International literary magazine on art, culture, and society from the young left.

Awareness Is Not Enough: On Art, Resistance, and Self-Delusion

Sara Frisch

In On Connection, Kae Tempest presents creativity as a way of achieving connection. At points throughout the book, there is a layer of acknowledgement that creativity and art, like everything, exist within the capitalist and consumerist system, the very system that seeks to inhibit connection and facilitate numbness. I believe Tempest, I believe that they are genuine, and I believe the genuine force with which Tempest loves music, poetry, and performance. Anyone who has ever seen them perform is forced to believe it. And luckily, Tempest finds a way to combine capitalism-critical ideology with their genuine love of art and performance into a neat, contradiction-free worldview: by constructing a binary of commercial art in opposition to art that seeks connection. 

For Tempest, artists ‘serve a purpose that is higher’ than consumption:

Even as you buy [a band’s] T-shirts and send them on their tours around the world. Even then, in that moment, the integrity of the intention sustains the inevitable involvement of the band that you love in capitalist industrialisation of their creative endeavours. The performance continues to be a deep searching for connection. They partake in the system, but are not engulfed in its numbness.1

On the flip side, certain art “is the product of mass manufacture, cynically assembled. It wants nothing but your clicks. It actively seeks your numbness”.2 But this binary rings false, it feels like an easy way out. It is a way to allow us to participate in a corrupt system and keep our purity.

All art is fighting for our attention, even that art that just wants to connect. Tempest acknowledges that “culture, in the main, is a bourgeois pursuit”3 and  there is a continuous acknowledgement of racism, poverty, sexism, classism, and the pivotal role that capitalism plays in creativity. But that acknowledgement is a ghost in the background in On Connection, not the foundation that it is built upon. It is just another aspect to be mentioned just to have mentioned it, not so it can actually inform their position. Tempest is aware of capitalism but doesn’t fully interrogate its role in the creation of art.

Yes, there is art that is purely commercial, and yes, even good bands sell T-shirts—but are they doing it in a different way from bad bands selling T-shirts? Can their participation in consumerism be excused? Or in the exploitation of labour that is inevitable in the production of said T-shirts? Tempest does not think this through and stops at the surface. Why even mention it then? Why mention the corruption of capitalism just to excuse it?

*

In the recent video The Problem with Video Essays on the YouTube channel PhilosophyTube, its creator and host Abigail Thorn describes her awareness of her participation in the numbers game and the clicks-chasing. She describes how she almost fell into the trap of making an easy, commercially successful video instead of a good one. Or, to say it in Tempest’s framework, she almost made the numb creation instead of the connected one:

In the phrase ‘educational YouTuber’, there’s two words, ‘educational’ and ‘YouTuber’, and it’s really easy to let the YouTuber bit overpower the educational bit because all the incentives you get as a creator are geared towards producing entertainment. A good YouTube video is clickable, shareable, and holds people’s attention. All the data- analytics feedback I get from YouTube the platform is geared towards helping me maximise those three things. And whether it’s accurate or not doesn’t really come into it.4

[…]

If I’m being really honest with myself, I think that my two most recent videos on Friedrich Nietzsche were […] less than the sum of their parts. There was some true and interesting stuff in there, but I kind of got carried away with the fun of that format and there was some sloppy oversimplification, too. The scary thing is, they did really well. There’s education and there’s YouTube, and sometimes those things are in tension. I made this video because I want my audience to be able to sit with that tension.5

There is not one kind of art that is commercial and then different art that seeks connection. At the very least, everybody looking for connection is commercial, too. PhilosophyTube invites us into the tension between the creative process and the capitalist system within which she creates. Partaking in the system and wanting to resist being ‘engulfed in its numbness’, in Tempest’s words, is a constant struggle. Having good intentions is not enough. To resist it, we have to actively keep resisting it. Thorn does just that:

But I want PhilosophyTube’s mission to be bigger than that. I wanna make that promise to you that I’m gonna keep pushing the limits of what a video essay can be, breaking the limits of what a video essay can be. Because I don’t just want you to like and subscribe. I want you to think.6

Philosophy Tube chooses connection. It is the kind of art that On Connection talks about. But it doesn’t offer a binary, a comfortable categorisation of creatives into those who play the numbers game and those who don’t, those who want our clicks and those who want us to connect, to think. It keeps pushing towards that goal of being connected without framing it as something that we either do or don’t do.

