Should all ‘good points’ be made?

You know, sometimes you think something and say to yourself “that’s a good point, but what are the implications of making it?”. This could be my epitaph, but equally it should have been a forewarning for the first half of the 21st century.

…Cultural cynicism, unironic irony because “it was always going to happen, wasn’t it?”.

Of course there’s a fine-line between a culture of knowing irony and dark cynicism, and a diagnosis of our reality that may appear to use the same reference points.

Reading Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism was like coming up for air, a moment of clarity and consciousness raising at the start of the 2010s. However, it was seen as ‘doomer’ by some people at the time, and perhaps this is what led him to work on ideas of ‘post capitalist desire’ and ‘Acid Communism’; two ideas that, since his passing, have become (ironically?!) spectres haunting a 2020s that has lost Fisher’s eyes – eyes that many of us found ourselves looking through.

This isn’t to idolise Fisher, it’s just to wonder he we are now lacking an expert mapper of our times. And without him, or David Graeber, or John Berger, we are finding it harder to find ourselves collectively.

But nonetheless, many, could not see the crucial difference between Fisher’s analysis and the likes of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, for example.

But returning to the original point, I have always also wrestled with this as an artist. My drawings have often been said to conjure a miserable outlook. I was always troubled by this, because the creative process, or breakthrough when an idea finally works, brings me a joy that feels like political empowerment, in that my drawing becomes my mouth and eyes that were previously unable to see and speak.

Yet, since the 2020s began, any sense of the work having any agency beyond my engagement and production of it has felt harder to believe in. Worse, in a world overexposed and thus overwhelmed by bad and scary news, where images compete with ever-more ferocity for our attention, what is my work but something that makes people feel more depressed, more disempowered?

Art in the age of Cosplay

Indeed, I have become lost in what seems to be a new artistic culture. Perhaps the 2010s was a fever dream of intentions? I don’t know, but in this period my work felt like it attached to something bigger than itself. Now, trying to make it exist for its own sake feels confusing, and it often feels like a project that has been ox-bow-laked.

If in the 2010s social media was a contested territory in terms of the platform’s subjectivation, now it feels that the self-as-brand as totally triumpthed.

Because of the ubiquity of Instagram, more than any other social media platfrom, this has changed what it means to be an artist, or at least tweeked it further down a specific road.

My theory is that to be an artist in an age of Instagram is actually to be an artist in the age of cosplay.

Formally we understand Cosplay to be dressing up as Spiderman, Wonderwoman or whatever and posting it on social media, with the most most popular profiles usually looking super sexy and suggestive of other types of imagery.

But I believe that Cosplay is now a requirement for artists.

The New doesn’t exist on Social media, just digitally reified iterations of things reduced to costumes that we all endorse to be valid. Sadly, now, to be a succesful artist from grassroots up, you have to cosplay like hell. You even have to cosplay a variation of your own identity, where working class artist perform a tired version of working class-ness.

Should all ‘good points’ be made?

I ask this question, because I’m not sure this observation helps, but in fact follows a long line of critiques of life to day that bereft of any agency, are more likely to be taken personally, taking a snipe at an individual’s behaviour, rather than being seeing as something we can work on.

To return to Fisher’s Post-capitalist desire, and Acid Communism, these were attempts to overcome the knowing irony, and cynicism that underlined what he called ‘capitalist realism’ but could be also said to be our culture from the 90s to the present. It was perhaps inspired partly by a critique of his own theory prior to this period, and whether it could become too easily tied up with the larger “everything’s shit, yes we know that” culture.

I sincerely hope my works, and my thoughts don’t contribute to the “everything’s shit, yes we know that” culture.

Sometimes the need to speak, in order to feel like you exist, can often produce sounds that aren’t really the ones you truly wish to make.

‘I’m not human anymore’

‘I’m not human anymore’ (2024/25, mixed media on paper, 140x100cm)

I am genuinely incredibly happy with this work. Yet, it feels tiny, no matter how big I made it and how shoulder injuries I get making it, the work feels smaller and smaller.

My vision no longer has eyes, not in quite the same way as it once did.

Things have changed. Whilst I was foolish (perhaps) for believing in a different kind of change.

Foolish (perhaps?) to have allowed myself to be a host for a millenarian kind of faith – a millennial who thought it inevitable that the transition from the 20th to 21st century would unveil a better/more liveable world.

Foolish (perhaps?), like millions of others, to have made a b-line to a beam of light, an opening to the 21st century we expected, as a genuinely progressive politics re-merged in the 2010s.

