Essay for Billy Fraser's solo show, 2024

This essay was written for A Case Study: Political Agency Within Contemporary Art compiled by London-based visual artist Billy Fraser for his solo show in 2024:

There’s a void to fill. By the many, not the few.

Lately, a tentative idea could be observed bubbling up from the cauldron that is our digital ether and public discourse: are we entering a post-individualistic age? This essay explores how a shift away from hyper-individualism might inform the way we move forward from our current political moment and looks at an example from progressive struggles in the past, so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes during this shift. As an age-old ‘by-product’ to social and political unrest, but never as a sole remedy, the role of art and artists in creating empathy and highlighting collectivism over individualism will also be reflected upon.

During an online discussion hosted by Protein, a cultural insight & strategy agency based in London, on the very question of a potentially ensuing post-individualistic age, I noted down the following during one of the speaker’s – Jack Self, a strategist, futurist and the founder and editor in chief of ‘Real Review’ – responses:

What we’re in right now is not a solution to anything, and it does not have a clear driving force behind it. We are faced with impossible decisions on a daily basis: “I know I shouldn’t be using disposable coffee cups, but I also want a cup of coffee.” Post-pandemic, nobody believes in linear time anymore; nobody believes that each generation will be wealthier than the one before it. Wider society is much more attuned to racial, gender and other injustices and inequalities, which has restructured the way in which we think of history and cast a new light onto who gets to make history and who gets to tell those histories, but the cumulative effect is that there’s a grand disillusionment about what society is for or where it’s going. Nobody believes any more that we should just infinitely extract infinite profit on a finite planet. We all know that that’s not viable, but there is no compelling alternative. We are seeing a global unwinding of the inequalities and injustices that have been created by modernity and the effect of the West, with its linear, exhaustive, cumulative processes.

He went on to compare our current moment, which can also be described as ‘in limbo’, to the time before the Renaissance, in which the medieval paradigm had fallen out of relevance, but there had not yet been a new establishment of modernity that would make clear what the new structures were going to be. What followed in the early 1400s, according to Self, was what is now coming to an end: modernity with its imperial and colonial project based on charting new territories and the extraction of resources, both human and natural. Self used the expression of a ‘slack tide’ to describe the time between the paradigm shifts from the medieval period to the colonial period, which also feels apt for our time, with whatever comes next potentially lodging itself into human consciousness for the next 100 plus years. Of course, we are already in ‘whatever comes next’, as time does not stand still. However, it feels like, on a societal level, we are neither here, nor there; in an in-between state, where the old has most definitely died, but the new has not emancipated itself from the old’s overpowering and decaying cadaver.

The word ‘limbo’ from the Latin for ‘border’ or ‘edge’ comes to mind. In geography, it signifies a place of uncertain classification (Wheeler, 2023). Standing at this border in time, the question about which way we will go is dependent on who or what takes the plunge and pulls the rest of society with it. It is this directionlessness and uncertainty that spurs some people to accelerate or corrupt the current fork-in-the-road moment, pouring hate and hyperrationality into it, easily sold by politicians as ways to ‘take back control’. This then becomes a more viscerally affective concept to those whose fears have long been brought to boil than simply “voting with joy” (Harris, 2024), as seen in the election result between former-and-now again US president Donald Trump (‘the old’) and Kamala Harris (‘the new’).

If this, our present moment of limbo, and the vulnerability that comes with it, was a place, Adam Curtis, provides just the name for it: “emotional void”. Known to investigate individualism’s rise at collectivism’s expense, the maker of documentaries such as ‘The Century of the Self’ (2002) and ‘Hypernormalisation’ (2016), said in an interview with WIRED in 2021: “Individualism began as a utopian ideal, promising freedom through self-expression. Then it morphed into consumerist enslavement.” In more detail: “Somewhere in the late 1960s, the radical left who talked in terms of power, society, overthrowing the power structure – all that rhetoric – gave up. And instead, encouraged by radical psychotherapy, they went for an alternative idea which said, “Okay, if you can’t change the world, in terms of power structure, what you do is change yourself.” He continues: “When this culture of narcissism didn’t bring the Me Generation the nirvana they hoped for, corporations stepped into this emotional void. They offered these people other ways of pacifying their emptiness, like products to buy and pills to swallow – Robert Sackler, the developer of OxyContin, enters stage left – while the ideology that was actually generating this pain mushroomed. Fast forward to now, narcissism remains a generational diagnosis and the enemy of collective action.” (Curtis, 2021).

