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. Cet article examine les limites de la « parrhésie cynique ». Sur la base d’un travail de terrain dans la ville de Dublin en poste-récession avec des artistes activistes, je décris leurs efforts difficiles pour utiliser une expression artistique aventureuse afin de provoquer un éveil critique dans un public d’étrangers, qui répond au contraire avec dérision. Je me concentre donc sur une caractéristique étroite mais répandue du travail et de la vie des artistes, ainsi que sur l’expérience du public face à des styles de critiques publiques provocantes : la rencontre avec l’inintelligibilité et l’aliénation dans la sphère publique. Je déploie donc la « mauvaise parrhésie » comme un outil permettant d’examiner les facteurs qui empêchent les artistes d’établir la relation critique souhaitée avec le public. Néanmoins, bien que ces rencontres parrhesiastiques ne réussissent pas, je soutiens qu’elles ne débouchent pas sur une absence de relations sociales, mais sur des relations plutôt « antisocial ». S’écartant des lectures de la parrhésie comme une forme d’individualisme, corrosive pour la rationalité, ou une réaction ludique contre les échecs de la politique démocratique libérale, je plaide pour encadrer la parrhésie comme une relation de contestation sur les types de critiques publiques qui sont jugées comme des réponses intelligibles et valables aux moments de crise culturelle dans les démocraties libérales du Nord. Seomra 2 was a mainstay pub in Mount Stevens. Dingy and serving a selection of only the most familiar beers, it flouted the trend of replacing such venues with chic cocktail bars and coffee houses. Located in a part of Dublin dense with controversial social housing regenerations, the neighbourhood had – until recently – been off city planners’ radar. The pub nevertheless had a devoted local following, who would gather there for quiz nights, lunches and performances from local musicians. Tonight, they were in for a surprise. 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. No one in the pub knew anyone in the group, who went by the name ‘The Fish Bowl’. When the performers emerged on stage, they were greeted by a mix of curious silence and good-humoured jeering from the fairly intoxicated crowd. The actors, dressed in metallic spandex suits, persevered and began reciting a collection of obtuse, spoken word poetry. Halfway through the show, one artist pulled a fishnet out of a bag and placed it on his head before dancing to the off-key accompaniment of a fellow performer. By this point, the crowd was uncontainable. People were shouting jokes at the stage, and for days afterwards those in attendance exchanged their most amusing video clips and images of what most agreed had been a bewildering performance. A friend, Heather, was seated at a table at the back of the pub next to her neighbour, Alan. When the group finally retreated from the stage, he turned to Heather and said, in audible undertones, ‘I think they misjudged their target audience.’ Heather, head in hand, muttered, ‘maybe we’re not cultured enough, but that was hilariously bad’. Based on 12 months of fieldwork with young artist-activists in Dublin, Ireland from 2016 to 2017, this paper recounts moments in which artists’ work produces confusion or censure. While artists and their artwork elsewhere invite more generative reactions, they are also often met with bafflement, frustration and ridicule. This paper therefore examines the reasonably frequent – but not altogether desired – consequences of artists engaging in adventurous artistic expression in public spaces. My focus is on the relationship that emerges between artist and audience when artists produce work intended to galvanise urban strangers, who instead respond with derision. My conceptual entry point is a Foucauldian reading of parrhesia, the ‘obligation’ to speak or manifest risky truths to others (Foucault 2019: 5). Drawing on Foucault’s theorisation of the artist as modern Cynic, and his reflections on the association between Cynicism and parrhesia, I argue that Cynical parrhesia is a helpful tool for understanding the relationship artists hope to establish with audiences, as well as why audiences refuse it. At the heart of Cynicism, Foucault writes, is a commitment to staging ‘practical scandals’ (2019: 172) in public and to maintaining ‘a polemical attitude’ (2019: 150) vis-à-vis social conventions and political institutions. Owing to a recent realignment between the arts and urban development policies in Dublin, a Cynical stance has become increasingly attractive to artists, who worry the critical function of art has been instrumentalised as a source of wealth-creation and fuelled exclusionary processes