Choreographing Agonism: Politics, Strategies and Performances of the Left 3030794458, 9783030794453

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Choreographing Agonism Politics, Strategies and Performances of the Left Goran Petrović-Lotina

Choreographing Agonism

Goran Petrovi´c-Lotina

Choreographing Agonism Politics, Strategies and Performances of the Left

Goran Petrovi´c-Lotina Brussels, Belgium

ISBN 978-3-030-79445-3 ISBN 978-3-030-79446-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79446-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Photo by Ronen Guter This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my beloved parents

Acknowledgements

Choreographing Agonism would not have been written without the generous support of my Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship (2019/2021) at the Institute of Advanced Study and the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. I am grateful for the opportunities provided by both departments and for the welcome given to me by my colleagues in both departments. Above all, I would like to thank my colleagues Milija Gluhovi´c from the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies who encouraged me to write a proposal for this fellowship that enabled me to work on this book, and Shirin Rai from the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Warwick who supported this idea. Thank you to my colleagues at the Institute of Advanced Study, John Burden and Sarah Penny, who kindly allowed me to reduce my academic commitments during the final stages of writing and who, along with Pieter Scott, organised a dynamic series of interdisciplinary lectures, debates, and workshops under the auspices of the Accolade programme. That opportunity allowed me to reflect on the many arguments introduced in my book. Deepest thanks to Chantal Mouffe whose theories inspired this book and whose friendship made it more accessible. Over the course of our many lengthy conversations about politics and art, Chantal’s comments were unfailingly generous and valuable. André Lepecki took the time to read and comment upon early drafts of the book and to share his insightful suggestions that helped me shape the book. Thank you to Milica Ili´c for

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our years of delightful conversations about the challenges and promise of artistic performance and for our friendship. For generously providing me with insight into their work, I wish to thank choreographers Mette Edvardsen, Arkadi Zaides, and Daniel Linehan. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not express my gratitude to countless colleagues in performance studies and political philosophy whose work engaged me and inspired my writing. Without your work, I would have nothing to cite, agree with, contest, and propose as an alternative way of looking at the interplay of performance and politics. I have no words to express my gratitude to Joanne Mackay-Bennett whose meticulous work improved the readability of the text immensely. Deep-felt thanks to my editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Eileen Srebernik and Jack Heeney, and their team, for their great professionalism and support in publishing this book. I am also thankful to the two anonymous reviewers whose generous comments on the initial proposals of this book helped me to better structure it. Equally, I am indebted to all the friends, colleagues, and comrades who contributed to the development of the following chapters in one way or another: Theodora Adekunle, Vincent Barthelemy, Johanne de Bie, Pascal Denis, Pablo Gisbert Donat, Jean-Michel Frodon, Bojan Djordjevi´c, Tony Fischer, Silvija Jestrovi´c, Marko Kantar, Bojana Kunst, Bruno Latour, Pascale Legué, Alexandra McIntosh, Monica McGivern, Christophe Slagmuylder, Joeri Smet, Gašper Smrekar, Christel Stalpaert, and Katleen Van Langendonck. But most importantly, my thanks to Frédérick Denis and to our cat, Jacques Fyodor. Without their support, care, understanding, and disturbance, this book would not be in front of you. The ideas in this book have been honed over many years and have been presented in different formats: public lectures, conferences, published articles, and book chapters. Earlier iterations of the text that have been previously published (see below) have been expanded in this book to present a discursive approach to performance studies by looking at the various philosophical, political, and artistic trajectories that inform performance theory today. Parts of Chapters 2, 4, 6, and 9 first appeared in different form in ‘Performance and Populism. Choreographing Popular Forms of Collectivity’, The Oxford Handbook of Performance and Politics, M. Gluhovi´c, S. Jestrovi´c, M. Saward and S. Rai (eds.), 679–692, OUP, 2021. Reproduced with the permission of Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 7 expands on some of the ideas contained in my article, ‘Theatricality: A dramatic form of contesting spectatorial codes’, Performance Research 24: 4 (2019), 68–75. Chapter 5 updates and modifies my ‘The Political Dimension of Dance: Mouffe’s Theory of Agonism and Choreography’, first published in Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy, T. Fisher, and E. Katsouraki (eds.), 251–271, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Reproduced with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Finally, Chapter 6 draws its inspiration from my article, ‘Agonistic Objectification: Choreography as a Play Between Abundance and Lack’, published in Performance Research 21:4 (2016) 34–40. The author is a WIRL-COFUND Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick (2019/21). These fellowships were supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions COFUND programme (grant agreement number 713548).

Contents

1

Introduction Contesting Performance Practices

1 2

2

Constructing the People The Return of Popular Sovereignty

17 22

3

The Choreography of Articulation The Choreography of Articulation

29 34

4

Political Strategies and Performance Studies Strategies of Avoidance Strategies of Rupture Strategies of Engagement

39 40 44 50

5

Discourse Theory and Artistic Performances Agonistic Artistic Practices Choreographing Agonism

55 62 67

6

Tension: A Guiding Force in Performance, Philosophy, and Politics Mette Edvardsen: The Choreography of Play Between Absence and Presence Immanence and Transcendence Abundance and Lack The Multitude and the People Concepts and Discourses Opposition and Paradox

79 82 88 90 96 100 103 xi

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CONTENTS

Drama: An Encounter Between the Performance and the Audience Phenomenology, Performance, and Individual Corporeality A Collective Perceptual Experience The Body in a Dramatic Encounter with the Audience

107 109 112 115

8

Affects and Opinion Formation Im/Mediacy of Affects Opinion Formation Performance as Object-Cause of Affects Critical Aspects of Performance

119 121 127 130 133

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Identifications Struggle Against the Techniques of Domination Constructing Alternative Communities Time, Space, and Community Artistic Practices and the Construction of Community Imagining a Popular Form of Collectivity in Rimini Protokoll’s 100% City

135 139 146 150 153 156

Bibliography

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The main issue addressed in this book is the political dimension of performance. The volume offers an alternative perspective on artistic performance as a practice capable of contesting dominant politics and mobilising the construction of different ways of living together. My interest in this topic emerged out of a basic dissatisfaction with the perspectives offered by contemporary performance scholars whose considerations of the political dimension of performance, either within the framework of strategies of avoidance or of rupture, often transcend the moment of representation. The arguments these forms of performance studies suggest are, in my view, one-sided and uniform. They have developed within the philosophical trajectory of immanence and the political models of absolute or anarchic democracy which do not provide a satisfying theoretical horizon for reflecting on the reality of ongoing social processes and the construction of alternative forms of collectivity. By pointing out the shortcoming of these ideas, I draw upon different politico-philosophical theories to suggest an alternative view on the relationship between performance and politics and the ways in which artistic performance may contribute to constructing alternative forms of collectivity and community. I have aimed to follow a bifurcated route in order to address the political dimension of performance in an alternative way. The first path introduces engagement as an alternative political strategy which does not do away with representation, but rather recognises that there is no © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Petrovi´c-Lotina, Choreographing Agonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79446-0_1

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way out of it. It asserts that every subject, like every object, is discursively constructed within a particular linguistic, geo-political, cultural, and economic context. The inscription of a subject or object within such a set of relations is what I call the ‘moment of representation’. When representation is understood as an indispensable moment in constructing reality, we can infer that every social construction belongs to the order of performativity. What follows from this observation is that in order to establish an alternative system of representation, one must engage with the existing one—contest and transform it, rather than simply avoid or disrupt it. The second path introduces a view of performance through the ongoing social processes of the Western world, and Western Europe in particular. This task requires the study of the nature of recent civic performances, such as civil movements, protests, and activism, and the logic of constructing collective identities. This intervention will reveal that the formation of alternative collectivity is the consequence of a choreography of articulating demands into rights, affects into representations, disorder into order, or absence into presence. I will demonstrate that this ‘choreography of articulation’ recognises tension as a dynamic force inherent in all social relations, including the relations between the choreographer and the artistic team, between the choreographer and the performers, and between the performers themselves. This same force of tension is also at work between the performance and the audience, which I envisage in terms of drama. According to this view, performance is conceived as a contesting, agonistic, choreo-political practice capable of eliciting social and political change by mobilising affects and opinions in the audience. Finally, the operations of engagement, articulation, tension, and the mobilisation of affects and opinions provides an alternative view on community in terms of identification. Identification is a contingent type of relation that enables the unity of many dissimilar positions in the form of a collectivity around shared ethico-political values.

Contesting Performance Practices The central question that this book asks is this: can performance practices contest existing politics and contribute to the constitution of much more democratic forms of living together? Given the current state of affairs tied to the crisis of neoliberalism, it is a topic that I, personally, find compelling. On a broader level, it deserves investigation and attention. The crisis of neoliberalism, which began with the subprime loan

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crash in the United States of America in 2007, impacted financial institutions nationally and around the globe. In Europe, the ensuing failure of banks in 2009 provoked a debt crisis in several eurozone member states (Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). To sustain the banks, governments across the EU introduced austerity measures and spending cuts. The disastrous consequence of this tactic was a decrease in the economic power of citizens and an increase in the unemployment rates across the EU. As a result, in some EU countries protests broke out with different voices condemning an elite class of wealthy bankers, businessmen, and conservative politicians whom they held responsible for the crisis. On 15 May 2011, for example, people in Spain took to the streets to protest the imposed model of financial resolution. A large cross-section of protesters and groups (feminists, environmental workers, and social justice advocates) occupied public squares in dozens of cities across the country. In 2014, a radical left movement-party Podemos / We Can emerged from a small faction of the anti-austerity Movimiento 15M , or Indignados / The Outraged. As a movement-party, Podemos distanced itself from the traditional party organisation, keeping close ties with social activist organisations and other progressive civil movements to foster democratic processes. The rise of collective demands for the return of popular sovereignty and increased participation in the decisionmaking process on both the national and the EU level also brought about counter-shift in political mobilisation. In 2015 and 2016, an unprecedented influx of people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe was followed by a significant rise in the electoral vote of radical right, anti-immigration political parties across the entire EU. Examples include parties such as the Italian Lega (League), the German Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), and the French Front national (National Front),1 while a successful referendum campaign of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) provided a vote for Brexit. Shifting the blame for the European debt crisis onto both internal and external immigrants and refugees, right-wing populists instigated protests and mobilised the people around discourses that articulated stigmata of otherness such as name, language, and religious practice. A direct consequence of the institutionalisation of right-wing discourses of intolerance was the explosion of various antagonisms. Over the last few years, Western Europeans

1 In 2018, National Front party voted to change its name to the National Rally.

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witnessed increasing neo-racist, xenophobic, and antisemitic sentiments across Europe. They manifest themselves in different ways: through the construction of fences along EU borders (2015–2017), the reintroductions of border controls, increased restrictions on employment, housing, and dual nationality, as well as expanding forms of discrimination of cultural differences. In tandem with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic (2019), discourses on tighter borders, nationalism, and antiimmigration increasingly serve to strengthen and entrench right-wing populist parties and authoritarian regimes. As fundamental human rights, such as the freedom of movement, the right to asylum, the right to work, and the right to participate in a cultural life, even to enjoy art, become increasingly suppressed under the current pandemic, and leftleaning thinkers remain undecided about whether withdrawing from institutions or engaging with them provides the best option for contesting a right-wing politics and invigorating values of freedom, equality, justice, solidarity, pluralism, and progress, the need to empower the left with ideas of economic transformation, political innovation, and social, geographical, and cultural connectivity, becomes all the more urgent. Choreographing Agonism investigates how performance practices contest neoliberal discourses of individualism and right-wing discourses on intolerance, while suggesting an alternative form of living together. Performance Studies offers a unique vantage point from which to study civic performance (civil movements, political speeches, public policy) and artistic performance (dance, theatre, music) and the forms of collectivity that they engender. In its comprehensive view of the conventionally separate categories of both civic and artistic performance, a view that includes both civic/genuine and artistic/imaginary perspectives, Performance Studies can expand our understanding of the processes of collective mobilisation and the construction of democratic forms of community.2 In his article, Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research (2002), Dwight Conquergood writes that the methodology of Performance Studies is one that combines practice, theory, and critical engagement.3 With Conquergood’s tri-partite methodology in mind, I have undertaken a study of performance practices and theories that are 2 Drawing distinctions between civic performance and artistic performance underscores my argument that all performance is cultural. 3 Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer, 2002): 145–156.

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best able to reflect on the complexity of ongoing social, political, and cultural processes. Firstly, I focus on civic performances to outline the different nature of civil movements on the left of the political spectrum. I distinguish horizontal civil movements without leadership, such as the international Occupy movement (2011), from civil movements that are vertical by nature and have leaders, such as the faction of the Spanish anti-austerity 15-M (2011) that transformed into a movementparty Podemos (2014) under the leadership of Pablo Iglesias Turrión. Secondly, I describe different strategies that these civil movements employ to achieve political goals, i.e., to contest a dominant politics (the strategies of withdrawal, rupture, and engagement). Thirdly, I distinguish three politico-philosophical projects of democracy that amplify the different natures of civil movements and the political strategies that they employ (absolute democracy, communal anarchism, and agonistic democracy). And, finally, I examine the ways performance scholars reflect on different civil movements, political strategies, and projects of democracy in order to formulate how artistic performance compels the audience to contest a social imaginary guided by a hegemonic politics and to articulate alternative forms of community (the post-representational approach and the representational approach). Moving beyond the dualism of positions between theory and practice through critical engagement, I develop theoretical tools that enable a formulation of community capable of both contesting the neoliberal insistence on individualism and the escalation of right-wing politics in Europe and contributing to the articulation of an alternative order of politics. Although I begin this book by drawing on civic performances and politico-philosophical models of democracy, my particular interest lies in artistic performances and the concomitant studies of them. Why, then, such an approach? The answer is simple. Artistic performances are informed both by civil movements that embody collectivity and theoretical formulations of democracy. As a result of this status, artistic performances provide sites for reassessing strategies of choreographing the people and forms of living together. And more importantly, they provide a setting for imagining, practicing, and formulating alternative ways of choreographing the people by offering alternative scores of living

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together. Like artistic practices, as Brian Holmes has stated, artistic performances ‘offer a chance for society to collectively reflect on the imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency, its self-understanding’.4 My particular focus in this book is on the following artistic performances: Archive (2014) by the France-based Israeli choreographer Arkadi Zaides, Black (2011), No Title (2014), and We to Be (2015) by the Brussels-based Norwegian choreographer Mette Edvardsen, and 100% City/Brussels (2014) by the Berlin team of author-directors, Helgard Kim Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, who work as Rimini Protokoll. This selection is guided by a view of performance as a choreographic practice that may appropriate elements from different arts (dance, theatre, mime, concert, painting, sculpting, filming, drawing, writing…), civic activities (doing sports, working, protesting, public speaking, combating…) and discourses (anthropology, psychoanalysis, politics, economy, linguistics, ethics, gender studies, critical race theory…). Although I do not necessarily focus on a particular form of performance, I pay special attention to choreographic practices that are usually associated with dance. This, however, does not mean that I am giving priority to dance in social, political and cultural processes, nor to any artistic form or particular style. I believe that dance practice, like various artistic performances and art more generally, can play an important role in recovering the democratic elements of popular sovereignty by mobilising the audience to reflect on existing forms of community and to imagine alternatives. After all, the role of artists, art scholars, and other cultural agents is not only to maintain or to anticipate political change in utopian terms; they can also inspire political change. Through critical engagement with hegemonic politics, sedimented practices, and symbolic frameworks, they can contest the dominant order of politics, organise across differences, allow excluded voices to be heard, stimulate particular affects, instigate social imaginary, and mobilise the audience to construct an order of democracy capable of representing a variety of human associations silenced by a politics in power. The object of investigation in this book is thus the way artistic performances critically engage with the complexity of social process casting alternative view on practices, epistemologies, and politics. It is within the framework of critical engagement that I locate the ‘contesting political dimension’ of artistic performance in particular, and art 4 Brian Holmes, “Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society,” Third Text, Vol. 16, No. 6 (2004): 549.

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in general. Unlike the ‘complying political dimension’ of art, whose role is merely to sustain a dominant politics, the contesting political dimension of art can contribute to its transformation. My formulation of the contesting political dimension of art is, above all, anchored in the postMarxist politico-philosophical thought of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In their book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Laclau and Mouffe acknowledge that antagonism is inherent in society.5 Developing this theory, Mouffe writes that antagonism, a conflict between enemies, cannot be eradicated from society but it can take a form of agonism, formulated as a conflict between adversaries.6 Situating agonistic and adversarial types of relations at the heart of democratic politics, Mouffe develops a theory of democracy which suggests that all social practices may contribute to the prevention of antagonistic conflicts. Following these theories, I argue that the contesting political dimension of art, which contains in itself critical, polemical, and conflictual dimensions, may contribute to the transformation of politics that either foster individualism for the benefit of capital, or reawaken racial, religious, and gender antagonisms that deepen social conflicts. In order to get a better handle on the political dimension of art, let me draw on two examples. The first one relates artists, artistic practices, theories, and art institutions that comply with a hegemonic politics. In 2016, Jan Fabre, Belgian artist and appointed artistic director of the Athens and Epidaurus Festival, planned to turn Greece’s major arts festival into ‘a tribute to Belgium’ and devoted eight of the festival’s ten productions to those from his homeland. In the midst of the Greek economic and political crisis, informed by harsh austerity measures introduced by the EU Commission in 2010, Fabre’s proposal was seen as a nod to the EU’s neoliberal elitist discourse of domination and neo-colonialism by local art communities. The opposition of the local art communities against Fabre’s intentions forced him to resign.7

5 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a

Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso, [1985] 2001). 6 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 20–21. 7 Parallels may be drawn with the case of Adam Szymczyk, the artistic director of the

Documenta 14 (2017). Szymczyk split the festival which traditionally takes place in Kassel, between Kassel and Athens. At the midst of the Greek economic crisis his move had been seen by art community as exploitative.

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The second example relates artists, artistic practices, theories, and institutions which contest a hegemonic politics. In this case, Jan Goossens, the former director of the Flemish Royal Theatre (KVS) in Brussels (2001–2016), wanted to build a programme with the local multicultural community that would address current realities such as the administrative and political division of Belgium into different language communities and cultures.8 Goossens also dedicated a great part of the KVS programme to Belgium’s colonial past, a topic that remains largely unaddressed in Belgium’s current education system.9 Concerned with the ethico-political values that are underlying KVS, Goossens critically engaged with the institutionalised politics to contest them and to offer an alternative solution for institutional management. As I argue throughout this book, the dynamism of critical practices of contestation and their capacity to contribute to the transformation of a hegemonic politics depends on the strategies they employ. Strategy, as philosopher Franҫois Jullien explains in his book, The Propensity of Things (1992), ‘aims, through a series of factors, to determine the fixed principles according to which one evaluates the prevailing power relations and plans operations in advance’.10 Jullien’s writing on strategy, Mouffe’s theory of conflict, and Conquergood’s writing on critical engagement provide a horizon for distinguishing ‘strategies of engagement’ from those of withdrawal and rupture. I demonstrate that unlike strategies of withdrawal (exemplified by advocates of absolute or direct democracy, such as Paolo Virno) and strategies of rupture (exemplified by proponents of anarchic democracy, such as Jacques Rancière), both of which aim to determine a self-organising or self-governing collectivity outside of existing institutions, sedimented practices, and symbolic representations, strategies of engagement (exemplified by advocates of agonistic democracy, such as Chantal Mouffe) succeed in constructing alternative forms of

8 One of the significant programmes established within this framework is Tok Toc Knock festival, or the location project, launched in 2012. Over the period of three years, artists were invited to create works in an encounter with the city of Brussels. 9 KVS organised and produced performances, exhibitions, and discussions, with a critical approach to Belgium’s colonial past and colonialism in general. The programme also included the development of collaborations between art institutions in Congo and Belgium. This is how Connection Kin festival was born in 2009, taking place in Kinshasa. 10 François Jullien, The Propensity of Things (New York: Zone Books, [1992] 1995),

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collectivity precisely by means of engagement with them. I will show that by virtue of engagement with institutions, practices, and representations that are governed by a hegemonic politics, contesting performance practices, including artistic performances, enable the public and the audience to both critically reflect on prevailing power relations and the imaginary figures they depend upon and creatively imagine other ways of living together. In short, I claim that strategies of engagement provide performance practices with a critical, contesting, and transformative force. This point of view calls for the engagement with the notion of representation. It requires a critique of Performance Studies that aims to do away with representation, whether the performances are inspired by political strategies of withdrawal which suggest the avoidance of any type of representation, as in the case of philosopher and performance scholar Bojana Kunst, or are informed by political strategies of rupture which create fissures within existing representations, as in the case of dance scholar André Lepecki. I will demonstrate that by doing away with representation, or simply by rupturing its existing forms, these theories do not answer central political questions, such as how to organise across differences and how to articulate alternative forms of community out of discrepancies. In a self -instituting, -organising, and -governing community without order, identity, or identification, all markers of the body are meant to disappear within a smooth space free of constitutive divisions. The community that is thus called into existence must be the expression of a harmonious collectivity that exists in itself. In contrast to the ‘post-representational approach to performance studies’, I take my lead from the politico-philosophical discourses on marking, mobilising, and engaging, which have been debated in performance studies over many years. Each of these discourses acknowledges an indispensable moment of engagement with the dominant order of symbolic representation that keeps a hegemonic politics in power. For instance, associating withdrawal from representation with silence, with the position assigned to women in patriarchal societies, performance scholar Peggy Phelan (1993) writes that the task of art is to interfere with representation that is hegemonised, regulated, and controlled by men, so that the metaphor of gender can be unmarked.11 Dance scholar Randy Martin (1998) suggests precisely that which is unregistered in representation 11 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, [1993] 2006), 164.

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mobilises participation of the audience, enabling it to critically expand the understanding of the political beyond its conventional register in existing representations, and, more importantly, to contest it.12 For his part, theatre scholar Joe Kelleher (2009) observes that artistic performances always represent our lives, that they always stand in for something and engage us personally to make critical judgements on the fidelity of such representations.13 The ‘representational approach to performance studies’ compels us to acknowledge that all bodies are inscribed in a set of relations designated by language, practices, and institutions, which are themselves governed by a hegemonic politics and discourses. Hence, it enables us to recognise that bodies are always already politically constructed and represented as identities. In a society dominated by white, male, middle-class privilege, for instance, identities such as black, woman, and worker, are constructed through techniques that dominate these groups and their practices. These identities can then be seen to stand for the anti-racist, feminist, and labour struggles. To recognise the demands of the groups in struggle is to elevate them to the level of rights. It is to defend and symbolically represent various human associations as embodied within the institutions of parliamentary democracy. This can only mean that rather than identity-blind artistic performances and theories, those that are identity-conscious and engaging can expand opportunities for minority groups. The representational approach to performance studies suggests that the contesting political dimension of performance lies in tension precisely because it is associated with the struggle for symbolisation. As I develop in the book, tension is a dynamic force inherent in all social relations including the relations between the choreographer and the artistic team, the choreographer and the performers, and between the performers themselves. This same force of tension is also at work between the artistic performance and the audience which I envisage in terms of drama. Drama, hence, is not a mere matter of plot, of a closed system relating polemics and struggles between the characters on the stage. Rather it is a form of encounter or tension between the performance and the audience. In such a dramatic encounter, artistic performance reveals the practice of contesting sedimented spectatorial codes. It mobilises senses

12 Randy Martin, Critical Moves (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 45. 13 Joe Kelleher, Theatre & Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 10.

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and emotions among the audience and discloses the ways in which spectators both perceive and feel dominant symbolic representations and the modes of identity and identification that are performed. It is by these means that artistic performance may instigate the audiences’ imaginary towards the construction of alternative subjectivities, collectivity, and community. Accordingly, drama in performance studies can be seen as a condition for rearticulating the audience’s experience of reality. Throughout this book, I return frequently to the practice of articulation provided by the drama or tension between the differential positions. I envisage articulation as a discursive practice that inscribes the being of the object, or the subject within a system of various relations, and structures it as representation. Concerning artistic performance, articulation is a choreographing practice that materialises the body as a representation of a particular subjectivity, collectivity, or community, which is then capable of contesting dominant representational frameworks of the body. In terms of the audience, articulation is a phenomenological practice prompted by performing bodies that can contest the audience’s spectatorial codes and transform spectators from passive onlookers to active citizens. In the case of civic performances mobilised by active citizenship, articulation is a political practice which suggests a sublimation of the multiplicity of contrasting, dispersed, and passionate democratic demands into a set of orderly and institutionalised rights that aim to constitute an alternative, democratic form of community. In short, articulation is a social practice capable of transforming the body into a particular representational framework, the affective into the symbolic, dispersions into an order, demands into rights, counter-hegemony into hegemony, or the self-organised multitude into constructed people. The contesting political dimension of art informed by strategies of engagement that enable a dramatic encounter between the paradoxically differential positions, and that mobilise the choreographic, phenomenological and political practices of articulation, is supported by a discursive approach to the analysis of performances. I do not, however, focus on discourse analysis which melds linguistics and focuses on the rules of language use.14 Instead, I centre my argument on ‘discourse theory’ 14 In discourse analysis, language is envisaged as a fact of anthropology, as something that humans possess, that enables members of a collective to undertake intellectual activity and conceptualise what is just and not just, and agree upon a form of community in which they want to live. Discourse theory deals with language, power, and knowledge

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which coincides with the theory of hegemony and pays attention to the contextual meaning of language. Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory provides me with my starting point. Revisiting the three main intellectual currents of the twentieth century, analytical philosophy, phenomenology, and structuralism, Laclau and Mouffe showed that in all three an illusion of immediacy—of a non-discursively mediated access to the things themselves through the referent, the phenomenon, and the sign—dissolved at some point and was replaced by one or another form of discursive mediation.15 Seeking inspiration in all three philosophical currents, Laclau and Mouffe defined discourse not only as a combination of speech and writing but as a system of linguistic and extralinguistic relations. From their point of view, language enables meaningful communication whereas institutions regulate the production of knowledge through social practices and symbolic representations. In other words, every social construction is discursively formed: through languages, practices, and institutions.16 Such a view implies that every performance, too, is discursively constructed and symbolically represented in relational sequences between linguistic phenomena, social practices, and institutions, within which the performing body is entwined. Similarly, as I demonstrate, the audience’s perceptual experience of performance functions as an expression of the system which is discursively constituted. A significant characteristic of discursive formation, as formulated by Laclau and Mouffe, is that it coincides with hegemonic formation.17 According to the theory of hegemony, every discursive formation presupposes the practice of articulation of different, never fully determined nor necessarily affiliated elements (languages, practices, institutions), into a chain of equivalence consisting of discursive moments. The practice of articulating hegemony demonstrates that every chain of equivalence presupposes a particular type of relation between discursive moments,

production. See: John Flowerdew and John Richardson (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (London: Routledge, 2017); Ruth Amossy, L’Argumentation dans le discours (Nathan: Paris, 2000); Dominique Maingueneau, L’analyse du discours (Hachette: Paris, 1991). 15 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, xi. 16 Ibid., 109. 17 Ibid., 136.