We recognise this emotional void, as it is what we have found ourselves in even before the pandemic. In need of new stories, the emotional void was filled with Brexit, Trump, incel culture and other hate-mongering right-wing-aligned ideologies. The question is then: How do we make sure that we are the ones filling it? And in that quest, how do we keep from repeating the same mistakes progressives have made before us? How to do this whilst not letting a liberal sense of self-actualisation get in the way? How to dodge the lure of ‘coping, hoping, doping and shopping’ – a concept coined by the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck that describes the response of ordinary people that is required to extend the lifespan of contemporary capitalism (Streeck, 2016). By ‘we’, I do not mean the ‘elites’, although that is what we are often portrayed as, including during Trump’s especially vitriolic rally in Madison Square Garden, New York, on 27 October 2024. ‘Elites’ would imply economic and political hegemony. As Jo Freeman writes in ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, first published in 1970 to address the need for organisation in the US women’s liberation movement as it sought to move from criticising society to changing society, “correctly, an elite refers to a small group of people who have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent” (Freeman, 1972). We may use elitist language picked up around the apparatus of the university, which can give us empowered ways of making sense of the world, but to be elitist one has to abuse one’s powers, which we arguably, do not, generally cannot and pointedly don’t want to. What is meant here by ‘we’ is those of us, progressives, artists, those on the margins of society, often portrayed as ‘dissidents’, ‘monsters’ or even ‘terrorists’; those who strive for a more just society – of course, whilst evading ever-seductive social media baiting or other short-term solutions that attempt to step into the void. It also doesn’t help when the Left police the Left. By being called and calling each other ‘elitists’ or ‘narcissists’, we disperse further into groups of individual actors rather than uniting for a common cause.

Making an argument for moving beyond individualism, Curtis remarked further: “If you have a society full of individuals, it’s like herding squealing piglets; you can’t collect them together into a mass group.” There have been some collective movements, as Self went on to state in the online discussion, like Me too, the global iterations of Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion in the UK, the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg and the climate strikes, worker strikes during and after the pandemic and Pro Palestine/anti-Zionism protests post-7^th Oct. However, there have also been counter movements from the Right that have stepped into the emotional void, which the need for new stories and control creates. As the contemporary thinker Matt Colquhoun argues in their brilliant book ‘Narcissus in Bloom’ (2023): “We have wrestled with the proposition of an overcoming of the individual throughout the history of art and culture.” Our “desire for an altogether more social age” certainly persists today and at its core, we share the “fear of a breakdown of an already false unity” (2023). If we think who has the most to lose in the case of any kind of societal breakdown, we come to the conclusion that it’s not the so-called 1% who have several ways at hand to evade societal breakdowns in their multiple local vicinities, to which they are distant, but the rest of us, which make up a global majority. ‘We’, here, then refers to the global majority, if we see the contested term as standing for the 99% that will be and is more directly affected – some more than others due to demographical, social, and economic factors of course, which we must continue to highlight and work against within the arts and beyond.

