Author Archives: jonathancoker

jonathancoker

Throughout the pages of “The Human Condition,” Hannah Arendt contends that denying the individual access to the realm of politics is to deny him or her their most fundamental right; the right for promise; for an utterance to actualize within space and time, transpiring as action; what I could further clarify as the right to see your own results, uncut.

Our readings this week speak on the necessary formation of the collective under this constant threat of the biopolitical, their appetite for power and control situating the political realm on its own, untouchable plane; unreachable overhead and yet still capable of causing destruction on the ground. Enter stage left, the Zapatistas and the Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT), led by Subcomandante Marcos and Ricardo Dominguez, respectively. 

These urgent collective formations fixate their leaders as “drag-kings,” noted by Diana Taylor, or a performative measure that symbolizes both an insurgent masculinity as well as a reprieve from the identity conventions that serve to further dehumanize these groups which endeavor to depict the nakedness of Emperor.

“The intentional fiction of masculinity (the hero and the voice of rebellion) based on performatic techniques. A revolutionary symbol without face or ego, made up of words and collective dreams.[His queer/ trans act] de-privatizes the face, the name, in order to transform the body of the multitude into the collective agent of revolution” (Preciado).

Creating these collective movements depends on a figure in which his or her people can see their own transformative powers. In this way, the leader begs to be dwarfed by the  idea, his body becoming as big as the assembly that exists in the many temporalities that modernity has shepherded. It is this building upwards, to the side, reaching down, and scooping up, that erects the 99% against the powerful few, for a single man can be easy to destroy, but his ideas can continue to thrive.

In “Digital Zapatista,” Jill Lane begins at our fingertips, with the world-making capabilities of cyberspace recontextualizing how we think of political legitimacy, making way for a novel, digital Zapatista whose “ virtual protests most often reveal the ways in which cyberspace itself is occupied and organized as a commercial and private, rather than public space to be protected with the full force of the law, or of the military” (127). 

What the Internet does for the Zapatistas and the EDT (and potentially any other form of social insurgency) is constructing a new public sphere described by Lane as a “runway for the staging of more productive ‘lines of flight’ for those struggling for social change” (131). We can easily compare this to airplanes taking flight towards unheard destinations, or we can view it even more succinctly as a utopian performance, a fashioning of disturbance. 

A modern fashioning of disturbance appears wherever the virtual and embodied blur and combine. This form of resistance comes in the form of a semantic disordering of established modes of living, in an attempt to “making visible the underlying and hidden relations of power on which the smooth operation of government repression depends” (Lane, 136). The political performance Dominguez and Marcos personify this “contention from the margins” (Dominguez) showing to the sidelined minoritarian and/or indigenous person that Limbo can be a state of mind, an abdication to Doom can be a signature silhouette worth dismantling, and fashioning one’s self towards Emancipation can be spectacle, even when banished to the periphery of Power.

Such theatrics require the refiguring of traditional resources, props, or fabulations, in order to reproduce, rehearse, and practice their world-shattering perspectives. In this way, the gestural use of the ski mask by the Zapatistas makes their presence legible to the greater public while anonymizing their personhood, as Marcos himself states, “the mask reveals” (Marcos). 

Into modernity, the EDT and digital Zapatista map an “alternate form of embodiment against exploitative ‘weightlessness’,” or the dogged prescriptions of Power that restrain a working class from the editors table, a sphere of political actualization that in its essence denies these individuals their right to rights. Instead, Marcos and Dominguez implore those compelled to life on the cutting room floor, to pick up the pieces of their intolerable production, and transform them into an act worth witnessing.

jonathancoker

What it takes to make a successful reality television star isn’t too disparate from what it now takes to make a political actor. 

I write this fully cognizant of the swath of “stars” in the reality television galaxy, from the Lotharios on The Bachelor (Since 2002) to the Alphas on Survivor (Since 2000) to the All-American Sweethearts on American Idol (Since 2002) to the so-real-you-could-reach-out-and-touch-em’ passersby on The Real World (Since 1992) to the Vulgarian Elites of the Real Housewives (Since  2006)…

There is a universe out there, where these stars have emitted a spectacular performance of reality, inevitably skewed by medium, that has bathed society in beaming rays of soft power for such a prolonged duration, that its illuminance has become blinding.