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that is, ‘a [particular] configuration, which in certain contexts of exteriority can be signified as a totality’.18 On one hand, this implies that every discursive totality stands for a moment of unity that entails a process of symbolisation or overdetermination. On the other hand, every symbolic unity is constructed in relation to that which it excludes, that is, in relation to alternative discursive configurations of totality that might become symbolically united in a counter-hegemony. It is then in relation to the excluded, that is to the other, that every discursive formation stands for a totality that is symbolically united in a particular hegemony. When discursive formation is envisaged as hegemonic formation, then it is a form of politics that attempts to dominate society by determining the fixed principles that would seize power over languages, practices, and institutions and, accordingly, govern a particular social imaginary. Insofar as it is partial and constructed in relation to some sort of exteriority, every form of hegemony is a precarious and contingent construction, threatened by that which it excludes, by a counter-hegemonic block. This implies that both performances and audiences may be affected by a hegemonic politics that has power over institutions and regulates our perception of reality through discourses beneficial for the reproduction of a particular order. Conversely, performances and audiences may be influenced by a politics which engages critically with the dominant discourse from a counter-hegemonic position. Seen from this perspective, performance relates neither to a conceptual practice occupied with the sheer presence of performers on the stage, nor to immediate access to the performing bodies themselves, but instead to a performance practice concerned with the ways socio-cosmic relations are discursively materialised, symbolically represented, enacted, embodied, hegemonised, viewed, valued, or exchanged, and, as such, whether they are sustained or contested. According to this view, discursive formation implies the reproduction of limits between different discursive constructions that belong to either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic politics. The practice of redrawing limits between counter/hegemonic politics depends on the strategies applied. Unlike strategies of withdrawal from, or the rupturing of, a hegemonic politics, both of which fix the moment of hegemonic articulation between delimited discursive totalities, strategies of engagement with a

18 Ibid., 106.

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hegemonic politics mobilise a pro-active process of articulation between the delimited, counter-hegemonic, and precarious symbolic representations. It is precisely discursive formation that imposes practical limits on any strategy demonstrating that the political dimension of art is a contesting force to the extent that it critically engages with other discursive constructions and symbolic representations that maintain a hegemonic politics in power, challenges them, and eventually articulates an alternative. Artistic strategies of engagement disclose the contesting political dimension by opening up the possibility for action, for radically dissembling hegemonic political discourses that dominate artistic institutions (e.g., education, museology, curatorial practices, programming, artistic practices, techniques, and concepts, dramaturgy, choreography, and so on) and are sedimented in prevailing discourses, symbolic representations, and practices. Within the framework of contesting artistic practices provided by the dramatic encounter between the paradoxically differential, counter-hegemonic positions that co-exist in tension, the goal of strategies of engagement becomes one of countering and disarticulating dominant discourses and of articulating a hegemony that suggests a different configuration of discursive elements capable of providing an alternative form of collectivity. One final note before I engage in more detail with the ideas on performance as outlined above. Let me make clear that my intention in this book is neither to diminish strategies of withdrawal or rupture in contrast to strategies of engagement nor to overcome the politicophilosophical differences between them. After all, from the point of view of discourse formation, strategies of withdrawal, rupture, and engagement are different hegemonic projects. This implies that we must see them as co-existing in tension and enable the moment of articulation to unfold between them. To this end, it must be emphasised that unlike strategies of engagement, strategies of withdrawal, or avoidance, do not enable the practice of articulation to take place. This is so because strategies of withdrawal do not recognise the conflictual, dramatic, and contesting nature of counter-hegemonic projects. For their part, strategies of rupture, although recognising conflict, do not provide the moment of hegemony because they do not believe in an institutionalised order. If strategic thinking manifests through the ‘extreme commitment to penetrating

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the real nature of all determining factors’, as Jullien suggests,19 then discourses on withdrawal and rupture cannot be perceived as dynamic political strategies but rather as predetermined static positions from which there is no escape. This is why the significance of the strategies of withdrawal and rupture for political change is recognised, but only as an initial move that must articulate a strategic engagement with hegemonic politics to secure pro-active participation. It is precisely through the dramatic encounter of conflicting positions provided by strategies of engagement that the practice of the disarticulation of a dominant hegemony and the articulation of an alternative hegemonic order might be put into practice. From the point of view of the theory of hegemony, strategies of engagement constitute the political forces necessary to critically evaluate the prevailing hegemonic relations and plan either contesting or complying performances in advance, even before the actual engagement takes place. In other words, performances in general, and artistic performances in particular, just like other artistic practices, cannot mobilise social change by transcending or avoiding all limits, relinquishing the other, and withdrawing from existing institutions, discourses, and symbolic representations. Theoretical analysis of performance practices alongside discourses on withdrawal and rupture suggest a view of the political dimension of performance in isolated, ahistorical, pre-discursive, post-representational, and harmonious terms. As I suggest in this book, it is through critical engagement and dramatic encounter that artistic practices contribute to the disarticulation of existing politics and the articulation of an alternative discursive order, thus assuring what I call the contesting political dimension of performance. As a whole, the contesting political dimension of artistic performance, and art more generally, does not manifest itself through the self-foundational project of stasis determined by an abstract conceptual denominator, but through the self-assertive project of a concrete action that is relationally and strategically performed in such a way that it assists whatever reveals itself to be external to the dominant hegemony. It is by these means that artistic practices may contest the hegemony of neoliberal politics as well as the ongoing institutionalisation of right-wing political parties and contribute to the articulation of a different order of politics, compelling members of the audience to unite around shared

19 Jullien, Propensity, 31.

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ethico-political values, beyond pre-established perspectives on subjectivity, collectivity, and community, in terms of class, gender, or race-based identities.

CHAPTER 2

Constructing the People

In order to understand how artistic practices can be a catalyst for political change, we must first explore the political background against which artistic practices come into being. Accordingly, I will inscribe my view within the neoliberal political framework of first-world capitalism. Initially based in eighteenth-century notions of liberalism which sought a shift from autocratic mercantilism to a free market handled by private individuals, neoliberal ideas of individualism and free markets began to proliferate after the Second World War. The escalation of these ideas, a reaction against the collectivism associated with social democracy and the welfare state, entered the mainstream in the 1970s. Throughout the 1980s, neoliberalism’s objective, to transfer the control of the economy from the public sector to the private sector, became a widely accepted socioeconomic model of politics in Western European countries. Its global spread, via multilateral economic institutions, such as The World Bank (WB), The World Trade Organisation (WTO), and The International Monetary

This chapter expands on a portion of my ‘Performance and Populism. Choreographing Popular Forms of Collectivity’, first published in The Oxford Handbook of Performance and Politics, edited by Milija Gluhovi´c, Silvija Jestrovi´c, Michael Saward and Shirin Rai, 679–692 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Reproduced with the permission of Oxford University Press. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Petrovi´c-Lotina, Choreographing Agonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79446-0_2

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Fund (IMF), was rapid. And its wide implementation, followed by the establishment of multilateral economic companies, brought about deregulation, privatisation, tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, outsourcing, and competition in public services. Neoliberalism has been often associated with Thatcherism, a form of political and economic ideology named after the Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1900). It was Thatcher who claimed that there is no such thing as society, only individual men and women.1 Her famous slogan, ‘there is no alternative’, best describes the sorry state of the political spectrum enforced in the early years of 1980s. In its suppression of the traditional divide between a politics of the left and of the right, neoliberalism prevented the possibility of political alternatives. The consequent ‘consensus at the centre’ aligned with neoliberalism’s agenda to create a harmonious society that precluded any type of conflict. One way of achieving this goal was to pave the way for a politics in which the interests of the people would be regulated and scrupulously controlled by the financial flow of capital. To accomplish such a move, state institutions were stripped of their democratic role of governance while power over them was allocated to the banking and business elites. This is how the role of state institutions was restricted to setting laws that ensured the smooth flow of capital. As a result, the possibility for people to exercise their democratic rights was reduced to free elections that, in reality, eliminated any concrete choice between political alternatives and led to the establishment of a hegemonic politics ruled by a transnational, global flow of funds. Ultimately, as neoliberalism exiled democratic elements of popular sovereignty from the realm of politics, it ushered in what philosopher Jacques Rancière in 1995 termed post-democracy.2 In the early years of the twenty-first century, it became clear that a crisis of neoliberalism was inevitable. It began with the subprime loan crash in the United States in August 2007 and was closely followed by the crash of the investment bank, Lehman Brothers, in 2008. As might be expected, the financial downturn in the United States impacted financial institutions around the globe. First to be affected in 2009 were 1 Margaret Thatcher, “No Such Thing as Society,” interview for Woman’s Own (23 Sept. 1987): 8–10. 2 See: Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, [1995] 1999).

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the European banks. And, like watching the dominoes fall, the failure of European banks provoked a debt crisis in several eurozone member states, notably Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. To sustain the banks, governments across the EU decided to bail out a large number of them. They introduced austerity measures and spending cuts— imposed by the ‘troika’ of the European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB), and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—across various sectors. The effects of this tactic, most specifically, a decrease of the economic power of citizens and an increase of unemployment rates across the EU, were disastrous. Understandably, these new economic measures were most devastating to southern European countries where populations experienced lower standards of living. Unsurprisingly, rioting broke out in cities across Spain and Greece. United around the Spanish Indignados / The Outraged or Movimiento 15-M (2011) and the Greek Aganaktismenoi / The Outraged (2011), people took to the streets to protest the neoliberal model of financial resolution and to condemn an elite class of wealthy bankers and businessmen whom they held responsible for the crisis. Protesters demanded greater power for the people. They called for increased participation in the decision-making process and the systemic transformation of the political system and its institutions. Factions of these anti-austerity, anti-corruption, and anti-establishment movements gave rise to left-wing populist parties. The Spanish political party Podemos / We Can, for example, emerged from the Movimiento 15-M movement under the leadership of Pablo Iglesias Turrión. Similarly, taking the demands of the Aganaktismenoi into party politics, the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left—Progressive Alliance, known as Syriza (2015), remodelled itself from an electoral coalition into a pluralistic party headed by Aléxis Tsípras.3 To defend the demands of the people, these left-wing, populist parties set as their goal the transformation of institutions of parliamentary democracy at both the national and EU levels.4

3 Syriza is a syllabically abbreviation of υνασπισμ´oς Pιζoσπαστικης ´ Aριστερας— ´ meaning the Coalition of the Radical Left, from υνασπισμ´oς Pιζoσπαστικης ´ Aριστερας´ ρooδευτικη´ υμμαχ´ια, meaning the Coalition of the Radical Left–Progressive Alliance. 4 In this book, my focus is on populism in Western Europe. Populism in Eastern Europe, just as in the other regions of the world, has different manifestation and requires a separate study that would provide insight into the local historical, geo-political,

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The European debt crisis did not solely inspire left-leaning civil movements and populist political parties. It also strengthened the right-wing populist parties, such as The Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), The French National Rally (RN), formerly known as National Front (FN), the Italian Northern League (LN), Alternative for Germany (AfD), The Netherlands Freedom Party (PVV), The Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE), The UK Independence Party (UKIP), Poland’s Congress of the New Right (KNP), and The Danish People’s Party (DPP). There is no doubt that the rise in popularity of these parties accompanied the expansion of the EU towards Central and Eastern Europe (2004, 2007). They gained particular momentum, however, as the European debt crisis unleashed the imposition of austerity measures and the subsequent migrant crisis that sparked an unprecedented influx of people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, particularly in 2015 and 2016.5 Leaders of these parties gained support by shifting the blame for the decrease in the standard of living onto both internal and external immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers.6 They designated them as a threat to the economic and cultural stability of the nation-state, national identity, and national security. At the same time, they blamed the current political elites for implementing immigration and integration policies that ‘wreaked havoc on the welfare state’.7 Promising to restore the economic power of the workers and the middle class at the national level, right-wing

cultural, and economic constellations. Nevertheless, my definition of populism in terms of constructing the people, or popular forms of collectivity, is more of a universal nature. 5 Immigrations to Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century differ from immigrations to Europe seen previously, by an unprecedented number of asylum seekers and a sharply divergent routes of arrival. See: Elizabeth Collett and Camille Le Coz, After the Storm: Learning from the EU Response to the Migration Crisis (Brussels: Migration Policy Institute Europe, 2018). 6 Anti-immigration has played a key role in the growing popularity of the right-wing populist parties across Europe since the mid-1980s. See: Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, “What Unites Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe?: Re-Examining Grievance Mobilization Models in Seven Successful Cases,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 41, Issue 1 (2007): 3–23; Chantal Mouffe, “Democracy in Europe: The Challenge of Right-Wing Populism,” Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2002), accessed 15 January 2020, http://www.cccb.org/rcs_gene/mouffe.pdf. 7 Akkerman writes about the significance of immigration and integration policies for the radical right parties in: Tjitske Akkerman, “Comparing Radical Right Parties in Government: Immigration and Integration Policies in Nine Countries (1996–2010),” West European Politics, Vol. 35, Issue 3 (2012): 511–529.

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parties began to mobilise the people around discourses that articulated stigmata of otherness such as name, language, and religious practice and awakened old antagonistic sentiments of racism, xenophobia, antiSemitism, and other forms of intolerance contradictory to democratic principles of equality and liberty for all. Additionally, their critique of current immigration laws on both the national and EU levels instigated Eurosceptic and ethnonationalist discourses. Clearly, the crisis of neoliberalism provoked a decentralisation of consensual politics. In delegating politicians who set business interests above the interests of the people as the elite, populist parties initiated a process that divided the social realm into two camps, the people and the elite. But the dividing line between the left and the right about the ways to construct the people remains stark. Whereas populist movements on the left call for a recovery of democratic elements of equality and popular sovereignty by advocating progressive and inclusive forms of collectivity that embrace cultural difference, populist movements on the right mobilise regressive forms of collectivity based on nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and other forms of intolerance. To suggest, however, that left-wing populist parties seek a solution by transforming EU institutions and emphasising economic problems, and that right-wing populist parties resort to Euroscepticism while emphasising cultural differences, simplifies the complexity of populism. It is important to note that new forms of nationalism have surfaced on the both sides of the political spectrum. Political scholar Julian Göpffarth has observed how some left-wing movements with populist elements, such as Jeremy Corbyn’s Momentum in the UK, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise / France Unbowed in France, and Sahra Wagenknecht’s Aufstehen / Stand Up in Germany, see restricted immigration and nationalist discourses as the path to re-establishing the welfare state.8 Similarly, one month before the 2019 EU elections (23 and 26 May 2019), Matteo Salvini, then Italian Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the right-wing populist party, the League, appealed to anti-immigration and Eurosceptic parties to unite in a pan-European block. Both of these

8 Julian Göpffarth, “Can Left Nationalism Stop the Rise of the Far-Right in Germany?” Open Democracy, January 24, 2019. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europemake-it/can-left-nationalism-stop-rise-of-far-right-in-germany/.

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examples reveal how new forms of popular identities evolving around nationalist discourses are being created on both the left and the right.9 One conclusion can be drawn from this conjuncture. In neoliberalism, the politics of the centre-oriented consensus is identified with individual liberty and the rule of law regulated by financial capital. This type of identification mobilised by individual economic interests and the flow of capital imposes the same consequences for supporters of both the political left and the political right: namely, the restriction of any possibility of popular struggle. In fact, for consensual politics, all forms of contest, conflict, (ant)agonism, and social mobilisation, are seen as exceptions. What a view of society as a harmonious unity of various individuals suppresses are elements of collectivity, equality, and the possibility of confronting those who govern. In light of this, the rise of populist movements may only be seen as an aspiration towards the return of popular sovereignty into institutions. However, such a tendency should not be seen as a way of establishing ‘a populist regime’. Rather, it should be seen as an endeavour to transform existing institutions and to construct alternative politics.

The Return of Popular Sovereignty Populism has been widely discussed by political theorists. Some of the recent and most influential contributors to the debate are: María Esperanza Casullo, Chantal Mouffe, Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Benjamin Moffitt, Jacques Rancière, Kirk Hawkins, Ernesto Laclau, and Kurt Weyland. Mudde and Kaltwasser, for example, define populism as ‘a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic camps, “the pure people”

9 Taking South America as an example, political scientist, María Esperanza Casullo, shows how left-wing populism may combine a classical left-wing discourse centered on inequality, poverty, social rights and social justice, with a traditional right-wing discourse centered on compassion, private virtue and philanthropy. See: María Esperanza Casullo, “Political Discourse on Distributive Social Policies: Are the Poor Citizens, Workers, Mothers?”, in Perspectives on Populism and the Media. Avenues for Research, eds. Benjamin Krämer and Christina Holtz-Bacha, 273–291 (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co., 2020).

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versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’.10 Moffitt describes populism as ‘a political style that is performed, embodied and enacted across a variety of political and cultural contexts’.11 Rancière envisages populism as a term that ‘serves simply to draw the image of a certain people’.12 As Rancière explains, it is because ‘the people’ as such do not exist, that there are only diverse and antagonistic images or figures that condense in themselves sequences of discourses that reject either governmental elites, practices, and ideologies, or foreigners, differences, and otherness. Hawkins lays out a discursive definition of populism. Analysing the speeches of some populist leaders—using their actual words, tone, and style—he defines populism ‘as a Manichaean discourse that identifies Good with a unified will of the people and Evil with a conspiring elite’.13 For Laclau, populism has a political logic which manifests itself through the discursive articulation of a plurality of dissimilar and unsatisfied demands in an ‘equivalential’ chain of popular demands. In other words, the political logic implies a symbolic unity of the people, or ‘the underdog’, against ‘an institutionalised other’.14 KurtWeyland adds yet another perspective on populism. He writes that populism is ‘a political strategy’ through which a charismatic leader ‘seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalised support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers’.15 Mouffe describes populism as a strategy of constructing political frontiers and ‘a way of

10 Cas Mudde and Christobal Rovira Kaltawasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 6. 11 Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 3. 12 ‘The Populism That Is Not to Be Found’ was first published in French in 2013. This quote refers to: Jacques Rancière, “The Populism That Is Not to Be Found,” in What Is a People, eds. Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Hubermn, Sadri Khiari, and Jacques Rancière, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 102. 13 Kirk A. Hawkins, “Is Chávez Populist? Measuring Populist Discourse in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 42, Issue 8 (2009): 1049. 14 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (Verso: London, 2005), 74. 15 Kurt Weyland, “Clarifying a Contested Concept: Populism in the Study of Latin

American Politics,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2001): 14, quoted in Moffitt (2016), 20.

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doing politics that can take various ideological forms’.16 For Casullo, populism revolves around repertoires which she defines as ‘socially shared discursive templates that determine legitimate or accepted ways for populist leaders to act, talk, dress and that indicate what life-stories are more suitable for a politician to tell’.17 Whether conceived as ideology, style, figure, discourse, political logic, strategy, or repertoire, populism in all these views implies a moment of division between the people and the elite. A view of society divided into two camps—the people and the elite— gives rise to a political debate about ‘the people’. Performance scholar Janelle Reinelt writes that ‘the absence of “people” or the inability to imagine one [a people] holds back the development of effective political strategies’.18 The debate about imagining, shaping, and constructing the people, one which revolves around the notion of ‘the common’, has attracted many left-leaning political philosophers. The post-operaists’s view of ‘the common’, for instance, resonates with the horizontal nature of leaderless civil movements, such as the Spanish Indignados (2011), and philosopher Benedict de Spinoza’s concept of the multitude. A practice-theory methodology allowed political philosophers Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Paolo Virno, to envisage community in terms of absolute or direct democracy maintained by the multitude. In A Theological-Political Treatise (1670), Spinoza conceived of the multitude as a plurality of singularities that exist in the common public sphere, while rejecting any form of authority of the state.19 His definition of the multitude echoes civil movements without leadership, such as the above-mentioned Spanish Indignados (2011) and the French Nuit debout / Up All Night (2016). Spinoza’s view inspired Virno to assert that the multitude survived the 16 Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018), 11. 17 María Esperanza Casullo, “How to Become a Leader: Identifying Global Repertoires

for Populist Leadership”, in Populism and World Politics. Exploring Intra- and Transnational Dimensions, eds. Frank A. Stengel, David B. MacDonald, and Dirk Nabers (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 56. 18 Janelle Reinelt, “Performance at the Crossroads of Citizenship,” in The Grammar of Politics and Performance, eds. Shirin Rai and Janelle Reinelt (London: Routledge, 2014), 37. 19 Benedict de Spinoza, A Theological-Political Treatise (London: Global Grey ebooks, [1677] 2018). https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/theologico-political-treatiseebook.html.

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creation of the state through the distinction between the private and the collective. According to him, the multitude straddles the middle region between the private and collective, two domains that comprise what Virno refers to as the ‘common place’. The common place, he adds, consists of shared linguistic and logical forms dubbed the ‘public intellect’. Virno writes: ‘[t]he movement to the front of the part of the intellect as such, the fact that the most general and abstract linguistic structures are becoming instruments for orienting one’s own conduct, this situation, in my opinion, is one of the conditions which define the contemporary multitude’.20 The multitude, which emanates from the common place, stands for new forms of subjectivity and community, a harmonious and smooth space, one could say, without a constitutive division. Enabled by the principle of withdrawal from state institutions and the logic of representation that they imply, community manifests itself as an expression of a direct rule of the multitude, of the horizontal politics of absolute democracy. On the other hand, Laclau and Mouffe’s view of ‘the common’ resonates with vertical civil movements with leadership which became political parties, such as the fraction of the Spanish civil movement Indignados (2011) which transformed in Podemos (2014) and philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ notion of the people. In contrast to post-operaists, practice-theory methodology allowed Mouffe to envisage community in terms of agonistic democracy maintained by the people. In De Cive (1642) Hobbes envisaged the people as an entity closely correlated to the state and the existence of rules and laws regulated by institutions.21 But he did not introduce the notion of the people to simply oppose the notion of the multitude which rejects any form of authority. It requires transformation of the multitude, through the process that echoes articulation of dispersed civil struggles, such as the above-mentioned fraction of Indignados (2011), into political party, Podemos (2014). In contrast to Rancière, for whom the construction of the people requires an anarchistic act that would lead to the erasure of institutions and representations as foundations of domination and hierarchy,22 Mouffe 20 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004), 15. 21 Howard Warrender, ed., The Works of Thomas Hobbes : De Cive (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, [1642] 1983). 22 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, 2006).

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ascribes to institutions an important role in establishing a social order and constructing the people.23 She writes that antagonism is inherent in societies, and that the role of democratic institutions is to transform or articulate potential antagonism into agonism. Mouffe envisaged antagonism as a form of relationship in which opposite sides are seen as enemies and agonism as a form of relationship in which opposite sides are seen as adversaries. Her view on institutions suggests that their role is to construct the people as agonistics.24 Agonistics, then, would stand for a plurality of democratic identities that inhabit a striated space, such as women, workers, members of LGBTQIA communities, people of colour, immigrants, refugees, sans-papiers, poor, and environmentalists. A significant characteristic of democratic identities is that they are constructed through a principle of identification that revolves around a set of ethico-political values, not economic interests, that are shared among the members of one or more associations. Democratic identities symbolise various democratic struggles, such as feminist, labour, or anti-racist struggles, against a hegemonic politics that regulate their identities through the existing institutions. It is then only through a strategic response to the institutions that various human associations may contest a hegemonic politics, seek representatives within them, and, hence, defend their demands. It is the tension between the democratic struggles and institutions that provides a dynamic force that can invigorate democracy. Following these thoughts, we can see left-wing populism as a reaction to the failure of a hegemonic politics to represent and defend a multiplicity of democratic demands within institutions. Left-wing populism stands for the mobilisation of various unsatisfied democratic associations of people in a civil movement and calls for the return of popular sovereignty to the realm of politics. This populist tendency implies the creation of what Laclau and Mouffe call the ‘chain of equivalence’ which establishes a unity between the differential democratic identities from which ‘a people’ emerges.25 Consequently, such a unity implies 23 On the difference between Mouffe and Rancière see my text: Goran Petrovi´c Lotina,

“Reconstructing the Bodies: Between the Politics of Order and the Politics of Disorder,” in Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance: Danger, Im/mobility and Politics, eds. Marina Gržini´c and Aneta Stojni´c (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 143–163. 24 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics (London and New York: Verso, 2013). 25 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Verso:

London, 2001), 127–134.

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the articulation of the initial horizontality of multitudinous democratic identities into the vertical structure of popular identity represented by the figure of a charismatic leader. One such example was the horizontal civil movement Indignados or Movimiento 15-M (2011). This movement connected different democratic struggles and gradually articulated popular power in the vertical political structure with leadership Podemos (2014), with Pablo Iglesias Turrión as its leader (2014–2021). The leader is the one whose role is to incorporate and defend the unity of different democratic entities that share similar ethico-political values. This means that the leader does not represent one will, but a multitude of democratic wills. Such a moment of representation implies a choreography that inscribes the people within a particular symbolic order and embodies a collective will. The practice of choreographing popular will can manifest itself through both civic performances (civil movements, political speeches, public policy announcements, legal matters...) and artistic performances (theatre, dance, film, music...), which give rise to ’a people’, stressing their role in reshaping politics, institutions, and governments. This approach suggests a view of populism as a practice of constructing the people on the symbolic level through performance. It is a strategic means of articulating a particular set of relations between the differential entities into a form of popular (comm)unity. Applying philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s use of the term concordia discors, this kind of community is epitomised by a ‘discordant harmony’ ‘that does not have unity as its point of departure but contains in itself the reason for a possible unity’.26 When the reason for unity lies in the shared quest for freedom and equality, that is, in shared ethico-political values, the common cause of struggle for left-wing populism must be sought in the institutions deprived of popular power, dominated by the elite and threatened by the increasing power of right-wing populist parties or authoritarian regimes. It is this extreme exteriority embodied in the elite that creates the condition for the emergence of the people on the political left. The symbolic construction of a progressive left unity can imply both national and transnational political logic.27 * 26 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. III , ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, [1935] 2007), 186. 27 On the potentials of transnational populism, see: Benjamin De Cleen, Benjamin Moffitt, Panos Panayotu and Yannis Stavrakakis, “The Potentials and Difficulties of

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In the following chapter, I will consider the return of democracy to the realm of politics and popular sovereignty into institutions as a choreographic practice of articulating the people. Taking the lead from the recent civil movements and appraisals for political change and the ongoing debates about them, I will demonstrate in more detail how the practice of articulating an initial horizontality of the leaderless civil movements, protests, and activism, into a mediated verticality of unions, organisations, and parties with leadership, gives rise to the people, that is, to forms of subjectivity, community, or collectivity, which give society a particular order.