*

I hate a conclusion along the lines of: I guess all we can do is be aware. We can have it all, capitalism tells us, we can feel good about ourselves both morally and in the capitalist value system. We can criticise that art is commercial and excuse when the art we like is commercial. We can both criticise and chase immense wealth and over-consumption, as long as we are aware that it is bad. We don’t have to give away our money because first, those who have even more should do it, (and it all doesn’t make sense without taxes anyway). Every idea that is critical of capitalism finds a way to exist neatly within it. True radicalism is almost dead but I’m not quite ready to let it die. If we are against capitalism, we have to resist the easy answers that swallow any radical thinking up into itself.

We shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that we can somehow participate in the system in a way that it didn’t entirely anticipate us to. It is designed to absorb anti-capitalist vibes into itself, to make us feel that we can do what it wants us to and for us to still be part of the solution. Alexander Avila’s recent deeply anti-capitalist video essay on tech-fascists asks us to see nothing wrong with it being interrupted by an ad read for a razor. Avila no doubt deeply cares about connection and anti-capitalism, but at the end of his ad read, when he needs some sort of justification for it, he says: ‘Look, maybe the end is near. But that means that those little moments matter even more. It feels good to care about something, and honestly it feels really nice to own a nice object that’s a consistent part of my life’.7  Then, he returns to his analysis of how capitalism will destroy the world.

I also know that there is no outside. There is no way to create art outside of capitalism, because capitalism is all-encompassing. How do we not come to the seemingly unavoidable, singular solution that is awareness?

I think it comes down to the fact that if we do not play the numbers game, our numbers might suffer and we have to let them. If we do not play the beauty and skincare game, yes, we will likely look a bit worse, and wrinkle a bit faster. If we resist fatphobia and refuse to starve ourselves, we could potentially become less skinny. If we don’t buy into consumerism, we will buy fewer things and therefore have fewer things. If we care about wealth inequality, we have to give away our money even if people richer than us haven’t done it first and even if it means that we have less, and feel that we have less. And, if you make an anti-capitalist video and say ‘the end is near’, you can’t have an ad read in the middle of it, and you’ll have to make a little less money with what you created. That’s it. You’re probably with me when I say that if we are against labour exploitation, we wouldn’t exploit workers and our profit would suffer. That’s the principle. 

Abigail Thorn chose to embrace tension and connection and move against the algorithm. Her numbers are suffering. As of now, the videos Was Nietzsche Woke?8 and Was Nietzsche MAGA?9 have around one million and 760 thousand views respectively. The video following The Problem with Video Essays stands at just over 300 thousand.10

Capitalism is very good at making us comfortable and seemingly giving us everything we want. But as we take everything we want, we pay a heavier price than getting fewer clicks, looking a little worse, and having fewer things. We’ll always be less than the sum of our parts. We will always be numb. It will never connect us. We cannot have it all. Awareness of the game is not enough. You have to keep trying not to play, and therefore potentially lose.

author bio
Winter 25-26 issue
  1.  Kae Tempest, On Connection, (Faber & Faber, 2020), pp. 110-111. ↩︎
  2.  Ibid, p. 111. ↩︎
  3.  Ibid. ↩︎
  4.  PhilosophyTube, The Problem with Video Essays, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsiKUsrqFkc>, 23:14-23:45. ↩︎
  5.  Ibid, 26:03-26:39. ↩︎
  6.  Ibid, 27:01-27:23. ↩︎
  7. Alexander Avila, The Tech Billionaire to Fascist Pipeline,<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olhu9UhFGl4>, 10:22-10:37. ↩︎
  8.  PhilosophyTube, Was Nietzsche Woke? ,  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIzuTabyLS8&gt;. ↩︎
  9.  PhilosophyTube, Was Nietzsche MAGA?,  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI4fSxkqdLU&gt;. ↩︎
  10. PhilosophyTube, Rationalising Colonialism – How the US Stole Indigenous American Land, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBjQBa23cOw>. ↩︎