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Bad parrhesia: the limits of cynicism in the public sphere

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Authors

Morningstar, Natalie  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3950-1457

Abstract

This paper examines the limits of Cynical parrhesia. Based on fieldwork with artist‐activists in post‐recession Dublin, I recount their fraught efforts to use adventurous artistic expression to provoke a critical awakening in an audience of strangers, who instead respond with derision. My focus is thus on a narrow but prevalent feature of artists’ work and lives, and the public’s experience of challenging genres of provocative public criticism: the encounter with unintelligibility and alienation in the public sphere. I thus deploy ‘bad parrhesia’ as a tool through which to consider the factors that mitigate against artists establishing the desired critical relationship with audiences. Nevertheless, though these parrhesiastic encounters do not succeed, I argue that they do not yield an absence of social relations but relations of an anti‐social kind. Departing from readings of parrhesia as a form of individualism, corrosive to relationality, or a playful reaction against the failures of liberal democratic politics, I make a case for framing parrhesia as a relationship of contestation over which kinds of public criticism are judged to be intelligible and valuable responses to moments of cultural crisis in northern liberal democracies.

Description

Keywords

Special Section Article, SPECIAL SECTION ARTICLES, parrhesia, art, cynicism, liberal democracy, critique, cynisme, démocratie libérale

Journal Title

Social Anthropology

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0964-0282
1469-8676

Volume Title

29

Publisher

Sponsorship
Economic and Social Research Council (G108269)