Transnational Populism: The Case of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25)”, Political Studies, 68(1) (2020): 146–166.

CHAPTER 3

The Choreography of Articulation

Following the global political and economic crisis of the millennium, numerous civil movements arose worldwide on the left of the political spectrum: in South America, the Arab countries, the USA, the EU, and Europe more generally. Common to all of these movements is the fact that they are driven by popular demands for political change. What distinguishs them are the strategies applied to achieve their political goals. This implies that the main concern of civil society is not only to set up a dynamic co lective force, but also to strategically use the powers of this dynamism to bring about political change. Generally speaking, there are two types of collective, social movements. Some are horizontal in nature. That is, they have no leaders and advocate a direct, immediate rule of the people. As such, they are conceived as post-hegemonic. Their main strategy is to withdraw from existing institutions and electoral politics. Examples include: the Argentinian Argentinazo (2001), the international Occupy movement (2011), the Spanish Indignados / The Outraged or Movimiento 15-M (2011), the Greek Aganaktismenoi / The Outraged (2011), and the French Nuit debout / Up All Night (2016). Other progressive forms of civil organisation are vertical in nature. They believe in a mediated rule of the people. They have appointed leaders whose role is to represent the people’s demands within the institutions and electoral processes. As such, these movements are conceived as hegemonic. The modus operandi of vertical civil movements rests on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Petrovi´c-Lotina, Choreographing Agonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79446-0_3

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their strategic engagement with existing institutions. It is a tactic which provides a path for these movements to articulate into political parties and, ultimately, to achieve parliamentary representation. Some examples include: the Spanish Podemos / We Can (2014), a political party articulated out of a fraction of the grass-root anti-austerity movement, Indignados / The Outraged (2011);1 the Slovenian Združena levica / United Left (2014), a political coalition that grew out of the Occupy movement (2011), a movement against austerity measures, corruption and inequality;2 and the Croatian political party Zagreb je naˇs / Zagreb is Ours (2017), whose roots lay in Pravo na grad / Right to the City (2009), a movement that united urban residents against the politics of private interests.3 Whether they arise in response to the incompetence of politicians to deal with economic crises, a dissatisfaction with austerity measures, a disgust with corruption, or unjust policies, a great number of recent civil movements are horizontal by nature: they are self-organised, egalitarian, and leaderless movements. Political philosopher Benjamin Arditi’s argument for the horizontal politics of social organisation evolves from his critique of hegemony. He particularly takes issue with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of hegemony as a dimension that is inherent to all social practices. When hegemony is understood is such a way, Arditi writes, it ‘construes all politics as hegemonic politics’ leaving no space for the outside or beyond hegemony.4 Arditi explains that if the hegemonic forms of politics evolve around the production of a chain 1 Podemos (We Can) emerged from the Movimiento 15-M militancy, the Trotskyist Izquierda Anticapitalista, an organisation composed of sections of the political party Izquierda Unida and a group of Political Science professors at the Complutense University of Madrid, including Pablo Iglesias, Íñigo Errejón and Juan Carlos Monedero. 2 The Slovenian Združena levica (United Left) was a coalition that gathered Iniciativa za demokratiˇcni socializem — IDS (The Initiative for Democratic Socialism), Stranka za ekosocializem in trajnostni razvoj Slovenije— TRS (Party for the Sustainable Development of Slovenia), Demokratiˇcna stranka dela — DSD (Democratic Labour Party) and civil society representatives. 3 Pravo na grad (Right to the City) is a platform that emanated from the campaign against the abuse of urban public spaces in Zagreb, in Croatia, in 2006. More about in: Milica Ili´c, “Building on Previous Achievements. A conversation with Teo Celakoski,” in Another Europe, eds. Philipp Dietachmair and Milica Ili´c (Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation, 2015), 269. 4 Benjamin Arditi, “Post-Hegemony: Politics Outside the Usual Post-Marxist Paradigm,” in Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the

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of equivalence between differential demands, subject positions, and social forces, then there is no room for those groups that are not part of that chain and that ‘do not require or demand a surplus signification for relations of equivalence among groups or struggles’.5 To defend the argument for a horizontal post-hegemonic politics, Arditi provides a survey of the December 2001 political mobilisation in Argentina, a period of civil unrest and rioting usually named Argentinazo. Argentinazo was assembled out of numerous heterogenous groups, such as Piqueteros (initially a group of unemployed workers), Asambleas de Barrios (an assembly of autonomous neighbourhoods), Peronistas (labour movement), and variety of radical leftist parties. Rebelling against the government of the Radical Civic Union party (URC) which introduced highly contestable economic reforms, protesters took to the streets shouting ‘All of them must go!’ (Que se vayan todos!). Arditi stresses that despite the absence of leadership, Argentinian protesters took over factories and brought down Fernando de la Rúa, the Argentinian President and head of the URC, whose neoliberal government introduced strict austerity measures, such as budget cuts for health and education. Arditi did not refer to Argentinazo by name but his theories about a post-hegemonic ‘outside’—a multitude, or a network of movements which is self-organised outside institutions, without equivalence between different groups, agency of articulation and hegemony—clearly apply to the movement. ‘Hegemony has an outside’, Arditi states, ‘that ranges from traditional electoral politics to post-hegemony’.6 Argentinazo stands for the multitude in action, for the plurality of movements in public space without the moment of convergence that is typical of movements with leadership. Nevertheless, Arditi does not answer how the multitude gives rise to a politics, to a set of discourses, practices, and institutions, through which a political order could be established. Instead, he focusses on defending the multitude, singularity, and action, outside chains of equivalence. What he calls ‘viral politics’ stands for a mode of action that is based on informal networks between singularities that render the multitude. Viral politics are

Multitude Versus the Hegemony of the People, eds. Alexandros Kiopkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 24. 5 Ibid., 25. 6 Ibid., 41.

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concerned with the ways these networks are structured, that is, with the tactics and procedures of organisation, rather than with the ways in which a series of dispersed actions and movements of singularities may establish an order and give rise to a politics. What strategies of withdrawal from the institutionalisation of viral politics do not demonstrate, however, are the ways that particular demands of the multitude expressed through a viral choreography may be defended and put to work outside institutions. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes that strategies of withdrawal or exodus do not demonstrate how the multitudes rule themselves.7 Similarly, Laclau writes that the strategies of withdrawal do not demonstrate how the multitude articulates in the people.8 In fact, strategies of withdrawal do not take into account the consequences of the horizontal, immediate, non-representative, anti-institutional, self-governed, and leaderless Argentinazo for the post-hegemonic outside, for the multitude. A look at the Piqueteros group during the Argentinian elections of 2003 offers a clear image of the consequences of the strategies of withdrawal. When the elections took place, the Piqueteros had no relationship with existing institutions or political parties. As Mouffe stresses,9 the consequence was a reduction of the electoral struggle to traditional parties: the centre-right faction of the Peronist Justicialist Party, headed by Carlos Menem,10 and the centre-left faction of the Peronist Justicialist Party, headed by Néstor Kirchner.11 It was only after the election that a faction of the Piqueteros movement entered the government on the initiative of the newly elected President Kirchner. Furthermore, it was this engagement with governmental institutions that allowed certain Piqueteros ’ demands to be heard and defended in parliament. As Arditi aptly claims, horizontal movements, or ‘insurgences’ as he describes them,

7 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 264. 8 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 239–244. 9 Markus Miessen, “Democracy Revisited (in Conversation with Chantal Mouffe),” in

The Nightmare of Participation, ed. Markus Miessen (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), 114. 10 Carlos Menem was the President of Argentina from 8 July 1989 to 10 December 1999. 11 Néstor Kirchner became the elected President of Argentina on 25 May 2003, and remained the President until 10 December 2007.

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provide ‘particularly intense moments of experimentation and improvisation’ that may certainly affect the transformation of the existing politics.12 Yet, as the case of the Argentinian elections clearly demonstrates, the network of autonomous struggles, which operates as a self-organised multitude—a network of actions undertaken by singularities—is capable of transforming a dominant politics only when it is articulated in a party politics, that is, through the strategies of engagement within the institutions of parliamentary democracy. This is why horizontal movements can be seen as a critical response to the crisis of representative democracy and its institutions rather than as a strategy to spur decision-making and contest a dominant hegemony. Like Argentinazo, most of the post-hegemonic protests failed to displace the dominant politics and fizzled out despite their progressive ideas and aspirations. The same could be said for the international Occupy movement and the French Nuit debout . Each of these movements provides evidence that neoliberal politics not only always survive post-hegemonic protests but they become even stronger afterwards. Two factors underlie their resilience. Firstly, the institutionalised, hegemonic position of neoliberalism enables the appropriation of the protesters’ demands for the benefit of capital. Secondly, the insufficient institutionalisation of a counter-hegemonic politics reduces the possibility of various democratic demands being heard, defended, and transformed into rights and policies. In other words, the strategies of withdrawal that argue for the immediate governance of the people preclude the possibility of the protesters’ ability to confront, challenge, and displace the vertically structured hegemonic politics, representations, and discourses, established by neoliberalism. Clearly, global neoliberalism will not disappear on its own. It follows then, that in contrast to the politics of defection, exodus, or withdrawal from or avoidance of institutions, more explicit engagement with them is needed. This is all very well understood by right-wing populist parties that fill the vacuum between the state and the left-wing populist movements and parties. Their gradual assumption of power over institutions gave rise to discourses on intolerance, discrimination, and nationalism. Examples here would include the Dutch Party for Freedom,

12 It is already widely recognised how the horizontal Occupy (2011) movement helped to transform the political field in the USA, boosting the support of the left-wing Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party’s nominee in the 2016 Presidential campaign.

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the Freedom Party of Austria, Poland’s Congress of the New Right, and the Hungarian Fidesz.13

The Choreography of Articulation Unlike Arditi, political philosopher Yannis Stavrakakis sees the relationship between post-hegemony and hegemony in terms of mutual engagement and co-constitution of immediacy and mediation.14 His point of departure is Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist discourse theory. In the preface to the second edition of their book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2001), Laclau and Mouffe write: “Discourse” has a pedigree in contemporary thought going back to the three main intellectual currents of the twentieth century: analytical philosophy, phenomenology, and structuralism. In those three the century started with an illusion of immediacy, of a non-discursively mediated access to the things themselves—the referent, the phenomenon and the sign, respectively. In all three, however, this illusion of immediacy dissolved at some point, and had to be replaced by one form or another of discursive mediation.15

If, following Laclau and Mouffe, we accept that a ‘non-discursively mediated access to the things themselves’ is an illusion of immediacy, then we must recognise that a thing may be only discursively grasped. Besides, if we accept that every discursive mediation exists only as a partial limitation of a surplus of meaning, then we must also recognise that the operation of limitation implies that a discursive totality and a surplus of meaning are co-constitutive to each other, and that their relationship is one of mutual engagement. Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory shines a light on understanding political processes in an alternative way. From their point of view, 13 Fidesz is a syllabically abbreviation of Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, meaning the Alliance of Young Democrats. 14 Yannis Stavrakakis, “Hegemony or Post-Hegemony? Discourse, Representation and the Revenge(s) of the Real,” in Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude Versus the Hegemony of the People, eds. Alexandros Kioupkiolis and Giorgos Katsambekis (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 111–132. 15 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso 2001), xi.

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immediacy stands for the horizontality of post-hegemony and a direct democracy that advocates strategic withdrawal of the multitude from any representation appropriated by the state. Alternatively, mediation stands for the verticality of hegemony and representative democracy that implies discursive construction of the people through strategic engagement with representations appropriated by the state. Once we have acknowledged a co-constitutive relationship between immediacy and mediation and their mutual engagement, we can start thinking about the ‘choreography of sublimation’ from an initial horizontality into verticality, or the multitude into the people. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory, Stavrakakis asserts that sublimation stands for the diversion of the libido, of the immediate affective impulses of pleasure, into noninstinctual, culturally acceptable values.16 He explains that post-hegemony promises immediate access to the being through habits and affects of the multitude, by relinquishing discourse and representation. Hegemony, on the other hand, provides an indispensable moment of sublimation of affective impulses into cultural values, precisely by replacing an initial illusion that direct access to the being is possible outside discursive mediation and representation. This is how Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory of hegemony allows for the performative practice of sublimation of an initial immediacy into a discursive mediation, that is, of affects into symbolic representations, the multitude into the people, horizontality into verticality, or counter-hegemony into hegemony. The choreography of sublimation, or—from the point of view of discourse theory—the choreography of articulation, can be observed in some forms of social organisation. It is applicable to the previouslymentioned Spanish Podemos / We Can (2014), a political party that grew out of a horizontal grassroots movement, Indignados / The Outraged or Movimiento 15-M , to protest austerity measures and corruption (2011);17 the Slovenian Združena levica / United Left (2014), a left-wing coalition which, similarly, transformed the initial political horizontality of

16 Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999), 131. 17 In the 2014 European Parliament Elections, Podemos (We Can) received 7,98%

national vote, and won five seats in the European Parliament. In the 2015 general election in Spain, Podemos received 21% of the vote and became the third largest party in the parliament.

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Occupy Slovenia (2011), a movement against corruption, financial capitalism and representative democracy, into a political coalition;18 the Croatian Zagreb je naš / Zagreb is Ours (2017), a political party that grew out of the initiative of Croatian intellectuals Pravo na grad / Right to the City and that contested the politics of private interest in downtown Zagreb (2009)19 ; the Serbian Ne davimo Beograd / Let’s Not Drown Belgrade (2017) that grew out of the struggle of citizens against the aggressive redevelopment of the Belgrade Waterfront by the ruling centre-right party (2016), and, to a lesser degree, to above mentioned Kirchner’s Peronism (2003), which included a portion of Piqueteros in the government (2001).20 In all these cases, the multitude gradually articulated into the people. In fact, the passionate affects of the multitude gave rise to the people through discursive means: through language, political institutions, practices, and symbolic representations. This is why the relational, vertical, hegemonic, representative, and institutional politics are seminal to radicalising democracy. They enable protesters to engage with the hegemonic politics which dominate institutions, representations, and practices. The strategy of engagement allows the protesters to confront, deconstruct, and rearticulate a dominant political order from within and articulate it in an alternative way. The practice of articulation gradually replaces the ‘moment of madness’ when everything is possible with the ‘moment of institutionalisation’ which enables many democratic demands not only to

18 In 2017, two out of four members of Združena Levica (United Left), Iniciativa za demokratiˇcni socializem —IDS (the Initiative for Democratic Socialism) and Stranka za ekosocializem in trajnostni razvoj Slovenije —TRS (Party for the Sustainable Development of Slovenia), joined forces as Levica (The Left) as a means of eliminating the structural shortcomings of a decentralised membership. This initiative was not supported by the two other members of Združena Levica, Demokratiˇcna stranka dela—DSD (Democratic Labour Party) and the representatives of civil society. In 2018, Levica won eight seats in the Slovenian parliament and became one of the strongest left-wing political initiatives in the Balkans. 19 In 2019, members of Zagreb je naš (Zagreb is Ours) formed a left-green coalition Možemo (We Can) together with other independent movements from across Croatia. In 2020, Možemo won seven seats in the Croatian Parliament; in 2021, they won a decisive majority of the seats in the Zagreb municipal elections. 20 On the new left movements in the Balkans, see: Igor Štiks & Krunoslav Stojakovi´c, The New Balkan Left. Struggles, Successes, Failures (Beograd: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Southeast Europe, 2021).

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be heard, but also to be defended in the parliament.21 This view on political processes implies that the separation of the multitude and the people in autonomous, adequational, and non-relational categories arrests the possibility of transforming a hegemonic politics and discourses that dominate the people. At the same time, such a dynamic model of democratic processes precludes any form of a rationally constructed totality, which the post-hegemonic, non-discursive, and transparent politics of immediacy render possible. The political dimension of the choreography of articulation of the multitude into the people is supported by Stavrakakis’s observation that ‘a multitude of autonomous struggles have historically become effective only when articulated within a common counter-hegemonic horizon of representation’.22 This means that a civil movement may transform a hegemonic political order and give rise to an alternative politics, provided that it appoints representatives who will defend various democratic demands within the institutions of parliamentary democracy. Rather than envisaging horizontality and verticality as isolated entities, in the positivist terms of separate totalities, Stavrakakis suggests that we should study their co-constitutive interpretations, opportunities, and challenges. Looking at the co-constitutive and co-engaging relationship of horizontality and verticality through the choreography of articulation provides a view of dynamic processes of democratisation that lead to sound decision making. The choreography of articulation enables a sublimation of the multitude of democratic demands and activities into a political order of rights and policies, or, in Arditi’s words, of ‘the multitude in action’ into hegemonic subjects. Finally, this approach supports the conclusion that a politics of verticality is a contingent construction, always traversed by horizontal moves. This is not to say that a politics of verticality sees the transition into a political party as the end goal for all civil activities. Rather, it opens up the possibility of constructing ‘movement-parties’ which would, as political theorist Herbert Kitchelt writes, ‘attempt a dual track by combining 21 Taking a lead from political theorist Aristide Zolberg and Sydney Tarrow, Óscar García Agustín and Marco Briziarelli use the notion of ‘moment of madness’ to designate a shift from the ‘cycle of protest’ to a ‘moment of institutionalisation’. In: Óscar García Agustín and Marco Briziarelli (eds.), Podemos and the New Political Cycle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 5. 22 Stavrakakis, “Hegemony and Post-Hegemony?” 120.

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activities within the arenas of formal democratic competition with extrainstitutional mobilization’.23 By embracing the tension that exists in the spaces in-between (vertical/horizontal, institutional/extra-institutional, politics/grassroots, integration/contestation, and governing/protesting), movement-parties may be capable of expanding citizens’ rights. More specifically, the path towards achievements in civic rights may rest on the capacity of movement-parties to respond to social activist organisations and other progressive social movements. The case of Podemos, a recent movement-party in Spain that was born from Movimiento 15-M , provides a case in point. * In subsequent chapters of this book, I discuss how the horizontal choreography of leaderless civil movements, which informs models of absolute democracy and communal anarchism, has inspired performance scholars to consider the political dimensions of artistic performances by reflecting on the ways in which they contribute alternatives to the construction of the people. Similarly, I will approach the same issue by drawing upon the vertical choreography of radical movements for political change which have appointed leaders and which inform the model of agonistic democracy. What will become clear over the course of this book is that the relationship between artistic performance and politics in performance studies will depend on three things: the nature of the movement (horizontal, vertical), the democratic model that the movement espouses (absolute democracy, communal anarchism, agonistic democracy), and the political strategy that the movement employs (withdrawal, rupture, engagement).

23 Herbert Kitschelt, “Movement Parties,” in Handbook of Party Politics, eds. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (London: Sage, 2006), 281.

CHAPTER 4

Political Strategies and Performance Studies

As outlined in the previous chapter, the various ways of constructing the people that emanated from civil movements and differential models of democracy inspired performance scholars to envisage how artistic performances embody democratic forms of community. Using examples of civic performances that fall on the left side of the political spectrum, my response will draw distinctions between three strategies that inform the political dimension of artistic performances. After distinguishing strategies of avoidance from strategies of rupture, I will give a more detailed description of what I mean by ‘strategies of engagement’.1

1 Chantal Mouffe uses the notion ‘strategies of engagement’ to designate ‘counterhegemonic moves aiming at a profound transformation, not a desertion, of existing institutions’. In: Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London and New York: Verso, 2013).

A portion of this chapter subtitled ‘Strategies of avoidance’ expands on my ‘Performance and Populism. Choreographing Popular Forms of Collectivity’, first published in The Oxford Handbook of Performance and Politics, edited by Milija Gluhovi´c, Silvija Jestrovi´c, Michael Saward and Shirin Rai, 679–692 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Reproduced with the permission of Oxford University Press. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Petrovi´c-Lotina, Choreographing Agonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79446-0_4

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Strategies of Avoidance Some performance scholars have found inspiration in horizontal civil movements, such as the international Occupy movement, and the politics of absolute or direct democracy which advocates the rule of the self-organising multitude. In her book, Artist at Work (2015), philosopher and performance scholar, Bojana Kunst places the production of subjectivity and community at the centre of the capitalist processes of production. Taking the lead from philosopher Paolo Virno, Kunst writes that the shift from Fordism, or the industrial phase of capitalism, to postFordism, the post-industrial phase of capitalism, is a result of a change in the process of production and the role of work. As the focus of production moved from the synchronisation of body and machine, it skewed towards the exploitation of movement, creative potentials, and linguistic-cognitive competencies of individuals, in order to produce capital. As a result, the division between work and leisure time gradually disappeared with everything becoming subsumed as work, including social relationships and artistic practices. Kunst explains how bodily movement in dance and performance, the collaborative relations between the performers and the audience, and the visibility of art and artists are all exploited to produce capital. By subordinating every aspect of human life to the demand of capital for the acceleration of consumption, post-Fordism also succeeded in accelerating time itself, adding economic value to temporality. What that leaves us with is a community embodied in workers’ identity. Reflecting on the relationship between the body and post-Fordism, Kunst introduced a post-representational and temporal dimension of duration. She suggests that different manifestations of duration, such as slow movement, laziness, inactivity, and sleep, provide the people / workers with the potential to subvert capitalist processes of production by avoiding movement accelerated by capital. Key to Kunst’s theory is the notion of purposeful, strategic avoidance of movement associated with post-Fordist production. She describes this avoidance of movement as ‘a durational search for new political embodiments’ in both civil movements and artistic performances. Kunst takes the international, horizontal civil movement Occupy (2011–2012) as an example of ‘localised but connected forms of temporal persistence and endurance in certain places’.2 She also recognises that temporal persistence and endurance 2 Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2015), 117.

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feature in Igor Štromajer’s and Brane Zorman’s artistic performance Statika (2007). During this performance, which lasts more than thirtyfive minutes, the audience observes a static robot installed in front of flickering city lights.3 According to Kunst, the audience’s waiting for something to happen—for the robot to begin to move, for instance— becomes a durational pleasure that can create a radical political and antagonistic disruption. The temporal dimension of duration implies that the role of artistic performances, and more generally, art, is to interfere with the ways of being in the workplace where movement is the life force of production. If, as Kunst argues, subjectivity is the unity of everyday movements intensified by collaboration, then artistic practice must foreground the ‘potentiality of profanation’ as a means of returning collaboration to its common use. Art, then, becomes an intermediary, a potential collaborator between the artist and the audience. By these means, Kunst maintains, art returns the relationship between the audience and the artist to ‘common’ (i.e., the common potential of art; the common place inhabited by the intellect and the most general and abstract structures). This move reclaims the symbolic role of art that enables it to point out the hierarchical organisation of society where ‘any kind of work … is part of the constellations of power’.4 It also permits a shift from the exclusivity of present time and the obsession with future time to ‘the time yet to come’. The condition of intermediacy implies that no projective temporality which pre-ordains otherness, identity, opportunities, or lack thereof, produces economic value through collaboration. Kunst reminds us that ‘the future is not related to actuality as a realisation of its “becoming”’ through collaboration.5 She goes on to suggest that we think ‘about the future of collaboration in the rupture between an impossible refusal of the collaborative process in which we are already implemented, and the possibility of genuine exchange, which has yet to happen’. The act of intermediation suggests a view of the common as ‘merely the ordinary state of being together, deprived of all historical tasks’.6

3 Statika (2007) was broadcast from the Lippo Centre in Hong Kong onto a big screen installed in the Hellerau Festival House in Dresden. 4 Kunst, Artist, 49. 5 Ibid., 85. 6 Ibid., 92.

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When the common is considered in ahistorical terms, community can be seen as a unity that enables a ‘constant dispossession of collaboration’.7 In such a community there is no representation, no identity, no exchange, no economy, no universality, no otherness, or anything else to be shared; ‘there is no common being’. There is only ‘I’, or in the words of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy whose work has inspired Kunst, a ‘strange being-the-one-with-the-other to which we are exposed’.8 Such a community consists of the parallelism of positions of an embodied ‘I’. This suggests that a popular form of community is not united by any representation. Rather, it is united by the temporal dimension of meeting which stands for a durational procedure capable of addressing a specific relationship with movement. As a post-representational and durational category, meeting opens up a space for ‘closeness’ which designates that which is still to come. Despite her attempt to avoid any representation of identity by means of duration enabling the embodiment of the self-organised multitude, Kunst’s view on community becomes trapped in the very problematic that she aims to challenge. By ascribing political value to duration, Kunst adds a temporal dimension to the concept of identity. Following her thought, identity is pre-established not by acceleration, flexibility, and efficacy but by the reverse: less work, inactivity, and waiting. By opposing one worker’s identity associated with acceleration to another one associated with duration, Kunst in fact creates an essentialist identity. She reconfirms workers’ identity as one that works less (is slower and lazier). As a result, community must be designated exclusively by class identity. But, such a view of community is incapable of avoiding the post-Fordist techniques of production and returning to ‘common use’ social, affective, cognitive, and other life forms, as Kunst anticipates. In fact, within this view, community becomes simply a class-differentiated model of democracy. One reason why Kunst’s thesis which focusses on workers’ resistance to the capitalist process of production faces shortcomings lies in her approach to Marxism. Kunst’s view of the capitalist process of production is to a large extent reminiscent of Marxism endorsing Marx’s concept 7 Ibid., 96. 8 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Inoperative Community,” in Theory and History of Literature, ed.

Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, with foreword by Christopher Fynsk, Vol. 76 (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxxix.