To make a competent reality television star is to make a modernized amalgamation, much like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, only much more cognizant of all the experiments and performances of starpower that came before, terrorizing our collective imagination. 

Now, don’t look under the bed, look all around you- a digitized archive in the sky containing the vastness of these many performative actions to starpower, sanctions of identity, reiterations, and affirmations of consequence, that, like the greatest Slasher villain or Horror movie fiend, is out of sight, but always on your mind, and potentially, dangerously accessible, simply in saying their name three times whilst staring into a mirror, or perhaps when you’ve closed your eyes and fallen asleep…

The Internet has become a ladder up (or down) towards the world of the intolerable, where our dreams seek materialization through an immersion within the intensity of digital time, bending space around it, Social Media spreading across its surface like constellations, creating the emergent potential for community, as the individual exists in the “solitary glow of handheld devices” (37 Edwards). 

The format for reality television and Internet consumption makes it truly difficult for their stars to burn out, with cross promotion and spin offs of spin offs into web series preserving their ray of light for a potentially unlimited period of time. And why exactly should we rid ourselves of them? Don’t forget- these are real people on the air, in our screens. Mr. Rogers was bound to be cancelled sooner or later, but why would we ever cancel someone (or something) like a Donald Trump?

Our reading this week, identify this collapse between entertainment and news, under threats of insurgency, and an appeal to a new kind of citizenship, indebted to an appeal to passion, a subsequent masquerade of information, and the birth of society as super-spectacle, where the line between hard and soft power, celebrity and charlatan, have blurred.

Mark Poster gives us a method for operating in this new domain and it relates squarely with Performance Studies. In “Information Please,” he contends that Western concepts and political principles cannot form the rights of man and citizen in this increasingly globalized condition. Operating in this domain not only ignores the World Wide Web of universality facilitated by the Internet, but also the humanizing force of technology on our natural plane of existence. This helps to develop my initial observation: What it takes to make the perfect reality television star and/or political actor is actually a bid towards man and machine hybridity.  

“In short, we may build new political structures outside the nation-state only in collaboration with machines. The new community will not be a replica of the agora but will be mediated by information machines. What is required therefore is a doctrine of the rights of the human-machine interface” (72, Poster)

If we watch Trump’s performance in this realm of human robots (or maybe living dead), we bare witness to a political insurgency that exposes the outmodedness in our perceived notion of power in real-time, streaming now, in turn, “changing people’s frames of reference by offering windows of possibility, allowing for the viral opportunity to “feel the exhilaration of making a difference by the mere fact of being together” (Arditi). And like any noteworthy performance, these coups last far beyond their initial spark and are innately devised to do so. 

Described by Benjamin Arditi in “Insurgencies don’t have a plan…,” these insurgencies are “animated by the belief that present-day conditions harm equality, freedom, social justice, and so on that they can make a difference by acting to make another, more equal and just world emerge from this one…organizing the future was not their top priority because they were already making a difference by merely demonstrating, occupying, and generally defying the order of things.” 

Trump and his cohort strive to disturb the present as if in rehearsal for the future, a transmission that relies on the collapse of news and entertainment, the notion of a media, detached and untrustworthy, and an abdication towards Doom that inverts our man-made absurdities, exposing the underlying fragility of a cultural hegemony built on the dread and disillusion of its subjects. 

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What does it mean to give the people what they want? A common idiom in matters of commodified transaction between actor and audience, to give the people what they want implies what they want is not necessarily what they need…but hey, give it to them anyway! But why? What is so innate within a populace that an actor can deny the best interest of his audience, or the most democratic outcome, or the most Utopian of horizons, in order to sustain this onstage charade? Politically, giving the people what they want, implies the continuation of myth, the next page in a legend that contextualizes everything we, the people, need to aspire, to saunter through days; a present-day answer to whatever Westernized-American-Dream. We can watch this, then, as the Dream weaponized. Our readings this week expose the historical terms of conditions the populace agree on instinctively, as spect-actors do, in order for the ruling class to make belief, weaponize dreams, disarm truths, and alter realities.