of urban regeneration. Yet artists’ provocative public displays are not always understood or valued by audiences, with whom artists may not have a pre-established critical relationship. While artists view themselves as courageous provocateurs, for uninitiated audiences, artists are often perceived to be humorously pretentious. They are understood to have benefited from a privileged position as pedestalled cultural critics, but to have wasted their energy on esoteric forms of artistic expression at the expense of establishing mutual understanding. The commitment to Cynical parrhesia thus presents a paradox: it is both central to the cultivation of artists’ critical attitude and a barrier to establishing the type of social relations necessary to successfully navigate the parrhesiastic encounter. This paper thus draws together Foucault’s theorisation of the artist as Cynical parrhesiast, and his reflections on parrhesia in the democratic city, to highlight the factors that can impede collective critical engagement in the public sphere. It argues that artists do not always achieve two key prerequisites for ‘good’ parrhesiastic expression: a carefully navigated relationship, and a shared value and understanding of critique. In this sense, my argument builds on philosophical accounts of ‘bad parrhesia’ (Marar 2014) and anthropological analyses of parrhesia, Cynicism and liberal democracy (Englund 2018; Boyer 2013) to examine what we learn from instances in which judgements regarding what counts as good parrhesia are not shared. To situate this paper in this Special Section, this analysis trains an ethnographic spotlight on the ‘morphology’ of values undergirding the parrhesiastic relationship and the ‘grammar’ that orders the parrhesiastic game (Fedirko et al. 2021). Rather than understanding parrhesia as a manifestation of liberal individualism (Englund 2018) or a reaction against liberalism’s ironies (Boyer 2013), this analysis argues that ‘good’ parrhesia is a relation predicated on the parrhesiast’s ability to uphold the apparently contradictory values of truth-telling and mutual understanding, a relation that the interlocutor can refuse where there is not a shared understanding or value of the parrhesiast’s brand of critique. I focus on failed parrhesiastic encounters for what they reveal – in the negative – about the rules that structure successful critical engagement in the public sphere. That being said, while the parrhesiastic bond is not established in these cases, I argue that a relationship of an ‘anti-social’ (Højer 2019, 2004) kind is indeed forged. Taking a cue from efforts to re-centre non-Durkheimian forms of ‘anti-social’ (Højer 2019, 2004) relationality (Candea et al. 2015; Coleman 2009), I deploy ‘bad parrhesia’ as an avenue onto considering what relationality looks like after trust has been breached and mutual intelligibility thrown into question. Consistent with this literature, I argue that anti-social relations are relations nonetheless, with active social effects. In this case, the anti-social relations that simmer following the failed parrhesiastic encounter foreground overlooked disagreement regarding what constitutes worthwhile criticism in the liberal democratic public sphere. It is worth revisiting Foucault’s account of the relationship between parrhesia and critique in the democratic city, and between Cynicism and modern art, in order to ground the relationship I am tracing between Cynical parrhesia and contemporary artistic production in Dublin. First, I’ll examine Foucault’s (2019, 2011) analysis of parrhesia and its contemporary offshoots and explore how Højer’s (2019, 2004) ‘anti-social contract’ offers a productive vantage onto anthropological debates about parrhesia, Cynicism and liberal democracy. I will then discuss why, considering the realignment between contemporary art and post-recession urban development policies in Dublin, Cynical parrhesia is an attractive stance for critically minded artists, even when it fails to rouse target audiences. Parrhesia is a notion that emerges in antiquity as a form of risky political criticism, of the citizen vis-à-vis the democratic majority, and of the councillor vis-à-vis the prince. Foucault was interested in the kinship between parrhesia and critique (2019: 43), and the genealogical correlation between forms of parrhesiastic expression in the ancient world, in Christian spiritualism and in modern practices of ‘telling the truth about oneself’ in the role of patient or penitent (2011: 8). Across its historical iterations, ‘good’ parrhesia is characterised by certain common features: it is (a) a virtue, (b) a technique and (c) a relationship. That is to say, (a) it emanates from a ‘duty’ (2019: 45) to the truth, meaning it