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of ‘labour-power as commodity’.9 This reductionist concept designates the power of the people exclusively in terms of commodity whose usevalue is labour. Accordingly, the power of the people is designated by class. And, when the relations between people are conceived entirely in terms of class, then community must be understood as a unity organised around economic interests. From this standpoint, workers’ interests are considered to be objective because in the final instance they are determined—as per Louis Althusser—by the economy. For that matter, all workers’ demands, such as those for the higher wages, better working conditions, lower working hours, better health insurance, the right to vacation time, less work, or slower work, are objectively justified. At stake here is what cultural theorist Stuart Hall stressed while criticising economism: that immediate class interests are challenged by a more structured analysis of economic class formations, which actually simplifies social relations to a structurally transparent ‘expressive totality’. What Hall calls expressive totality is objectivity ‘in which every level of articulation corresponds to every other, and which is from end to end, structurally transparent’.10 In fact, expressive totality reduces the complexity of social articulations, both vertical and horizontal, to a single line of determination. Accordingly, Kunst’s approach suggests two possible scenarios: the first scenario reduces the play of differences by fusing the social into the substantial totality, into a harmonious, immanent community; the second reduces the play of differences by turning social agents into economic competitors. Such criticism reveals that the imagined authority of the working class united around economic interests is incapable of representing other democratic demands, such as those of women, immigrants, refugees, poor, people of colour, environmentalists, LGBT, anti-bio and antinuclear weapon activists, including demands that vary between the workers no matter whether or not they share a workplace, country, or continent. In fact, the unity in the workers’ identity fails to consider that the process of production may not be determined exclusively by economics and that the process of production is also the consequence 9 The concept ‘labour as commodity’ is mentioned for first time in Engels’ Principles of Communism from 1847, and elaborated in Marx’s Capital from 1867. 10 Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York: Routledge, [1996] 2003), 418.

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of various social practices performed by the multiplicity of democratic identities. What the concept ‘labour-power as commodity’ thus omits, is an important distinction between ‘the productive inputs embodied in people capable of social practices and all those remaining inputs for whom ownership by capital is sufficient to secure the “consumption” of their productive services’.11 This distinction means that the process of production is the result of different inputs mobilised by distinct forces. Both social practices and capital play a pro-active role in the transformation of the process of production. This is why the logic of determination governed by capitalist forces must be distinguished from the logic of political formation governed by social forces. The logic of political formation points out that the capitalist process of production does not consist only of the techniques of production that aim at extracting labour-power from people, as Kunst believes. It also consists of techniques of domination that aim to impose control over the people and their social practices. Moreover, it is by means of techniques of domination that capital controls every aspect of human and non-human life. The recognition of techniques of domination precipitates an alternative view on the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, the construction of subjectivities and communities, and the role of art. It goes without saying that this scenario requires strategies that are altogether different from those of avoidance that advocate withdrawal from representation, identity, exchange, economy, universality, otherness, or anything that is shared.

Strategies of Rupture To envisage how artistic performances may contribute to constructing alternative forms of community, some performance scholars have found inspiration in horizontal civil movements without leadership and the politics of anarchic democracy which advocates the direct rule of the people. Dance scholar André Lepecki, for example, takes his lead from various protest choreographies, such as the Arab Spring (2010), Indignados / The Outraged in Spain (2011), Occupy Oakland (2011), and 11 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Structure and Practice in the Labour Theory of Value,” Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 12, No. 4: 8, quoted in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, [1985] 2001), 78.

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Rancière’s model of communal anarchism, to formulate how artistic performances, and dance performances in particular, contribute to these processes. Rancière’s notions of the police and politics play key roles in this approach. The notion of ‘politics’ stands for an anarchic democratic principle of the power of everybody. It designates an entity that exists autonomously from representations absorbed by the principle of the State. The notion of ‘police’ designates the State. In addition, Rancière sees politics and art as mutually dependent categories. He writes that ‘politics has its aesthetics , and aesthetics has its politics’.12 This means that both politics and art play a role in the constitution of political subjects. For Rancière, ‘the dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable’.13 It is by strategic disruption that new political subjects can be constituted. Rancière’s view on politics inspired Lepecki to envisage how artistic performances, and in particular dance performances, contribute to the (re)production of subjectivity and collectivity by means of rupture. Like Rancière, Lepecki stresses that contemporary societies are controlled by the order of police. Indeed, in Dissensus (2010), Rancière claims that the police intervene in public spaces and that ‘the space for circulating is nothing but the space of circulation’.14 For Rancière, ‘move along’ aptly describes the modus operandi of the police. Expanding on this definition in his essay, Choreopolice and Choreopolitics, or the Task of the Dancer (2013), Lepecki states that police guarantee that ‘everyone moves and circulates in accord with a general conformity of being-in-circulation’.15 That is, by integrating movement, the notion of police becomes equal to the notion of choreopolice. As a generalised function of power, a choreopolice succeeds in reproducing ‘consensual subjectivity’ by reiterating

12 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, [2000] 2006), 62. 13 Ibid., 63. 14 The quote relates Rancière’s text ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ published for the first time

in French in 1997 under the title ‘Onze thèses sur la politique’, that is, ‘Eleven Theses on Politics’, and then in: Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 37. 15 André Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics, or the Task of the Dancer,” TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter, 2013): 19.

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a certain kind of movement. In other words, by implementing a prechoreographed pattern of movement, a choreopolice will reproduce the same patterns of circulation, corporeality, and belonging used to sustain police power. To challenge the order of police that controls societies and reproduces consensual subjectivities and collectives, Lepecki relies on Rancière’s notion of politics. In contrast to police, Rancière writes, politics ‘consist in transforming this space of “moving along”, of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens’.16 Lepecki stresses that politics ‘requires a redistribution and reinvention of bodies, affects, and senses through which one may learn how to move politically’.17 To demonstrate this, he locates the subversive potential of politics in strategies of rupture.18 According to Lepecki, strategies of rupture require engagement with spaces of circulation by means of which every bodily movement is controlled. They (the strategies) call for their transformation into spaces of free movements and dissensual subjectivities. Lepecki identifies free movements enacted in dissensus with circulation with the notion of choreopolitics. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s observations that ‘the meaning of politics is freedom’19 and that ‘we do not know—at least not yet—how to move politically’,20 he defines choreopolitics as a movement towards freedom. He writes that choreopolitics is a collective practice of moving politically which is learned, rehearsed, and experienced. And, it is this choreo-political practice of moving freely, in dissensus with police, that can give rise not only to new forms of subjectivity and collectivity, but to a political entity which is as yet unknown. Lepecki suggests that dance performances play an important role in these processes. He writes that dancing bodies can help us envisage ‘what could be the conditions of emergence for the enactment of freedom

16 Rancière, Dissensus, 45. 17 Lepecki, “Choreopolice,” 20. 18 To be sure, Lepecki never uses the expression ‘the strategies of rupture’. He is rather

captivated with the notion of dissensus which is elucidated with rupture interval. 19 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005); quoted in Lepecki, “Choreopolice,” 13. 20 Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik? Fragmente aus dem Nachlass (Munich: Piper, 1993), quoted in Lepecki, ibid., 13.

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in today’s “control society”’.21 To demonstrate how choreopolice and chorepolitics operate, he describes a hip-hop style dance performance, TURF, as performed by members of Oakland California’s Turf Feinz crew, No Noize, Man, BJ, and Dreal. Their performance took place in in 2009 in East Oakland, a largely African-American neighbourhood, on a street corner where pedestrians and traffic circulating according to established rules are expected to simply ‘move along’.22 Engaging with such spaces of circulation, Turf Feinz’s dance performance, which involves rhythmic contractions of muscles, quick and slow arm and leg movements, or pirouetting, breaks the policed circulation of pedestrians who are prohibited from loitering/dancing on the sidewalk and disrupts traffic flow as drivers detour to avoid their dissensual dance. According to Lepecki, such a choreo-political practice of moving freely in dissensus with policed circulations, of rupturing and diverting policed circulation, gives rise to new subjectivities and new forms of collectivity. According to Lepecki, engagement does not just enable movement in dissensus with police. It also stands for the politics of formation of active and engaged modes of existence, which give rise to new forms of collectivity. Lepecki’s view on alternative forms of collectivity which emanate from dance practices of chorepolitics springs from the study of the relationship between the choreographer and the dancers. This study is inspired by the horizontal choreography of protest movements and the relationship between the leader—whose role coincides with that of the choreographers, and the followers—whose role coincides with that of the performers. Following philosopher and dancer Erin Manning, Lepecki acknowledges that to follow is ‘to take the initiative of engaging with the leader and demonstrating through engaging that the leader is always the one who, by leading and because of leading, must follow’.23 More importantly, Lepecki stresses that the initiative of engaging with the leader implies an ethics of following which, in fact, prevents the leader from making all decisions, that is, from making followers obey 21 Lepecki, ibid., 15. 22 During the Great Migration (1916–1970) Oakland became a popular city for African

Americans who were escaping racism in economically depressed South. 23 André Lepecki, “From Partaking to Initiating: Leading Following as Dance’s (apersonal) Political Singularity,” in Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity, eds. Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Holscher (Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013), 34.

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his/her commands.24 Similarly, the initiative of engaging in dance practice enacts a choreo-political critique of leadership too. Lepecki writes that in ‘[d]ancing, one engages by constantly taking the initiative to fuse and to confuse lines of authority and of submission’.25 In other words, in dancing the lines between the choreographer as leader and the dancer as follower are complicated. When leading and following in performances are envisaged as intertwined forces, leading must be seen simply as a way of opening up a gap that is then followed. Lepecki calls this opened-up gap a partaking gap, after Rancière, or a rupture interval that defines dissensus. Accordingly, what he calls ‘leadingfollowing’ is choreography that creates the relation of a rupture interval, a dissensual moving interval, that leads to the composition of an alternative way of partaking in the distribution of spaces, times, and activities. This task also implies that all entities at play risk-taking initiative, or, in fact, ‘risk activating movement towards the actualization of a yet unmapped nascent event ’.26 Taking a risk to initiate an actualisation of something which is ‘yet unknown’ through the kinetic phenomenon of leadingfollowing is what Lepecki calls ‘a courageous choreopolitics of engagement’. A significant characteristic of the courageous choreopolitics of engagement that emanates from leadingfollowing is that it requires ‘moving together without identification’. Accordingly, Lepecki stresses that leadingfollowing should not be envisaged as a person or individualisation, but ‘as immanent force, invisibly composing a particular unexpected dancing, a particular singular actualisation’.27 In other words, leadingfollowing is an a-personal singularity, an unconditioned event, and a dance that initiates engagement without the choreographer. This is why dancing must be seen as an a-personal singularity, an unconditioned dissensual event detached from the practice of identification. In this view, the dancing body is simply ‘a reservoir of dissensual somatic-political capacities’,28 and 24 As in Hannah Arendt, the capacity to initiate something corresponds to the activity to act. It is closely linked to the ‘capacity of beginning something anew’. See: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, [1958] 1998), 9. 25 Lepecki, “From Partaking to Initiating,” 35. 26 Ibid., 34. 27 Ibid., 36. 28 Ibid., 22.

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the movement of the body is an ‘activation and actualization—of corporal and critical capacities towards the composition and formation of engaged modes of existence’.29 Accordingly, dancing invites performers to act, to engage in the a-personal transformation of the consensual sensorial distributions which manifest themselves through the existing compossibilisations, and, more importantly, to compose or actualise alternative compossibilisations.30 For Lepecki, alternative compossibilisations are initiated by a-personal dissensual affective energies. Once ‘a-personal’ is understood as a singularity, as a thing that designates both humans and non-humans, and compossibilisation as an actualisation of the a-personal thing, of the unconditioned singularity in a collective composed of either objects, animals, rocks, or humans, then collectivity designates ‘a mutual sharing of a true affective-political field’.31 This means, Lepecki explains, that when subjectivities that constitute a collective become energised by a sentiment to a particular imminence, they create gestures, steps, positions, dynamics, and assemblages in response. At a certain moment, these actions become actualised in particular movements, transforming an existing compossibilisation into a different co-extensive affective field which is corporeal. According to this view, subjectivities are affective

29 Ibid., 30. 30 Compossible is a term coined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. According to him ‘our

certainty regarding universal and eternal truths is grounded in the ideas themselves, independently of the senses, just as pure ideas, ideas of the intellect’ (393). The ideas of the mixed modes of relations ‘are real just as long as the modes are possible, or […] distinctly conceivable’ (265). It is this that requires that mind’s ‘constituent ideas be compossible, i.e. be able to be in mutual agreement’ (ibid.). Accordingly, compossibilisation entails a totality of things possible in themselves depended on truth procedures. Inspired by Leibniz, Gilles Deleuze writes that the very condition of compossibility is ‘a prolongation or continuation of convergent series, one into the other’ (50). Compossibility hence points at the infinite processes of reconstitution of convergent series, that is, the world constituted by all series. Accordingly, compossibility could be called ‘the totality of converging and extensive series that constitute the world’ and ‘the totality of monads [or individuals] that convey the same world’ (60). See: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: The Athlone Press, 1993). 31 Lepecki, “From Partaking to Initiating,” 31.

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constructions of corporealities.32 They constitute community blind to identity, identification, or representation. Since such an approach does not demonstrate how demands of marginalised groups can be defended, how people can organise across differences, and how can they establish an alternative form of community, we must seek an alternative strategy.

Strategies of Engagement Philosopher François Jullien writes that ‘strategy aims, through a series of factors, to determine the fixed principles according to which one evaluates the prevailing power relations and plans operations in advance’.33 This means that in order to bring change, one must envisage all factors at play within a particular context and strategise how to deploy them for one’s own benefit. According to this view, change does not depend on the capacity of individuals, nor on isolated human associations, but on the existing disposition of things, their configuration, embodied representation, or form, and, the dynamic forces invested in and among these things. When such dynamic forces are strategically put into play, one focuses on mobilising and changing the existing power relations and determining the future orientation of events. In other words, one focuses on employing or exploiting ‘the potential born of disposition’ to construct reality in an alternative way. Following Jullien’s thought, we can observe these processes both in politics and in art. In the realm of politics, they call for the strategic deployment of languages, practices, and institutions, to construct the people in a particular way. The consequence of this tactic manifests itself through particular power relations and counter-hegemonic projects. In the realm of art, they call for the strategic deployment of various audio, visual, or corporeal elements that shape a particular symbolic representation as performance. The consequence of this tactic manifests itself through artistic practices that either comply with sedimented symbolic representations which are the properties of dominant politics, or contest them. The key question remains how might we strategically deploy the

32 Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 5–6. 33 François Jullien, The Propensity of Things (New York: Zone Books, [1992] 1995),

31.

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potential born out of disposition to construct alternative ways of living together? To envisage community beyond reductionism to class identity, we must acknowledge that the capitalist process of production cannot be perceived uniquely in terms of economic inputs. This is so because economic inputs manifest themselves through post-Fordist techniques of production which, as pointed out by Kunst, aim at extracting labour-power from people by means of the acceleration of production and time, the accumulation of capital, or the exercise of efficiency and flexibility. The capitalist process of production must also be perceived in terms of other inputs that manifest themselves through post-Fordist techniques of domination. These techniques aim to control forces embodied through various social practices that are capable of resurrecting ethico-political values suppressed by economic interests and contesting the capitalist forces that dominate them. Neoliberal techniques of domination are discursively set in motion by various systems of control, subordination, and exploitation, such as mass media, education, religion, law, conventions, bureaucracy, surveillance, economy, and so on. As such, they dominate social practices, maintain identities, and sustain particular discourses in power, aiming to prevent excluded and diverse marginalised groups to form their will, defend their demands, articulate them into rights and make their voices heard. They do so, for example, by maintaining the practice of individualism over collectivism, favouring identity-blindness over identityconsciousness, prioritising time over place, or giving preference to one identity over another. To envisage how diverse subordinated groups can contest neoliberal discourses of domination, transform the capitalist process of production, and construct alternative economies and politics, we must abandon a view of social forces merely in terms of practices of resistance to the capitalist institutions through strategies of avoidance or strategies of rupture. Rather, we must embrace a view of social forces in philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s term of praxis , that is, in terms of pro-active practices of struggle against capitalist institutions through strategies of

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engagement.34 It is through strategies of engagement with the neoliberal disposition of existing institutions, practices, and symbolic frameworks, employed by vertical civil moments, such as the previously observed faction of the Spanish Movimiento 15 M (2011) which articulated into the movement-party Podemos (2014), that various social forces may transform the domination of the market mode of capital and the reproduction of consumer identity secured by the hegemony of neoliberal discourse. By extension, strategies of engagement with existing institutions open up an alternative perspective on constructing collectivity. Strategies of engagement suggest that a democratic form of collectivity cannot be imagined in terms of commodity whose use-value is labour. Such a view, as I have observed, reduces community to class identity, enabling the workers to monopolise the sphere of politics and precluding the possibility of other social groups from defending their demands which are dominated by labour forces and economic interest. Similarly, strategies of engagement suggest that a democratic form of collectivity cannot be imagined without the practice of identification. This view, advocated by Lepecki, reduces community to communal anarchism, precluding the possibility of the unity of many different identities in an overall progressive movement against a politics that dominate the social practices of various human associations. Although each of these perspectives offers something useful, taken individually neither one provides a relevant framework for envisaging not just how pro-active forms of collectivity can be constructed, but how they can transform institutionalised politics that dominate people and articulate alternative ways of living together. Jullien’s observation shows that the construction of an alternative form of community does not depend on the capacity of isolated groups but on the existing disposition of institutions, practices, and symbolic frameworks, and the dynamic forces invested in and among them. Unlike

34 Gramsci stressed that Marxism is a doctrine of action. To formulate what he means by action, Gramsci restored the Marxist philosophy’s notion of praxis . Praxis, he writes, ‘can only be conceived in a polemical form and in the form of a perpetual struggle’. Praxis stands for a critique of the mode of thinking within a particular historical context associated with what Gramsci terms ‘common sense’. In: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 421.

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strategies of avoidance, or withdrawal,35 which suggest the possibility of a self-organised community, and strategies of rupture, which suggest a form of self-governed community, strategies of engagement suggest that community can be established precisely by engaging with existing institutions, contesting them and transforming them from within. Strategies of engagement recognise that institutions play an important role in constructing the people. As long as a hegemonic politics deploy existing institutions to regulate identities, practices of identification, and forms of community in a particular way, a change of politics will require strategic engagement with these same institutions. Strategies of engagement call for the construction of a community based on the process of identification between the differential democratic identities that are represented within the institutions of parliamentary democracy and symbolically articulated in a popular form of collectivity. What characterises popular collectivity is its commitment to engage with the determining factors and forces and to reconfigure them in an alternative way. Such a form of collectivity is then the locus of struggle of that collectivity against the techniques that dominate all democratic identities and social practices. My intention here is to demonstrate that the struggle of differential subordinated democratic groups against the hegemony of neoliberal discourse implies the possibility of constructing a counter-hegemonic politics capable of representing an economic and political community that is different from the one advocated by capital.36 As Mouffe has proposed, counter-hegemonic identification amongst many groups relates the process of identifying with a shared set of ethical and political values.37 To envisage community in collective, relational, and ethico-political terms is to recognise that the subject belongs to many different associations 35 I use the term ‘withdrawal’ to designate various strategies that in one or another advocate withdrawal from existing institutions as an alternative political gesture, such as ‘avoidance’ suggested by Kunst, or ‘exodus’ used by post-operaists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negro, and Paulo Virno. See: Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2015); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Empire (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001); Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext[e], 2004). 36 I do not neglect the powerful role of economy in constructing societies. Rather, I point at economism as a sedimented reductionist theoretical approach that determines every social practice. 37 On Mouffe’s view on citizenship see: Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993.)

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and struggles, that it is hence constructed at the point of intersection of various subject and discursive positions, and that as such renders irrelevant any essentialist (i.e., work-based, sexuality-based, or race-based) identity. A view of community in terms of identification, however, does not necessitate erasing the markers of identity. Identities do not disappear. On the contrary, they stand for labour, feminist, and anti-racist struggle for the equality of workers, women, and racialized people, wherever these identities are subordinated to forces of domination—locally and globally, nationally and internationally, within institutions and without institutions. By extension, I propose that every action in artistic performance is itself institution, scored, spatialised, and dramatised. I will then show how artists through strategies of engagement with various institutions, imagine, construct, embody, and articulate alternative forms of collectivity, provoking an innovative theoretical formulation of the political dimension of artistic performances. By so doing, I challenge the ways in which knowledge about ‘the political’ is reproduced in several theories of performance. I argue that by overlooking the significance of the practice of engagement, strategies of avoidance and rupture may in fact sustain the neoliberal politics in power and preclude the unity of social forces on the political left. In the chapters that follow, I demonstrate how strategic engagement informs performance practices and how it enables performance studies in particular to consider the ways in which artistic performances affect the audience. More specifically, I argue that artistic performances informed by strategies of engagement affect the audience by encouraging them to critically reflect on existing power relations and to contest them by eliciting a robust polemics and by mobilising the audience to imagine and construct alternative forms of community commensurate with a plural, interconnected, and conflictual society. To expand on this perspective, I will now turn to a discussion of discourse theory.

CHAPTER 5

Discourse Theory and Artistic Performances

In their landmark work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), political philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe call for the deessentialisation of the classical metaphysical figures of foundation such as ground, universality, and totality, as opposed to their recuperation on immanent grounds. They stress the need not to withdraw from these figures, but to engage with them in order to contest and weaken their ontological status from within. The political implications of such an approach become clear once we see that this way of addressing the problem and nature of existence compels us to acknowledge that every social construction is contingent. This implies that every identity, object, and relation is a contingent construction and may always be otherwise. Political theorist Oliver Marchart has described post-foundationalism as thus resting on undecidable terrain in the eternal tension between ground and abyss, between attempts at foundation and the inevitable

This chapter is a slightly reworked and extended contribution of my “The Political Dimension of Dance: Mouffe’s Theory of Agonism and Choreography,” first published in Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy, edited by Tony Fisher and Eva Katsouraki, 251–272 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Reproduced with the permission of Palgrave Macmillan. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Petrovi´c-Lotina, Choreographing Agonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79446-0_5

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failure of such efforts.1 The frontier between these differential arrangements, between ground and abyss, may never be overcome but only expanded at the expense of another choice. The unavoidable tension between the differential choices acknowledges paradox as constitutive of any social construction. In sustaining tensions between the paradoxical positions in the space of undecidability, post-foundationalism recognises conflict as inherent to society. Post-foundationalism strives to challenge homogenising and totalising conceptualisations of ontological paradigms that seek to sustain social and political status quo by rendering difference between choices irrelevant. Post-foundationalism provides a framework for thinking how an alternative social and political order could be established. This argument is particularly important to the development of postMarxist political theory of Laclau and Mouffe. Their critique of essentialism, liberal theories of rationalism and individualism, evolves from discourse theory. Extending Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘discursive formation’, they defined discourse not only as a combination of speech and writing but as a system of linguistic and extralinguistic relations. This is to say, every social configuration is meaningful and symbolically constructed within ‘institutions, rituals and practices through which a discursive formation is structured’.2 Distinguishing ‘discourse as a system of differential entities’ from ‘the field of discursivity’, discourse becomes an ensemble of differential entities materialised through a language game. The language game consists not only of language, but also, as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests, of actions with which language is entwined.3 Language games relate one entity to another and strive to achieve totality and domination over the ‘field of discursivity’. Laclau and Mouffe cancel the completeness of the relational logic of these entities by affirming that ‘a discursive totality never exists in the form of a simply given and delimited positivity’.4 On the contrary, a discursive totality can

1 Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). 2 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, New York: Verso, [1985] 2001), 109. 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [1953] 1986), 5. 4 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, 110.

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‘exist [only] as a partial limitation of a “surplus of meaning”’.5 It is a type of particular fusion, a concrete unity that requires overdetermination in relation to the other. The practice of overdetermination accentuates that every social unity is a symbolic unity constituted on a nominal level and conditioned by that which it excludes.6 But excluded entities always pose a threat to discursive totality. This means that no single principle, no ‘determination in the last instance’ for defining society in terms of totality—for example, the role played by class for Antonio Gramsci or the logic of reproduction for Louis Althusser—may fix the whole field of differential entities. Any such ‘fix’ of totality can only be the result of an unstable and partial limitation enclosed in what Laclau and Mouffe refer to as nodal points.7 Nodal points relate to the privileged position of some discursive constructions and aim at partially fixing their meaning in order to ‘arrest the flow of differences’. The notion of nodal points demonstrates at once that every social construction is the effect of a partial limitation in relation to that which exceeds a particular discursive configuration. And, it is precisely the production of limits that points out that all social constructions are organised by the same principle of exclusion. For example, the identities ‘worker’, ‘women’, ‘black’, or ‘immigrant’ become symbolically subordinated and excluded in relation to different discourses depending on whether they are discourses that prioritise class over gender, gender over race, race over religion, and so on. It is in revealing the differences that permeate social practices that an excluded social group struggles to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy by threatening and

5 Ibid., 111. 6 Overdetermination is a concept borrowed from linguistics and psychoanalysis. In these

disciplines, overdetermination has an objective dialectical connotation relating content. Overdetermination is the key concept in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. In his theory, overdetermination points at the unity of multiply factors and complex structures— including those that are not visible and not articulated—in various aspects of social life. Drawing upon Freud, Louis Althusser conceived of overdetermination as an accumulation of contradictions in a ruptured unity. See: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, [1900] 2010); Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, [1969] 2005). 7 Laclau and Mouffe criticise Althusser’s ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ that unifies the social in the space of rationalist paradigm; they propose, instead, the notion of ‘nodal points’ derived from Lacan’s concept of points de capiton. Nodal points are constructed through hegemonic practices—practices of articulation.

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destabilising the dominant social order and its limits stimulating ruptures within the social fabric of totality. The relational logic between these differential positions, between the symbolic order and its surplus, between interiority and exteriority, implies not only ruptures and conflicts, but also what Mouffe calls the drawing of limits between conflicting positions. When limits expand, they do so to the detriment of other possible symbolisations but they are never able to entirely overcome each other. It is for this reason that Mouffe’s and Laclau’s discursive approach to the construction of society implies a politics that, by drawing limits, acknowledges antagonism and hegemony to be inherent to society. Laclau and Mouffe distinguished hegemony and antagonism as key concepts in defining the nature of the political. About hegemony they wrote: ‘One can see hegemony as a theory of the decision, taken in an undecidable terrain’.8 Informed by the dimension of radical negativity, hegemony manifests itself in the possibility of excluding other choices and, thus, acknowledges the ever-present possibility of antagonism between paradoxically differential positions.9 Antagonisms, however, ‘are not objective relations, but relations that reveal the limits of all objectivity. Society is constructed around these limits, and they are antagonistic limits.’10 Laclau and Mouffe’s view on society in antagonistic terms is reminiscent of political theorist Carl Schmitt’s writing on ‘the political’. In The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt writes that the substance of the political is contained in concepts, images, and terms, as well as in everyday language, tactics, practices, competitions, and intrigues. He explains that all these constructions are manifestations of conflict and that they have a polemical meaning. This led him to assert that ‘the political is the most intense and extreme antagonism’.11 Without antagonism, that is, without specific conflicts and polemics, all the words that relate to different objects, such as the state, society, economics, culture, or art, simply turn into empty abstractions. According to this view, antagonism implies a friend–enemy grouping.

