Dutch Gold and Debord: The class politics of “Humans of the Sesh”
In the parade of selfies, inspirational memes and baby pictures it’s unusual that you stumble across a facebook post that gets you thinking about critical theory and mid-twentieth century French leftism but it does happen. A post by a friend and performer who I much admire had just such an effect on me when he levelled a searing critique at the explosion of “sesh heads” in Irish social and discursive life over the past year, who have scuttled out into our social world like whippet-addled weevils boring out of the woodwork.
“I love how everyones a mad “SESH head” these days but when myself and the boys were getting off our boxes back in the day, people who are now “SESH heads” were calling us “Scumbags” “
As the only irritating bore who can turn jokes about slugging back flagons of Linden into a meditation on capitalism this idea really struck a chord with me. Where does this culture of “the sesh” come from an how are its terms, phrases and shibboleths used both to promote and subvert radical class discourse?
Humans of the Sesh is one of the only reasons I log into facebook anymore. It’s irrerverant posts takes the sappy, NPR-esque “everyone has a story” liberalism of Humans of New York and turns it on its head. It presents pictures of earnest looking hipsters and appends to them wild tales of being “on the sesh”; snorting huge lines of ketamine in between plugging ecstasy up your rear end. It hilariously satirises the twee melodrama of viral content and uses it to prod at the layers of social identity and falsification that separate our “sessioning selves” from the neat and tidy selves we labour over in perform in our public working and schooling lives. It mirrors the Rubberbandits’ brilliant use of a defiantly working class voice to satirise and analyse the entrenched power structures of “Official Ireland” as well as the neat a proper complacency of acceptable Irish liberalism.
But the way in which the language of the page has seeped into the everyday conversation of Irish youth culture has also led to a more pernicious phenomenon: a kind of class tourism where the struggles and lived experience of working class and impoverished sectors of Irish society become hilarious accessories for a Dutch Gold selfie-taking middle class.
French left wing intellectual Guy Debord (one the north stars of my critical thought) spoke about the concept of “recuperation”. This was the process whereby powerful and radical ideas of experiences were absorbed by the status quo in such a way as to legitimise the oppression and devastation that they were once supposed to oppose. Think about how we got from Stonewall to Pride Parades sponsored by Google. Debord wrote:
“To recuperate words is really to recuperate what they represent; so that the only activity that words describe is the activity the recuperated words describe. It follows that the true meanings of the words merely become aspects of their false meanings, the true activity they describe merely aspects of their false activity.”
Or, to put it in a more palatable way that can be heard from outside the orbit of my own pseudo-intellectual rear end, the “sesh” in popular usage becomes something outside of the sesh itself. It is removed from the radical joy of youth culture and the sardonic relay of working class culture to become an empty slogan. Middle class “sesh heads” crunch their faces up at the taste of their selfie-ready cans of Druids before stumbling into Coppers and sticking to the Orchard Thieves for the night. They pridefully carry pouches of Johnny Player Blue until they are offered more appealing Marlboro Lights in the smoking room. As they waddle home they are careful to avoid the ruffians sipping on Linden Village for fear of a mugging as they post about what an epic “sesh” they’ve had.
Humans of the Sesh seems to recognise this ignorant discursive robbery on their own page as they gleefully post pictures of preening Donnybrook “sesh heads” posing with their “rollies”. This alchemy whereby the necessities of working class deprivation are turned into the accessories of middle class style is symptomatic of a broader class unconsciousness in Irish society. Irish society denies the existence of any socioeconomic inequality and insists on a class porousness that is an evident and laughably fiction.
I must note that this criticism comes from a place not of superiority but of self-flagellation. My upbringing has afforded me enough time and leisure to peruse French intellectual thought and treatises on class dynamics without ever really having to struggle for anything. My comfortable life and BA allow me to joke about getting wrecked down the town park on “tashty aul tins” without having to confront the reality of the situation I am mocking. The discursive recuperation of the sesh is not only the anti-craic but also serves to entrench economic inequality and silence discussion of social immobility in modern Ireland. So if you want to be a true sesh-head, drop the Bulmers Pear and pick up Das Kapital.
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