Performing Antagonism

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.

Tragedy highlights what is perishable, what is fragile and what is slow moving about us. In a world defined by relentless speed and the unending acceleration of information flows that cultivate amnesia and an endless thirst for the short-term future allegedly guaranteed through worship of the new prosthetic Gods of technology, tragedy is a way of applying what Walter Benjamin saw as the emergency brake. Tragedy slows things down by confronting us with what we do not know about ourselves: an unknown force that nonetheless unleashes violent effects on us on a daily, indeed often minute-by-minute basis. Such is what psychoanalysis calls a symptom, whose source is unconscious. Such is the sometimes terrifying presence of the past that we might seek to disavow but which will have its victory in the end, if only in the form of our mortality. In the words of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie, Magnolia, ‘We might be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us’. Through its sudden reversals of fortune and rageful recognition of the truth of our origins, tragedy permits us to come face to face with what we do not know about ourselves but which makes those selves the things they are. Tragedy provokes what snags in our being, the snares and booby traps of the past that we blindly trip over in our relentless, stumbling, forward movement. This is what the ancients called ‘fate’ and it requires our complicity in order to come down on us.

These two quotations from Medea and Hippolytus, act as a frame and reference for this chapter which functions as prolegomena of a project that sets out to examine the structural links in Greek tragedy between maternity, natality and theatricality. I would not be stressing anything particularly new in saying that Greek Tragedy has some difficulty in presenting the mother figure. The playtexts are littered with mothers that kill their children, sleep with them, stepmothers that pursue them, and in the case of The Bacchae, a mother who not only kills and dismembers her child but returns to the stage with its head as a prized trophy and invites everyone to join in the feast. However, in as much as tragedy is about action—ethical, political, personal and public—this analysis proposes to read that action in relation to what I call the ‘Mother-trope’ or ‘Mother-machine’. In responding to the question of ‘what is there to be done’, tragedy is not solely premised on narrative action, but also and importantly on dramatic, theatrical, embodied action. This theatricality of tragic action exhibits a strong attachment to its mothers, as protagonists, and as tropes and theatrical conventions. Indeed, this fascination that tragedy has with mainly monstrous mothers, may be the precondition, the grounds of its theatricality.

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]).

According to Jürgen Habermas, the public sphere is brought into being every time private individuals gather publicly to ‘confer in an unrestricted fashion … about matters of general interest’. (Habermas, 1974, New German Critique, Vol. 3, pp. 49–55, p. 49.) The notion of a single universally accessible and power-free zone has been problematised by a great number of scholars. (For an introduction to these debates see Fraser, Nancy, 1990, Social Text, Vol. 8–9 pp. 56–80; Curran, 1991, Communication and Citizenship; as well as McKee, 2005, The Public Sphere an Introduction.) Nancy Fraser, for example, suggests that the concept of a single public sphere should be replaced by the notion of multiple spheres, some of which are large and ‘official’, some of which are smaller and ‘subaltern’. (Fraser, 1990, Social Text, Vol. 8–9 pp. 56–80.) Whilst this model offers a framework within which one can reflect upon the formulation and circulation of a multiplicity of counter-discourses, the relationship between all-encompassing official spaces and alternative spaces becomes correspondingly more complex. There is a fracturing of interests which, while potentially politically productive, can also contribute to the ‘thinness’ of democracy under the economic and social constraints created by the dynamics of neo-liberalism. (See Massey, 2010, Soundings number 45 pp. 6–18.)

The concepts of powerlessness and vulnerability centred in the experience of life have often featured in political philosophical discourse as ways of rethinking not only issues of political subjectivity but also the concept of government in general. Life’s fragile and mortal demeanour offers itself, for the French philosopher, mystic and activist Simone Weil, as the main condition of existence. In her poetic and insightful Gravity and Grace, she observes that ‘the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence’. (Weil, 2002, Gravity and Grace, p. 108.) For Michel Foucault, the same essential freedom that, is conceived in its relationship to agonism is what compels the subject to confront the fundamental question about the meaning of freedom, and by extension, of life itself under capitalist governmentality; ‘[this is] a relationship,’ he maintains, ‘at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle’ (Dreyfus and Robinow, 1982, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, pp. 221–222). But the centrality of this relationship is perhaps most explicitly elaborated in Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical work whose persuasive analysis has grandiosely exposed human life as already having become a dispensable economic value, adhering to the logic of biopolitical governmentality. Indeed, his argument presents us with an invaluable reading of the passage from mere life to political life conceived as a necessary prerequisite for life’s entering the domain of politics. Grounding the workings of biopolitics on the exclusion and domination of mere life, Agamben locates the idea of ‘bare life’ at the centre of bio-political vulnerable life. ‘Bare life’, in this sense, emblematically represented by the figure of the ‘sacred human’, maps out the biopolitical terrain upon which sovereign power is exercised and by which human life is transformed into sacred—hence, perishable—life.

Invisible Committee, ‘the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality’ (described by one of the members of the anonymous group), published a text in 2007 that hypothesised the ‘imminent collapse of capitalist culture’ that would arise from new waves of social contestation. Under the title The Coming Insurrection the text (denounced as a manual for terrorism by the French government) functioned as a call to arms during the upheavals of the following years. The introduction concluded with a question that, in this chapter, I would like to suggest still stands as a precondition for political action. This question is: Where do we find each other?

