year exists among a frenzy of Far-Right activity: recently, the "Culture Minister" of Slovakia's Far Right government fired both the head of the National Theatre and the National Gallery, without any kind of adequate explanation (something about an accident on stage being "improperly handled"). But these are only the tips of icebergs, as Slovakia both flirts with and actualises a phase of shifting to a more authoritarian government, echoing pulses resonating across Europe, as governments trigger their various populations' protectionist impulses using the instrument of fear. 

The fear of 'the Other' is a political reaction that often drives the impulse for "invasion" - the theme of Kiosk 2024. Its justification is that strangeness is threatening, that boundaries must always be defended, that the dividing lines between self and other, us and them, are absolute and uncrossable. Yet we know, if we examine closely our experiences of being human, not only is this untrue, but that it denies the most pleasurable and meaningful parts of existing: those pleasant senses of trust, exchange, and togetherness that perhaps only culture and community can really bring. While it's true that over-extending ourselves can be self-destructive, Far Right proposals bring no answers to dilemmas, instead bringing solutions that are easy and brutal, boring and wrong.

In writing today, and so late, I've decided to pick and choose a little bit, for time allocation reasons. So it's apologies to many great shows: Unkulunkulu, a magical puppet theatre piece about a senile man travelling to the moon, as so often directed at children but - with a little coaxing of our wasted, tired imaginations - equally enjoyable to adults. And the closing show of the festival, Pinkbus, a rawcus queering of Sovak traditional signifiers. It's a novelty to see the Slovak national anthem performed with such genuine masculinity!

The two shows I'll focus on today are both from Slovak artists, one (Tomáš Janypka) based in Prague and the other (Roman Škadra) in Berlin. The shows have some similarities, so I'll put them in conversation with each other sometimes.

Lonesome Cowboy

The houselights dim, the hubbub dies down. The lights on stage go up. There stands the lonesome cowboy: dressed in white, leading against the pillar, his head bowed and covered by his oversized hat, as though masking some unspoken, deep sadness. Does he pine for some lost love? Does he search the desert for his own sense of self, lost among this vast, shifting sands? Or is he just a poser, performing some emotion that he never has the depth to truly feel?

 Photo: Natália Zajačiková

It's an iconic pose to open Lonesome Cowboy, drawn from Sergio Leone's cartoony portraits of Clint Eastwood in films such as For a Few Dollars More (1965), albeit updated for today's online community of aesthetic-driven, trope-obsessed viewers. And that first pose, held by performer/deviser Tomáš Janypka pretty much sums up the whole of Lonesome Cowboy, performed in Žilina following its premiere in Prague. The shallowness of the image is deconstructed and played with throughout the performance, undertaking a kind of 'call-and-response' with composer Tomáš Vtípil, (mostly on violin). 

Kiosk Day 2: "Invasion"

There are some times when being at Kiosk Festival feels like a bit of a throwback. Somehow the coming together of people in this place – mostly Žilina’s New Synagogue and the converted train station STANICA – lacks the cynical edge you find around most theatre institutions, driven increasingly by a calculated and meticulous approach to audience. Here, people can hang out in a free way and watch great performance together, and it’s easy to forget that this is a very cool thing.

This year’s theme is “Invasion”, a no-bullshit direct reference to the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Whereas it was possible in the previous two editions of Kiosk to skirt around this subject - for example, "After Human" (2022) was only ever indirectly related, and "No Power" (2023) may relate to the targeting of electricity systems but not necessarily - this year’s edition asks more directly about this human tendency to take the space of the other through aggression, abuse, and trauma. Although these things are universal, the presence of people from Ukraine here, as well as its close proximity to borders of russia’s 2022 attack, ensures that there is little room for interpretation as artists still attempt to deal with the philosophical and cultural fallout of this single disastrous decision by the russian state.

Day 2 of Kiosk Festival saw a couple of shows that were fantastic in different ways. Trying to do them justice is a little difficult – apologies to the morning’s  Adam Dragun: ALEX and Blízke stretnutia, respectively a presentation of a work-in-progress about blurring categories in crisis, and a short peaceful interlude into the tradition of Camera Obscura. The meaty program saw the afternoon’s activities include a puppet-theatre work, a promenade performance in nearby Rosina, a fascinating piece of war composition played by a string quartet at a petrol station, finally retuning to the New Synagogue for a deconstruction of masculinity in the form of “the cowboy” and then some outdoor silent discos and DJs at Stanica. Overall, hard not to enjoy it, as you walk around catching up with friends from previous editions, exploring new facets of the valueless diamond that is the concrete city of Žilina.

Your correspondent has fallen a little bit ill, so I’ll do something a bit irregular as I’ve missed Day 3 of the festival. Instead, I’ll split day 2 into 2 parts. First up, it’s Sonic Highway Motorest and Nemiesta, and save the other two for tomorrow.

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Sonic Highway Motorest

Sonic Highway Motorest is a collaboration between members of the group MFK Bochum in Germany and locals to Slovakia, from Žilina and Bratislava. As such, it’s the type of vision that Kiosk Festival excels at – a site-specific, international and pan-European work, blending different experimental forms around a theme of environmental protection and citizen rights. In this case, we are treated to a bus ride, a 4km walk along an abandoned highway, and a strange, choreographed happening on a hill at the sunset. 

 Photo: Natália Zajačiková

The series of fortunate events begins with the bus ride, with local expert Marián Gogola (Mulica) guiding us through the history of the Žilina bypass road’s and tunnel construction (it was supposed to be finished in 2010, and supposedly “at least one direction” of it will be open in the next years). We get off the bus in an urban dystopia of concrete and dilapidated industry – the kind where you might dump a body – and walk around the corner to find a small DJ set from Marlene Ruther, played from a loosely set-up decks on the back of a broken car. Some “easter eggs” are already lighting our path: for example, someone in beach clothes casually strolls through holding a giant umbrella. We are led by another collaborator, the camo-dressed  Adam Samuel Marko,  and given instructions that we participate at our own risk, and amusingly (I think?), that there are no toilets available for the next 2 hours, but the assistants have plastic bags. This section is left with the motto of the National Highway Association: “Who wants searches for a way – who doesn’t want, searches for a reason”.

Reflections, Part 1: Criticism, “Coaching”, and Manipulating Desire

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.