Abstract
Bad parrhesia: the limits of cynicism in the public sphere
Highlights
This paper examines the limits of Cynical parrhesia
A neighbour was throwing a party on the weekly music night, but instead of the more common rock‐trad‐pop cover combo, the group was greeted by a troupe of experimental theatre performers
This paper examines the reasonably frequent – but not altogether desired – consequences of artists engaging in adventurous artistic expression in public spaces
Summary
This paper examines the limits of Cynical parrhesia. Based on eldwork 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 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 deploy ‘bad parrhesia’ as a tool through which to consider the factors that mitigate against artists establishing the desired critical relationship with audiences. 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
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