“Give the People What They Want” is a pretty popular Philly Soul track from the O’Jays that spent one week at the top of the R&B Single Charts in ‘75, peaking at number 45 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was regularly used at campaign events during Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign. Another track by the same name was written by The Kinks in 1981, as the English rock band’s response to the fascination of the abomination splattered across American TV. Here, the musician asserts the role of bard, as if delivering a message from the Otherside, a plane of existence that is not confined by earthly limitations, but is still privy to the trials and tribulations that comprise the lives of ordinary citizens. 

Giving the people what they want suggests a collective sanction that Machiavelli professes is perpetually underlying; omnipresent and overarching; foundational and supportive. It is the continued legend of sovereignty latent within the realm of politics just as much as it is another indication of our abdication to Doom-Give the people what they want…because they know not what they need, nor should they, for if they did, perhaps that which they needed would not reflect our (the Rule’s) best interest.  

Therefore, the bard, the shaman, the folk, is styled, ever in-draft, as performatic allegory, giving you modern tragedy, serving up Death and all his Biopolitcal Friends. In such an enshrouding fabulation, the folk hero (as in the Man, the Myth, the Legend), thrives like a Criminal, the taste of glory forever on the tip of his lips, but never in his grip. Like some obscene after hours show on repeat, this dreadful pornography is lore-making, and the constant aversion to the laws of nature or man (or both) sting like a delayed orgasm.

Which, it seems, might be at the root of giving the people what they want. What they want is to keep wanting to keep pining; an encore without applause; a show that is episodic, but free from threats of cancellation. In this way, the populace can continue relying on the perceptions of others to help sharpen their teeth, feed their egos, break their jaws. In turn, we don’t even have to blame ourselves, nor the folk hero in which we base our beliefs; we can simply blame the way things are on the way things have always been; at the feet of Legend; an abdication of Doom.  

In “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Mind,” Kolbert highlights different experiments and findings revolving around the human faculty of reason and its relation to fact.  In the vastness of the modern age, she argues that “incomplete understanding is empowering,” and there is a pleasurable rush of dopamine involved in the sanction of fallacy and depth that often constructs a community of knowledge. It is this capability to be social, to learn and trust in another’s performance, that has formed the basis of reason as an evolved human trait. It is with great cunning that bad actors, those audacious enough to see themselves as princes, mislead a populace into the erroneously scientific, the perceived natural, through the ritual performance  of Doom, the false pulpit of royalty, and the security within Fear, that Machiavelli tells us is supported by the dread of pain, which is forever implied in this darkened theatre. 

jonathancoker

Disruption of political norms inevitably requires a queered imagining of the future. This future is never entirely contingent on present-tense conditions, but rather, becomes emboldened by what some day may be witnessed; a consequence of audacity, a notion that reality is never truly momentary, but continuously pieced together by social edits to a preconceived script handed down like tradition. These traditions strive to establish a framework capable of haunting an individual into a ritual submission, at once invisible and omnipresent. This perceived invincibility spurs a collective champing at the bit, a population ever gazing for the invisible horror they would rather bask in than subjugate. 

Here- witness a population transfixed by plurality lest they risk isolation. This shared watching of the political condition has become tantamount to citizenship, in that it asks for specific membership criteria of the inevitable spectactor while depending on their renewed sanction to the agreement. This cyclical, aesthetic horror story gleams an abdication to Doom whenever minoritarian subjects encounter this hegemony and are incapable of becoming neatly fixated within its framework. Our readings this week expose what it means to exist in this zone of displacement, noticeably in relation to the image and its modes of confession.

Like an action, you cannot take photography back. In this way, Azoulay by way of Arendt, contends that photography ontologically resembles action more than work (129). Moreover, if  space of plurality in necessary for a condition of action, we must expect the same of photographs. Modernity has turned the image and photography into a valuable currency capable of undermining stability in its capturing of a moment, and in turn, the perception of a reality. And yet, the dominion photography thrives on a horizontal plane, its conquest dependent on the photographer with the camera in hand, the subject within the photograph itself, and anyone who dares look (Azoulay 138). 