Foolish (perhaps?) to believe in the vitality, the sheer necessity of the work I made to have some kind of agency – some purchase, if only slight, on the moulding of reality.

I am disorientated. The 2020s have brought a deep doubt about the potency of art, my art, and what the work itself becomes once that potency is absent – even if only in my own perceptions.

Downer at the door

It’s creeping in again, it’s such a familiar pattern now.

A few social interactions that left an unwelcome aftertaste, alongside too much repetition of habits you now fear will be written on your tombstone (if you get one), and the aftertaste begins to spread to all corners of your skull.

Normal habit would be to seek a shut down; sabotage all signs of showing up, like a losing army in retreat.

Sometimes I get so sick of myself it’s like you see yourself reduced to your own bodily excrement and nothing else.

I was 41 on Friday. So far this is has by no means my worst winter.

Since my late 20s each most of them have felt like private humiliations, and there’s been a long list of self destructive actions to go with it. But thiis one hasn’t been quite so bad.

However,  something is coming up now, after a lot of birthday social stim in places that know my face all-too-well. And now comes the need to disappear.

Yet, I know that this isn’t what I should do. I know that this year I should not listen to those emotions, I should see it through.

The task is still to get to a point where I am no longer trying to get out of my life, and I know that this year has to be the year where I stay with myself.

I’m hoping I’m just in need of a good night’s sleep.

But there’s a downer at my door. Yet, the best thing I can do tonight is make sure all the windows are closed.

Wallace and Grommit – A North where the trauma of Thatcherism never happened.

Two staples of British TV culture returned this Xmas, Wallace and Grommit and Outnumbered.

And before I start, I really enjoy both of them. I used to love Wallace and Grommit as a child, with it’s dry humour, that manages to remain humorous whatever age you are. Whilst Outnumbered felt very comforting to watch around the time of the late noughties and early 2010s when the financial crisis presented a concerning near-future ahead.

I’m always half-inspecting things. Sometimes I wish I didn’t, sometimes I won’t watch things because I won’t be able to passively consume, and I’ll be left overly-wired in the evening. This will now be a life-long side effect from reading a lot of digestible culture theory that itself now feels lagging behind, out of breath, when the pace is set to a Tik Tok tempo.

So, what I am about to say isn’t a criticism of what seems to me best described as ‘eerie comfort culture’, because something is conspicuously absent, and intends for it to be absent, as it knows we want to imagine a world without it.

Yes, Wallace and Grommit is an animation – and all animations want to do with reality what reality cannot do with itself. But it’s also deeply familiar, conjuring a dream-scape of what could have been made of a north from the past if that past had trauma-lessley joined onto the present tense.

This take has nothing to do with migration, the changing face of British cities in terms of skin colour, multiculturalism, etc – that would be a silly suggestion. Because for me, Wallace and Grommit is perhaps the archetypal presentation of a North where the trauma of Thatcherism never happened.

The writer Carl Neville wrote a book called Classless, which was largely a critique of Danny Boyle’s films as films that conveyed the New Labour illusion writ-large – that there was no more class struggle, no more social history anymore, that’d we’d kind of plateaued and life would be comfortable for all, except for life’s normal up and downs, a world that just looked like everyone had a family like that off Outnumbered.

Again, this is not a slating. This is an awareness that popular television often comforts us by showing us a world as we feel it should look, rather than how it does look.

Outnumbered, all though rooted in a present, with many contemporary references, still resembles the fantasy that Wallace and Grommit portrays. One where, through life and death, through illness, through human aches and pains, is still one where we can all grow old with the confidence and independence of self-actualised adults. An idea of middle class life that remains rooted in a future that 1997 dreamt of.

And Wallace and Grommit and Outnumbered were soothing plasters for a country where things really do not feel too great.

A country where millennials and their ageing parents (to name just two generations) can indulge in the idea that the dream-scape of New Labour Britain 3rd way future actually worked for all.

A north that felt truly at ease with it’s industrial past without relying on nostalgia, because the old and new had fused into a Modernity that actually worked, and gave us all a sense of northern citizenship.

And a Uk that had flowed seamlessly through social democracy to the internet age, without the pain of Thatcherism, and consequently austerity and Brexit.

This is all so rose-tinted, and flawed by blindspots about succesful transitions from lost futures to alternative Nows. But perhaps lost futures, alternative Nows are our current collective fantasy?

Novara Media’s ‘2024, the year that ‘Woke’ died…’

So the reason I wanted to think about this on my blog, as opposed to writing about it on a social media feed is for how easy it is to fall fowl when using certain language on there.