is opposed to the theatrical dissimulations of ‘flattery’ (2019: 19) or ‘rhetoric’ (2019: 21). Because it is a risky form of truth-telling, (b) it requires that the parrhesiast know the right ‘circumstances’ in which to speak (2019: 23). Finally, (c) it is an unsettled ‘game’ (2019: 24) in which the interlocutor has the power to refuse the parrhesiastic agreement. Thus, a requirement of the parrhesiastic relationship is that there is ‘similitude in the choice of existence’ between both parties (2019: 29) – what Ziyad Marar (2014) calls ‘mutual understanding’ of the rules of the game and its value. If these criteria are not met, we have ‘bad’ parrhesia: ‘saying anything one has in mind … without taking care’ (Foucault 2019: 41). Thus, parrhesia isn’t any kind of risky expression; it has to be unalloyed and well executed, and the relationship between parrhesiast and interlocutor must be carefully navigated – precisely because it is at risk. Moreover, while Foucault notes that the parrhesiast is ‘in a position of inferiority to the interlocutor’ (2019: 44), he is also clear that only those of high ‘social status’ have historically been judged capable of parrhesia (2019: 118). As he writes of ancient parrhesia: it ‘is not a right equally given to any citizen, but only to some, who are specially prestigious’ (2019: 92). What made parrhesia powerful was that it was a form of risky expression through which high status persons could influence those in power in ‘the interest of the city’ (2019: 113). Parrhesia thus cuts to the heart of a ‘discrepancy’ Foucault identifies in democratic politics: between the ‘egalitarian’ ideal that posits that anyone is capable of expressing the truth, and the reality that a select few are often judged capable of truth-telling (2019: 113). For Foucault, the paradigmatic example of the parrhesiastic skill was ancient Cynicism. The Cynics are particularly relevant here, as they often tested the thin boundary between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parrhesia. Cynicism thus helps us understand instances in which parrhesia is judged to have failed. Moreover, it is in discussions of Cynicism that Foucault explicitly deals with the relationship between parrhesia and democracy, and between parrhesia and modern art. The Cynics were active from the fifth century bc, though varieties of Cynicism have re-emerged in several historical contexts since. They occupied an ambiguous role in ancient society: both ridiculed and sought after by the elite, they proffered polemical, popularly accessible critique, in the form of public preaching, combative dialogue and scandalous behaviour (Foucault 2019: 169). They aggressively championed truth and frankness but lambasted luxury, hypocrisy and sophistry. Cynicism is thus often described as a reaction against the failure of high Greek philosophy and its linkages with ‘the decadence of the political structures of the ancient world’ (2019: 166). An iconoclastic mode of existence, it was defined by an emphasis on practice over doctrine, by an antinomian, ‘scandalous attitude’ vis-à-vis social mores, and by a commitment to manifesting ‘essential truths’ via forms of ‘visible, spectacular provocation’ (2019: 167). In this respect, Foucault (2011) posited that ancient Cynicism is an antecedent to the ‘anti-cultural function’ (2011: 189) of modern art. As he notes, the historical figure of the Cynic as eccentric critic is recapitulated in the expectation, dominant since the Renaissance, that the artist live ‘a singular life, which is not entirely reducible to the usual dimensions and norms’ (2011: 187). Indeed, it was this quality of the artistic life that led Simmel to describe artists as structural ‘outsiders’, distinctive figures whose lives and work are marked by a refusal of ‘intelligibility’ (2011: 190) and a commitment to making ‘a system out of life’s lack of system’ (2011: 191). Similarly, there is an affinity between the ancient understanding of parrhesia as unmediated truth-telling and the ‘modern idea that the artist’s life, in the very form it takes, should constitute some kind of testimony of what art is in its truth’ (2011: 187). Foucault’s thesis is consistent with art historical accounts, which have emphasised the antagonistic, anti-cultural thrust of many 20th-century European artistic and avant-garde movements (Bishop 2012: 78). From Dadaism to Surrealism to Situationism, some of the core precepts of Cynicism have surfaced in the modern period: a positive value has been attributed to art that inverts social mores, scandalises its audience or tests ‘the consensus of culture’ (Foucault 2011: 189) from within. Here, I would like to pause to consider an important tension that emerges in Foucault’s work on parrhesia and