8 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony, xi. 9 On the genealogy of hegemony, see: Ibid., 7–46. 10 Ibid., xiv. 11 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1932] 2007), 29.

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Thinking with and against Schmitt, Mouffe stresses in Agonistics (2013) that the task of democratic politics is to allow conflict between differential positions in the form of agonism rather than antagonism. The central category of Mouffe’s theory of agonism is adversaries. Adversaries are not enemies to be destroyed. They are those ‘whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned’.12 In Mouffe’s view, conflict between adversaries is the very condition of a vibrant democracy. In fact, agonistic democracy implies a politics that allows for choice between conflicting positions, that is, between paradoxically different logics. It criticises rationalist and individualist politics of consensus, totality, and harmony which aim to eradicate difference and conflict. Insofar as the conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’ may never be rationally overcome, the crucial question of Mouffe’s democratic politics is: how to organise human relations in a way that is adequate to the plurality of positions that constitute the social realm? How to prevent relations between ‘us’ and ‘them’ from taking the shape of antagonism and articulating them as agonism? This question calls for the radicalisation of democracy. According to Mouffe, to radicalise democracy is to offer a critique of the dominant discourses of liberalism that are characterised by individualism and rationalism. In The Democratic Paradox (2009), she explains that the aim is to challenge the hegemony of the liberal tradition which stands for the rule of law, the defence of human rights, and respect for individual liberty, to the detriment of the democratic tradition of equality which stands for a popular sovereignty.13 Within the liberal tradition, she distinguishes two paradigms: the instrumental rationality of the so-called ‘aggregative’ model of liberal democracy which is moved by economic interests, and the communicative rationality of the ‘deliberative’ model of liberal democracy which is defined by morality. These two liberal political philosophical regimes are grounded in an a priori belief that equates the excluded, the other, with the enemy. The enemy is one whose ‘equal’ position in society can be recognised only through the principle of subjugation to the universal economic or moral laws these regimes prescribe. Both models express a tendency to establish a homogeneous, univocal, 12 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013),

7. 13 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London and New York: Verso, [2005] 2009), 2–3.

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and non-conflictual society by achieving consensus on the existence of universal economic regulations or human rights as natural regulations and rights to be respected. However, by recognising and subordinating the other as the enemy (e.g., as a threat to universal economic principles and human rights), modern liberal democracy entails destructive, antagonistic contradictions, precisely by leaving ‘no choice’ to the people. Following Mouffe, to transform the antagonistic effects of liberalism which today is formulated as neoliberalism, is to reinstitute the democratic conception of equality and the political constitution of a ‘demos’, and to rearticulate relations between liberalism and democracy. Mouffe explains that relations between these two political traditions may be rearticulated by the acknowledgement of radical negativity at the level of the ontological. This act stresses that conflict is an ineradicable component of society. When this is recognised, the goal is no longer to rationally overcome conflictual we/they relations but to constitute them in different ways. Such an approach then requires a reconfiguration of social relations from an antagonistic struggle between enemies to an agonistic struggle between adversaries. For this to happen, it is necessary to provide an institutional framework for the form of sovereignty of the people defined by an agonistic struggle between adversaries. To be sure, adversaries fight against each other over the interpretation of their principles in hegemonic terms ‘but they do not put into question the legitimacy of their opponent’s right to fight for the victory of their position’.14 In other words, the opponent’s right is not to be subjugated and subsumed to universal economic interests or moral laws; rather, disparate demands should be confronted. It is precisely the acknowledgement of the confrontation between the adversarial positions, which mobilises passions and affects among the people and provides active citizenship, that distinguishes ‘agonistic pluralism’ from aggregative and deliberative models of politics. As noted, agonistic pluralism points at the articulation of paradoxically different positions through democratic institutions. To clarify this new perspective, Mouffe makes an important distinction between politics and the political . In On the Political (2005), she writes:

14 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics, 7.

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by ‘the political’ I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by ‘politics’ I mean the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political.15

Mouffe explains ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ in ontic-ontological terms. The ontological concerns ‘the very way in which society is instituted’, whereas the ontic level has to do with the ‘manifold practices of conventional politics’.16 By situating antagonism on the level of the ontological, Mouffe identifies the space of counter-hegemonic struggle as one made possible by the dimension of the political. This view acknowledges that antagonism is inherent in society, that it stands for an ever-present possibility, and that it cannot be eradicated. As such, antagonism conditions the possibility of the domestication of conflicts within the field of politics in an agonistic configuration. Nevertheless, the constitution of society in agonistic terms does not simply render concrete a resolution for conflict which originates on the ontological level. Rather, agonism is a proximate solution to conflict and is always threatened by antagonism. As such, agonism, which situates politics at the level of the ontic, is a precarious and contingent practice. This explains why society can never be established as a fixed totality, but only as a contingent order of human collectives whose conditions of existence are always threatened by conflicting forces. Recognising this existential condition, Mouffe’s agonistic approach to politics provides both a theoretically dynamic model of social relations and a practical radicalisation of democracy. In concluding this section on Mouffe’s political-philosophy of agonism, it is necessary to emphasise that moments of decision play an important role in the agonistic model of democratic politics. The decision-making process indicates that the confrontation between conflicting alternatives of the liberal-democratic values and we/they relations opens up the possibility of choice beyond moral categories of good and bad. Mouffe explains that ‘a decision in favour of some alternative is always at the detriment of another one’, thus situating undecidability at the core of politics.17 ‘Undecidability which is at work in the construction of any form of objectivity’ acknowledges that the 15 Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 9. 16 Ibid., 8–9. 17 Mouffe, Paradox, 136.

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conflict between different choices cannot be bypassed and prevents any form of essentialisation and totality. It is precisely undecidability—the impossibility of deciding between paradoxical positions, thus pointing to the unstable character of decisional acts—that distinguishes Mouffe’s project of democracy from other theorists identified with agonism.18 Within Mouffe’s theoretical approach to agonism, hegemonic forces and conflicting relations are ineradicable from society. This is where the argument for the pluralism of positions resides.

Agonistic Artistic Practices The agonistic project of democratic politics recognises inextricable relations between art and politics. Contrary to liberalism, which often considers the relation between art and politics in clearly delimited, unchallenged spheres, confined within an immanent and univocal field, an agonistic model of democratic politics introduces the ontological dimension of ‘the political’ offering another perspective on their relation. Accordingly, in Agonistics Mouffe writes: I do not see the relation between art and politics in terms of two separately constituted fields, art on one side and politics on the other, between which a relation would need to be established. There is an aesthetic dimension in the political and there is a political dimension in art. This is why I consider that it is not useful to make a distinction between political and non-political art. From the point of view of the theory of hegemony, artistic practices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order, or in its challenging, and this is why they necessarily have a political dimension.19

For Mouffe, an agonistic model of democratic politics is particularly significant for artistic practices because of their inherent political dimension, and their ability to support or challenge the symbolic order that underpins social relations. The operation of challenging the symbolic

18 Mouffe’s theory of agonism is different from the theory of agonism that is found in William Connolly, Bonnie Honig and James Tully, who also draw on the work of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Carl Schmitt. 19 Mouffe, Agonistics, 91.

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order entails a struggle against the discourses appropriated by a dominant politics. It is with regard to the struggle for the symbolisation of different social relations, which may invigorate democracy, that we can distinguish—what I will call—the contesting political dimension of artistic practices from those whose role is merely one of compliance. And, it is with this distinction that the importance of hegemony and antagonism emerges for understanding the political dimension of artistic practices: it helps us to recognise the pragmatic role of art and the consequences it may have on the audience. Only when the consequences of artistic practices are analysed are we able to see that artistic practices are capable of either sustaining or contesting dominant politics, sedimented social practices, and fixed representations embedded in institutions on the symbolic level. To grasp this point more fully, we shall take a closer look at the relationship between art and discourse insofar as it implies the two key elements necessary for defining art in relation to the political: antagonism and hegemony. To say that every artistic practice is discursively constructed is to acknowledge that objects of art, just like different collectives, cultures, and identities, are symbolically constructed. This operation demands an understanding of discourse not as a mere representation of the social or the historical that encompasses only practices of speaking, writing, and communicating, but as something constitutive of the social and of histories that encompass all dimensions of social reality. In other words, discourse does not reflect the mentality of rationalising the ‘being’ of an object at the level of universal conceptual form as do idealism or realism. Rather, it reflects the material character of every social construction and indicates that the very being of objects is itself a discursive production, not an ‘essence’. The questions that arise out of the discursive approach to the understanding of objects is not what the objects of art are, but rather how and why they are constructed and what the consequences of constructing the objects of art are? This way of approaching the problem of the object demands the abandonment of the thought/reality dualism which reduces and rationalises the being of the object, that is its existence, to the level of abstract concepts. In order to stress the inconsistency of any rationalist conception of ‘objective totality’, we must develop the idea of ‘relational totality’ that

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affirms the material character of every discursive structure.20 Deepening both philosopher Karl Marx’s materialism which showed that the meaning of any object is a result of radical exchange and relationalism of things, and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of the language game consisting of language and the actions into which language is woven, Laclau and Mouffe define a discursive configuration in terms of relational sequences between linguistic phenomena and institutions, social practices, and rituals, through which discourse is structured. Hence, discourse is a system of relations within which objects are symbolically articulated. To move away from rationalism, then, is to point out the material properties of every object, that is, to show the relational, historical, contingent, and symbolically constructed character of objects. In recognising that objects acquire the attribute of materiality we are then able to acknowledge that an everyday object is understood as an object of art only when it is inscribed in a system of relations that structure and articulate it within the social practice of art. For example, a stone is an object of art only to the extent that it establishes a system of relations with the institution of art; otherwise, when we throw it, the stone is a projectile used in a game, or a weapon in a conflictual situation, or a structural component in building constructions. This example shows that the object draws meaning from the context within which it is inscribed. Once inscribed within a system of relations comprised of differential entities, the object articulates a particular discursive totality through naming. Provided that the meaning of the object is constructed within a particular context, that is, a particular system of relations, society is never able to fix or fully articulate the variety of possible positions of the object under the logic of a single principle. A discursive configuration reveals that the meaning of the object lies in the performative operation of naming that articulates relations between differential entities within a particular delimited context which it either sustains or contests. In regard to articulation, the meaning of an object is no longer separated as conceptually discrete or as empirically given. On the contrary, the meaning of every object is a consequence of articulatory practices. It is constructed in

20 Relational totality is conceived in contrast to ‘objective totality’ that may be defined, on the one hand, in terms of ‘the essentialism of the totality’—which aims to establish harmony between differential elements, as we find in Spinoza, and, on the other hand, in terms of ‘the essentialism of the elements’—whose goal is to secure their independence, as in Leibnitz.

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discursive and relational sequences and within a particular context. Relational totality—previously designated as a symbolic overdetermination—is then the property of associated elements or entities. It entails the process of discursive configuration which only partially fixes the meaning of the object within a particular context, yet, by an act of decision it excludes other choices. For this reason, hegemony, which manifests itself precisely in the moment of decision, implies that the meaning of an object is conditioned by the range of discourses that a particular relational configuration excludes. Accordingly, every work of art, just as every object, is constructed by the limits established between differential positions— between interiority and exteriority of the object, or between its ‘totality’ and its surplus—which prevent its full foundation or absolute objectivity. Once it is recognised that the production of limits cancels the existence of objective relations, we have to acknowledge that the construction of the object of art is an effect of unstable and paradoxical relations between differential entities that may never be overcome. It is with regard to the moments of decision and exclusion that all limits to objectivity are paradoxical and a manifestation of (ant)agonism. On the one hand, this view explains why different societies are incapable of fully articulating, fixing, or representing the being of objects. On the other, it shows that the stability of the object may always be threatened by its constitutive exterior. For example, the system of fixed relations among differential entities reflects the way institutions, such as museums, art galleries, theatres, art funds, artists themselves, and university departments that study art, seek to fasten the being of an object through the work of art in a particular representation and thereby delimit its reality. Conversely, recourse to the object’s exteriority makes it possible to challenge established limits by showing the discursive, relational, historical, and contingent character of those actions by which cultural institutions have determined the ‘being’ of objects. This view explains that every institution or social practice, just like every work of art, is a precarious and contingent construction, a type of order that can always be contested from its constitutive outside. We now have all the elements necessary to envisage artistic practices in relation to Mouffe’s distinction between politics and the political . It is worth repeating her definition of politics, cited earlier in this chapter. For Mouffe, ‘politics’ means a ‘set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human co-existence in the context

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of conflictuality provided by the political’.21 Politics belongs to the ontic level which has to do with the ‘manifold practices of conventional politics’. In the realm of art, ‘politics’ indicates the representational aspect of art—art as social practice of representing. Representation is a relational and discursive configuration of differential constitutive elements of art (formal, social, geo-political, economic, and so on), articulated in a particular contingent construction that conveys meanings on the level of symbolic. As such, every representation is a source of affects that belong to the level of ‘the political’. By ‘the political’, Mouffe writes, ‘I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies’.22 The political is placed on the ontological level that concerns ‘the very way in which society is instituted’. In the realm of art, ‘the political’ indicates the contesting aspect of art—art as a social practice that mobilises change. It elicits affective states that give rise to various opinions, polemics, agreements, and self-assertive actions. And, as long as this process gives rise to numerous alternative representations, the political in art indicates a conflict of positions, or tension between positions, which I will also call drama that might be observed, for instance, through the relationship between the performance and the audience. Once artistic practices are envisaged this way, it becomes apparent that they always possess a political dimension. While some art discloses the political dimension by complying with existing politics, other art discloses the political dimension by contesting them. Complying artistic practices reproduce the hegemony of current politics by virtue of what Franco Farinelli calls ‘geometrical objectification’ which reduces the observer’s gaze to a ‘vanishing point’ and smooths divergences between subject and object.23 In other words, complying artistic practices mobilise affects that reproduce dominant politics. In contrast, contesting artistic practices challenge the consistency established between subject and object by striating the space they share through the intervention of outside stimuli. In fact, they mobilise affects that give rise to alternative politics. According to this distinction which stresses a co-constitutive relationship between art and 21 Mouffe, On the Political, 9. 22 Ibid., 9. 23 By geometrical objectification Farinelli refers to the ‘birth of modernity’ grounded in Florentine linear perspective. Franco Farinelli, “Subject, Space, Object: The Birth of Modernity,” in Mathematizing Space, The Object of Geometry from Antiquity to the Early Modern Age, ed. Vincenzo De Risi (Basel: Birkhauser, 2015), 143–156.

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politics, two obvious conclusions necessarily follow: (1) art may be identified with hegemonic politics and forces of compliance that intend to fix particular discourses in absolute totalities; (2) art may reveal its contesting dimension, placing itself within the context of counter-hegemonic political practices that strive to unfix established totalities. The principle of contestation hence manifests by the operation of fixity/unfixity, determination/indetermination, or articulation/disarticulation, in which ontic content assumes an ontological function. It is important to realise that through processes of repetition any counter-hegemonic or critical gesture may itself become sedimented, fixed, and instrumentalised by hegemonic politics. As political philosopher Yannis Stavrakakis points out, ‘something that starts as a non-conformist radical intervention often ends up being gradually absorbed by the art system and the dominant hegemonic order, partially transforming its status at the same time’.24 This is why within the context of counterhegemony, art should be seen as a practice of continuous contestation and struggle against discourses appropriated and manipulated by hegemonic politics and social practices and forms of representation they fixed or determined. Against a politics that govern institutions, including artistic practices which themselves become institutions among other institutions, counter-hegemonic and contesting artistic practices provide a horizon for confrontation and, consequently, for constructing alternative politics and collectives. Counter-hegemonic artistic practices do not conceive of the artist as an a-political solipsist but as an active participant in the struggle against hegemonic politics. By this, the artist may mobilise particular affects and encourage self-assertive political actions among the audience. At this point, we can start thinking about how artistic practice may contribute to the processes of disarticulation of a dominant politics and their rearticulation in an alternative way.

Choreographing Agonism I have argued that in order to grasp the political dimension of any artistic practice, it is necessary to introduce discourse theory to the analysis of art. I suggested that this can be achieved by pursuing insights found in

24 Yannis Stavrakakis, “Challenges of Re-politicization: Mouffe’s Agonism and Artistic Practices,” Third Text, Vol. 26, No. 5 (September 2012): 554.

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Mouffe’s agonistic model of democratic politics which emphasises discursive configuration, antagonism, and hegemony, to be constitutive to any social construction. Mouffe has demonstrated that reality is discursively constructed as a system of linguistic and extralinguistic relations that entail the construction of (ant)agonistic limits and moments of exclusion. When ‘the excluded’ is theorised in ontological terms, it challenges the stability of a hegemonic politics, its institutions, social practices, and representations. As noted, art may comply with politics insofar as it supports hegemonic politics and sets of discourse and practices that those politics prescribe. Conversely, art can contest a hegemonic politics from a counter-hegemonic position, revealing that contingency is inherent to any objectification. This way of approaching artistic practices provides the framework for my argument about the relation between artistic performances and politics and about the political dimension of artistic performance practices: their possibility to contest a hegemonic politics and contribute to the construction of alternative ways of living together. To show how artistic performance constructs diverse and compelling communities, performance scholar Judith Hamera observes that performance is always produced in relation to discourse: ‘all performance, including dance, is enmeshed with language, in reading, writing, rhetoric, and in voice’.25 We can agree with Hamera that steps and positions have names, that movements always tell stories and are taught through stories, and that metaphor may be used to communicate how a movement looks or feels. We can also agree with Hamera that press kits and reviews are part of performance; they communicate ideas to the audience and help performance companies survive. Here, names, stories, metaphors, and reviews acknowledge the intellectual capacity of spectators to rationalise the object of art at the level of concept. However, this view reduces discourse to the realm of linguistics. It fails to account for the extralinguistic, for the institutions and practices through which discourse is formed. In Hamera’s view, discourse is a mere presentation of performance as a social practice of choreographing bodily movements which does not question the nature of that social practice itself. To grasp the political dimension of artistic performance requires conceiving of discourse in terms of relations that encompass all dimensions of social reality. In that context, discourse 25 Judith Hamera, Dancing Communities. Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 5.

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not only stand for the practices of writing, speaking, and communicating, that is, of presenting the elements of performance as aesthetic practice. It also stands for a system of relations materialised through body language, symbolic frameworks, and institutions withing which the performing body is inscribed. The inscription of the performing body in such a set of relations is a moment of its representation. The representational approach to artistic performance implies that the body is entangled with various linguistic and extralinguistic frameworks. In this view, performance no longer relates to a conceptual practice occupied with the form rationally deduced from the sheer presence of performers and objects, but to a practice of articulation concerned with the ways socio-cosmic relations are materialised through the process of symbolisation and corporeally constituted, valued, viewed, and exchanged. From this viewpoint, performance stands for a choreography that may appropriate elements from different artistic practices (dance, theatre, mime, opera, concert, video, drawing, among others) as well as from various civic practices (clubbing, sport, aerobics, jumping, boxing, working, public speeches, protesting, and so on) and discourses (anthropological, economic, political, cultural, moral, ethical, archaeological, mathematical, or any other discourse). In this view, the emphasis is not exclusively on the ontic manifestation of performance, on its form. It is also on its ontological dimension which manifests through the encounter with the audience. Inasmuch as that encounter invokes tension, it instantly enables an appreciation of how the materiality of performance, established through the performativity of actions that pertain to coloured, queer, or workers’ gestures, for instance, may comply with or contest spectatorial codes. It can either sustain existing or construct alternative histories of such gestures. The materiality of performance, as political theorist Shirin Rai writes, ‘allows us to reflect upon its power’, to accept or challenge its political syntax.26 The material properties of performance articulate a particular discursive disposition of different range of actions. On this basis, an everyday action or movement is understood as artistic performance only when it is inscribed within the system of relations that structure it as an artistic practice of performance. Brushing one’s teeth, for instance, becomes artistic 26 Shirin Rai, “Performance and Politics. Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament,” in The Grammar of Politics and Performance, eds. Shirin Rai and Janelle Reinelt (London: Routledge, 2014), 154.

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performance when executed by Allan Kaprow in his own bathroom in the 1950s.27 Pedestrian activities, acrobatics, workers’ marches, sports, and games became performance in Yvonne Rainer’s choreography during the 1960s and 1970s.28 The knife game known as ‘five finger fillet’ in which a knife stabs back and forth between the fingers of a palm placed on a table becomes a rhythmic performance, or a ‘rhythmic exercise’ in Marina Abramovi´c’s Rhythm 0 (1973).29 Likewise, a series of quotidian gestures, such as leaning with head on hand, running fingers through hair, and baring and covering shoulders, were utilised and connected in the system of mechanical movements in Rosas Danst Rosas (1983) choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.30 In dbddbb (2015), Daniel Linehan departs from protest movements and marches to explore both group solidarity and individual autonomy within the choreographed space. In El Conde de Torrefiel’s performance, Guerrilla (2016), when more than sixty participants dance for forty minutes to loud techno music, a syllabus-free dance becomes choreography. Combative, resisting, and ritual movements from conflict zones in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East are core choreographic elements of Eszter Salamon’s Monument 0.4: Lores & Praxes (Rituals of Transformation) (2017). Similarly, the dancing of so-called ‘video vixens’, black women degraded to

27 Looking back at his own performances, happenings, from the 1950s, Allan Kaprow in Performing Life (1977) writes that the models for his early happenings were everyday life routines, such as brushing teeth, washing dinner dishes, asking for time, and so on. Allan Kaprow observes the everyday actions as performances drawing upon sociologist Erving Goffman. See: Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), 195. 28 Pedestrian movement, for instance, becomes performance in Yvonne Rainer’s Ordinary Dance from 1962. Then, in The Mind Is a Muscle from 1968, ‘[a] film of feet gently kicking a ball is projected onto a hanging screen’. In a group pedestrian protest Street Action from 1970, Rainer incorporated the ‘M-Walk’ movement from the march of the alienated workers in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927). About Rainer see: Catherine Wood, Yvonne Rainer: The Mind Is a Muscle (London: Afterall Books, 2007). 29 Art historian Ješa Denegri, a witness of Abramovi´c’s early performances, introduced the term’rhythmic exercise’ to describe Abramovi´c’s performances from the Rhythm series. Ješa Denegri, ‘Govor u prvom licu—isticanje individualnosti umetnika u novoj umetniˇckoj praksi 70-ih godina’, in Nova umetnost u Srbiji (Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1983), 9. 30 In Rosas danst Rosas quotidian gestures connected to mechanical repetitive movements point at the power of production processes over every aspect of human lives.

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sexual objects in popular hip-hop and rap music clips from the 1990s and early 2000s, becomes a choreographic score for Cherish Menzo’s performance Jezebel (2019) in which she challenges stereotyped representations of the black female body that accompany lyrics typically written by popular black male singers and song writers. As these examples show, artistic performances employ bodily movements that are associated with different social practices, inscribed into a particular system of relations, and articulated, or rather, embodied through a particular choreography. If ‘motion is a property of the res corporea’, as Heidegger proposed, then bodily movement must be conceived as ‘a mere change of location’.31 This implies that the body moves according to a particular score. This way of thinking about bodily movement suggests a view of choreography as a decisive ordering of bodies which stabilises temporal movement in space. Structured through an act that spatially organises the range of temporal movements, choreography may comply with or contest the existing politics, practices, techniques, and representational frameworks.32 Choreography, as dance scholar Randy Martin has aptly observed, embodies moves that are informed by the ongoing social and political processes generating a sense of being.33 Whether it complies with existing politics or contests them, choreography always possesses a political dimension. Andrew Hewitt’s assertion that choreography is ‘a way of thinking about the relationship of aesthetics to politics’ is perfectly justified, as is his claim that choreography cannot be ‘set in opposition to the category of “the political”’.34 Hewitt’s view of the relationship between choreography and politics provides a framework for my argument about the inherent political dimension of artistic performance within the context of counterhegemonic struggles. To say that choreography stabilises a temporal performative movement in space, is to define choreography as a hegemonic system of differential corporeal movements that is distinct from the range of temporal moves that it excludes. For instance, the rigid 31 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, [1962] 2008), 124. 32 In Chapter 9, I will turn to the relationship between time and space to examine articulation of the temporal dimension into the spatial dimension. 33 Randy Martin, Critical Moves (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 34 Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday

Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 11.

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ballet technique that maintains physical mastery over dancing bodies by means of strict methods (alignment, turnout, posture, toe pointing, and so on) is grounded in the exclusion of movements that relate any other social practice to ballet (street-dance, sports, games, stand-ups, protest marches, just wars, still-acts, and so on). Similarly, as dance scholar André Lepecki stressed, the still-act in the performances of Steve Paxton (Magnesium 1972), Vera Mantero (a mysterious Thing said e.e. cummings 1996), and Jérôme Bel (The Last Performance 1998, and Jérôme Bel 1995) rests on the exclusion of uninterrupted and abstract movements of ballet and modern dance from choreography.35 Pichet Klunchun and Myself (2004), a joint performance by Thai choreographer, Pichet Klunchun, and French choreographer, Jérôme Bel, demonstrates through debating, performing, and comparing different traditions of dancing, how different histories, politics, economies, and cultures draw lines of exclusion to designate the practice of dancing. Likewise, when movements of violation, intimidation, and antagonism function as a choreographing system, as in Arkadi Zaides’ performance Archive (2014), all agonistic aspects of social moves are excluded. As these examples demonstrate, choreography may be embodied in a stable representation only in relation to the surplus

35 Still-act is a mode of performing proposed by anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis. I envisaged it as a contingent configuration of bodies that gives rise to a meaning of performance within a particular context at a given moment. It is important to stress, as Derrida pointed out, that ‘no context can determine the meaning to the point of exhaustiveness’. In contrast, to claim that still-act is ‘dance’s exhaustion’, as dance scholar André Lepecki asserts, would be to argue that the reality of dance as a social practice is exhausted and thus to idealise still-act as an ultimate political form of dance. Parallels to this thought could be drawn from the visual arts. In the visual arts, as art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto pointed out, the monochrome, such as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), would stand for the internal exhaustion of the possibilities of painting, if the painting would not be analysed within the context that gives rise to the meaning of the painting. Dance’s exhaustion, therefore, should not be associated with the form of performance, but with a moment of institutionalisation in which performed movement becomes itself an institution among other institutions, as anthropologist Victor Turner’s theory suggests. On context see: Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 9. On exhausting dance see: André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York, London: Routledge, 2006), 16. On monochrome painting and non-exhaustion, see: Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 170; On exhausted movement and institution, see: Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Cornell University Press, [1969] 1991), 112.