How to get to an altogether more social age? Looking at previous progressive struggles with the benefit of hindsight, we can witness a pattern. It is the pattern where the oppressed and/or radical Left push back against oppressive power structures, but where that pushback, however much successful – followed by a moment in-between in which we can either leap forward for something new or let our fears cause us to retreat deeper into the old – is quickly filled by other oppressive power structures. Often these new oppressive power structures appear to have the same progressive flavour as the cause that opens up the emotional void through which they are then able to seep in. One may think here of the similarities between the concepts of ‘woke’ on the Left and ‘awake’ on the Right (Which emerged in response to which and what fuelled each side and for which reasons?) or the accusations of antisemitism as a silencer to prohibit Pro-Palestinian/Anti-Zionist protests against the genocide in Gaza (as seen in Germany and beyond). Those in power, which are the real elites, can be witnessed all throughout history to seemingly feed the masses what they seek whilst lining their own pockets and/or sustaining their own hegemony.

An early example, provided by Colquhoun in ‘Narcissus in Bloom’, is the Peasants’ War from 1524 and the events surrounding it. In the German empire, stricken by famine, plague and syphilis, the “peasantry had mounted a (poorly) armed insurrection against the German aristocracy” (Colquhoun, 2023). This was shortly after Martin Luther’s protests against the corrupt Catholic church had promoted literacy among the masses, and the invention of the printing press had increased access to art, with the new technology allowing Luther’s ideas to be shared widely, first as placards and later, as pamphlets that people could take away. These pushbacks and processes of democratisation for the many did not, however, result in better times, nor did Luther’s protests follow intersectional goals. The printing press was used by the few in power to further embolden their political hegemony, and the new class consciousness following the unsuccessful Peasants’ War and Luther’s Protestantism ushered in the concept of the individual. Those in power knew how to use this to their advantage and affirmed the individual even further, obscuring all social relations in their totality. Subsequently, the aristocracy remained “well-positioned to exploit the resulting chaos for its own longevity” with Luther’s contradictory denouncing of the “collective narcissism of subordinated groups” as the nail in the coffin of the struggling peasants’ movement (Colquhoun, 2023). It was contradictory in that it seemingly stood against his criticism of the deep-seated political and theological corruption of overpowered Catholic institutions and their abuses of power. Here, we may think of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk from 2012, in which she said: “You can be ambitious, but not too much.”, pointing to the contradictory messaging to girls. By extension, the amended sentence: “You can be ambitious, but you can’t.” speaks to the lack of intersectionality between Luther’s ‘protest’ and the peasants’ cause. Paradoxically, as Colquhoun writes, the “exacerbation of individualism”, whilst being “credited to that growing class consciousness”, ended up being weaponised in the undermining of the Peasants’ demand for a “redistribution of wealth” (2023). Even if ultimately the Peasants’ War was unsuccessful, the “relations of power that existed before its outbreak did have to be completely redrawn”, which we might see as progress in the fight for social justice. However, this – dare we say – emotional void allowed certain mechanisms of social control to be reconstructed with a new essence (2023). We can see how the hands that feed the masses used the emotional void after the progressive pushback from the oppressed to simply change the bait, which instigated a new age of liberal subservience up until the French Revolution.

The contradictory push and pull factors in times of standstill and transformation that our ancestors grappled with all those centuries ago, continue to keep us in their fangs today. As the critical theorist Nancy Fraser writes in ‘The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born’ (2019): “No subjective response, however apparently compelling, can secure a durable counterhegemony unless it offers the prospect of a real solution to the underlying objective problems.” She goes on: “The objective side of a crisis is no mere multiplicity of separate dysfunctions. Far from forming a dispersed plurality, its various strands are interconnected and share a common source. The underlying object of our general crisis, the thing that harbors [sic] its multiple instabilities, is the present form of capitalism – globalizing, neoliberal, financialized [sic].” We are familiar with the tensions between the subjective and the objective and we could say that the tensions between the individual and the social are the tensions between the subjective and the objective.