Cynicism. If we accept that parrhesia requires a relationship based on mutual understanding, but that Cynical parrhesia has a fundamentally anti-cultural function, two criteria are necessary for Cynical parrhesia to succeed. The interlocutor must know or trust the parrhesiast enough to willingly accept the parrhesiastic agreement, and must value and understand the anti-cultural criticism proffered. In other words, there must be (a) a carefully navigated relationship and (b) a pre-existing shared Cynical attitude. As we will see, in the forthcoming encounters, neither are present. As a result, artists are seen to have failed to use their privileged positions as vocal public provocateurs to speak meaningfully in the interest of the majority, instead turning their attention to genres of criticism intelligible to and valued by a small clique of fellow initiated artists. What we find flourishing in the wake of bad parrhesia, then, is a relationship between artist and audience characterised by humour, confusion and withdrawal. That being said, the key contribution of this paper is to argue that a bad parrhesiastic encounter does not yield the absence of a social relationship but a relationship of an ‘anti-social’ (Højer 2019, 2004) kind. Højer’s (2004) analysis originates in an ethnographic account of the Mongolian concept of hel am, a category of diffuse danger carrying ‘connotations of dispute’ and ‘powers of harm’ or ‘misfortune’ (2004: 50). Højer demonstrates that hel am is a ‘“creative” principle working for disintegration … not just negatively working for the integration of society’ (2004: 52). To account for such categories, Højer argues, we require a theory of relationality that makes space for qualities other than mutuality, reciprocity or togetherness. Against the assumption ‘that you can take each other’s point of view’, Højer re-centres forms of ‘avoidance’, ‘enmity’, ‘suspicion’, ‘withdrawal’ and ‘indifference’ as active relational forms (2004: 61). Not only is the ‘anti-social contract’ a productive corrective to the Durkheimian assumption that sociality is principally characterised by mutuality. It is also a concept through which I aim to contribute to anthropological debates about Cynicism, parrhesia and northern liberal democracy. Ethnographies of parrhesia and Cynicism have situated it as a form of possessive individualism and corrosive to intersubjective relations (Englund 2018), or as a reaction against the ironies of liberal democratic politics (Boyer 2013). In order to make sense of my particular case, a slight adjustment is required in each case. In his ethnography of free speech debates on Finnish radio, Englund (2018) describes a series of confrontations between public-service broadcasters and bigoted listeners. Englund argues that these debates stem from disagreements regarding the relationship between voice, truth and the subject: for public-service broadcasters, truth is constituted intersubjectively through dialogue, while for bigoted listeners, internal truths are expressed via a singular, fearless voice. Englund contends that listeners’ commitment to self-expression is akin to Foucault’s parrhesia, which he defines as characterised by a tight, proprietary bond between the parrhesiast and inner truths, and counterposed to intersubjectivity. In my case, I recentre another aspect of parrhesia that Foucault emphasises: the skill required to navigate the parrhesiastic relationship. Arguably, what Englund’s and my case share is a focus on bad parrhesia. These are instances in which the expression of incontinent truths clumsily compromises the relationship between parrhesiast and interlocutor. In describing these as instances of bad parrhesia, then, I focus attention on the ways in which what counts as worthwhile public criticism is subject to active contestation. I also aim to highlight that bad parrhesia may compromise public discourse while nonetheless actively generating intersubjective relations, if relations of an ‘anti-social’ variety. Second, in Boyer’s (2013) ethnography of Reykjavik’s satirical 2010 mayoral campaign, he describes the campaign’s Cynical parrhesia and satirical humour as a reaction against the ironic distance between the liberal value of multi-vocality and the dominance of a narrow range of liberal ideologies and elite actors. Yet Boyer does not draw attention to the factors that mitigate against a person appreciating or understanding the Cynical attitude. In this respect, he perhaps underemphasises the secondary factors that influence whether a person is likely to acknowledge or value publicly visible forms of critique, which can become just as homogeneous and entrenched as those liberal ideologies against which they are a reaction. In my case, the