‘Invisible and free!’ So begins one of the more chaotic scenes in Bulgakov’s (1997[1966]) The Master and Margarita. After being granted the gift of flight, Margarita embarks on a euphoric rampage through Moscow’s city streets. Unleashed but unseen by her targets, she revels in mostly harmless mayhem. An absurdist account of life under Stalin’s rule, Bulgakov’s novel offers a vision of futility markedly different from Camus’ (2005[1942]) account in The Myth of Sisyphus. In both, art plays an essential role in living with futility, but if for Camus, art offered an escape from meaninglessness and inefficacy, for Bulgakov, the work of art was itself fundamentally absurd. And absurdism, for him, was a crucial tool for turning futility into the engine of satire.

This essay examines the possibility of responding playfully to futility. It suggests that parodying futility is a significant mode of political expression, one especially intelligible in the post-truth era. Unlike the melancholy of cynical reason (Sloterdijk, 1987), or the generative devastation of the absurd (Camus, 2005[1942]), this response to futility implies a playful and strategically evasive relationship with art, politics, and life. Drawing on work with disenchanted artist-activists on the Irish Left, I examine where they lean into performances of futility as a mode of critique that is both enjoyable in itself and tactical. This contribution thus engages with a critique sustained elsewhere in this series: of futility as a judgment that implies a stable understanding of means and ends. Yet instead of considering how temporality (Knight, Kelly, this collection) or different understandings of value (Estalella, this collection) render the category unstable, I suggest that judgements of futility may also be frustrated by a suspension of sincerity. If futility is a judgement of inefficacy, absurdly spotlighting it can paradoxically be politically efficacious. Futility can become a vehicle for political critique.

Consider the following act. Positioned before a blank white gallery wall, Kerry Guinan leans over a table in an image of haughty lassitude. A camera is trained on her upper body as she faces the crowd at her inaugural Irish General Election press conference. Kerry delivers a genre-defying polemic riddled with semi-serious but comically ambitious promises: to collapse the distinction between art and politics, to liberate art from class, and to dissolve all state art institutions, including the one hosting her. After her speech, she rebounds an onslaught of questions from a confounded audience. Her words are ‘often repetitive, cryptic and mind-boggling’ (McGrath, 2016). When one man points out that in the improbable event that Kerry wins, she would immediately be outvoted, Guinan is unperturbed. Training her deadpan expression on him, she quips, ‘This is irrelevant’. When asked whether this is an artistic stunt, she dodges the question: ‘This is a political campaign, I’m a candidate for the Irish General Election 2016. This is true and it is up to you where the art is or is not’.

Kerry was less equivocal in conversations we had afterward. She described the campaign as an ‘art act’—entitled Liberate Art—one defined by an intentional ‘lack of sense’. Laughing, she explained that her ‘character’ was staged to draw attention to the evasive but polished rhetoric of the politicians she and her audiences watched make futile promises in the lead up to and after the recession. Yet Kerry was no stranger to the political sphere. A committed activist, she was involved in high-profile occupations and protests, in which political utility was treated as paramount. She was nevertheless also aware of the power of satire. She would thus routinely bracket off time and space to stage devious public ploys. In each case, she would overperform the futility of the political status quo, forcing its weaknesses to their absurd conclusions, and revelling in the heated public discussions that would follow.       Here, the performance of futility not only emerges as potentially politically useful, but also as a joyous release that can cut deeper than earnest critique. This response to futility—to inhabit it—is akin to Boyer and Yurchak’s (2010) description of the Russian genre of parody called stiob, an incarnation of a longer tradition of Russian absurdism that includes Bulgakov. In their work on stiob, they argue that it is particularly attractive in late-liberal and late-socialist settings, both of which are characterised by ‘highly monopolised and normalised conditions of discourse production’ (Boyer and Yurchak, 2010: 181). In these contexts, ‘literal criticism’ (184) can seem too easily absorbed by politics as usual, making way for a turn to ‘the parodic possibilities of inhabiting the norm’ (Boyer and Yurchak, 2010: 184). Indeed, Kerry and other interlocutors would describe ‘neoliberal capitalism’ as endowed with such all-consuming capacities. As one interlocutor observed, there often seemed to be no line ‘between protest and Che Guevara on a t-shirt’. Effective dissent, then, required unconventional strategies, and art was used to explore them. Like Yurchak and Boyer, they cited The Yes Men and Kuryokhin’s ‘Lenin Was a Mushroom’ as models to emulate in a public sphere that seemed capable of neutralising political critique, leaving politicians free to bluster.

As we witness an uptick in post-truth politics, and an unmooring of political claims from conventional understandings of factual veracity, this form of dissent is worth considering more closely. In contexts in which critique is easily absorbed, and public dialogue has been compromised, critics may instead rely on ‘squatting in the language of power’ (Boyer and Yurchak, 2010: 283). Nevertheless, performing futility can be a volatile gambit, as it is difficult to control its outcome. It can be harnessed to platform debate, or it can come across as an irritating form of in-person trolling. Occasionally, it yields a bizarre combination of both. As the target and form of critique echo one another, mimicry and disavowal can be difficult to disentangle. Moreover, as with Bulgakov’s text, absurd humour can coexist alongside serious political consequences. Yet it is perhaps precisely because of this ambiguity that it is tapped for its critical potential: overperforming futility does not confront but amplifies the weaknesses of liberal democratic politics at a time when its most cherished ideals are under threat. It is the opposite of prefigurative politics: it may come across as light-hearted, but it is actually a warning.

At the very least, it offers a compelling alternative to escapism or melancholia. This series has been imagined as a collective ‘effort to understand political actions at the limits of their usefulness’ (Oustinova-Stjepanovic, this collection). What this example asks of us is that we consider where politics might start rather than end with nonsense, where one might not attempt to overcome or dwell in futility, but to weaponise it.

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