‘Some of those holier-than-thou protestors need to remember that we are all living here on stolen land. If you can’t own your privilege as a non-Indigenous Australian, all your boycotts, your rallying, your protests, mean nothing,’ one says. ‘Maybe you can use the show to make, you know, a statement! Say something about how strongly you disagree with what Nilsson is doing.’
Good Posture
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen on Pitaya Chin’s critique of performative morality
What distinguishes acting out of care from acting like you care? Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen examines what Pitaya Chin’s The Director and the Daemon has to say about art masquerading as activism and activism masquerading as action.
That old adage – the personal is political – has taken on new meaning in the contemporary age, when affiliations and identities have become a form of cultural currency. The doubling of lives – one in the flesh, one online – has only accelerated this fact: what you post is who you are.
Add being a creative into the mix and it’s all amplified, particularly in the age of LARPing identity or struggle – an update on the old cliche of the starving artist. If not born into wealth, an artist will likely require some kind of benefactor or stroke of luck to be able to sustainably create their work and make it into a career. But even if you do have those things, you have to pretend not to – the bourgeois artist cosplaying poverty; the poor artist unable to create due to the conditions of their life.
Another rule: you must not bite the hand that feeds, even if it also chokes.
The personal is political is personal is political is personal is…
This is the ouroboros of being a so-called progressive in the modern age: a hall of mirrors, each distorting further, until reality and reflection blur into a muck, where everything begins, and also ends.
The ethical and the political have long been central concerns in Pitaya Chin’s writing. In a conversation with Chin, then known as SL Lim, for Liminal in 2021, Cher Tan noted that the author’s first two novels were ‘about characters coming to terms with the moral and political grey areas within postmodern society’, to which Chin responded, ‘I’m interested in people’s relationship with their desires and their ethical commitments, what survives and what breaks.’ Chin’s excellent 2020 novel, Revenge: Murder in Three Parts, is a whirlwind of anger and resentment aimed at the nuclear family, with the main character raging against the cultural and familial expectations she must endure as a daughter and a woman, eventually coming up with a bloodthirsty plot to escape it all. Chin’s writing style is often experimental, defying convention and genre to create something altogether more elusively fascinating.
The Director and the Daemon continues this trajectory, dissecting the contemporary political scene through two storylines that blur together over the course of the novella. The first involves the unnamed director of a sci-fi TV show starring a beautiful non-binary actor named Kit – the object of the director’s affections. The show’s precarious future hinges on an ethical dilemma: a big-bucks sponsorship opportunity is coming by way of Nilsson Services, a company that funds offshore detention centres. The principled director is reluctant to accept the money. But Kit, who is living with them, will walk if the show is not renewed.
There are clear resonances between the director’s dilemma and that which the Australian arts world currently faces. Recently, there has been heightened scrutiny around the creative industry’s ties with Zionist-backed entities, which provide many funding and grant opportunities, as well as jobs. In the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, there has been pushback against working with and for groups and organisations with hidden, or not-so-hidden, agendas – Creative Australia being one recent example, with the revocation of its selection of pro-Palestinian artist Khaled Sabsabi to represent the country at the Venice Biennale; another example being the Queensland State Library, with multiple judges resigning from the Queensland Literary Awards after Indigenous author KA Ren Wyld was stripped of a prestigious fellowship for their tweets about Hamas.
While the genocide in Gaza has brought the arts’ reliance on ethically suspect funding – and the subsequent censorship that takes place – into sharp focus, the situation is by no means a recent phenomenon. Journalist Dee Jefferson describes the Sabsabi situation as ‘an extreme iteration of a scenario that has been playing out across the arts for years’. For instance, take the excellent community-run Other Worlds Zine Fair, which was founded in 2014 in response to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s then-ties to Transfield, a company that, like the fictional Nilsson Services in Chin’s book, provided services to offshore detention centres. That same year, in protest, many artists withdrew from the Sydney Biennale over its own ties with Transfield.