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 chapter aims to question how online video postings of contemporary sequences of social unrest might change our engagement with emancipatory struggles and our perception of collective action. It examines these images of revolt by placing them into two main categories: the spectacular or mediatic image on one hand and the militant image on the other, the latter being then divided further into two subcategories: the iconic militant image and the dialectical militant image. The analysis of these divisions supports a reflection on the spectator-subject as defined by Alain Badiou and ultimately leads me to consider the way drone footage of revolt might induce a dialectical subjectivisation by means of a radicalisation of the image.

This chapter examines the artistic practices and discourses emerging within the field of ‘Institutional Critique’ understood here as the historical tendency of the artistic avant-garde from the 1960s to the present. As set out by sociologists Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello, the idea and practice of critique—and here I specifically refer to artistic practices of institutional critique—exist in a paradoxical and dynamic relation with capitalism: an ‘isomorphic’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007, The New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 518) relation, both sharing the primary aim of the ‘prioritisation and exploitation of change’ (Boltanski, 2011, On Critique, A Sociology of Emancipation, p. 136). Moreover, this isomorphism of critique and capitalism inevitably transforms the way in which the subject is to be understood insofar as it has an influence over the modes of subjectification available to artists, including those engaged in practices of institutional critique.

In order to support this argument, I will first turn to the quasi-transcendental philosophical trajectory developed by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, before then turning to examine post-foundational politico-philosophical thought, which emphasises the indispensable moment of exclusion in the construction of any social practice, and the dimension of the impossibility of absolute foundation or grounding. This is of particular relevance to Mouffe’s agonistic model of democratic politics which proposes the disarticulation and transformation of dominant socio-political discourses around we/they relations. For Mouffe, democratic politics begins by acknowledging—rather than suppressing—antagonistic relations within the practice of hegemony. Insight into Mouffe’s political theory provides the basis for grasping the political dimension of art and, moreover, will permit an understanding of it in terms of counter-hegemonic struggle. In the final section, I envisage dance practice from these philosophical and political standpoints with the aim of defining choreography in relation to the sphere of contestation such that it may be understood to contribute to the transformation of democracy and society as a whole. In this regard, what I will be calling agonistic encounters and agonistic objectifications in dance performances will be the articulation of partial and contesting systems of relations allowing different realities to be materialised in the same space.

How do audiences respond to participatory art in unscripted ways? This chapter questions the status of participatory art in the developmental context as forging cohesion amongst participants and focuses on its sometimes conflictual potentials. Reflecting on a case study of the Theatre of the Oppressed in the context of a Congress-party-led initiative for women’s mobilization in India, the essay analyses participation by linking the macro-dimension of development with the micro-dimension of community theatre practice. Of particular interest is how participation occurs by way of a nuanced range of reactions, with functions ranging from the disruptive to the meliorative. The essay calls for methodological attention to ancillary activities that take place at the margins of the theatre event. These seemingly para-theatrical phenomena indicate that community participation often assumes unsolicited forms.

There is something fundamentally transformative about the idea of antagonism. Consider the case of environmentalist Lios Gibbs, from housewife to founder of the Love Canal Homeowners Association and, subsequently, of the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes. Responding to ‘crisis and challenge’, Murray Levine observes with regard to Gibbs’s transformation, that it was Gibbs’s responsibility in her role as a mother who cares for her children that brought her to embody and enact multiple discourses, including the discourse of environmental activist—and she ‘transcended herself’. Indeed, as Gibbs confesses: ‘If I imagined a year earlier that I would be chasing Congressman LaFalce with signs, … giving press interviews, doing radio programmes and chasing a congressman, a governor, and the President with signs saying I supported him or that he was doing something wrong … well, I wouldn’t have, that’s all. … Radicals and students carry signs, not average housewives.’ And yet, constructions of identity, what essentially Gibbs describes, are precisely part of the radical processes and practices of antagonism. This is because, on the one hand, antagonism as a discursive mode of politics designates the opening up of reality (e.g. motherhood, environmental and climate change) as a site of social struggle by which antagonisms (e.g. housewife, property owner, environmentalist) emerge as limits within the social. But, on the other hand, the terms ‘antagonism’ and ‘antagonistic’, especially in their relation to theatre and performance as ‘political’, describe a practice of negation that not only points to differences and limits in the hegemonic discourse (e.g. to care for her children, to have a home and the rights and responsibilities these positions entail), but uses differences and limits as practices of antagonism in order to subvert and disarticulate the hegemonic discourse and its practices (e.g. the discourse of environmental justice). In this respect, theatre and performance become particularly good places for undoing an image or situation of the dominant discourse in society simply by, we might say, presenting it, whether on the stage of the public space or the stage of the theatre, in order to ‘replace’ it, which in itself is an antagonistic act—the act of ‘negating’ something in the present reality in order to expose it, subvert it and, ultimately, transform it. In this sense, then, all antagonisms, broadly speaking, might be seen as theatrical performances. They offer ways of negation that ‘perform’ resistance by which it becomes possible to discover not only new meanings in multiple, pre-existing and operating discourses, but to also transform and transmute them from within, precisely by staging them and, therefore, exposing their existing differences, limits and contradictions.