Another phenomenon I highlight is that of the difusion of expertise (or in more optimistic scenarios “the democratization of expertise”, e.g., Fulbright, 2020), a phenomenon which is augmented by the internet economy where individuals are given a stage. Expertise, and the forms of authority it gives access to, can be claimed by anyone on any possible topic, from wines to perfumes and from pranks to magic tricks. The critical literature on bloggers and micro-celebrities discusses this expansive claiming of expertise as a platform afordance (see for instance, Presswood, 2019; Patel, 2020), as platforms turn everyone into a potential expert, therefore magnifying the curatorial imperative. In this sense, we can speak of a public sphere undergoing a process of curatorialization instead of artification, as a more appropriate term to address platform practices and cultures.
The work of Michel Foucault on social technologies as part of neoliberal governmentality aiming to create positive desiring investments to subjects is also helpful for the study at hand. Foucault uses the term dispositif, or “apparatus” in English, to describe an ensemble of institutional, administrative, regulatory, discursive, and epistemological structures through which social power operates. As a form of a distributed imperative, curating is part of a creative dispositif, as Angela McRobbie calls the neoliberal injunction to fabricating positive, free, and self-fulfilling subjects (McRobbie, 2018). I refer to the work of Foucault mostly in Chapter 6, but the tradition of Foucauldian cultural studies runs through the pages of the book in general (e.g., McRobbie, 2018; Gill and Organ, 2022; Wilson, 2017; Littler, 2017). Finally, I employ the idea that social perceptions of class are inscribed in cultural exchange (Skeggs, 2013) to account for the aspirational class identities and the middle-classifying drive surrounding the curatorial imperative. In this context, I will be often referring to concepts from the work of Pierre Bourdieu on symbolic and economic capital, distinction, and habitus. The curatorial imperative in its performative and aspirational dimensions relies on objective positionalities which are predisposed on class but also on gender, ethnicity, and ability. For instance, the performance of a “respectable” instead of “cool” self as part of upward mobile aspirations is conditioned by respective class afordances (Skeggs, 2013; Pitcan, Marwick, and boyd, 2018). In their research around upwardly mobile younger people from low socio-economic status in New York, Mikaela Pitcan, Alice Marwick, and danah boyd (2018) argue that these people have to edit an online “vanilla self” that abides to social norms and is less socially risky in order to achieve their aims. The idea here is that insofar as lower-class populations want to become respectable members of the community and compensate for their socially stigmatized class, they are in principle obliged to perform more normative online identities. Beverley Skeggs similarly shows how the inscription of notions of self-worth in aspirational femininity involves a repudiation of working-class lifestyles (Skeggs, 1997; 2013; McRobbie, 2018). The politics of self-curating, whether they pivot around respectability, coolness, authenticity, or inspiration, are in this sense always inscribed within particular notions of class and broader or narrower milieus of cultural exchange.
Introducing the Curatorial Imperative
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