The activist Matt Chun, who has been at the forefront of this movement against propaganda masquerading as arts philanthropy, remarked in an interview last year, ‘[M]any of us [artists] will capitulate or self-censor in order to gain these platforms, benefits and resources.’ The director in Chin’s novella faces this very decision, and knows deep down they can’t accept the money. But there are people urging them to take it, such as fellow artists at the ‘Creatives in Colour’ dinners, who parade their progressive politics even as they counsel complicity with state violence:
Saying you care about the oppressed is a virtue signal, not meaningful action. One line made me laugh in bitter recognition as my stomach churned in disgust: ‘We wanted to do something speaking to the national story, Indigenous Australia – decolonisation is big right now.’ Chin’s point here is clear: these very real injustices are being treated as trends, followed to boost social, cultural and financial capital. Decolonisation is big right now, until the next thing comes along and the conversation zooms off in that direction.
The main political figurehead in this storyline is a Labor senator named Katherine K Kelly (clock the initials). ‘She is left-leaning, isn’t she?’ asks one character. ‘MPs for Climate Action. Hopefully she can put a stop to this scary stuff.’ Another character praises her, fawning over ‘strong women’. But Kelly is a peddler of the worst kind of political inaction disguised as activism, of conservatism cloaked in so-called feminism, with which she is associated simply by virtue of her being a woman. This is the ‘girlboss’ figure, ubiquitous in the contemporary age. (See: the disproportionate praise Julia Gillard continues to receive for her 2012 ‘misogyny speech’, notwithstanding her decidedly non-feminist actions during her tenure as prime minister, such as the infamous stripping of the single-parent pension.)
The novella’s critique of performative morality continues in its second storyline, involving a young radical who is part of a close-knit activist collective that hunts down ‘climate imperialists’ and commits acts of physical violence against them. The setting is a near-future dystopia, with temperatures topping 50 degrees. People are desperate for meaningful action and change, and the collective is ostensibly working towards this goal but begins to fracture as lateral violence increases, and constant in-fighting and posturing threatens to break them up permanently.
Chin makes no secret of their disdain for the performative, hypocritical left. The author’s voice is biting and acidic, much like Cher Tan’s in her excellent essay collection Peripathetic, which also deconstructs contemporary political and subcultural life, and its intersections with the online space. We’ve all met a Bombadil, for example, who ‘is white and owns property as a result of never actually having come out to his parents’. He runs a monthly social event called ‘Radical Zines for Radical Teens (In Rad Scenes)’, where most of the attendees are upwards of thirty. Then there’s Kabir, the dreadlocked white partner of a friend. He has a dog named Kaya, short for Kartikaya, the Hindu god of war (‘Kabir’s girlfriend is not a Hindu and Kaya frequently shits inside the house’). Another member of the group is called DojaCat!!! (exclamation marks included). The young radical can’t remember which way DojaCat!!! is transitioning but, as the character says, ‘Gender is a shitpost, anyway.’
These two storylines dart in and out of one another, colliding occasionally, as when one of the activists spots ‘cute enby’ actor Kit at a rally. There is a sense that everything is intertwined: the director could be the radical, or the radical could be the director; any of us could be one another, separated only by circumstance. The eventual, supposed betrayal of Kit mirrors the supposed betrayal of the radical group. These characters have superficial connections which masquerade as something deeper; unsteady relationships based purely on transactional value and social capital.
Politics is an identity marker for these characters, in a way that also impacts and shapes their interpersonal relationships. I laughed out loud at a line about the aforementioned ‘magnet for the white chicks’, Kabir: ‘Well, you know how they can be when there are men from the Orient. “Dick curved like a scimitar,” as Edward Said said, probably.’ It’s not Chin’s only throwaway joke involving the pretension of referencing academics or philosophers – at another point, a character asks, ‘What are you going to Badiou about it?’
These are the characters populating the share houses and activist groups. They can afford to be radical because of their comfortable circumstances – intergenerational wealth, a university education – which are concealed out of shame or necessity. They carefully and carelessly toss out these references, desperate to prove their intelligence and status. Their personas are closely curated to appear dishevelled and blasé – the not-so-subtle art of not giving a fuck.
These characters are all terminally online, peppering sentences with ‘lmao’ and ‘lol’; they communicate in memes more than they meaningfully speak to one another. They post in an online community called Asian Baking Obsessions, which is splintering due to its own in-fighting: a nod, surely, to Subtle Asian Traits, a Facebook group that began as a lighthearted way for the diasporic Asian community to connect over shared frustrations and stereotypes but that later exploded into a web of lateral violence. It still exists, constantly bubbling with tension, like its sister group, Subtle Asian Dating.
