Suchergebnisse

Resumen. Escribiendo en respuesta al ensayo de Sartre sobre literatura comprometida, Adorno proclamó: "No es el momento para obras de arte políticas; más bien, la política ha migrado a la obra de arte autónoma, y ha penetrado más profundamente en obras que se presentan a sí mismas como políticamente muertas". Hoy, los teóricos del "giro social" en el arte han rechazado completamente a Adorno, adoptando en cambio un nuevo tipo de compromiso en el arte. En este ensayo, revisito esta larga disputa sobre la "eficacia" social del arte en sus formas clásicas y contemporáneas. Al preguntarme cómo debemos entender la labor política del arte en nuestros días, examino dos teorías del efecto, basadas en un análisis del "giro comunicativo" de Habermas: una que alego que conduce a una reducción sociológica de lo político en el arte; y otra que sugiero que ofrece una base para entender la eficacia política del arte, comprendida en términos de lo que yo llamo una teoría del efecto político "perlocutiva" o "aleatoria". Palabras clave: Arte político; giro social; compromiso; eficacia; Habermas; perlocución.

This essay explores the discursive invocation of 'civil war' to describe the polarization of the political terrain in post-Referendum Britain in order to contextualize the National Theatre's production of Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris's 'verbatim' play My Country and its representation of Brexit. It shows how the political reality of Brexit, understood as a crisis of 'general enculturation', undermined the NT's attempt to transcend the impasse of the political context. It argues that in identifying the NT with the play's central figure of Britannia, an image of reconciliation, the theatre failed to account for its own implication in the wider crisis of enculturation.

In 1973, the Trilateral Commission asked whether democracies were becoming 'ungovernable'. Warning of the 'rise of anomic democracy', it identified threats that we are more than familiar with today, as we confront – once again – the 'crisis' of democracy: 'the disintegration of civil order, the breakdown of social discipline, the debility of leaders, and the alienation of citizens'. In this chapter I revisit this 'problem' of anomie, locating it at the very heart of democracy and the historical problem of its governance. In the Laws, Plato had already used the disparaging term 'theatrocracy', which drew on the analogy of the theatre and its audience, to describe the unruly nature of democratic forms of life. Just as the theatre audience is an ill-disciplined rabble so, he argued, the members of a democratic society are prone to various disorders. Thus the pathologies of the democratic polis qualify it for one of Plato's 'diseased cities', where popular discontentment collapses democracy into something far worse: tyranny. I pursue this 'theatrocratic' problem as a means of understanding democracy's central dynamic, particularly visible in an age of popular discontentment, namely its constitutive proneness to displeasure, incivility and antagonism. The first part of the chapter re-examines the legacy of theatrocratic discourse by reframing it in relation to the discourse on play. I argue that for theatrocratic discourses 'play' – often understood as 'idleness' – constitutes the core problematic of democratic or 'common' forms of life, and that for Plato, and for many commentators who later followed him, democracy must be viewed as 'dangerous play'. I show how the modern State sought to neutralise the 'theatrocratic' threat associated with democracy's dangerous play by means of 'education', converting incivility into civility; disorder into orderly conduct; idleness and illegality into productive labour. The second part of the chapter, focusses more closely on this educational solution, arguing that it leads to a ...