We all know that. Indeed this is exactly what Novara are discussing in their 2024 round-up. Woke at it’s core, is a preoccupation with the use of language.

Now you feel in safe hands with the likes of Ash Sarkar, primarily because for reasons totally out of her hands, she had become a kind of poster girl of ‘Woke’ culture, largely from the perspective of those who were being pushed in the opposite, ‘anti-woke’ direction.

Wether it is that these 3 Novara pundits are now veterans of their trade, their thinking, and have matured much since the heady days of Novara’s initial growth (between the 2010 student protests and the beginnings of Corbyinism), their approach to the experiences and attitudes of a wider pool of society and not just Millennial graduates has become evident.

But I think Ash, specifically, has become incredibly good at at importing her empathy and own self-reflection into her own political analysis.

As ‘Millennial graduates’ they understand that we have a large proportion of people who were encouraged to go to University, many of whom were encouraged to go into the humanities, from where the use of language becomes an obsession.

Ash and Aaron conclude on something that I’ve thought about for a long time, but is so bloody hard to communicate without it provoking an eyebrow of suspicion that you’re on a downward spiral towards saying something like “I’m not racist, but..”. It’s not that the values behind woke are wrong, “it’s the style of politics” as Aaron says. Aaron talks about how it’s a politics seems to have no intention to persuade.

I understand how this occurs, especially because of the instantaneousness of online communication, and the immediacy needed trying to make practical incursions into the direction the 21st century can often seem to heading down – we turn for the language weapons with the biggest immediate impact.

But in doing so, we fall into camps. And are very quick to form suspicions and push away somebody who hasn’t learnt the appropriate codes for this moment in time.

I’ve seen friends, and associates, often largely, but not always, ones who didn’t go to university (especially humanities departments) who feel more and more aligned with alt-right attitudes, always there waiting to take over your Youtube, once you type in something relatively innocuous. People who are by and large decent people who hate the idea of suffering, have felt the target of one camp because they don’t quite fit, and have consequently become almost wholeheartedly associated with everything opposite to it.

For me the ‘Summer riots’ of 2024 were of particular, if not deeply distressing, interest. Here in South Yorkshire there were two ‘protests’ on the same day. One in the heart of Sheffield, and one in the heart of the Dearne Valley. In Sheffield a large group of pro-immigration, left-leaning people gathered outside the city hall. In the Dearne Valley the anti-immigration protests focussed on a hotel housing asylum seekers, refugees.

Now, anyone who knows much about the history of South Yorkshire will know that the hotel which endured those pogrom-like events is literally yards from where an event began 40 years ago that is crucial to the contemporary left-wing narrative: The Miners’ Strike.

Not to go too much into the changing cultural geography of South Yorkshire, but the Dearne Valley, and in fact most of South Yorkshire beyond a sliver of urban Sheffield, has changed vastly from 1984. Disused coal mines have been built over by retail parks, and call centres, and lifestyles for those who can buy into it, have largely shifted, and become less community, politically-focussed, and more consumer, family, and car-ownership focussed. Now, this isn’t across the board, but it’s a truth that runs across a lot of the UK that identity has changed for many who find themselves teetering on that line between lower middle class and what my language-obsessed conscience is shouting at me for describing as a ‘white working class’.

Sheffield city centre, or at least a chunk that extends West and South from the city centre, is like an island amidst a contemporary South Yorkshire that bears no relation to it. This part of Sheffield is very much like the the environment that the London-based Novara Media would be more naturally at home in: Urban-to-surburban, multi-cultural, high graduate retention, and a higher reliance of public transport and community institutions.

I can’t even get into the newer kind of alienation that I believe besets a post-political mass of suburban, car-owning Britain. But all I know is that there were two camps in that Summer Sunday in South Yorkshire. Ten miles apart, but a million miles apart in ability to communicate with one another.

Do the people who, maybe out of a broth of anger, racism, misplaced humiliation and alcohol, nearly killed people, deserve being put into comparison with graduates concerned with their use of appropriate language, but probably generally thinking they’re making social progress?

All I know is that 40 years ago I can guarantee that a large proportion of these people’s parents, grandparents would have been directly involved in the battle to keep the livelihoods going – a cause that united people from all different social groups at the time.

I’m not even sure where I’m going with this, just a boxing day ramble. But I was just so glad that some of the most trusted media figures on the left are willing to discuss that there may be some deep problems with ‘woke’, whether you agree that it is dying or not.