“This is X” is the implication of an image, and at the same time, an unfeasible rendering of a moment (Azoulay 141), if we consider the vast apparatus of time and space and the mess they make of history. The image skillfully asserts its nature as gestural identification while assuming the role as mere convention, which Azoulay reminds us is “first and foremost a gathering” (143). A get-together is truly only as inspiring as the compliance of its guests, and yet, the image is clandestine, filled with discursive eruptive pockets often times only felt by specific groups or in specific instances, out of sight, but nonetheless still present. 

What struck me most intensely from each reading was this concept of “BECOMING A SPECTATOR, BECOMING A CITIZEN,” bookended by Azoulay. Ranciere asks us to consider the differences between becoming and representing, differences that leave a gap wide enough for contestations of identity to be exploited for the biopolitical: 

“The image never stands alone, it belongs to a system of visibility that governs the status of the bodies represented and the kind of attention they merit…Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act offering an equivalent…The image is not the duplicate thing. It is a complex set  of relations between the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid. Not just what is in front of the photographer/filmmaker. It is always an alteration that occurs in a chain of images which alter it in turn” (96-99).

Therefore, the image as commodification, as public conversation and agreement, is drafted in the reflection of the rulers in society, aesthetic gatekeepers who, with great nerve and audacity, keep the information machined well-oiled by churning out political spheres in which the masses should identify, lest they fall by the wayside, out of bounds, indiscernible: non-citizens. 

Ranciere prompts us to “construct different realities, different forms of common sense…different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meaning” (102). This resilient queerness is exemplified in modern times by DREAMers, undocumented youth whose appearance calls into question the limitations of citizenship. Beltran describes how “coming out” for undocumented youth is “an effort to become civically legible and politically speakable” (87). DREAMers assume the role of moving image, avoiding both the promissory fragment of the photograph and its stable gaze as well as the faulty sheen of representation. In concordance with the Gay Rights Movement, “coming out” implies leaving one foot within the inverted spectacle, while the other makes a mad dash from restraint, knowing the other can soon follow with enough velocity- such successive images mark continuity. This new domain of spectactor-ship, created via routes of new media and online assembly, carves out a vantage point that anticipates a queered, future-oriented, political-consciousness, its authorship in the hands and the eyes of the oppressed, intolerability making way for emancipation. 

jonathancoker

Doom is a sentiment that glides over individuals to create immovable bodies. Doom is a “judicial condemnation or sentence” as much as it is an “unhappy destiny” bonded to death and ruin. Doom revels in the “holy revolt” of the oppressed, it is the contour that gives “unauthorized seeing” its grim bent, and it is the “modern soul’s” incidental preoccupation. Doom is the anxiety in the mishandling of biopower, and in turn, the affirmation used by those in power to dictate the terms of public life as always out of reach of the individual. Our readings this week speak on the strategies of power in spaces of appearance where Doom is both underlying and overarching, a promise as well as a deferment, taking place in the now in preparation for the later, banking on ties to the past. 

Within Percepticide, Taylor asks “What do we learn to focus on? What are we trained to overlook? How do we get these signals?” She goes on to define a “self-blinding of the general population” that can be conflated with Doom. If this percepticide “blinds, maims, kills through the senses,” then human faculties are being usurped and replaced with Doom; an ease with death; an eternal peace of mind. Doom is a tool used in the strategy of power, which is comprised as a system. Interestingly, systems are generally puzzles, there is more to them than meets the eye, making their totality difficult to realize. Therefore, the most accessible cause will “appease crowds appetite for violence,” since natural causes are of no interest.

Girad’s assessment of the crowd as spectator and prosecutor brings us to questions of audience in judgements of power. Prosecutors look to an audience to join in on the game of persecution as a means to spread the Doom. Why should a single individual be complicit in acts of persecutory violence when the spectacle can be used as a strategy to differentiate? The crowd inevitably helps to reinforce this culture of krino, or the way in which a collective persecution satiates a thirst for condemnation. What Girad calls an “engagement in a form of repression,” I will call an abdication to Doom. 