If we want to insist on our right to be active participants in our own lives, we already know that we should probably stare less at our phones. The pandemic has shown that screens can’t replace face-to-face interactions and highlighted our intense interdependency on each other in times of crisis and beyond. It has also proven that a life lived solely behind a screen is a life without joy. If we follow Self’s statement in the online discussion that “the history of capitalism is in many ways the history of the invention of subjectivities; as creating ‘the housewife’, ‘the teenager’ with their own distinct tastes and characteristics, helped selling us more unique products.”, turning away from individualism presents as the most sensible way to fill the current emotional void. Especially since, as Self continued to argue, “the freedom that neoliberalism pretends to provide us with is just enough freedom to be accountable for our failing, but not enough to create genuine change. If we choose rightly, we ratify our own exploitation. And if we choose wrongly, we are consigned to the outer darkness – and then demonised as the cause of social ills.”. You can be free, but not too much. Colquhoun also speaks to this entrapment, stating that “we are all Narcissus, we are all monsters, in that we are trapped between various ways of seeing and being seen”. It is within the arts that we can take up the “work against the invocation by those in power that those on the fringes are demons and mutants” (Colquhoun, 2023); that we can not just point out the common in the commons (the ‘global majority’ of ordinary people) but present our multiple commonalities and enriching differences using the universally understood language of affect and the senses. By doing so, we continue to dissolve the silos we are put in and put ourselves in – and strife for an overcoming of this renewed “melancholy we feel towards our (in)capacity to coexist with each other” (Colquhoun, 2023).

Again, somewhat paradoxically, but consistently so throughout the history of humans, the internet is also a key driver of what is referred to as post-individualism, as Yancey Strickler, another panellist from the online discussion, says in his article ‘The Post-Individual’ (2024), which was stated as the impetus for the event. Since its inception, the internet has incubated entirely new models of identity and selfhood, reshaping what it means to be an individual. Online our identity has become untethered from where we physically live, where we were born or what we look like, and memes as a sort of “intra-group communication” (Strickler, 2024) can very much be understood as a longing for community and universal understanding. It is via the internet that the idea of having multiple selves and identities based on qualities, real or imagined, has been incubated and normalised. It is this that describes the post-individual: a state of being, in which a person carries multiple, non-compulsory, group-oriented identities. Post-individualism then presents itself not just as a filler for an emotional void, but as a concept to live by when opposing hate. Strickler, the co-founder and director of Meta Label, a platform for releasing collective work, and co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, explains post-individualism as follows: “Post-individualism is not defined by rejecting individualism, but by graduating from it to a place where someone accepts their individuality, but feels called for a variety of reasons (social, creative, metaphysical, financial) to seek greater meaning and context with others” (Strickler, 2024). The following quote originating with K-HOLE, a trend-forecasting group based in New York, also referenced in Stricker’s ‘The Post-Individual’, was highlighted by Joanna Lowry, the Strategic Futures Director at Protein, as “really getting to the heart of the post-individual experience”: “Once upon a time, people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today, people are born individuals and have to find their communities.” (2013). Pondering on what a graduation from individualism means, Lowry went on to present Strickler’s mapping of the shift from pre-individualism to individualism, to post-individualism, where once in pre-individualistic times, the source of power was clans and bloodlines, under individualism, capital and politics became the source of power, and under post-individualism, power can be found in capital and communities. Of course, we still have people holding on to their clans and bloodlines, where the myth of meritocracy looms large, which we must work against in intersectional ways – to form a counterhegemonic bloc that Fraser speaks about.

At face value, post-individualism seems to be “at odds with capitalism”, as is discussed in the event. Post-individualism with its emphasis on community and collectivism seems incompatible with capitalism's focus on individual success and accumulation, but there's been some research done by the think tank, ‘Other Internet’, into how post-individualistic values might reshape capitalism. ‘Other Internet’ is mentioned by Lowry to have predicted that “in the future we won't necessarily interact with money as individuals but rather as collective squads, whether between housemates or discord friends”. Squad wealth is about allowing social currency and financial capital to interconvert, creating opportunities and group resilience that would have been impossible to achieve alone. Artists are attuned to working collaboratively and support each other in a climate that has always been precarious for them. They are also familiar with the tension between transformative and oppressive narcissisms (Colquhoun, 2023). You can be narcissistic, but not too much – the label of being self-involved and narcissistic often given to them from external sources. Faced with art’s subservience to financial markets, artists are left with the choice to either compromise and produce at least some commodity art to sustain their lives, or to remain outside of society. But that is no choice at all in today’s age marked by cultural funding cuts, the energy crisis, and the cost-of-living crisis on top of an already precarious existence as an artist. Artists are also aware that they are not individual actors, but that their work in total can offer a tapestry of truth from the contexts the works were made in – that is, when the commerce around it is stripped away.

