The Carnival of Popularity Part II: Towards a ‘mask-ocracy’

This is Part II of an article titled ‘The Carnival of Popularity’ that was published here in Third Text Online in September 2019. [1] The original essay grew up around a single stimulus, a 1.5-minute film clip, from 1927, found on social media, showing a pageant or carnival conducted by Shetland Islanders in a poor, rural community in the far north of the British Isles. Here is the link once again: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1943763908999092. On reflection, what made me write about, around and in response to this clip was the hunch or intuition that here might lie some clue, maybe even some possible solution to one of the biggest cultural and political problems facing us today, ie the erosion of a once progressive and optimistic, post-World War II ideal of an increasingly mobile, multicultural and international society, and the threatened collapse of that ideal into increasingly divisive and defensive societies. This direction implies the corruption and diversion of democracy’s promissory trajectory by the rising forces of populism and resurgent nationalism.