So if spaces of appearance bend to the will of power, we rigidly come to rely on a script or a Theatre of Terror that makes Doom common-sense or natural. Theatre begs for an audience to its spectacle. The audience warrants meaning to the spectacular ceremony, but also becomes co-conspirators, teammates, or potentially silent symbols in agreement. Here, power becomes inscribed on the body, as the voyeur chooses to victimize, lest they become victims themselves. The objective of this corporeal Doom State is akin to terrorism and torture, for it aims to “prove to the population at large that the regime has the power to control it.” In identifying more readily with the victim, the spectator is doing themselves a disservice, opting to remain in the dreadful bondage of terror as a means to escape the potentiality of livelihood. In this way, Taylor contends,  “torture also threatens to reduce the world of public.” This public destabilization is enacted through threats of violence that have managed to seep into the private. Its amplification is the adornment that gives power its controlling features. And, as Foucault contends, “power relations operate through people,” which in turn flings criticism back on the spectator, who must decide what role they wish to play in the “pathetic drama” in which they have inevitably been cast. 

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Fashion Week has an interesting history with political spectacle as some shows send garments down the runway conscious of their cultural critique, while other shows are infiltrated by spect-actors in protest. Just this season, model Ayesha Tan Jones, staged a protest against Gucci’s straight-jacket inspired collection as they walked down the catwalk, hands held eye-level, with “mental health is not fashion” scrawled on their outward-facing palms in pen. The same London Fashion Week was commemorated by a staged die-in by climate campaign group Extinction Rebellion outside its venue, thrashing about in buckets of fake blood to symbolize the fashion industry’s role in the deterioration of life on earth as well as its negligent accountability towards a more sustainable model. And elsewhere, during Paris Fashion Week, comedian and performance artist Marie S’Infiltre crashed Chanel’s latest show in a vintage Chanel outfit (her grandmother’s), as a means to not only enliven the infamously serious affair, but also partake in a spectacle that promises glory, basking in the eternity of the Chanel brand.  These examples act as critiques of an industry whose preservation depends on the constant reiteration and belief in itself. 

All of the mentioned spect-actors take on the role of party crasher, breaching an assembly by satirizing the imaginary borders installed around the spectacle. However, my interest is in Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty Show, a political spectacle in its own right that did not seek to exclude, but instead invited all of us to crash the esteemed party of Fashion Week. 

If fashion shows hope to inspire possibilities in its spect-actors, then one that strives for inclusivity should facilitate an entrance point of empathy everyone can align themselves with. Rather than encouraging a prohibited breach of spectacle, it encourages self-actualization through socialization; it is equity in action, spilling off the catwalk and into the capacities of the individual. 

Art executed through performance is innately political for it displays the potential for radical transformation. Boal contends that if art is to be sovereign, then it should deal with all humans, their actions (or inactions), as well as what is done to them. Performance spectacle accomplishes this through a catharsis of the senses that depicts a correction of humanity; in a purposeful alteration, a new way of orienting the body is enacted and there is potential for the viewer to find emancipation. 

Performatic theatre is often called an artistic form of coercion. The spectacle of Fashion Week is a great example of placing commodities on display in artistic sequence. This is essential if we are to agree with Brecht that theatre in the scientific age should strive for the joys of liberation; liberation from the confines of history; liberation from present conformities of daily life; liberation from precarious potentials of the future. Thus, theatre begs its actors to move in the style of a man who wonders as opposed to the man who knows the truth. Judging performance through issues of true/false or those of being/pretend becomes futile; what gives these mediated acts their effectiveness is in their affectations, or even more precisely, the inspiring potential in the emotional weight of their movements. 

That being said, Brecht would not want us to ignore the contradictions of our given world when tempting this intersection. This season’s Savage x Fenty is cognizant of Brecht’s appeal, so, unlike the initial acts of protest described here, this political spectacle strives to deconstruct the fashion show format rather than puncture its beloved iterations. In this way, it establishes a new world of expression that is not totally dismissive of the power structures it critiques, but instead works within its bounds of artifice, simultaneously challenging its norms and expectations. 

The show introduces new performatic possibilities for a fashion show by highlighting the brand’s inclusive ambitions and blowing them up in a colorful display of lingerie, sleepwear, dance, and song. Interestingly, the audacity of this political spectacle makes each choreographed song or dance number seem more like performance of protest, seamlessly oriented around a multiplicity of body types and gender identities marching before a fashion world that does not typically champion their body or existence. Thus, Fenty x Savage reasons with the idea of fashion as a protection from human nature’s more restrictive tendencies in an attempt to promote modern nature (and all its inconsistencies) at its most cathartic.