When Lawrence Abu-Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani, the four artists who had been shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2019, decided that there would not be a single winner that year, the question why they allowed their nominations to go forward in the first place, does not consider that it takes a lot of courage and/or inherited wealth and/or economic security to turn down a nomination like that, especially considering that going forward with the nomination means they get to show their work at the Tate to an audience of 70,000 people as part of the Turner Prize exhibition. They should be applauded for using the platform of the Turner prize to “take a stand against the toxic political climate [marked by the Conservatives’ politics of austerity and exclusion] and individualism”, which was already at its peak in 2019 – the same year Fraser’s book was published. Writing to the jury to ask for the prize to be awarded to them as a collective, they said: “At this time of political crisis in Britain and much of the world, when there is already so much that divides and isolates people and communities, we feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity—in art as in society.” In an interview with the Guardian, they said further that being pitted against each other would have gone against their “individual artistic efforts to show a world entangled”. Their eventual joint statement made the additional point that the issues they each deal with are “as inseparable as climate chaos is from capitalism”. The point that these artists press home is that they live in the real world and that their work is not disconnected from their lives and opinions, and the society in which they live. Abu Hamdan remarked, “although his fellow shortlisted artists use very different aesthetic tools from him, they have much in common – an interest in power and agency, exclusion and oppression”. His films in the show arise from a project to collect aural memories from survivors of the infamous Saydnaya prison in Syria – memories that in practical terms helped researchers reconstruct the conditions of incarceration. Shani, who is Jewish, talked to the Guardian about how she feels “antisemitism has been manipulated by the right. There’s a feeling that you are being instrumentalised and that people are speaking on behalf of your identity in the name of protecting you.” She also said that she has been vocal about her financial precarity, having posted on social media about how she’s feared having “to give up working as an artist because of the difficulty of making ends meet”. These artists bring home the point that everything is related, and it should be seen as such. Jasleen Kaur, the most recent artist to have won the Turner prize, makes this point in her speech at the award ceremony in the context of 2024: “I want the separation between the expression of politics in the gallery and the practise of politics in life to disappear. I want the institution to understand that if you want us inside, you need to listen to us outside.” By ‘outside’, here she is referring to the protesters outside Tate Britain, where the award ceremony was held, made-up of artists, culture workers, Tate staff and students who were once more demanding a ceasefire and an immediate arms embargo for Palestine. She also says, addressing the Tate as an institution directly, that the protesters had gathered to make visible the demands of the open letter signed by 1310 signatories, calling for the Tate “to sever ties with organisations complicit in what the UN and ICJ are finally getting closer to saying is a genocide of the Palestinian people.” And: “This is not a radical demand. This should not risk an artist’s career or safety. We're trying to build consensus that the ties to these organisations are unethical, just as artists did with Sackler.” She, too, laments how it is that artists are required to dream up liberation in the gallery, but when that dream meets life, they are shut down (Kaur, 2024).

Post-individualism then does not ask us to leave our differences behind, but to embrace them whilst moving forward as a collective. It is within the arts and the realm of aesthetics, that we can create viscerally affective countermovements to oppose hate, in which we do not just highlight our commonalities and offer something as elusive a concept as joy, but pointedly address inequalities that create differences – by way of universally understood material use and symbolism to induce an ‘embodied feeling’ in the onlooker. Here, we may think of Eyal Weizman, the founder of the interdisciplinary research agency, Forensic Architecture, operating across human rights, journalism, architecture, art, aesthetics, academia, and law, and his case for aesthetics in the field of forensics shared in an interview with ArtReview in 2022: “Aesthetics is not a question of beautification but of the sensible.” By speaking to the senses, the capacity of which unites all humans, art and aesthetics offer an ultimately democratic space to feel and reflect. They also teach us a deep attunement to our surroundings and a way of seeing more instinctively, giving us and our feelings active agency, which can help us to counteract a market-enforced binge-watching existence and to oppose the separation of art, life, and people.