Cynical attitude does not invite the audience into a playful critical relationship but closes the door to critical engagement. This is because the Cynical attitude is not only unfamiliar and unvalued by audiences; it is also seen as less subservient to the expression of difficult truths than to artists’ commitment to nurturing a position of rebellious distinctiveness. Nevertheless, as we will see, artists’ tendency to engage in bad parrhesiastic expression remains an intelligible reaction to a conundrum artists face in the contemporary Irish arts sector. In what follows, I explore the contextual factors that have laid the groundwork for these ‘bad’ parrhesiastic encounters. I situate the anti-social character of artists’ work against the backdrop of two shifts in city planning and artistic production, and I explore the relationship between status and the limitations of Cynicism as a critical stance. Since the 1990s, European art has experienced a drift away from its historically anti-cultural function. Two factors have contributed to this sea change. First, ‘the social turn’ in contemporary art has heralded a global rise in ‘participatory’ work: art that treats social life as its subject matter and stages social situations designed to leave participants with a sense of heightened belonging, empowerment or togetherness. This genre sees the artist less as auteur than co-author, or even, where deprived communities are targeted, quasi-social worker. Though it has received ardent criticism, ‘participatory’ art continues to dominate the European art sector (Bishop 2012, 2005). Simultaneously, there has been a swell in ‘culture-led’ urban development policies, with the ‘creative city’ model among the most familiar. Championed by Richard Florida (2003), the ‘creative city’ approach capitalises on the capacity for creative labourers – artists, designers, tech workers – to attract an upwardly mobile consumer base to urban areas. This development model was pioneered in North America but has been widely applied elsewhere (Peck 2005). The ‘social turn’ has meant that contemporary artists are trained to produce precisely the sort of community-oriented artwork ‘creative city’ advocates are eager to platform. However, for artists critical of the social turn, this alliance has signalled the inoculation of art’s critical function. Culture-led development models involve an overt repurposing of bohemianism as a tool for kick-starting economic growth (McGuigan 2009: 293). They also frequently deploy legions of precariously employed artists to patch over gaps in social services (Bishop 2012: 14). The anti-cultural function of the artist has thus been explicitly folded into urban policymaking and dominant modes of cultural production. ‘Creative’ and ‘culture-led’ development approaches have been applied with enthusiasm in Dublin and featured centrally in the state’s response to the recession, during which time artists were earmarked as key ‘creative’ allies in Ireland’s return to economic prosperity. Under the auspices of a variety of policy programmes – the Creative Dublin Alliance, Creative Ireland, the Percent for Art Scheme – artists have been encouraged by the government and the Dublin City Council to reinvigorate vacant sites with temporary collectives, pop-up exhibitions and studios. However, policies that nominally emphasise ‘creativity’ and ‘community’ have predominantly repackaged existing models of entrepreneurialism in the interest of a small network of actors (Lawton et al. 2010). Moreover, the sites targeted for regeneration are often derelict buildings in ‘blighted’ neighbourhoods in the city centre, or on the sites of recently demolished social housing estates, where quick-fix ‘creative’ projects have been demonstrated to exacerbate existing inequalities (O’Callaghan and Lawton 2016). If we step back and consider these factors, we can understand why critically minded artists might have a high tolerance for bad parrhesiastic encounters, even if it means giving oxygen to anti-social relations. The confluence of contemporary art’s ‘social turn’ and the ‘creative city’ model has meant that ‘anti-social’ art appears to be the only way to preserve art’s ‘anti-cultural’ edge. More than this, to refuse to appeal to this participatory genre is about expressing solidarity with those communities that experience public art projects not as an innocuous source of entertainment, but as, in the words of one artist, a ‘mercenary … mechanic for the ruling class’. Ironically, however, it is precisely this turn toward ‘anti-social’ art and antinomian lifestyles that presents a hurdle to establishing easy relationships with audiences. It should be noted that the subject matter of this paper is not the relationship between