5. ‘An Actor, But in Life’: Spectatorial Consciousness and Materialist Theatre: Some Notes Apropos Althusser

The most significant theatre moments of 2014 were not marked by exceptional productions and performances, but by the violent attacks against critical artists in Russia, by the forced closure of Brett Bailey’s post-colonial performance installation Exhibit B in London and Paris, and by the cancellation of Rodrigo Garcia’s Golgatha Picnic at a Polish theatre festival. Against this backdrop of events, it has become fatally ignorant, or wilfully ignoring, for theatre artists, audiences and academics alike, not to engage with the pressing concerns of our time: with the global, national and local political crises, from the fundamentalist terror of IS and the attacks on freedom of thought symbolised by the Charlie Hebdo and Copenhagen assassinations in early 2015, to the rise of a racist, homophobic and anti-intellectual right-wing populism across ‘enlightened’ Western countries. Simultaneously, on a more micro-systemic level, theatres, their artists and makers find themselves under an increasing pressure by the neoliberal agenda of total marketisation and austerity savings. Public doubt has been spread about the legitimacy, let alone necessity, of arts funding and the public financing of theatres even in a rich cultural nation such as Germany (a widely debated venomous attack against the German system of public arts funding was launched by a group of conservative sociologists and right-wing populists, in Klein, Knüsel et al. 2012. Germany spends 0.5 % of its public budget for its allegedly sumptuously funded theatre system). At the same time, it is not only a conservative sentiment that conceives of the arts as no more than pleasing societal divertissement upholding the eternal value of beauty. From a traditional Marxist perspective, art and culture belong to society’s ideological superstructure, and can therefore at best offer a (secondary) reflection, yet more often than not only an imaginary transfiguration of the material economic base and its inherent contradictions (Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of the US-American Jacobin platform, exemplarily stated in a recent interview that his website and magazine would ‘generally try to avoid cultural content …. We’d never cover an opera or a play, or avant-garde culture’ [Sunkara 2014, 36, 37]).