Writing in response to Sartre's essay on engaged literature, Adorno proclaimed: "This is not the time for political works of art; rather politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art, and it has penetrated most deeply into works that present themselves as politically dead". Today, the theorists of the "social turn" in art have all but rejected Adorno entirely, embracing instead a new kind of commitment in art. In this essay, I revisit this longstanding dispute about the social "efficacy" of art in both its classical and contemporary forms. In asking how we are to understand a political work of art today, I examine two theories of effect, based on an analysis of Habermas's "communicative turn" –one that I allege leads to a sociological reduction of the political in art; and the other that I suggest provides a basis for understanding art's political efficacy grasped in terms of what I call a "perlocutionary" or "aleatory" theory of political effect. ; Escribiendo en respuesta al ensayo de Sartre sobre literatura comprometida, Adorno proclamó: "No es el momento para obras de arte políticas; más bien, la política ha migrado a la obra de arte autónoma, y ha penetrado más profundamente en obras que se presentan a sí mismas como políticamente muertas". Hoy, los teóricos del "giro social" en el arte han rechazado completamente a Adorno, adoptando en cambio un nuevo tipo de compromiso en el arte. En este ensayo, revisito esta larga disputa sobre la "eficacia" social del arte en sus formas clásicas y contemporáneas. Al preguntarme cómo debemos entender la labor política del arte en nuestros días, examino dos teorías del efecto, basadas en un análisis del "giro comunicativo" de Habermas: una que alego que conduce a una reducción sociológica de lo político en el arte; y otra que sugiero que ofrece una base para entender la eficacia política del arte, comprendida en términos de lo que yo llamo una teoría del efecto político "perlocutiva" o "aleatoria".

The chapter examines the nature of 'tragic experience' in modern theatre from Arthur Miller to Heiner Müller, arguing that while the modern stage eschewed the classical tradition of tragic drama, what it nonetheless discovered, through the ghastly lessons of the twentieth-century, was a new kind of tragic experience that it made thematic: the death of experience itself - where tragedy permeates the very essence of everyday living.

This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe. What I call a 'theatre of the impasse' seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished. Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision to resolve its conflicts. I situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt's and Walter Benjamin's dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an 'allegorical' theatre in Benjamin's terms. Blitz Theatre's Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence. In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt. I read the performance, instead, as an elegy to Nancy's inoperative community, at the centre of which are the figure of lovers, bound to, yet unable to take possession of, one another. Staging impasse, Late Night allegorises the fragile human community, exposed in its fundamental precarity.

The introduction to the book provides a rationale for the collection by sketching out a 'tragic conception' of the political. It is in relation to this conception—understanding the tragic in terms of the finitude and precarity of the political—that the various approaches taken by the authors in the collection might be said to be responding. Core to this approach is the theme of 'antagonism' as theorised in the work of Carl Schmitt and later Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. The introduction offers a comprehensive account of the 'agonistic' dimension that defines the political as such, beginning by tracing the 'agon'—meaning 'struggle'—back to its origins in ancient Greek society and culture. That the ancient Greeks understood the insuperable nature of the agon provides the starting point for a discussion of the limits of the political, grasped as the permanent interplay of contesting forces and thus the impossibility of reaching a final consensus on social and democratic life. How theatre and performance respond to this tragic conception, or deploy it, is then discussed in the final section of the chapter, through a brief analysis of the emergence of 'post-Brechtian' aesthetics—central to debates that animate the essays that follow.

This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement (particularly as a means of understanding acts of protest). Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of 'dissensual speech' as a form of 'unauthorised' speech through which the 'people' appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault's notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of 'performatives', since parrēsia—'speaking truth to power'—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail 'risk' to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr.

This book begins with a simple observation - that just as the theatre resurfaced during the late Renaissance, so too government as we understand it today also began to appear. Their mutually entwining history was to have a profound influence on the development of the modern British stage. This volume proposes a new reading of theatre's relation to the public sphere. Employing a series of historical case studies drawn from the London theatre, Tony Fisher shows why the stage was of such great concern to government by offering close readings of well-known religious, moral, political, economic and legal disputes over the role, purpose and function of the stage in the 'well-ordered society'. In framing these disputes in relation to what Michel Foucault called the emerging 'art of government', this book draws out - for the first time - a full genealogy of the governmental 'discourse on the theatre'. * Proposes a new reading of well-known controversies over the social history of the stage, allowing a better understanding of the complex interplay between theatre, politics, economics and government * Presents a theoretical as well as historical methodology, using the tools of 'discourse analysis' and concept of 'governmentality' developed by Michel Foucault * Offers a critical, systematic and historically-grounded reappraisal of the 'anti-theatrical prejudice' proposed by Jonah Barish, revealing that prejudice targeted 'common' tastes generally, rather than theatre as such Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/arts-theatre-culture/british-theatre/theatre-and-governance-britain-15001900-democracy-disorder-and-state#XoM5tTH0phQJIeTi.99

Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugurating a 'new field' of study. Accompanying that claim is a radical proposition that 'performance thinks'; that it should be counted as a form of philosophising in its own right. But in what sense can performance be construed as 'genuinely' philosophical thought? Taking my cue from Laura Cull's alignment of performance philosophy with Laruelle's practice of 'non philosophy' – and specifically, with its introduction of 'democracy' into the dispositives of 'standard' philosophy in order to challenge its transcendental authority over the Real – I argue that performance philosophy might be seen to enact a similar disruption of the 'dispositives' of performance theory. This, however, is only partly what is at stake in the fundamental proposition of performance philosophy, and I conclude by suggesting that a more radical proposal lies behind its assertion of a new 'field' – one that does not reduce it to an empirical fact, but grasps it as a radical 'utopian' hypothesis designed to 'open up' the philosophical dimension of performance itself; utopian because what performance offers – seen in this way - is not simply another system of representation but a possible democratic thought of the Real itself.

Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugurating a 'new field' of study. Accompanying that claim is a radical proposition that 'performance thinks'; that it should be counted as a form of philosophising in its own right. But in what sense can performance be construed as 'genuinely' philosophical thought? Taking my cue from Laura Cull's alignment of performance philosophy with Laruelle's practice of 'non philosophy' – and specifically, with its introduction of 'democracy' into the dispositives of 'standard' philosophy in order to challenge its transcendental authority over the Real – I argue that performance philosophy might be seen to enact a similar disruption of the 'dispositives' of performance theory. This, however, is only partly what is at stake in the fundamental proposition of performance philosophy, and I conclude by suggesting that a more radical proposal lies behind its assertion of a new 'field' – one that does not reduce it to an empirical fact, but grasps it as a radical 'utopian' hypothesis designed to 'open up' the philosophical dimension of performance itself; utopian because what performance offers – seen in this way - is not simply another system of representation but a possible democratic thought of the Real itself.

In this paper I look at Castellucci's On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God as a means to sketch out what I would like to call a theatre of the 'abject/sublime'. In contrast to the Kantian notion of the sublime, which requires nothing less than the acknowledgment of the moral law by the subject, I will situate Castellucci's work within a reading of the 'sublime' that embraces the failure of the subject to achieve transcendence. By this I mean the subject fails to achieve the kind of ethical autonomy that Kant's radical sublime demands. Instead, I propose to interpret Castellucci's work in two 'heteronymous' ways: firstly, in light of Kristeva's dictum that the 'abject is edged with the sublime', and secondly, in terms of Levinas' claim that the face is nothing less than the 'infinite which blinks' (OB: 93). What results, I argue, is a theatre of 'failed transcendence', in which Castellucci's 'face' of God, returned to the abject condition of its own corporeality, marks the traumatic site of the ethical demand..

The following paper takes the form of a staged dialogue between two characters who meet on a country road. We chose the dialogical form for a number of reasons. The first is that the theatrical form which is the subject of our piece forefronts the technique and art of argument - and so, here two characters engage in an extended argument over the meaning and possibility of political theatre, following the death of Augusto Boal in 2009. Second, the literary conceit of a written dialogue has a long history within discourses of theatre, philosophy and politics - going back to Plato, but one also finds it in Diderot and in Brecht's 'Messingkauf' dialogues. It may appear that there is a certain irony to our approach, which uses a staged dialogic form to talk about a mode of theatre that is essentially improvised with and audience who are incorporated as its participants. However, our aim is to engage the reader through a deliberately polemical technique: to engage Boal, not as most of the literature on 'Theatre of the Oppressed' does, by reporting on practice, but through an imagined discussion with philosophical interlocutors. Thus, we connect Boal with a broader question (and tradition) of political theatre and its current meaning. A third reason is that we wanted to retain a certain fidelity to the way this thinking originated, which as a co-authored piece, presented performatively at conferences, also derives from many hours of discussion. Fourth, and finally, we wanted to invite reflection on the paradox of theatre itself, which 'stages' dialogue, at the same time as making it impossible. Here we wanted our dialogue to function a little like Benjamin's automaton chess player, who "respond[s] to every move [.] with a countermove [to] ensure the winning of the game."