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moves that it excludes. And, insofar as they are constitutive for choreography, the excluded physical moves, or acts, may always disrupt the system of established corporeal movements. It is this moment of exclusion that depicts the conflictual, (ant)agonistic aspect of performance. The disrupting potential of a range of physical moves that are excluded is manifested in the variety of impromptu acts inclined to destabilise and disarticulate systems of corporeal movements sedimented in choreographic representation. By impromptu bodily acts I mean the embodiment of any corporeal move in choreography that occurs either as a result of the struggle of the bodies for the recognition of particular needs that have been excluded by hegemonic politics and representational norms, or have been subordinated to different discourses such as those that prioritise religion over gender, gender over class, or class over ethnicity. Under these circumstances, the counter-hegemonic choreographed movement is the embodiment of any impromptu bodily act. As such, it mobilises affects among the audience triggered by moves activated against various social, cultural, economic, or moral laws. Counter-hegemonic choreography contests existing modes of representation by articulating representations that acknowledge and respond to plural, multicultural, and migrating societies. In other words, a counter-hegemonic choreography redraws the limits and challenges the constructed, historical, and fixed character of any representation. From this viewpoint, choreography is not a matter of ‘instituting a mode of becoming beyond the historical moment’, as dance scholar Philipa Rothfield suggests.36 Rather, it is a practice of engaging with historical moments to reactivate the past and change the present.37 Choreography, as dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster writes, derives its very meaning from a specific historical moment.38 But what happens when movements of violating human rights function as a choreographing system? This type of choreographic practice is

36 Philipa Rothfield, “Tinkering Away: The Untimely Art of Subtraction,” in Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion, eds. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Philipa Rothfield (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 20. 37 Historian Enzo Traverso challenges Walter Benjamin’s insight on history by envisaging melancholy as a powerful catalyst for the reactivation of revolutionary thought: Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia. Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 38 Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 5.

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at work in Archive (2014) a performance by Arkadi Zaides, a Belarusborn, Israeli choreographer based in France. Zaides found inspiration for Archive (2014) in the Camera Project, launched by the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights B’Tselem in 2007. The goal of the Camera Project was to distribute cameras to Palestinians in severe conflict zones of the West Bank, in order to document Israeli acts of violation against them. Zaides, reviewed about 4500 hours of these video recordings and selected clips that served as the starting point for his choreography. In Archive, the selected clips are projected on a big screen positioned above the stage. Zaides takes his place close to the screen, in order to be able to look at the videos with the audience. His one-hour performance is based on a range of physical moves and vocal gestures taken from the video recordings. With a remote control in one hand, Zaides manipulates the video projection. He plays the clips, stops them, rewinds some scenes, and plays them again. This enables him to focus on particular moves and vocal gestures and to perform them on stage. By the end of the performance, all the moves and gestures extracted from the video clips are connected and articulated in a choreography that embodies the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and, more precisely, contests the hegemonizing power of Israelis over Palestinians. In this choreography, Zaides embodies the physical actions (pointing a gun, throwing a stone, or shattering olive trees) and accompanying vocal cues (shouts, taunts, or jeers) that Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank resort to in their attempts to intimidate Palestinians. Zaides’ goal is to stage and question the gestures of violation that are sedimented in the community to which he belongs, yet remain absent from broad public debate.39 A choreography that incorporates in it the gestures and movements of violation immediately raises questions concerning a hegemonic politics under which acts of violation are performed in everyday life. His performing body becomes a medium of protest against such politics and, what performance scholar Gabriele Klein calls, ‘the carrier of the sights and symbols of protest’.40 In fact, by suggesting the right to ‘physical integrity’, Zaides’ body becomes the site of a counter-hegemonic discourse that emphasises the right to the integrity of one’s body, and in 39 Arkadi Zaides, Interviewed by author, personal interview (Skype, 20 May 2017). 40 Gabriele Klein, “The (Micro-) Politics of Social Choreography Aesthetics and Political

Strategies of Protest and Participation,” in Dance, Politics and Co-immunity, eds. Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher (Berlin, Zürich: Diaphanes, 2013), 197.

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this case of the body of Palestinians. To stress the significance of physical integrity, as Sandra Noeth writes, is ‘to concern ourselves with our own processes and policies of setting up boundaries and creating territories’.41 Archive is precisely the result of Zaides’ concern with the ways societies set boundaries. As a bounded system, the body, Mary Douglas suggests, can ‘represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious’.42 Zaides’ call for a counter-hegemonic politics is amplified by the absence of excluded, violated bodies of Palestinians. To contest the perceptual experience of the audience, Zaides invites both Israeli and international audiences to confront the violation of Palestinians’ human rights; he mobilises the audience to become active participants in a debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is at this point that choreography ceases to be a matter of a closed system relating to drama on the stage (the plot). Instead, it pivots to the relationship between the audience and the performance, creating tension between them. Archive invites the audience to engage with the performance and to envisage how bodies can co-move through different choreographic scores of living, how they can organise relations in a way that is adequate to the plurality of positions, and how they can articulate antagonistic relations constructed in ways that separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ as enemies, as an agonistic configuration constituted along the lines that separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ as adversaries. Here the political dimension of performance ceases to be a way of just thinking about the relations of power and becomes a strategic force, a demand for acting upon antagonistic relations in order to contest them. Contestation, dance scholar Randy Martin writes, should be envisaged as a matter of mobilisation of participation which ‘rests with the possibility of theorising it as a more than simply attendance at the event […] as struggles over the context and configuration of an alternative public space’.43 Contesting forces mobilise the audience to envisage, debate, and articulate how disparate collectives can share the space along differential positions and conflictual lines, not as enemies but as adversaries.

41 Sandra Noeth, “Intact Bodies: Slow Violence, Gestures of Touch, and the Integrity of the Body,” in Bodies of Evidence, eds. Sandra Noeth and Peter Mills (Stockholm: Stockholm University of Arts, 2016), 23. 42 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 115. 43 Randy Martin, Critical Moves (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 47.

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Given these points, the significance of impromptu bodily moves that contest a hegemonic politics embodying resistance, struggle, and mobilisation of the audience resides in a striating of the smooth space of ‘pure immanence’ whose effects can manifest in violent relegation of differences that do not comply with the ‘universal’ laws and rights. Striated space enables the co-existence of paradoxically different entities and movements rather than silencing and subjugating them through antagonistic acts. By disarticulating antagonistic relations between ‘the determined system of differential corporeal movements’ and ‘the rage of excluded impromptu physical moves’—transforming them into agonistic and plural configurations—artistic performance may ultimately invigorate democracy. As is apparent in the choreographic work of Zaides, the contesting dimension of performance is manifested throughout the struggle of the performer’s body for the recognition of discourses and moves that embody ethical, political, and cultural values that differ from the values sustained by a hegemonic politics. ∗ ∗ ∗ This is why the political project of agonistic democracy, in the manner developed by Mouffe, is such an asset for Performance Studies. It enables performance scholars to grasp counter-hegemonic or contesting (artistic) performance practices and allows them to theorise performance practice differently. By differently, I mean not only within the theoretical framework of immanence in terms of the actualisation of the multiplicity of abstract concepts deduced from bodily movement, but also within the theoretical framework of quasi-transcendence concerning a performative practice which embodies the struggle over the configuration of alternative spaces of living together. Such performance practices open up a space for a dramatic encounter between the performance and the audience. Or, as Mouffe suggests, an agonistic encounter of separate entities located in the same space.44 These agonistic choreographic practices stress the contingent character of any objectification. In performance, contingent objectification stands for choreography which only partially stabilises a

44 Chantal Mouffe, “Marcelo Evelin, Dance as an Agonistic Encounter,” in Time We Share: Reflection on and Through Performing Arts, eds. Daniel Blanga-Gubbay and Lars Kwakkenbos (Brussels: Kunstenfestivaldesarts & Mercatorfonds, 2015), 246–254.

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specific decisive configuration of moves at a given moment. It is discursively constructed as a contingent and contestable system of relations, which may always be articulated otherwise. Performance practices can be envisaged as choreo-political performances that challenge the ways in which reality, nature, objects, and practices are articulated and contribute to their rearticulation in alternative ways. Recognising that antagonism threatens any social construction, agonistic choreo-political performances propose alternative ways of envisaging the systems of living together, how we encounter the world, and how we objectify it. They open up a space for polemic around discourses which structure different social practices, representations, and institutions. Without polemic, that is to say, without the acknowledgement of conflict or tension, there is no contesting political dimension in artistic performances or in art more generally. It is only by embracing the social dimension of conflict, tension, or the drama of positions, that a counter-hegemonic politics can merge with choreographic practices that are capable of challenging existing forms of identification and articulating new forms of community. In the next chapter, I explore the seminal role tension plays as a guiding force in performance, philosophy, and politics.

CHAPTER 6

Tension: A Guiding Force in Performance, Philosophy, and Politics

Inspired by anthropology, performance theorist Richard Schechner, one of the founders of Performance Studies,1 summed up the main research question of performance scholars as ‘what does performance do?’ In his book, Performance Studies: Introduction (2002), a compilation of his observations, findings, and notes from the 1960s onward, Schechner describes every type of (human) action or behaviour—whether sports, the performing arts, the everyday life actions, social movements, or the enactment of gender, sex, race, or class—as worthy of the term performance.2 Some questioned Schechner’s adoption of anthropology in the 1 An independent, interdisciplinary, academic discipline, Performance Studies was founded by Professors Richard Schechner, Michael Kirby and Brooks McNamara in the USA, in 1979/1980. 2 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge, [2002] 2013), 1.

A portion of this chapter subtitled ‘The multitude and the people’ expands on my ‘Performance and Populism. Choreographing Popular Forms of Collectivity’, first published in The Oxford Handbook of Performance and Politics, edited by Milija Gluhovi´c, Silvija Jestrovi´c, Michael Saward and Shirin Rai, 679–692 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Reproduced with the permission of Oxford University Press. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Petrovi´c-Lotina, Choreographing Agonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79446-0_6

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newly emerging field. In The Ends of Performance (1998), for instance, performance scholar Peggy Phelan critiqued the anthropological approach to performance studies when she suggested that it reduces performance studies to the ‘recitation of the facts of the event’.3 Phelan’s critique was influenced by the recent English translation of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s famous seminar: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, which was published in 1988. In it, Lacan envisaged the construction of subjectivity in relation to the other. He asserted that human relations are defined by speech and that ‘the speech included in discourse is revealed thanks to the law of associations by which it is put in doubt’.4 The casting of doubt on speech prompted Phelan to envisage performance as a practice that places doubt on existing discursive representations.5 Such an observation emphasises the relational, representational, and polemical aspects of performance. It suggests that performance is always constructed in relation to the other, in relation to some sort of exteriority, or the audience, and thus gives rise to polemics, disagreements, conflicts, or—in a word—tension between various discursive positions. With the introduction of tension as a guiding force in constructing performance, the fundamental question for performance scholars ceased to be merely what does performance do? and became how and why is performance constructed, and, what are the consequences of constructing performance as such? In response to these questions, I will refer to philosopher François Jullien. In The Propensity of Things (1992), Jullien writes that artistic form is the effect of tension which could be described as a dynamic force that animates various elements in what he calls a possible ‘setup’.6 This contends that tension, animated by the possible arrangement of elements, is a dynamic force working on multiple levels in artistic performance. For

3 Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, The Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 7. 4 The first English translation of Lacan’s seminar appeared in 1988. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. John Forrester (London and New York: W. W. Norton and Company, [1988] 1991), 271. 5 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, [1993] 2006). 6 François Jullien, The Propensity of Things (New York: Zone Books, [1992] 1995), 75–76.

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instance, if we speak about tension as a constitutive part of choreography, then we can consider choreography as the embodiment of contrasting movements at play; lowering the head, for example, stretching hands aloft, or lifting a leg. In the same manner, we can speak about the tension between movements that are performed and those that are excluded from choreography, whether everyday, combat, or fluid ballet movements, as observed in Chapter 5. Similarly, we can speak about tension as a force that connects contrasting artistic practices during the creative process of performance, like choreography, writing, music composing, and costume-, light-, and stage-design. A strategically thought-out configuration of these practices articulates a particular form of performance that will produce effects on the audience. As a dynamic force that works on both the performance and the audience, tension, in this case, challenges sedimented, spectatorial codes. It questions the ways in which spectators experience performed forms of subjectivity and objectivity. To more fully understand the dynamic force of tension in performance, I will begin by looking at the performances of Brussels-based Norwegian choreographer and performer, Mette Edvardsen. In her trilogy, Black (2011), No Title (2014), and We to Be (2015), the play between the presence and absence of objects, between our attempts at grounding the totality of an object and the repeated failure of this endeavour, introduces tension as a guiding philosophical, political, and artistic force capable of doing away with philosophical dualism, the politics of harmony, and the reduction of artistic practices to the level of concepts. In what follows, I will demonstrate that aesthetic phenomena manifest themselves through a series of paradoxical, and by that I mean contrasting, positions that co-exist in tension, such as absence and presence, abundance and lack, or visible and invisible. Furthermore, I will argue that it is the force of tension which connects these polarities and mobilises the audience’s physical and cognitive abilities, both mind and body, to imagine different realities, to contest a dominant politics, and to construct an alternative mode of living together.

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Mette Edvardsen: The Choreography of Play Between Absence and Presence Starting with her earliest performances, Edvardsen has explored how it is that the body and objects are constructed in time and space. In Private Collection, her thirty-minute-long solo that premiered in 2002,7 Edvardsen brought into play her body and a number of quotidian objects—wooden chairs, an indoor plant, a plastic bottle, a short wooden board, a take-away coffee cup, and her own clothes. The performance took place in front of a white wall in the middle of which three lines were drawn with black chalk simulating a corner of a room. During the performance, Edvardsen interacted with the objects in different ways. She used her body to measure the distance between the two chairs; to experience their weight, she held the chairs in her hands while lying on her back; to literally embody the shape of a chair, she stretched out on it with her stomach pressed across the seat while touching the floor with her knees and the palms of her hands. Edvardsen pushed the chairs aside, lifted them up, moved them, and constantly re-arranged them. At one point, she walked slowly in front of the wall with a plant placed on a wooden board balanced on her head. And at another point, she dressed the chairs in her own clothes putting her socks and trousers on the front legs of one chair and her shirt on the back of another. Then, suddenly, she lay on the floor and placed a bottle on her stomach. During the performance, different objects, such as the coffee cup, the wooden board, the bottle, and the chairs, are arranged and rearranged in different ways so that they create ‘new’, innovative objects. At the end of the performance, all the objects were assembled together in a sort of quasi-monumental structure, placed in a ‘corner’ of the room. Writing about Private Collection, Edvardsen explains: ‘I am interested in the nature of things, such as gravitation, weight, balance, stability, shape, and volume, and how we organise things which by classifying, collecting, and order relates the object in time and space’.8 Objects, she observes, have ‘a chameleon like quality’. She wonders about the way in which objects can be both present and absent. This pursuit led 7 Private Collection premiered in 2002 in Nadine, Brussels laboratory for transdisciplinary art. 8 “Private Collection,” Mette Edvardsen, accessed 4 February 2016, http://www.met teedvardsen.be/projects/pc.html.

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Edvardsen to create a fifty-five-minute-long performance, Opening, which premiered in 2005.9 In this performance, Edvardsen explores her own body as it seems to hover between absence and presence. The act of walking, talking, or falling on the stage, for example, becomes an effect that is equivalent in value to effects that are produced by space, sound, text, music, light, and curtains. In other words, her actions ‘perform’ on their own. Throughout the performance, Edvardsen repeatedly enters and exits the stage. Then, forty minutes after the performance first began, another performer, Nienke Reehorst, steps into the action of ‘opening’ the performance so subtly that it is not immediately visible to the audience. The most striking feature underlining Private Collection and Opening is the activation of the audience’s desires and affects in the creation of different realities. Edvardsen’s performances challenge viewers to ‘other views and readings, to look and look again’.10 She achieves this by stressing the instability of constructions such as identities, objects, spaces, and times. Following up on this idea, her later performances began to investigate the ways in which language contributes to this operation. As she explains, the goal became to explore how reality exists in language and how language extends reality into space.11 What Edvardsen examines, in fact, are the possibilities and limits of language to materialise the being of objects through choreography and, in so doing, to mobilise particular affects among the audience. Her performance trilogy, Black, No Title, and We to Be, demonstrates this endeavour. Black is a twenty-five-minute-long solo which premiered in 2011.12 In it, Edvardsen appears on stage alone, wearing jeans and a plain blouse. The only tools she uses to construct objects, space, and time are language 9 The first version of Opening premiered at Vooruit Art Centre, in Ghent, in 2005. The running time of the first version of Opening was 20 minutes and it was performed by Edvardsen. The second version of Opening premiered in Kaaitstudio’s in Brussels, in 2006. Here, a second performer, Nienke Reehorst, appeared after about 40 minutes of the performance, replacing Edvardsen and performing the last 15 minutes on her own. Sources: Mette Edvardsen, interview by the author, 19 September 2017; “Opening,” Mette Edvardsen, accessed 19 September 2017, http://www.metteedvardsen.be/projects/ op.html. 10 “Opening,” Mette Edvardsen, accessed 19 September 2017, http://www.metteedva rdsen.be/projects/op.html. 11 Mette Edvardsen, interview by the author, Brussels, 26 August 2014. 12 Black premiered during Performatik Festival, in Kaaistudio’s in Brussels.

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and her body. By simply calling out their names, she brings objects to presence. The name of each object is repeated eight times in succession—table, table, table, table, table, table, table, table; chair, chair, chair, chair, chair, chair, chair, chair; lamp, lamp, lamp, lamp, lamp, lamp, lamp, lamp; floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, floor, and so on. It is the rhythmic alteration of the names of objects as different as table, chair, lamp, light, floor, window, and door, that constructs the space of performance. All the objects that create and fill in the ‘room’ in which Edvardsen performs—and that she measures aloud with her steps: one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one; two, two, two, two, two, two, two, two; three, three, three, three, three, three, three, three— are brought to attention in their absence, either by being pointed to, looked at, or mimed. This is how the pattern of words—created by different arrangements of stressed and unstressed syllables in what resembles an accentual verse, and by the differences in the timing, duration, or stress of consecutive notes—entwined with various everyday actions that Edvardsen performs in the ‘room’, produce the meanings of objects and the performance as a whole. For instance, water gets spilled on the floor, a dog walks around, leaves fall off a plant, fresh air is let in by opening the doors, some material is printed and work gets done at the desk; Edvardsen sits, cleans, pets the dog, waters the plant, walks across the room, wanders in her daily routine, and thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks, thinks… And when night falls, she lies on the floor, or—we imagine—in a bed; as she pronounces the names of objects, thoughts, and actions, the tempo slows down, only to gradually speed up again, keeping her awake. When she pronounces the word ‘black’ only once, the imagined darkness fills in the stage and the audience understands that the performance has come to an end (Fig. 6.1). No Title is an approximately forty-minute-long solo which premiered in 2014. In this performance, with her eyes closed, Edvardsen absents objects by verbally negating their presence, that is, by excluding objects that are already present, or that she brought to presence (some of them) in her previous performance, Black.13 It is mainly the verb ‘gone’ that patterns the performance and its rhythm. All objects, subjects, movements, numbers, and sensations, such as the word beginning, walls, other walls, ceiling, floor, table, chair, dog, plant, but also shadows, arm, hidden

13 No Title premiered in Kaaistudio’s Brussels.

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Fig. 6.1 Mette Edvardsen. Black. 2011 (Photo by Gaetano Cammarota. Courtesy of the artist)

cables, green emergency exit lights, mountain, clouds, negations, David Bowie, the 1960s, paint, the distinction between writing and drawing and thinking and doing, as well as the ‘distinction itself’, are all gone. When Edvardsen draws a line with a piece of chalk on the black floor, thus splitting the stage in two, she pronounces the (still visible) line as gone and starts erasing it. Even the title of the performance, ‘No Title’, implies that it, too, is gone; that it has disappeared and that it is absent. In her performance We to Be, which premiered in 2015, Edvardsen herself, is gone. In fact, she is completely absent from the stage. What is present, however, is the darkness of the space, the empty stage filled only with words, with language.14 Edvardsen’s idea was to ‘make a piece where everything was happening through language’.15 In this performance, all language is uttered by Edvardsen the performer who is seated 14 We to Be premiered in 2015 during We Love Radio festival in the art centre BUDA in Kortrijk, Belgium. 15 Mette Edvardsen, interview by the author, 19 September 2017.

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in the middle of the audience. For more than fifty minutes, she reads her own book, consisting of five scenes, an intermission, and a brief ‘Part Two’.16 The context of experiencing objects, characters, sounds, spaces, and moments in darkness (such as a sound of a shoe dropped by a father, a spot that turns out to be a hole in the floor, the silences between speaking, the trees in a dark forest)—or, in a dream (such as the one in which the car that Edvardsen was driving sank in the water)—are uttered by three characters: the director of the performance, a performer, and a prompter. All are played by Edvardsen. Interestingly, none of the characters speaks in the present tense. The director speaks in the future (about what will be), the performer in the past (about what has already happened), while the prompter speaks in the future perfect (about what will have happened). The lighting design adds dramaturgical effect to the book. House lights fade out during the first fifteen minutes of the performance and fade in during the last fifteen minutes, while stage lights appear discreetly opening up the dark, dense space of the stage, ‘to shape the darkness’, as Edvardsen put it. The construction of objects, subjects, and narratives is left almost entirely to the audience; to the silent listeners’ imaginations, desires, and memories. The three verbal tenses of the play, all of which escape the present, mobilise the audience’s imagination precisely by not telling the audience how to act, and how and what to see. Reading aloud about the role of silences in acting, Edvardsen, as the prompter, states: The silences, of forgetting or remembering will have sounded very similar from where I will have been sitting. The spaces of doubt, the small shifts in attention, changes of intonation, delays, hesitations, … The darkness will not have meant much for me. The silences will have been decisive.17

Decisive silences affected more than just the prompter and the audience in BUDA Kortrijk, where I saw We to Be, because the performance was simultaneously broadcast on radio. One imagines a large, remote audience, sitting at home or in their cars, or elsewhere, taking part by simply listening to and imagining the performance that is being played between silence and utterance, past and future, and presence and absence.

16 Mette Edvardsen, We to Be (Brussels: Mette Edvardsen, 2015). In 2016, Edvardsen was awarded the National Ibsen Award for the book We to Be. 17 Ibid., 16.

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In Edvardsen’s trilogy, the linguistic play between the presence and absence of objects, between attempts at grounding the totality of an object and the repeated failure of this endeavour, challenges the audiences’ spectatorial codes. It impels the audience to recognise that objects are always constructed through language, that they are not stable entities, and that they are always partial and subject to change. Edvardsen stresses this in Black by saying: ‘things do not change, they cannot, I change my mind, words and things change place’. She adds: ‘things that change place often blur the shape quite distinct, but obscured by dust. Shapes and thickness of dust reveal the thing removed’. With her poetic statements, in which each word is uttered in succession eight times, Edvardsen explains that objects as things have existence but that they are never given as such.18 Objects do not reveal to us their essence, that is, their matter, except through discourse.19 A discursive construction of ‘essence’ is what we call the being of an object, which renders the most essential possibility of an object. In fact, every object is always discursively constructed, articulated in and through what Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) designates as language games: games that unfold in language and actions into which language is woven.20 By pointing out that different human acts may differently affect how people articulate objects, Edvardsen encourages the audience to recognise that the meaning of objects is always context-dependent. In fact, the meaning of objects is always articulated within a specific discursive configuration that can always be articulated otherwise. For instance, we can think of a spherical object being a ball in a tennis match, a globe in a geography classroom, and an object of aesthetic contemplation in theatre. The contextual conditionality of the meaning of objects shows that every meaning is generated by different decisions and actions, as performance

18 Here ‘thing’ stands for a universal connotation (e.g., a spherical object), whereas

‘object’ stands for the particularisation of ‘a thing’ achieved through the performative practice of naming (e.g., a spherical object as a ball, or as a globe, or as a projectile…). 19 In this context, the essence of the object is understood to be identical to what ancient philosophers Aristotle and Plato called matter. 20 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, [1953] 1986).

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scholar Victoria Pérez Royo suggests,21 and that, consequently, objects are always precarious, contingent, and contestable constructions. The process of continuous de/construction of objects that we encounter in Edvardsen’s performances is what I call the articulation of the being of the object. This operation inscribes an absent object in a system of relations and structures its presence as an unstable representation. By drawing a line between the representation of the object and its exteriority, between the object and its existence, between the light that makes the object visible and the darkness that makes it disappear, that is, between the presence and absence of the object, Edvardsen’s performances demonstrate that controversy, polemics, and tension are inherent in any objectification. Far from being finally resolved in some absolute truth, in a fixed definition suggested by performance, discourse in Evardsen’s choreography defers the final meaning, keeping the spectator in a state of tension. By subjecting the spectator to such a contingent discourse, she leaves it to the spectator to develop the performance.

Immanence and Transcendence In Edvardsen’s performances, absence does not do away with presence. Neither does presence eliminate absence. Rather, absence and presence are conceived as paradoxical yet relational and co-constitutive categories that engage with one another. Radical relationalism, paradox, and tension between the disparate categories of absence and presence give form to Edvardsen’s performances. This form is shaped by tension, informing a philosophical perspective that overcomes the dualism of positions. To envisage such a philosophical perspective emanating from Edvardsen’s performances, I will refer to two dominant trajectories in contemporary continental philosophical thought: the trajectory of immanence and the trajectory of quasi-transcendence. These philosophical routes inform different ontological perspectives which suggest distinct views on the relationship between presence and absence and which, by extension, give rise to the rival projects of democracy and the ways of conceiving of the political dimension of (artistic) performance. Approaching these two philosophical paths in terms of co-constitution and tension allows us to grasp innovative types of relation and innovative forms of community. 21 Victoria Pérez Royo, “Knowledge and Collective Praxis,” in Dance [and] Theory, eds. Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013), 57.

