Laura: As mortal beings, as creators, do we have a duty of care to take a moral stance, to expose, to transmit our values and beliefs? Do you think the character of an artist and integrity are different?  

 

Estelle: Something Ocean Vuong said struck me yesterday regarding his students being held hostage by ‘cringe culture,’ whereby kids feel self-conscious about social media surveillance, and they don't want to be perceived as being overly earnest or effortful in their writing, since they’re scared of public judgment. They perform cynicism because cynicism is often misread as intelligence, being cool, dissaffected, defined by mutual distaste. They’re one type of writer at home, and another in the classroom. Artistic callisthenics.

 

I think in a roundabout way, this speaks to the considerable misalignment we’re seeing as it pertains to Palestine. More specifically, the key difference between character and integrity. Maybe character is our overall moral fibre; we might be kind, empathetic, ethical, or whatever. It’s a self-expressed or perceived state of morality by the people around us. But integrity, the way I see it, is who we are when nobody is looking, who we are when we’ll be castigated for standing by those ethics, and penultimately: what we do about it. Integrity is who we are under duress. 

 

If our professed character crumbles under the fear of ridicule or is concerned with posturing ourselves differently from our peers, our character doesn’t really check out, let alone our integrity. They’re disparate and inconsistent. I’m not sure how to put this. Character and integrity should not be swayed by inconvenience, pressure, persecution, or coercion. When we’re all alone in the world, behind closed doors, when we don’t need approval or recognition, will we, in the very least, stop leaning back. Can we make it in the world without integrity, without moral fibre that is true around the clock?

 

Laura: I am sceptical. I remember a long debate with the Royal College of Art students during the Urgency of Arts session with British writer and critic Orit Gat on the same question. The set off point was Roland Barthes’ essay in which he killed the author to allow the reader (or meaning) to be born. But of course, that was 1969 with no internet in sight or in hand. It was possible to ignore the information about the author, her values, ideas, and moral stance. In the 21st century, the matter of character and integrity of the creator is far more complicated. The integrity of our positions is examined not by a small circle but by the whole world. The duress under which we are tested is no longer local or contained but has the full weight of fibre optic cables. Nor is it temporary, but indelibly etched in the cyber chronicles. And while I agree that without a moral fibre we are nothing but marketing puppets, lip-synching, tik-tocking, instagramming “click baits”, I experienced first-hand that for some, especially young artists, denied a right to forget, a moral stance can be a terrifying prospect. 

 

In our previous ARK PARRHESIA issue, we confronted questions of war (as well as gender, power, AI,  racism, colonialism, and disability) but we could not convince a Jewish student who was privately horrified by the events in Gaza to take a public stance. And we had to respect their right to keep their views private. 

 

I am all for plurality and freedom of choice, but surely some things are universal: not killing innocent children, for one. Surely we can agree regardless of our own lifespan. Hannah Arendt warns us of obedience, conformity, and failure to think critically about our actions. There is enough space and resources on this planet to live within the means and in peace, but egos and greed of the few get in the way.  In your Manhattan Marxist, you set out an Artistic Manifesto for Mentor-Futurism “We don't believe that capitalism is an insurmountable structure, and it's crystal fucking clear that this assumption is bringing us to the brink of extinction. We don't have to resign ourselves to the concept that this is the sole future that our progeny can expect. Our liberation can come from freeing ourselves from our obsession with economic growth. Beyond resource sharing, we have come to think more and more that there is an element that could informally reframe our instinct of accumulation and expansion.” Do you stand by it? 

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Estelle: I stand by it. More than stand, I leap at it with the gusto of a javelin. I published this manifesto with Mousse Magazine, inspired by Chris Kraus, who has offered me friendship-mentorship for a decade. Her generosity has propelled my commitment to this type of mentorship exchange with interested parties. I’ve been involved in a prison writing project where members engage in a mentorship program, and I’m invited to give critical feedback three times while participants develop their text. The backbone of mentorship as a social force is the dissolution of competition, the fascist tendency that prevails everywhere. Therefore, we can think about ways to preserve our existence, our social and creative solidarity, through the traits and fingerprints of mentorship, which we can make up together. And it’s a two-way street of growing artistically; mentors learn from mentees' strengths. Rhythm is super tricky for me sometimes, and also really often, so reading a writer with innate rhythm is helpful for my praxis. I guess I mean mentorship as a decentralised, unranked relationship that flaunts the line of friendship, expansion, social imagination, and probably a lot of other things Daffy Duck would splutter over.

 

The cycle of struggle for Prison Writing Programs is delay in the process. It’s not a swift back and forth; there are many channels and ridiculous protocols to navigate. However, I’ve come to think that the ‘problem’ of delay can be reimagined as the total devastation of pressure to produce work with road-runner speed; another antagonism of fascist neoliberalism, which goes beyond a Looney Tunes political defeat and changes the cognitive and psychological composition of hyperconforming society. Beep Beep! Delay is a withdrawal from the condition of exploitation. Delay could be an attribute of artistic mentorship that molds itself into a precious, slowed conjunction of events, allowing us to see people as individuals, not machines. Protracted time to think about one another's work and person through the ‘inconvenience’ of delay becomes the peak of human-ness. 
 

The full conversation in ARK|Repetition 2025 autumn issue