The following are some starting points for a greater conversation on performance and politics stemming from our last two weeks’ readings:
Politics as contention By definition, politics is adversarial. A classic(al) example: Plato, an aristocrat, expels the Poet from his Republic. Balibar contends that a necessary condition of politics is the existence of an us and a them: an inherent by-product of politics is a hierarchy of have-nots that are neither a whole subject nor an integrated part. Similarly, Mouffe adds that every identity is relational and that politics deals with collective identities, that is, a we and a they. In response to these conditions, for example, Boal’s Teatro do oprimido aims to reverse roles and have oppressed subjects act out possible futures with different outcomes than their immediate reality.
Politics as exclusion Through the distribution of the sensible, Rancière reveals the internal political mechanisms that determine who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and how and when they do what they do. He asks, Who gets to be political, who has the time to be political? Boal’s analysis of the Greek system of tragedies as a means of political coercion establishes the aristocracy –whose means and state control allowed for the theater to flourish in the first place– as the determiners of the ultimate goods and virtues of their cultural and political contemporaneity.
Politics as passion Mouffe claims that we cannot understand democratic politics without acknowledging passions and affect as driving forces in the political realm. Through Boal’s breakdown of tragic(ist) coercion, we come to understand the apparatus of politically motivated emotional manipulation established at the base of Western theater whose ultimate goal is to control passions and purge dissident conducts. Brecht recognizes contemporary theater goers as sleepers whose passion for the arts has been reduced to aimless gawking, therefore rendering them malleable.
Politics as specatorship Through Boal, we come to understand how the aristocratic citizens of Ancient Greece manipulated the masses through coercive spectatorship. Recognizing this, Brecht calls for a more critical spectatorship, in which alienating effects from the actors on stage would spark interest and an awakening in the audience. On the other hand, just like in commercial theater, Taylor claims that spectators in politics are meant to sit there and watch, to absorb passively; state violence and political spectacles render citizens speechless, blinded, enthralled, incapable of responding. Performance art can call spectators to action, even if it happens in circumstances or conditions the spectator doesn’t fully understand. Spectatorship functions within systems and relationships of power, undoubtedly, and Rancière reminds us that, in the collective realm, only a few are allowed to determine for the whole. Rancière also reminds us that seeing is also a doing: spectators are able to refashion and reinterpret what they see.
Politics as emancipation Balibar provides a succinct summary of the conditions necessary for political emancipation and the subjects who achieve their own emancipation as opposed to the subjects whose previous emancipation confirms their place and rights within the political realm. Noticing the inconsistencies, Boal proposes specific theater practices as a way of emancipating spectators from their lack of political agency, therefore planting the seeds for further, more generalized political subversion.
Politics as transformation Balibar defines politics as change within change, that is, within a capitalistic system defined by (ex)change, politics is a dialectics of change. Boal proposes his theatrical practices as a way of preparing the subject for political change through artistic inquiry and performance. Taylor’s analysis of various forms of performance art reminds us that all art is political and expresses an artists’ desire for change by making possible an interaction between the artist, the spectator, and their worldviews.