As the Scottish artist, Jasleen Kaur, says in her acceptance speech of the Turner prize 2024, quoting the cultural theorist, poet and scholar, Fred Moten, whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies: “There’s a difference between the expression of solidarity and the practice of solidarity and the practice of solidarity is something that people will have to engage with where they are.” Let us fill the current emotional void with work that does more than just express solidarity but puts solidarity into practice. Let us continue to make work that creates a viscerally affective countermovement to right-wing populism, perhaps by following Nancy Fraser’s proposition of “progressive populism” that puts post-individualism at its centre. Let us continue to hold the art world to account for showing an egalitarian platform of democracy. Let us continue to insist on spaces for reflection on what Colquhoun refers to as “the monstrous acceleration of new technologies that terrifies and unnerves us so utterly, both in terms of its relation to our ever-accelerating industriousness and our frayed capacity to observe and analyse its effects” (2023). Let us continue to embrace each other and our plethora of subjectivities whilst moving towards a post-individualism that is for the many, not the few, for those ‘inside’ as well as ‘outside’.

REFERENCES

Adichie, C. N. (2012): We should all be feminists. TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists?subtitle=en

Colquhoun, M. (2023): Narcissus in Bloom. An Alternative History of the Selfie. Repeater Books, London.

Curtis, A. (2021): Adam Curtis knows why we all keep falling for conspiracy theories. WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/adam-curtis-bbc-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/

Fraser, N. (2019): The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born. Verso, London.

Freeman, J. (1972): The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

Harris, K. (2024): Instagram Post: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBzRl8vPYhS/

Higgins, C. (2019): ‘It’s about solidarity’: the artists who hijacked the Turner prize speak out. Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/04/its-about-solidarity-the-artists-who-hijacked-the-turner-prize-speak-out

Kaur, J. (2024): Turner Prize speech snippet shared on the Instagram account @palestinesolidarityuk:https://www.instagram.com/p/DDIUn7pobc6/

Protein Forum: Are we entering a post-individual age? (2024): https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/play/ZO2r2rIPyaNRlXEH3kwuMjaNFkwiF3ia16QHl-ejtmOZIltoJqloJ28WdENwpgeAASVGbnXBn6UvNa_j.m1hx_eg4w3f8sFVx?hasValidToken=false&canPlayFromShare=true&from=share_recording_detail&continueMode=true&componentName=rec-play&originRequestUrl=https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/rUVzciKMxQhvwL_QM5RLc9_Lxo4q45uuGKbyAeNk-JpPRgGzAtS7clApI-UpkuPW.spj5VwdDJARqaa2g

Silva da, J. (2019): In shock move, all four nominated artists win Turner Prize 2019. The Art Newspaper: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/12/03/in-shock-move-all-four-nominated-artists-win-turner-prize-2019#:~:text=Lawrence%20Abu%20Hamdan%2C%20Helen%20Cammock,UK's%20most%20prestigious%20art%20prize&text=In%20an%20unprecedented%20move%2C%20this,Oscar%20Murillo%2C%20and%20Tai%20Shani

Streeck, W. (2016): How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System.

Strickler, Y. (2024): The Post-Individual: https://www.ystrickler.com/thepostindividual/

Weizman, E. (2022): Why Aesthetics Must Mean More than Beauty. ArtReview: https://artreview.com/eyal-weizman-why-aesthetics-must-mean-more-than-beauty/

Wheeler, S. (2023): Limbo. BBC Podcast: A Point of View: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001pfqx