Editor's note, December 2004
On 'confessional culture'

Dolan Cummings

One of the recurring themes that has come up on Culture Wars over the past few years is the idea of 'confessional culture': an increasing blurring of the lines between public and private, and a concern to expose or reveal our 'true selves'. This culture is apparent in everything from reality TV to politics (as instantiated in the fuss over home secretary David Blunkett's private life that led to his resignation).

In the arts, the term confessional culture is particularly associated with Tracey Emin, whose work is concerned not only with her own experiences, but with some of the most intimate and disturbing aspects of her life. Many critics see this as self-indulgent and narcissistic, but in his essay Don't Shoot the Messenger, Patrick Hayes shows that such criticisms miss the fact that Emin is keenly tuned into contemporary society. Hayes argues that Emin's attempts to make her private world publicly perceptible express both the atomisation of society and a desire to transcend it.

Whether or not such a project is successful is of course a different matter. Anu Liisanantti reviews Storylines, Robert Frank's exhibition at Tate Modern, which catalogues the photographer's move from a 'landscape of people and places absent of hope and promise' to increasingly personal work about himself and the misfortunes of his family. While the earlier photographs may have offered a bleak vision of the human condition, it was at least recognisable; Liisanantti suggests that the later photographs are meaningful only to the artist, and accessible to others only voyeuristically.

The absence of shared and lasting human values in what he calls 'liquid modernity' has long been a concern of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. In his latest book, Identity, he considers how this affects the individual's sense of self. Traditional identities based on class or nationality have much less resonance today. Confessional culture can be seen as an attempt to forge an identity by acting out in public, as Emin does, a more basic, supposedly authentic notion of humanity based on emotional vulnerability. In my review, I focus on how this culture has emerged in the context of the failure of the political ideologies that once mediated between the individual and society by offering a positive vision of human subjectivity.

In South African novelist Andre Brink's latest novel Before I Forget, reviewed by Natasha Hulugalle, an ageing anti-Apartheid activist disoriented by the new South Africa tries to make sense of his life by remembering his past love affairs. Here the shift from political engagement to personal self-involvement is particularly pronounced, and as Brink attempts to explore the present through the past, he also explores the past in the psychological idiom of the present. (This is of course a familiar aspect of historical biography, and particularly biographies of artists and writers, whose authors often seek personal psychological explanations of artists' work.)

On this note, Patrick Turner reviews Our Last Great Illusion, Rob Weatherill's psychoanalytic critique of 'therapy culture'. Weatherill's critique is more structural than others, such as Frank Furedi's, which emphasise intellectual developments. In fact, Weatherill sees the breakdown of the family as the key factor in the transformation of subjectivity. He argues that the demise of the authoritative father figure has led to a weakened individual, less able to cope with life. As Turner shows, however, this means Weatherill shares many of the assumptions of those he is criticising, accepting that human beings really are, or have become, more vulnerable than was thought in the past.

All this has obvious consequences for the arts and culture. Such a significant transformation of how we understand what it is to be human must have a special effect on the narrative forms of literature, theatre and film, as well as art, while it has been argued that confessional culture is at the heart of reality TV. Culture Wars will continue to pursue this theme in the new year. We look forward in particular, and with some trepidation, to Tim Fountain's Sex Addict at the Royal Court in January.