If we consider Arendt, political action can only take place on the condition that the human body makes an appearance. In being witnessed, various perspectives concerning the body depend on such displacement in order to establish coherence. Butler contends that this is how political action persists- the space in between actors. The emancipation we feel does not emit from the individual, but the relation among individuals. Thus, political revolution by way of spectacle cannot be commenced by a single instance, but by the radical solidarity of the “us.” Both Arendt and Butler concur that human dignity is championed by social relations that strive towards acceptance in the name of equality. 

Butler adds that, “The claim of equality…is made precisely when bodies appear together, or, rather, when, through their action, they bring the space of appearance into being. This space is a feature and effect of action, and it works, according to Arendt, only when relations of equality are maintained” (Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 88-89). The life that emits from a body, although it may not be as readily apparent as a garment, must still seek out means of perseverance, especially when it is at odds with a domineering hegemony. Such queered conditions of perseverance inevitably depend on sociality, and in turn, ask for radical reorganization of established mores in order to carve out space to thrive. In light of this, I ask: If fashion has become a means of simultaneous protection and expression, notably for minoritarian subjects who are disenfranchised by the industries’ historicized limitations, then it is in turn a political sphere where we should not only make room for such bodies to exist, but also make this a paramount objective, in the name of equality for all.

By opening up the fashion discourse to include traditionally excluded bodies in a realm that champions political post-structuralism, Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty Show aims to provide a forgotten (or disposable) population within the confines of fashion a right to be seen. This generosity of the human spirit is exemplified by the opening moments of the show, where the pop star and mogul takes center stage on a platform surrounded by other dancers; she is not alone, even though her larger than life persona almost calls for her alienation. Instead, she concedes to the role of conductor, facilitating an assembly that is not all about her, but in fact all about us. 

Keywords: “Equity,” “Aesthetics,” “Empathy”

Democratic Primary Debate: Crowley and AOC

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Both of our texts this week explored the ways in which humans come to exist, notably within the political context of the public sphere, an ongoing process of performances between accepted participants who are in on the joke of reality. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition is a feverish championing of natality and action which depends on speech to actualize. Arendt raises power as the thread holding  together this discursive web of human interconnectedness. To not join in on this game of life is to “forfeit” the potential to power, in turn becoming “impotent,” regardless of personal strife or reasoning (201).

Arendt highlights the tradition of the polls as a means to distinguish oneself as well as remedy the seeming futility of action and speech. If politics is to spring forth from the polls, they should then strive to embolden the good promises of action, making speech immortal, like an exercise in an organized remembrance. There is a need to be together to fully understand the gravity of the human experience. 

Arendt argues that reality is only as real as we dare to comprehend it. When minoritarian groups are banished from the realm of the public sphere, they risk losing a say in the very essentialities of life. In this struggle of power, action is hungrily squashed, for it is the underlying actuality to the human experience, with no foreseeable end. And yet, we attempt to untether ourselves from the inane perpetuity of action by confirming each others existence; We see each other and in turn continually give birth to our potentialities to do what we want (can?) with the world we have between us; we show up when we turn up. 

Within Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, she more directly confronts this idea of togetherness. Examining the performative right to appear, Butler wonders who constitutes the “people” of “we the people.” She links the concept of precarity to gender and other limiting social constructions. Butler’s sees the fight to assemble as the fight against becoming the “dispensable” within a society, one without a presence on the frontlines of the making of mankind, championing precarity as the saving grace of the relation of man. 

Butler is constantly in discussion with Arednt’s notion of bodily action igniting principles freedom and equality, upholding an interdependency of being that Arendt hints at but refrains from fully encapsulating. This “push” against Arendt is defiant when Butler further explores exactly who constitutes the “we” of “we the people”. She is deeply concerned with who gets to enter this arena of fabrication and by what toll they can enter. In this “push”, Butler contends that Arendt is too dismissive of the perplexities involved when one group is excluded from publicity. Yet, Butler accepts the Arendtian characteristic that freedom transpires not necessarily from the individual, but due to the relation between individuals. Thus, espousing an equality that makes capable the conditions for bodily materialization as an essential component of a politics where everyone has a right to rights.