artistic labour and class. This is a complicated subject that I address elsewhere. Indeed, a vast literature attests to the challenge of characterising artists’ working lives in straightforwardly classed terms (e.g. Bain and McLean 2013; McRobbie 2011; Menger 1999). For the purposes of this analysis, it is significant that artists benefit from social status in at least one sense: they enjoy roles as politically valuable cultural producers, which allow them to court the ear of the powerful and impact public consensus. As Heather’s remark in the opening vignette attests, there was a sense that uninitiated audiences, especially in gentrifying neighbourhoods, did not have the same access to or awareness of artistic genres of cultural production and criticism – in Heather’s words, they weren’t ‘cultured enough’. Foucault’s reflections on the relationship between prestige and parrhesia helps us understand why: the parrhesiast is definitionally a person who has achieved sufficient status to be deemed a socially valuable purveyor of difficult truths and to be granted a politically sanctioned platform for critical expression. Artists undoubtedly enjoyed this role, yet audiences often thought artists had indulgently squandered their position, engaging in forms of abstruse cultural production at the expense of establishing mutual understanding. My interest in these encounters is a reflection of their prevalence in neighbourhoods like the one in which I lived, which I call Mount Stevens. I spent nine of twelve months of fieldwork living on a public–private row on the backside of the recently demolished site of one of Dublin’s most controversial social housing estates. An area that housed several blocks of tenements in the early years of the Republic, Mount Stevens is historically working-class. More recently, it has been subject to renewed regeneration efforts. When I arrived, I rode in on the heels of a recent flush of hip cafes and arts spaces, with one artist’s residency appearing adjacent to the demolished estate. In addition to spending time in Mount Stevens, I participated in twice-weekly workshops at two state-funded institutions in central Dublin, interviewed artists in dance, theatre, visual and performance art sectors, and spent innumerable hours attending shows in 50-odd studios, collectives, theatres and galleries. The artists I interviewed were those regularly encountered via involvement in these institutions. In neighbourhoods like Mount Stevens, where artists were newcomers, perceived class differences did exacerbate the factors that mitigate against the establishment of the parrhesiastic relationship. However, class differences were neither straightforward nor predictive of whether the artist would fail to establish a shared critical relationship with his/her audience. What was more significant, to audiences of varying socio-economic backgrounds, was whether the artist was perceived to have misused their privileged status. The concept of Cynical parrhesia helps us understand both why artists critical of the ‘social turn’ have returned to more antagonistic forms of public spectacle, and why the same critical attitude has rendered their art opaque, humorous or unpleasant to uninitiated audiences. The Cynical attitude leaves artists in a catch-22. It allows them to manifest a vaguely polemical attitude vis-à-vis city planners, investors and curators keen to mobilise ‘participatory art’ as a temporary stopgap for a lack of social services in gentrifying areas. Yet it also means that artists appear to be ‘outside’ or ‘against’ those communities on whose behalf they abstractly see themselves as producing polemical ‘anti-social’ art. I return now to an ethnographic account that makes this clear. Shortly after arriving in Dublin, I participated in a performance art workshop at a state-funded institution I call Meeting House. Several artists – professional and amateur – attended classes run by visiting performance artists. I participated in these and a culminating open show, staged in a cavernous studio with two-storey ceilings, three white walls, and a 20-metre-long bay of modernist windows looking out onto a public park and social housing estate. During the first half of the performance, those of us who attended the workshops staged a ‘performative intervention’. The second half showcased a practitioner of a genre of avant-garde dance that involves making microcosmically slow, hyper-controlled, extemporaneous movements. In its most evocative form, it is meant to so powerfully convey extreme physical and emotional states that the performance establishes a strong connection between audience and artist. Because of the slow pace of movement, however, it is difficult to appreciate for the uninitiated. Bot