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The trajectory of immanence, inspired by the philosophies of Benedict de Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, has influenced anti-foundational, politicophilosophical thinkers such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Maurizio Lazzarato. The trajectory of quasi-transcendence, inspired by the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, has influenced the postfoundational politico-philosophical thought of thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Yannis Stavrakakis. Where these two trajectories diverge is in their respective relations to metaphysics, specifically on the question of existence and the ontological question of being. Philosopher Martin Heidegger, who challenged traditional metaphysical language which prioritises ‘being as presence’, inspired Deleuze and Derrida to approach ontology in distinct ways.22 Their disparate views on ontology result from two different ways of defining difference, a notion closely tied to the question of being. For Deleuze, difference refers to the difference of being in itself. In Difference and Repetition (1968), he stresses that ‘difference must be articulation and connection in itself […] a differentiation of difference’.23 Identical to an ontological pursuit of being, difference is the very source of things. In fact, it is difference that gives rise to concepts by means of which reality gets constructed anew. This is to say that the internal differentiation, that is ‘in-itself difference’, is situated in becoming, in ‘a life’, or in a thought, out of which subjects and objects are actualised. Given these points, difference is contained within the plane of absolute immanence which is more real than reality, hence virtuality, a disembodied abstraction, a set of laws independent of the state of affairs and, thus, of meaning and representation.24 In short, immanence is more presence than representation. In contrast to Deleuze, who aims at constructing an ontological account of the world, Derrida attempts to deconstruct ontology by means of discourse. In other words, whereas Deleuze aims to determine the very source of thing itself, Derrida seeks to challenge the meaning of 22 Heidegger’s critique of traditional metaphysical language can best be grasped in:

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, [1962] 2008). 23 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press [1968] 1995), 117. 24 For Deleuze, the real and the virtual are not simply opposed. The virtual is the real, but only when the real is not actualised. On the virtual see: Ibid., 208–214.

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any such thing that, in fact, appears as the consequence of discursive relations. In his essay, Différance (1968), Derrida deliberately misspelled différence by replacing the vowel e with a. And because différence and différance are pronounced the same way, the difference between them is purely graphic: ‘it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard’.25 Stressing that the difference between différence and différance cannot be heard, Derrida challenges the privilege of speech over writing. For him différance is polysemy. Furthermore, because of its many meanings, différance can never be conceptually determined but only represented through discursive and performative operations, as a play of differences that may, for example, be envisaged as a play of presence and absence. However, différance, which precede differences, does not point to only differing, that is to the playful differentiation of disparate relations. It also refers to the situation of deferring any final meaning, or totality, which is a consequence of such a playful, discursive relationality. Accordingly, différance is something that is always excluded, that is absent from a metaphysical closure, yet it constantly contests, disrupts, and transforms metaphysics of presence. It is a relation that transcends metaphysics and the ontological difference between being and beings. The excluded which constantly threatens metaphysical closure, conditions its very possibility and thus makes exteriority a quasi-transcendental and constitutive part of metaphysical closure. The moment of tension between absence and presence, transcendence and immanence, and possibility and impossibility, places Derrida’s theory at the limits of these trajectories, that is, at the point of their intersection. This theoretical approach renders Derrida’s thought quasi-transcendental.26

Abundance and Lack The distinction between the philosophical trajectory of immanence which we encounter in Deleuze, and the philosophical trajectory of quasitranscendence which we encounter in Derrida, informs a distinction between two ontological perspectives: the ontological imaginary of abundance informed by the philosophical trajectory of immanence (Deleuze) 25 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 26 Note that Derrida never described himself as a philosopher of transcendence or quasi-transcendence. Derrida situated his own work on the margins of philosophy.

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and the ontological imaginary of lack informed by the philosophical trajectory of quasi-transcendence (Derrida). In the former, ‘being’ is envisaged in positive terms, as abundance, or presence; in the latter, ‘being’ is envisaged in negative terms, as lack, or absence. The observation of the differential ontological formations of being which evolve around presence and absence will help us grasp how the differential projects of democracy that are informed by these ontologies are constructed. To help unpack this thought, I will turn to political philosophy inspired by psychoanalysis. With Lacanian psychoanalysis as his starting point, Oliver Marchart suggests that the ontological imaginary of abundance coincides with the primacy of desire over lack, and that the ontological imaginary of lack is a category of primacy of lack over desire.27 In the former, ‘lack’ refers to the positivity of the subject’s desire for being-in-itself (étre-pour-soi), for the fulfilment of the subject’s desire for pure presence. In the latter, ‘desire’ refers to the lack-of-being (manque-à-étre) in the subject, relating to the ‘Other’, to that which is absent in the subject and which renders a productive negativity. In both views desire points to the relation of being to lack. However, what distinguishes these two views is the way lack is fulfilled. To grasp this difference more clearly, let us turn for the moment to Lacan’s writing on desire. Explaining how desire is structured, Lacan writes: [d]esire is that which is manifested in an interval that demand hollows within itself, in as much as the subject, in articulating the signifying chain, brings to light the want-to-be, together with the appeal to receive the complement from the Other, if the Other, the locus of speech, is also the locus of this want, or lack.28

Lacan’s notion of desire underscores a relation of the subject to the Other, to want-to-be, and to what it lacks. For Lacan, ‘this lack is the lack of

27 Oliver Marchart, “The Absence at the Heart of Presence: Radical Democracy and the ‘Ontology of Lack,” in Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack, eds. Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2014), 26. 28 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, [1966] 2001), 200.

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being properly speaking’.29 If the Other is the locus of speech which is in fact the ‘gift of language’, then the reality of the subject can be grasped only by means of language. Lacan writes that the ‘illusion that impels us to seek the reality of the subject beyond the language barrier is the same as that by which the subject believes that his truth is already given in us and that we know it in advance’.30 He demonstrates that even children have their own system of language. For example, a child’s relation with the Other renders the child capable of playing with language which, nevertheless, is unintelligible, deformed, non-verbal, and of no use.31 The process of, what Lacan calls, the ‘sticking of language’ to the child’s imaginary leads to the ‘accomplishment’ of imaginary paths on the level of speech. For Lacan, the world of speech is the world of symbolisation conceived as a result of the effective relationship, coordination, and play between the imaginary and language. Finally, this play results in articulating a signifying chain. All this means that the symbolic law in which lack is constituted has its roots in the imaginary paths by which desire succeeds in identifying itself with the Other, that is, with ‘want-to-be’. When desire is conceived as an effect conditioned by the existence of the language, and when the Other is the locus of the deployment of speech, Lacan claims, the subject’s desire must be understood as the desire of the Other. This implies that the subject and the Other are both designated by a constitutive lack in which desire appears. Accordingly, lack cannot refer to the phenomenon of positivity which gives ‘primacy to desire over lack’. The phenomenon of positivity prioritises the subject’s desire for being-in-itself, that is, the subject’s desire for achieving pure presence. It pertains to the subject’s abundance which ‘emphasises networks of materiality, flows of energy, processes of becoming and experimenting modes of affirmation’.32 This assertion can

29 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forester (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 223. 30 Lacan, Écrits, 69. 31 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique

1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by John Forrester (London and New York: Norton 1991), 83. 32 Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen, “Rethinking Radical Democracy Between Abundance and Lack,” in Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack, eds.

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best be explained via Deleuze’s theory. From the point of view of the ontological imaginary of abundance, which is informed by the philosophical trajectory of immanence, the fulfilment of the subject’s desire for being-in-itself requires a situation of an unmediated flow of presence to presence which renders what Deleuze calls the plane of pure or absolute immanence. According to Deleuze, pure immanence is an impersonal, a-subjective life in-itself, which is not dependent on a being.33 If the fulfilment of the subject’s desire could be imagined beyond external life, as Deleuze suggests, the a-subjective being would have to be aware of its being and placed in relation to the multitude of beings aware of their own beings. This would mean that the reality of the subject can be actualised out of immediate consciousness. If, however, we acknowledge that the reality of the subject and the reality of being can be grasped only by means of language in relation to the Other, as Lacan suggests, then we must recognise that abundance, as Marchart convincingly pointed out, is the reverse of the term lack. When abundance and lack, or presence and absence, are defined by positivity, as reversals, they are simply the opposite of each other, each of which suggests an absolute, incontestable totality. In view of the philosophical trajectory of immanence, the relationship between abundance and lack can best be described by Deleuze’s term l’adéquation, by means of which abundance and lack are adequate or parallel to each other—they are simply reversed terms. To the extent that positivity implies a reversal of terms, Marchart warns, it becomes impossible to decide on the level of argumentation which phenomenon is prior, lack or abundance: ‘[o]ne will simply have to take sides between two apparently incompatible paradigms’.34 This can only mean that the constellation of reversals precludes the possibility of choice, a state of affairs which is antithetical to democracy. In contrast to the phenomenon of positivity, the phenomenon of negativity gives ‘primacy to lack over desire’. It acknowledges that desire refers to the irresolvable lack-of-being in the subject that can be fulfilled only in relation to the Other, to want-to-be, to what the subject lacks or to

Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2014), 6. 33 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 27. 34 Marchart, “The Absence,” 26.

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what is absent, which is a locus of speech and which renders a productive negativity. The phenomenon of negativity casts another light on the relationship between abundance and lack, or presence and absence. This phenomenon can best be explained via Derrida’s theory. According to Derrida, negativity points at a difference from itself. It reveals that there is something other than oneself.35 From Derrida’s perspective, both the self and the other are overdetermined by the events of language which situate them within the differential contexts. But despite the fact that the relationship between the self and the other is paradoxical, both entities are nevertheless co-constitutive and mutually engaging. This is to say that the self and the other pierce, negate, and contaminate each other. Such a relationship of negativity that manifests itself through tension arrests any totality of the self, that is, of the other. More importantly, Derrida’s theory suggests that what he calls différance always implies play between differential positions, such as the self and the other, positivity and negativity, abundance and lack, or presence and absence. This can only mean that play must be conceived of as preceding the alternative of one or another position. As Derrida writes, ‘[b]eing must be conceived as presence or absence [abundance or lack] on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around’.36 He acknowledges the illusion of a non-linguistically mediated access to being-in-itself, that is to some sort of internal truth hidden in itself, and to the autonomy of the self. Such a view explains that in reality the illusion of such immediacy must always articulate in the lack-of-being which requires linguistic mediation, symbolisation, or the Other. Negativity plays an important role in Lacan’s theory, too. Lacan asserts that ‘desire is essentially a negativity’. By that he means that desire is always grasped in the other, in the body of the fellow being, that is, through identification with the Other rather than exclusively in the image of one’s own body.37 This implies that méconnaissance (misunderstanding; misrecognition), which characterises the ego constructed through identification with the Other in the mirror stage, operates through negativity. This, obviously, does not mean that desire stands 35 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 10. 36 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292. 37 Lacan, Book I , 147.

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for an unlimited energy flowing ex nihilo. Not only does this negativity, lack, or absence, render a productive negativity, it also recognises the elements of positivity, abundance, or presence. Writing about the relationship between such disparate positions, political philosopher Yannis Stavrakakis observes that ‘the constitutive play between lack and abundance is internal to Lacanian theory, only it never serves the idealisation of desire and abundance, precisely because of the ontological status of lack and negativity’.38 The play between abundance and lack, presence and absence, and positivity and negativity, is designated by the possibility of taking a decision on an undecidable terrain which manifests itself through tension between the disparate positions. And, as we will see, it is this possibility of choice between disparate alternatives that informs a progressive model of democracy. As I have explained, the philosophical trajectory of quasi-transcendence integrates the play of abundance and lack by connecting Lacan’s notion of lack and Derrida’s notion of negativity. In contrast, the immanentist ontological imaginary of abundance in which desire is directed towards the subject’s being-in-itself, that is, towards the positivity of the subject’s desire, suggests adequation of the abundance of beings-in-themselves and a possibility of simply taking sides between the incompatible yet reversed positions such as ‘abundance or lack’, that is, ‘presence or absence’. In fact, the quasi-transcendental ontological imaginary of lack in which desire is directed towards the lack-of-being, that is the Other, or negativity, points at the mutually engaging, co-constitutive, and conflictual aspect of the differential and paradoxical positions of ‘abundance and lack’. From this perspective, we can say that unlike the phenomenon of positivity which implies a harmony achieved through the parallelism of reversals, the phenomenon of negativity implies tension, conflict, polemic, disharmony, or the drama of positions, enabling dynamic social processes to unfold. When the ontological horizon of the lack-of-being is perceived as productive negativity, the articulation of the lack-of-being onto the ontic level must be perceived as a positive value, as abundance or as presence. This means that on the ontic level the subject is constructed as such, and not in-itself but it nevertheless contains negativity. Accordingly, lack is both the condition of the possibility of positivity, presence, or abundance, and the condition of their impossibility. 38 Yannis Stavrakakis, “Negativity and Radical Democracy: Radical Democracy Beyond Reoccupation and Conformism,” in Radical Democracy: Politics Between Abundance and Lack, eds. Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2014), 187.

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The Multitude and the People Different views on the formation of being, the positive ontological imaginary of abundance which evolves as the lineage of the philosophical trajectory of immanence, and the negative ontological imaginary of lack, which evolves as a lineage of the philosophical trajectory of quasi-transcendence, inform contrasting projects of democracy. Political philosophers Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen write that the ontological imaginary of abundance conceives of democracy in terms of a ‘neverreceding pluralism’, whereas the ontological imaginary of lack conceives of democracy in terms of hegemonic constellations.39 Following Tønder and Thomassen’s hypothesis, we can observe how the former gives rise to the model of absolute democracy, whereas the latter invokes the model of agonistic democracy. Above all, absolute democracy requires an unmediated flow of presence to presence, rendering what Deleuze calls the plane of absolute immanence. Absolute immanence is pure presence, an event ‘freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from subjectivity and objectivity’.40 It is determined by the abundance of singularities. Unlike individuality, singularities are neutral, impersonal, and infused with an immanent life that is pure ‘power and bliss’.41 A community in which what we have in common are our singularities can best be described by philosopher Benedict de Spinoza’s notion of the multitude. In A Theological-Political Treatise ([1670] 2018), Spinoza, who inspired Deleuze’s work, argued that humans are governed by passions under the pretence and power of the state. He then introduced the notion of the multitude to stress that each person possesses the power to exercise their own rights over the rights imposed by the absolute power of the state. The multitude stands for a plurality of singularities existing in the common public sphere, while rejecting any form of authority of the state.42 According to this view, society is the relation of conflicting forces between the multitude and the state institutions. 39 Tønder and Thomassen, “Rethinking Democracy,” 2. 40 Deleuze, Immanence, 28. 41 Ibid., 30. 42 Benedict de

Spinoza, A Theological-Political Treatise (London: Global Grey ebooks, [1677] 2018). https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/theologico-political-treatiseebook.html.

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In order to resolve such a conflict, post-operaists imagined a model of democratic community that would do away with state institutions. Political philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri do just this in their influential book The Empire (2000). Borrowing the vocabulary used by Spinoza and Deleuze, they call for the absolute power of the multitude envisaged as a multiplicity, as a plane of singularities. In their view, community is a fluid supranational juridical order established by a selfconstituting immanent force.43 In a similar vein, philosopher Paolo Virno asserts in The Grammar of Multitude (2001) that the multitude ‘indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One’.44 According to Virno, the multitude, or ‘the many’, inhabits common places which consist of shared linguistic and logical forms which allow individual expression, generate visibility, and provide orientation. This means that the logico-linguistic forms are the properties of the multitude, rather than of institutions. They constitute what Virno calls the ‘public intellect’. The public intellect and intellectual activity that transpire in common places make up a plural, non-hierarchical, and political community. Such a community is a result of the actualisation of a selfconstituting and self-governing multitude. It contains a multiplicity of adequate and inconclusive singularities co-existing in harmony. Envisaged as a logico-linguistic structural closure, the community constituted by the multitude delimits a smooth space without constitutive divisions. Enabled by the principle of withdrawal from institutions and the logic of representation that they imply, post-operaists maintain that a democratic community is an expression of direct rule of the multitude, of the horizontal and harmonious politics of absolute democracy. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s thoughts on citizenship cast doubts on the ability of the multitude to rule itself. In De Cive ([1642] 1983), Hobbes writes that the multitude which consists of a singular number of persons has many wills. And, because it has many wills, the multitude cannot promise, contract, acquire rights, or act. According to Hobbes, the multitude is nothing but a disordered crowd that has no legal status. Hobbes stresses that only when the wills of the multitude agree and are

43 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Empire (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 16. 44 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 21–22.

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accepted as the will of all can the social contract and order be established. Furthermore, it is precisely by means of a social contract—an agreement by which individuals transfer their rights to one person or one assembly having the role to represent their rights—that the multitude articulates into the people. For Hobbes, the concept of people is correlated to state institutions and the existence of rules and laws which guarantee peace and security to all citizens. United by law, the people signify a commonwealth, a civil society, or civitas.45 Political philosopher Chantal Mouffe’s model of a democratic community implies tension between the people and state institutions. Such a view is the result of a discursive approach to the construction of society. Discourse theory asserts that language cannot be the property of the multitude. It recognises that language is not a fact of anthropology. It is not simply something that humans possess that enables them to undertake intellectual activity to discuss what is just and what is unjust and to agree upon the form of community in which they want to live. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s writing on language, Foucault’s discursive formation, Derrida’s notion of negativity, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic notion of lack, Mouffe, together with Laclau, defines discourse as a system of linguistic and extralinguistic relations consisting of languages, practices, and institutions within which discourse is formed. For Mouffe and Laclau, every social configuration is meaningful and symbolically constructed within ‘institutions, rituals and practices through which a discursive formation is structured’.46 For example, according to discourse theory, ‘being’ can never be given as mere existence, a pure presence that can be grasped in-itself. Being is always constructed through the relational logic of discourse. It is discourse that inscribes being within a set of linguistic and extralinguistic relations. This means that a discursive representation of being is its ultimate reality. For Laclau and Mouffe ‘a discursive totality never exists in the form of a simply given and delimited positivity’.47 Every discourse is partial, constructed in relation to that which it excludes, to what is not symbolised, or to what it lacks. In other words, every symbolic construction of 45 Howard Warrender (ed.), The Works of Thomas Hobbes : De Cive (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1642] 1983). 46 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, New York: Verso, [1985] 2001), 109. 47 Ibid., 110.

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being is designated by a constitutive lack or negativity. It articulates a meaning which is not associated with the invention of abstract concepts that designate a delimited positivity, such as the presence of being initself, but with the performative practice of symbolising being in relation to that which is absent, that is, in relation to the lack-of-being. The discourse approach suggests that the people can never be fully represented on the symbolic level precisely because of an inherent negativity or lack, meaning that all possible demands can never be represented in their multiplicity. For this reason, the discourse approach implies an ever-present possibility of tension, conflict, or (ant)agonism, between that which is symbolised and its surplus. In order to challenge representations sedimented on the level of institutions regulated by hegemonic politics, a moment of overdetermination must take place among the entities that are excluded from symbolisation. Overdetermination implies a collective demand for a symbolic unity, stressing the significance of a social contract, or rather solidarity, and the need for the articulation of various social demands in a set of institutionalised rights. It is precisely this articulation of demands into rights, of the surplus which escapes representation in a symbolic construction or of absence into presence, as Edvardsen’s performances suggest, that elicits a continuous play or tension between the multitude and the people, abundance and lack, positivity and negativity, and immanence and transcendence. This can only mean that in order to change symbolic constructions, one must change institutions. Unlike absolute democracy which requires withdrawal from institutions, Mouffe’s model of agonistic democracy advocates engagement with them. The strategic engagement mobilises forces of tension between institutions and the people and manifests itself as a struggle over symbolisation. According to Mouffe, we need institutions to establish an order that will prevent conflicts from taking the form of antagonism and instead transform them into agonism. This implies that institutional change is a necessary antecedent to change on the state level. In short, this observation shows that the ontological imaginary of abundance and the phenomenon of positivity give rise to a politics of harmony. The politics of harmony is guided by the logic of reversal which reduces the relationship between abundance and lack to the level of opposites. In this view, abundance and lack are tantamount to the same, showing no traces of a constitutive difference. They are constructed inthemselves through the strategic withdrawal of one from the other. The

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consequence of this strategy is a community that consists of the multiplicity of opposites that inhabit the smooth space without a constitutive division. In such a community, one must side with either abundance or lack. On the other hand, the ontological imaginary of lack and the phenomenon of negativity give rise to a politics of tension. Guided by the logic of tension, the relationship between abundance and lack is complicated and paradoxical. It implies that abundance and lack, although inherently disparate, are constantly at play. They are relationally constructed, co-constitutive to each other, and mutually engaging. The consequence of this strategy is a community that consists of the multiplicity of paradoxical positions that inhabit a striated space and that offer the people concrete choices of abundance and lack. In contrast to the community which conceives of politics in terms of a ‘never-receding pluralism’ of adequate or parallel positions, a community inhabited by agonistics stands for relational, paradoxically different, yet co-constitutive and mutually engaging positions. This means that the moment of institutionalisation of a political party which aims to provide greater participation of the people in decision-making processes implies a continuous tension with the extra-institutionalised mobilisation, i.e., with progressive civil movements.

Concepts and Discourses Just as models of democracy differ, so, too, do their ideas about the political dimension of artistic practice. Within the context of absolute democracy, which embraces a positive, ontological imaginary of abundance inspired by the philosophical trajectory of immanence, reality is reduced to what philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes as an ‘infinite potential field of virtualities’. It is pared down to an impersonal, mechanical intensity of elements from which works of art are conceptually actualised.48 Such a view of art is the result of a belief in immediate access to being in-itself, to pure presence. From this viewpoint, the political dimension of art manifests itself through the possibility of undermining, overcoming, or transgressing the dualism of positions through the principle of adéquation which entails a parallelism among the abundance of beings-in-themselves. When the political dimension is envisaged as

48 Slavoj Žižek, Organs Without Bodies (London: Routledge, 2012), 4.

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an attempt to embrace the totality of differences in-themselves, the importance of representation diminishes. Philosopher and performance scholar Bojana Cveji´c’s theory provides a view of the political dimension of artistic performances that resonates with the philosophical trajectory of immanence. Starting by the method of posing problems in order to undermine thought as the synthesis of subject and object in representation, In Choreographing Problems (2015), Cveji´c draws upon Deleuze’s theory of ideas, problems, and concepts. Following Deleuze, she stresses that problems are conceived as objects of ideas and resolved in thought by the faculty of thinking.49 Thought gives rise to concepts which are constitutive to problems. Accordingly, the process of choreographing problems is accountable for making, performing, and attending ‘concepts’, such as part-bodies, part-machines, movementsensations, power-motion, crisis-motion, and resonance, among others.50 Cveji´c writes that ‘concepts are specific to the modes in which they are expressed’.51 What she calls ‘expressive concepts’ can be accountable for either making (part-bodies), performing (becoming-molecular), or attending (resonance). The expressive concepts are then observed in relation to Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza’s principle of adequation (l’adéquation). Cveji´c writes that ‘the relation between [each expressive] concept [in either making, performing, or attending], the problem it refers to, and something of the performance it includes, is an agreement based not on representation, but on adequation’.52 She explains that adequation ‘supposes the equivalence and parallelism of the two dissimilar things, for instance […]bodily movement and the thought of a movement’.53 Therefore, the objects of ideas that are resolved in thought which give rise to expressive concepts are adequate or parallel to each other. Quoting Spinoza, Cveji´c stresses that an idea is adequate ‘insofar as it is considered in itself, without relation to an object’.54 For Spinoza,

49 On Deleuze’s theory of ideas, problems, and concepts, see: Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. 50 Bojana Cveji´c, Choreographing Problems (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 2–3. 51 Ibid., 24. 52 Ibid., 30. 53 Ibid. 54 Benedict De Spinoza, Ethics, trans. E. Curley (London: Penguins, 1996), IID4, quoted in ibid., 44.

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idea ‘has all the properties, or intrinsic denominations of a true idea’.55 Consequently, an expressive concept stands for an in-itself-true-idea of performance in making, performing, and attending which only partially actualises bodies and movements in a choreographic performance. In other words, expressive concepts are objects of thought—not objects of knowledge—that give rise to choreography, and, more importantly, to reality. If we accept Heidegger’s assertion that ‘the “in-itself” can by no means be ontologically clarified’,56 and cultural theorist and philosopher Stuart Hall’s proposal that a structurally transparent ‘expressive totality’ stands for the simplification of social relations,57 then we must conclude that within the philosophical framework of immanence art is a disembodied abstraction, a polity of laws and principles designated by a set of concepts that determine the reality of things. It is a predetermined, static position from which there is no escape. From this point of view, the political dimension of art is already a-political having been reduced to an essentialist politics which strives to create an ideal society through the positivist principle of subsumption of all differences to an abstract conceptual denominator. Within this view, abundance and lack, or presence and absence, are simply the reverse of each other. The model of agonistic democracy offers an alternative perspective on the political dimension of art. Within the philosophical framework of quasi-transcendence, the role of artistic practices is to contest institutions that lay claim to a particular representation of reality through the principle of exclusion. Once we have recognised that every phenomenon is constructed as an object of knowledge, rather than as an object of thought, and that knowledge is always an instrument of power maintained through institutions, as Foucault asserts, we can envisage art as a practice that challenges sedimented spectatorial codes. With the recognition that every subject and every object is discursively constructed and regulated by a politics that have power over art institutions, comes the awareness that artistic practice is itself an institution. Accordingly, the contesting political dimension of artistic performance manifests through a practice that 55 Ibid. 56 Heidegger, Being and Time, 106. 57 Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”, in Stuart

Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York: Routledge, [1996] 2003), 418.

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calls for a process of disarticulation of symbolic constructions by means of engagement with existing institutions. It is a pro-active force that operates from an exterior yet co-constitutive position. From this perspective, performance is capable of contesting the existing politics by revealing limits to any ‘absolute’ objectivity that is determined through institutions. Within this view, categories of institutional and extra-institutional, symbolic and its surplus, and presence and absence, are co-constitutive entities that operate through tension and stand for a movement beyond dualism.

Opposition and Paradox Performance scholar Jon McKenzie convincingly observed that objects are always ‘overcoded by many discourses, and situated in numerous sites of practice’.58 In view of the discursive construction of everyday objects and the indispensable moment of exclusion that it entails, Edvardsen’s choreography mobilises the audience to recognise that objects have existence; they are autonomous but they can never be discursively grasped in their totality. In acknowledging that objects are constructed through linguistic and extralinguistic means, such as language and ‘numerous sites of practice’ within which language is inscribed, we are also affirming that they are precarious, contingent, and contestable. In Black, when Edvardsen rhythmically repeats the name of each object eight times in succession and heightens their presence by lifting her arm, mimicking sitting, touching a table, or opening the door, she opens up a space for the audience to imagine objects in a multiplicity of forms, relating different ‘sites of practice’ or contexts in which they encountered and articulated them. In No Title, when Edvardsen says ‘a door, opening and closing—gone; the ceiling—gone; shadows moving in silence—gone; emergency exit lights—gone’, the operation of the dis/articulation of objects is supported by her presence on stage but it is a presence through negation, through that which is said to be gone, which is absent, and which is lacking. In We to Be, a call for the disarticulation of objects and their articulation in different ways is pushed to the most essential possibility of objects—to language. In fact, in this performance everything happens through language—not only in the absence of objects, but also 58 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001), 18.