The aim of this article is to interrogate the emergence of a form of participatory theatre that I shall call 'radical democratic theatre'. The term 'radical democracy' derives in the first instance from the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, but in terms of its application to theatre and performance practices, it might well be drawn in relation to Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. Consequently, one useful starting point in grasping what is at stake when speaking of a radical democratic theatre is to trace the limits of Boalian thought by revisiting some of the theoretical assumptions upon which it stands. Two fundamental assumptions of specific concern have to do with (1) the nature of the theatre 'subject', as conceived by Boal, and (2) its relation to the political task of emancipation. Boal expresses this task in the following terms: 'In order to understand the poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people – "spectators," passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon – into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action' (Boal, 2000: 122). To begin to approach the limits of this task, and probe what is implicated in its basic presuppositions, I want to focus on what will emerge as a significant theoretical difference over the way in which we might understand the nature and ambition of the strategy of 'transformation' – specifically, by drawing a distinction between the underlying aims of the Theatre of the Oppressed and the project of radical democratic theatre, as it might be conceived today. While Boal thinks the emancipatory potential of theatre predominantly in terms of freedom from oppression, by contrast, I will argue that the fundamental strategic aim of radical democratic theatre is not 'liberation' per se, but the destabilisation of the relational space in which political identities are first configured. Radical democratic theatre cannot 'liberate' anyone but it can destabilise the matrices of a given political distribution and in particular release thereby what politics has suppressed – first, antagonism and dissent, and second, forms of reciprocal action and empathic identification on which new forms of sociality might be based. The shift in perspective marked here can be thought as a move away from the classical focus of the left on emancipation from oppression to the problem of what Iris Marion Young calls 'domination', which suppresses, not freedom, but rather equality at the level of political engagement. Domination, she tells us, 'consists in institutional conditions which inhibit or prevent people from participating in determining their actions or the conditions of their actions' (Young, 1990: 38). Placing the emphasis on equality, rather than freedom, by no means entails the denial of oppression. Rather, it signals the attempt to think emancipation beyond the classical rhetoric of revolutionary praxis. I will describe the possibility for this kind of strategic intervention, with reference to Michel Foucault, as necessitating, instead, the practice of the arraignment of power. It is this kind of idea that Randy Martin has in mind when, defending Boal's legislative theatre from its critics, he describes how Boal was able to awaken a recalcitrant public to a consciousness of itself as the primal scene of the political, in which the 'law can be interrupted, reversed, challenged' (Martin 2006: 28). It is also, however, precisely here, where oppositional politics encounters the law, that the limits of this form of participatory theatre are disclosed. This is because it is precisely at the point where opposition moves from resistance to direct engagement with the structures and institutions of power that the democratic moment is most at risk of assimilation and co-option by the forces of the status quo. The reasons for this are complex and unnerving – as Laclau and Mouffe have demonstrated through their astute critique of 20th century Marxism: '[there is] no subject' they write, 'which is absolutely radical and irrecuperable by the dominant order, and which constitutes an absolutely guaranteed point of departure for a total transformation' (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: 169). I shall call this profound instability, which is constitutive of political identities, the 'democratic limitation'. The democratic limitation refers to both the inherent volatility of political identities and to the impossibility of reconciling those social antagonisms, constitutive of the political field, according to a universal political settlement. Through this concept we will be able to discern, not just what makes radical democratic theatre and performance possible; we will also be able to specify in what sense it can be called radical insofar as it reveals the precariousness of every essentialist political discourse.