These organic identity-based communities and projects are under constant risk of commodification – a comment about Subtle Asian Traits and Subtle Asian Dating on the Asian American subreddit reads, ‘I’d be surprised if both groups aren’t being aggressively courted by corporations right now offering the admins sponsorships.’ It brings to mind the questions raised in Siang Lu’s The Whitewash, which exposes the complex and cunning web of commercial interests hiding behind the facade of so-called diversity. Both Chin and Lu show how corporate investment can cause rot in even the most well-intentioned and purposefully inclusive environments; and that every movement, no matter how diverse or meaningful in its aims, must contend with the danger of being co-opted for profit, when all its meaning, all its solidarity, will be melted down into gold.
Through The Director and the Daemon, Chin raises an important question: how does one cut through all the bullshit and actually make a difference as an artist, activist or both? It’s interesting reading The Director and the Daemon alongside the author’s polemic for New Socialist, in which they use a number of texts, including Anwen Crawford’s book No Document, as a springboard to explore the phenomenon of performative white politics within the context of making art. Chin describes No Document as ‘the worst caricature of “identity politics”, whereby the identity being evoked is that of having a politics’. Therein lies the dilemma driving Chin’s novella: we are all inseparable from our backgrounds and lives, and those things often drive us to action. But they lose their genuineness when peddled out as a weapon or card. By centring the self in a larger collective struggle, the message and meaning can be diluted.
In the New Socialist piece, Chin examines how Crawford artfully describes a scene from an activation, yet skims over the actual political significance of the event and the tireless labour behind it:
We learn how flares lit up the sky at the Woomera detention centre breakout of 2002 – a striking, beautiful image – but not about the organising that led to this moment, how it failed or succeeded, nor how anti-border movements have evolved since then, or might evolve in the future.
Similarly, ‘the Tuggerah detention centre breakout of 2005’ in The Director and the Daemon becomes a shorthand badge of honour for a certain kind of activist. We don’t learn who did what at that action, or what the purpose of the struggle was, or even what happened to the refugees – just that these people were there, and that’s all the information you need in order to know exactly how good, how principled, they are.
When questioned about his politics, for instance, one character, Robbie, shoots back, ‘Look, you can be as pure as you want. Degrowth, land back, anti-colonialism. Obviously, I believe in these things too. I was at Tuggerah, remember.’
His point: being involved, saying you were involved, is absolution enough for any other political wrongs one might have done. At another point, a character nicknamed The Rat is questioned, too, about their politics – ‘where were you at the Tuggerah detention centre breakout of 2005?’ They reply, laughing ‘dementedly’: ‘I was born in 1994… So, at the time of the Tuggerah Detention Centre Breakout, I was eleven. That’s where I was. Being eleven.’
Self-awareness is not always enough, but by sending up these caricatures in The Director and the Daemon, Chin acknowledges not only the limitations of a writer and creative to effect political change, but also their own privilege: ‘While I hate white people, and with excellent reason,’ they write in the New Socialist piece, ‘I am at most lightly oppressed’.
Chin’s novella lays its cards on the table: this is a book, and perhaps it will change some minds. Here are the ideas, and here are the limits of the ideas, which might slowly filter out to change the world; or perhaps they will merely provide yet another avenue for progressives to posture loudly about who they are and what they believe while doing not much of anything. After all, as Chin says in their interview for Liminal, ‘the rhetoric that creating and consuming art is in itself an act of liberatory resistance […] is empirically disprovable; Richard Spencer has a B.A. in English Lit!’
Yet there’s something remarkable about this book – a fresh, funny and furious work that stands entirely apart from much else around at the moment. This is a book that will probably piss a lot of people off, and thank god for that. We need more audacity in Australian literature, more boundless creativity, more envelope-pushing. We need more writers to stand up and say that all of this bullshit is enough, that your digital moralising and endless Instagram stories mean fuck all if you don’t actually live by your values, embody them, risk something, do something.
It’s rare these days to read something that fizzes and pops off the page and lights a fire in your gut and makes you feel like you’re about to throw up with all the rage and magic and weirdness of being alive. That makes you excited to read, to write, to act. Maybe this is all bullshit too – as Chin says, to quote the Liminal interview again, ‘[C]lout can be bad. But doing this big gesture of renunciation isn’t necessarily more authentic.’ But I read this book, and then I read the whole thing again, and my reaction both times was visceral, violent, physical. It changed something in me.