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in the absence of the performer, of the body that is not on stage but in the audience. By this choreographic tactic, which embraces the linguistic play between presence and absence, Edvardsen’s performances activate the audience’s imagination and invite their participation. And, although the activation of the audience relies on language, Edvardsen’s performances heighten the awareness that each object is not only a linguistic construct but an object that is discursively brought to presence in relation to its particular historical context, institutions, practices, and discourses. The role of the artist will be to connect and expose the plural nature of objects constructed across different spaces and times within which they are inscribed. By these means, artistic performances open up a horizon for collective identifications based on the instability of representations. When objects are constructed from the metaphysical projection of mitigated totalities suggested by the immanentist politico-philosophical trajectory, we find ourselves within the realm of idealism or realism which rationalise and determine relations in abstract terms and promise a unity of the differential and opposing totalities that co-exist in a harmonious society. In contrast to essentialism, however, the quasitranscendental politico-philosophical trajectory recognises that plural arrangements instead permeate each other. They are partial and contingent objectifications that are constitutive of each other rather than parallel, independent, and oppositional totalities. In overcoming objective relations—relations between conceptual objects and relations between ‘real’ objects—Edvardsen’s performances open up a space for envisaging objects in terms of contingent objectification. The insuperable tension between absence and presence, included and excluded, full and partial, or abundance and lack, reveals that paradox is, in fact, constitutive of all social relations and constructions. Contrary to eclecticism which conceives of relations in terms of oppositions or contradictions aiming at establishing harmony between the differential arrangements within the smooth space determined by the parallelism of positions, a dialectics that acknowledges social paradox by defining relational, precariousness, and contestable structure of any social construction, acknowledges tension to be inherent in society. No society, as anthropologist Victor Turner asserts, can function without paradox brought about by dialectics.59

59 On dialectics in view of Turner, see: Victor Turner, The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Cornell University Press, [1969] 1991), 94–130.

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The contesting political dimension of artistic practices recognises that reality is constructed through tension as a continuous play between the ontology of abundance and the ontology of lack, between the presence of objects and their absence, or between attempts to ground the being of objects and to reveal their historical, contingent, and unstable nature. Critical reflection on how tension creates a gap between paradoxical positions and its understanding of human values and principles in terms of contingent objectification should, in my view, be central to everything that transpires in art. By challenging existing social relations and articulating them in alternative configurations, artistic practice may mobilise people to construct different realities and in so doing, to invigorate democracy.

CHAPTER 7

Drama: An Encounter Between the Performance and the Audience

In the previous chapter, I introduced the notion of tension as a guiding force in philosophy, politics, and social practices. In this chapter, I envisage the encounter between the performance and the audience along a similar trajectory of tension. Since the body is central to performance, the main question is: How does the audience experience the body in terms of tension, drama, or the conflict of positions? In response to this question, I will refer to sociologist Erving Goffman. In his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Goffman famously stated that performance provides the audience with the experience of social interactions, role playing, and everyday activities.1 He stressed how the performing body in the presence of the audience dramatises actions to make the invisible visible. A performer, Goffman contends, ‘infuses his [performer’s] activity with signs which dramatically highlight and portray confirmatory facts that might otherwise remain unapparent or obscure’.2 Accordingly, dramatisation through signification is a creative process employed in artistic practices which, as performance, emphasise that the body is always symbolically constructed and, as such, it affects the audience. 1 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburg: University of Edinburg, 1956). 2 Ibid., 19.

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For philosopher John Langshaw Austin, performativity (‘to say is to do’) distinguished actions in performance as objects of utterance.3 His speech theory inspired philosopher Judith Butler to proclaim that the body and bodily actions are constructed through the performativity of language. For Butler, certain words and modes of address may sustain the body, whereas other words and modes of address may threaten it.4 Questions about the power of language ‘to produce what it names’, i.e., to produce identity, point out that the body, including bodily actions, is historically constructed through the repetition of names. Demonstrating how the development of science has shaped bodies over centuries, dance scholar Susan Leigh Foster stressed the historical existence of corporeal epistemes ‘that participate in the production of knowledge and the structuring of power’.5 She writes that corporeality in artistic performance participates in experiencing how bodies have been classified over time as the other, whether in terms of gender, race, or class. Following the thought of Austin, Butler, and Leigh Foster, I will envisage the experience of the body in relation to the dramatic structure of performance. Drama, looked at from the point of view of discourse theory, suggests that the body is always constructed through languages, practices, and institutions, over which certain politics have power. As I outline, the moment of inscription of the body in a set of such relations is the moment of representation. My hypothesis is that a discursive approach to the body permits an understanding of the encounter between the performance and the audience in terms of drama. This is to say, it is through the dramatisation of symbolic actions that the performing body affects the audience to see things differently, to imagine alternative realities, and to reconstruct politics. Since a perceptual experience of the performing body is central to phenomenology, I will begin my observation of the body as a phenomenon by outlining phenomenology’s principal concerns.

3 John Langshaw Austin’s book How to Do Things with Words is a compilation of

lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1962] 1975). 4 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 5 Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 13.

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Phenomenology, Performance, and Individual Corporeality In Performance and Phenomenology (2015), performance scholars, Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelkopoulou, argued that phenomenology ‘speaks to fundamental concerns of performancemaking, starting with questions about how audience members encounter performances’.6 Phenomenology helps performance scholars to study experiences of performances through acts of consciousness, definitions of meaning, relations to other subjects and objects, and the existence of a body in the world. Since its introduction to performance studies in the 1990s, phenomenology has inspired performance scholars to envisage the encounter between the performance and the audience in innovative ways. The act of performing has been compared to Edmund Husserl’s method of epoché, or bracketing the existence of the natural world. This method focuses on acts of consciousness and the subjective experience of the world. Its task is to describe ideal meanings, or noema, from objective contents of consciousness, such as ideas, images, or concepts.7 Unlike Husserl, Martin Heidegger focuses on the interpretation of our activities in the world within a particular contextual relation to technology, that is, within the broad range of equipment, machines, and artefacts that we invent, construct, and exploit.8 His view on phenomenology raises questions about the ways performances incorporate technology, such as television, sound reproduction, the internet, and robotics. Studies of some performances have also been elucidated by Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential phenomenology which foregrounds the place of an individual in the world, its relation to others, and the impossibility of a conscious grasp of the world. Sartre’s method of interpretative description situates our

6 Maaike Bleeker, Jon Foley Sherman, and Eirini Nedelk, Performance and Phenomenology: Traditions and Transformations (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 4. 7 See: Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London and New York: Routledge, [1913] 2002). 8 See: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, [1962] 2008); Martin Heidegger, Questions Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, [1977] 2013).

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experiences in particular contexts in which we relate to the other, look at each other, and are constructed by others.9 It was Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view on phenomenology that inspired performance theorists to consider the role of the body in human experience: its being, spatiality, temporality, motility, relationality, liberty, equality, and acts of speaking. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty writes that ‘my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world’.10 And, just as the body in the world can see and be seen at the same time, Merleau-Ponty stresses that language enables one to both speak and to be spoken about. Such a view on the relationship between the body and language enabled him to envisage the construction of meanings through perception as a historical process. Consequently, an interest in the relationship between phenomenology and language began to play an increasingly important role. Key to that interest was the question of how it is that the body is constructed through signs. Communication scientist Richard Lanigan writes that all communication is semiotic, constituted by the system of signs. Lanigan claims that ‘all such systems contain formal and structural relations between signifiers (elements of expression) and signifieds (elements of perception)’ and that ‘all communication is a phenomenology by force of being constituted and regulated by consciousness of experience (the signifier) and its entitlement as the experience of consciousness (the signified)’.11 It is this convergence of ‘text’, or semiology, and its ‘interpretation’, or phenomenology, that renders what he calls semiotic phenomenology. Semiotic phenomenology is concerned with the experience of the world which is immediately constructed through words, images, behaviours, and arrangements of many kinds. It is a discipline that studies how experience is mediated by signs. The body that speaks different languages, executes symbolic gestures, and models sculpted images, inspired performance scholars 9 See: Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, [1943] 1993). 10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge, [1945] 2003), 475. 11 Richard Lanigan, “Semiotic Phenomenology: A Theory of Human Communication Praxis,” Journal of Applied Communication Research, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1982): 62–73.

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to envisage the experience of the performing body in terms of semiotic phenomenology. In The Semiotics of Theatre (1992), performance scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte puts forward a view of theatricality in semiotic terms—as signs of signs, signs that ‘double up’ the cultural system in which the performance takes place.12 But despite her earlier view of theatricality in semiotic terms, in The Transformative Power of Performance (2008), Fischer-Lichte anchored the audiences’ perceptual experience not in the actor’s interpretation of the text, in the semiotics of building a character, but in the sheer materiality of the performer’s body, that is, the actor’s individual corporeality that consists of voices, pitch, and gesture. Fischer-Lichte develops this view by distinguishing the phenomenal body from the semiotic body. The phenomenal body pertains to the sheer presence or materiality of the body. It is performative because it relates to the presence of the actor’s body that has been trained to master certain techniques and practices. The actor’s actions are pre-expressive; they break with ordinary physicality and evoke particular effects on their own terms. At the same time, the phenomenal body ‘constitutes the existential ground for the coming into being of the character’.13 Unlike the phenomenal body, the body of the character is semiotic. It coincides with the representation of the actors’ body which is constructed through signs and symbols. The character’s constructed actions would then be seen as expressive, relating to ordinary physicality, the interpretation of text, signification, and the evocation of different effects for the audience. The audience’s perceptual experience is affected by both the phenomenal body and the semiotic body. The perception of the phenomenal body relates to the presence of an actor whereas the perception of the semiotic body relates to the representation of a character. The presence of the actor generates meanings as sensations and emotions, whereas the representation, that is the character, stimulates thoughts, ideas, and emotions. This implies that the meaning of the representation that the audience ‘produces’ is ‘generated’ by the sheer presence of the actor. In prioritising presence and presentness, meaning in this instance is not based on inter-subjectivity and interpretation. Rather, it is associative and emerges

12 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theatre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 13 Ibid., 48.

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without intention. By extension, meaning is linguistically inexplicable, and unmotivated.14 It pertains to the state of consciousness that triggers the impulse to act. Such a view enabled Fischer-Lichte to envisage both the audience and the actors in terms of sheer presence. When the audience and actors are both present at a performative event, that is, when they share reality, their relationship becomes oscillatory.

A Collective Perceptual Experience Can we envisage the encounter between the audience and the performance in terms of oscillation? Are we able to grasp the sheer presence of the body? If theatricality is a ‘sign of signs’, as Fischer-Lichte has aptly observed, could perceptual experience begin on the level of the sheer presence or presentness of the body, beyond semiotics? Are constructed meanings of the world generated by the pure presence of the body, beyond sign, representation, tension, and conflict, or the drama of positions? Fischer-Lichte’s theory of the bond between the phenomenal body and the semiotic body attempts to overcome the dualism between body and mind. However, neither Merleau-Ponty’s theory, nor semiotic theories that inspired Fischer-Lichte, support the construction of meaning outside historical processes. When Merleau-Ponty writes ‘in order to have light, I must have a representative being facing me, otherwise my soul would be dispersed and at the mercy of its various states’ in The Incarnate Subject,15 he clearly suggests that the possibility of overcoming dualism does not reside in the subject but in the other. He designates the other, the ‘representative being’, by intelligible extension. Touched by intelligible extension, or with that which is not itself, the mind becomes ‘the fact of apperceiving’ which disorients a subject-centred account.16 The meaning of perceptual experience is not subjective, as Fischer-Lichte maintains, but is a consequence of inter-subjectivity conditioned by intelligible extension. Intersubjectivity, as Merleau-Ponty writes, implies that ‘one’s body consist[s] precisely in the fact that it is at the same time 14 Ibid., 143. 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran and Bergson on

the Union of Body and Soul, trans. Paul B. Milan (New York: Humanity Books, [1947] 2001), 50. 16 Ibid., 43.

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both mine and other’.17 What Merleau-Ponty contends is that the knowledge of the body (res cogito) is conditioned by and constructed in relation to the intelligible other (res extensa). The introduced schism or unity between a touching body and a body being touched collapses the Cartesian dualism between body and mind. As philosopher Martin C. Dilon fittingly observed, Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to ‘overthrow dualistic modes of thought’ is an attempt to connect the spheres of immanence and transcendence which are usually seen as radically disjunct.18 Semiotic phenomenology deepens the relational aspect of the body. Unlike Ficher-Lichte, who asserts that the perceptual experience is generated by the sheer presence of the body outside semiotic structures, Antonio Bondi and Francesco La Mantia suggest quite the opposite. They write that semiotic practices generate perceptual experience.19 Any perceptual experience, they assert, is mediated by semiotics.20 According to Bondi and La Mantia, perceptual structures are both expressive and semiogenetic21 and consequently cannot be seen in pre-expressive terms. For semiotic phenomenologists Victor Rosenthal and Yves-Marie Visetti, expression is conceived ‘not as a completed act, but first and foremost in the expectation of the response of the other’.22 And, although one’s perceptual experience is subjective and private, it always involves a relationship to some sort of exteriority, to historical, socio-cultural, and political structures. This is to say, the subjective experience lies in an encounter with the other. By this method, Rosenthal and Visetti 17 Ibid., 44. 18 In Chapter 6, I designated Jacques Derrida’s philosophy as quasi-transcendental

because it anticipates the play between transcendence and immanence. On Dilon, see: Martin C. Dilon, “Sartre on the Phenomenal Body and Merleau-Ponty’s Critique,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May 1974): 144. 19 Antonino Bondi and Francesco la Mantia, “Phenomenology and Semiotics: Crossing Perspectives,” Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2015): 13. 20 Ibid. 21 The meaning of expressivity in Bondi and La Mantia implies the other, a sort of exte-

riority, such as language, practices, and institutions. As such, it differs from the meaning of expressivity proposed by performance scholar Bojana Cveji´c, who connects it to Spinoza’s notion of adequation, which implies the thing in-itself, without a relational aspect. See: Chapter 6. 22 Victor Rosenthal and Yves-Marie Visetti, “Expression et sémiose pour une phénoménologie sémiotique,” Rue Descartes, Vol. 4, No. 70 (2010): 55.

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attempt to avoid the exclusive immanence of individual expression or the transcendence of the sole symbolic order. According to Bondi and La Mantia, any encounter with the other ‘can be seen as a socio-semiotic game that involves institutions (knowledge, transmission, norms, values and practices) and distributions of roles where the individual understands himself first as semiotic perception’.23 Following their thought, any performed action appears as an expression of a system historically constructed by language and institutions. This observation is paramount. It stresses that institutions not only regulate bodies, identities, and everyday practices, they also regulate perceptual experiences. Contrary to Fisher-Lichte, Bondi and La Mantia assert that the transformative power of performance is not limited to individual acts enclosed within the field of immanence but can also include institutions that are regulated by a dominant politics. To put it clearly, the transformation of institutions is a condition for the expression of alternative acts through performance. Information scientists Daniel Martínez-Ávila and Richard P. Smiraglia emphasised the significant role that institutions play in our perceptual experience. They write that our perceptual experience is ‘constructed and transformed day-by-day by political discourse and strategies of control that affect the living experience of the people exposed to them’.24 What people see, hear, smell, and touch is inscribed in a set of relations that bears traces of the measures and rules that produce effects that uphold the power of a particular politics. Such a view implies that perceptual experience does not stand for an abundance of subjective, self-organised, and autonomous acts, as Ficher-Licte observes. On the contrary, it demonstrates that perceptual experience is shared, inter-subjective, and relational. In other words, perceptual experience is a collective experience controlled by power operating within what philosopher Michel Foucault called an institutional apparatus or dispositif : ‘a heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’.25 23 Bondi and La Mantia, “Phenomenology and Semiotics,” 15. 24 Daniel Martínez-Ávila and Richard P. Smiraglia, “Revealing Perception: Discourse

Analysis in a Phenomenological Framework,” NASKO 4 (2013): 223. 25 Michel Foucault, “‘The Confession of the Flesh’: A Conversation with Alain Grosrichard, Gérard Wajeman, Jacques-Alain Miller, Guy Le Gaufey, Dominique Colas, Gérard

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Recognising the significance of the institutional apparatus for perceptual experience demands a shift from a semiotic approach to phenomenology concerned with the production of meaning to a discursive approach to phenomenology concerned with the effects and consequences of meaning regulated by a dominant politics through languages, practices, and institutions. Thinking about perceptual experience from the point of view of discourse theory enables the targeting of a collective, multi-pronged strategy against hegemonic institutions. What this clearly indicates is that the transformation of institutions goes hand-in-hand with the transformation of perceptual experience.

The Body in a Dramatic Encounter with the Audience If theatricality is the performative practice of signs of signs, as FischerLichte convincingly argues, then our perceptual experience of performance cannot be envisaged in relation to the sheer presence of the body. The performing body is always already represented. It is inscribed in a set of linguistic and extralinguistic relations, that is, in languages, practices, and institutional frameworks that are governed by a hegemonic politics. In other words, the body is constructed, oriented, and possessed by a hegemonic politics. The point of inscription of the body in such a set of discursive relations is the moment of representation. To designate representation as the primary level in constructing the body is to recognise that the body belongs to the order of performativity. Accordingly, every performance is the expression of a plurality of dissimilar currents, both linguistic and extralinguistic, articulated in a single image which can take various symbolic forms. If perceptual experience is a collective experience governed and controlled by a hegemonic politics then the relationship between the audience and the performance can be seen in terms of oscillation only when the performance complies with a hegemonic politics. It follows, then, that in order to envisage how performances contest a hegemonic politics, the terms of the relationship between the audience and the performance must be reimagined. To recognise as philosopher Judith Miller, Catherine Millot, Jocelyne Livi and Judith Miller,” in Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 , ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194.

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Butler writes, that ‘actors are always already on the stage, within the terms of the performance’,26 is also to acknowledge that the perceptual experience of performance is based on acts that are always already constructed. This requires the recognition that bodily actions are always invested with signs which enable a performer to dramatise social reality. Dramatisation through signification is a creative process employed in artistic performance that can challenge spectatorial codes. It also ‘sets the stage’ for a dramatic encounter between the performing body and the audience. In this view, drama is not simply a matter of style or of an encounter between the differential symbolic positions tied to language and motivational calculus or actions, as Kenneth Burke proposed in his theory of dramatism.27 Neither is it simply a matter of aesthetically representing ‘any kind of specific cultural enactment’, as Richard Schechner explains in his theory of ‘aesthetic dramas’.28 Rather, drama is an encounter guided by the logic of political formation. Through a dramatic encounter with the audience, the performance itself can contest sedimented spectatorial codes: representations that are performed and the modes of identification that they impose. Some performances challenge stereotypical representations by introducing nonconventional movements on stage, say, selecting an intersectional team of performers or working with playwrights that 26 Judith Buter, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 4 (December 1988): 526. 27 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1969). 28 Borrowing anthropologist Victor Turner’s vocabulary, performance scholar, Richard Schechner, designates symbolic constructions of times, spaces, and characters as ‘aesthetic dramas’. He contends that aesthetic dramas differ from ‘social dramas’ which happen ‘here’ and ‘now’. Whereas the outcome of the former is predetermined, Schechner writes, the outcome of the latter is in doubt. Neither do I agree with Schechner’s view of the dramas’ outcomes, nor with his distinction between the social and aesthetic dramas. All performances are social practices, having both aesthetic and political dimensions. This is why I find a distinction between civic dramas and artistic dramas, just like between civic performances and artistic performances, more suitable to performance studies. Besides, when drama is seen as a matter of an encounter between different positions, as I outline, we could say that the outcome of any performance is predetermined to put something in doubt. In this book, however, I employ the notion of drama without a clear differentiation between civic dramas and artistic dramas precisely to stress the political moment of a dramatic encounter which I designate by a force or an act of tension. On ‘aesthetic drama’ and ‘social drama’ see: Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 75–79.

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contain contesting narratives. A dramatic encounter marshals movement beyond dualist thought. It acknowledges that all relations are paradoxical, constructed by the force of tension that operates between differential discourses about society. In a dramatic encounter, that is, through tension with the audience, performances can mobilise the spectator’s senses to envisage different realities, to engage with hegemonic politics, and to contest them. This possibility of mobilising a counter-hegemonic politics implies the investment of different affects in performing bodies. To more fully grasp how the body mobilises the audience through dramatic encounter, more specifically, through tension, requires an examination of how affects and opinion formation play into that relationship.

CHAPTER 8

Affects and Opinion Formation

In the previous chapter, I described the body as a discursively constructed phenomenon inscribed in a system of languages, symbolic representations, practices, and institutions. The inscription of the body in a set of such relations is what I called the moment of representation. Furthermore, I argued that in the case of artistic performances, the dramatisation of representations of the body (i.e., gender, sexuality, race, class) creates a fundamental tension between the performing body and the audience. The performing body confronts the spectator with specific movements, objects, identities, and texts situated within a particular geo-political and cultural context, or, more explicitly, in a relational context of dominator and dominated. As philosopher and feminist thinker Sara Ahmed explains, in ‘orienting’ towards objects and identities that have hegemonic symbolic value or, conversely, ‘disorienting’ from them, the body either sustains a dominant politics or contests it.1 In other words, the body enables perceptual experience through vision, hearing, smell, taste, and somatic experience and mobilises particular affects among the audience that can either comply with the dominant politics or contest them. As Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory famously asserts, affects are psychical processes which manifest as felt emotions, fundamentally, 1 On dis/orientation in: Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2006): 543–574.

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the emotions of pleasure and unpleasure.2 Performance scholar Susan Leigh Foster’s inspired work on dance and empathy theorised how dance performances foreground the emotion of empathy as the ‘potential of one body’s kinesthetic organisation to infer the experience of another’.3 The notion of empathy, Leigh Foster tells us, theorises how one’s body feels what another’s is feeling. Together with kinesthesia and choreography, empathic connections flesh out how corporealities are historically constructed within particular cultural contexts. For Leigh Foster, this is most vividly demonstrated in dance performances. In its kinesthetic organisation, she writes, the dancing body appeals to the audience to experience the epistemic shifts in the ‘cultivation’ of the body, reflecting on relationships of power, or of dominating and dominated bodies. The body in artistic performance thus calls on the audience to collectively infer the experience of another body. The viewer’s rapport is hence shaped by the dancing body which ‘draws upon and engages with prevailing senses of the body and of subjectivity in a given social moment as well as by the unique circumstances of watching a particular dance’.4 A discursive approach to the body recognises that corporeality is relationally and historically constructed within a particular geographical, political, and cultural context. More importantly, it stresses that the affective experience of the (dancing) body can be articulated only through theorising the body’s legibility, its mediated process of symbolisation. Such a view, as I will explain, refutes the distinction between affect and representation. What interests me is not a particular emotional state evoked by artistic performance (empathy, shame, anxiety, pleasure), but how artistic performance mobilises affects to stimulate emotions and processes of opinion formation in the audience. To envisage the interplay of affects and opinion formation, I will begin with my critique of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of affect.

2 See: Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1962). 3 Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London

and New York: Routledge, 2011), 175. 4 Ibid., 2.

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Im/Mediacy of Affects Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of affect takes Baruch de Spinoza’s philosophical monism as a reference point. In his book Ethics (1677), Spinoza writes: ‘by affect, I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained’.5 Affections for Spinoza are consequences of infinite encounters between an infinite number of substances or things. In What is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari explore the relationship between affect and art. They distinguish affects from opinions and assert that ‘art does not have opinions’.6 They see opinions as ‘functions of lived experience that […] claim to have a certain knowledge of affections’.7 But, opinion ‘misjudges affective states and groups them together or separates them wrongly’.8 For instance, jealousy becomes an unhappy consequence of love, that is, love resembles jealousy. In order to reverse the order of affective states that are ‘misjudged’ and ‘separated wrongly’ through the principle of resemblance, Deleuze and Guattari turned their attention to sensations. They write that art preserves ‘a bloc of sensations’ which is a ‘compound of percepts and affects’.9 Percepts and affect should not be mistaken for perceptions and affections; they are beings in themselves. And, although sensation refers to the material and tools used by artists to create a work of art (i.e., clay, paint, a score/a chisel, a brush, the body), it is the percept or affect of the material itself that the work of art preserves. This is why the work of art can be seen as ‘a being of sensation’ that ‘exists in itself’.10 Deleuze and Guattari write that art resides in zones of indetermination or indiscernibility where things, beasts, and persons, precede their natural differentiation; they are in themselves. The non-human becoming that arises from zones of indetermination is what Deleuze and Guattari call affect. Accordingly, artists are understood to be ‘presenters of affects’, the inventors and creators of affects’.11 They reverse the order of affective 5 Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (London: Penguin, 1996), 70. 6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and

Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 176. 7 Ibid., 174. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 164. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 175.

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states presupposed by opinion. For example, they may reverse an opinion which designates jealousy as an unhappy consequence of love by creating an affect that would elicit the opinion that one must love in order to feel jealousy. Once described in a book, jealousy becomes finality or destination; it is ‘the meaning of signs—affect as semiology’.12 Thus it is the artworks in themselves—not opinions—that embody the pure event and the unconditioned truth, that compel the subject to invent new ways of being through affects. If ‘the work of art is a being of sensation’ then, we must recognise that the work of art does not only preserve affects; it also embodies the event, the unconditioned and eternal truth—the truth in-itself.13 Philosopher Brian Massumi played an instrumental role in introducing Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of affects to scholars of performance studies. This is not surprising since Massumi placed movement and affect at the centre of his philosophical universe. For him, the political power of affect resides in reactions on the surface of the skin, in mime. Whereas language interrupts meaning, Massumi writes, mime decomposes movements outside semantic structures. It divides the continuity of movement into a ‘potential infinite series of submovements’. This is why mime may be given various limiting contents on the receiving end. Receiving apparatuses, such as the family, the media, the school, or the church, can inhibit the actualisation of life potentials by selecting a particular movement or a gesture. But, the mime ‘almost imperceptibly intercalates a flash of virtuality into the actual movement under way’.14 According to Massumi, the political potential of mime belongs precisely to this immanent virtual field overflowing with actions and expressions of potentiality. It lies in a disembodied abstraction that stands for an immediate, autonomous, and self-regulated dynamic unity. Therefore, the political dimension of mime resides in the zone of indetermination. It does not pertain to something mediated or corporeal, but rather to something in-itself, immediate, and

12 Ibid. 13 In view of Deleuze, the condition of truth must contain something unconditioned

which differs from the ‘form’, that is, from the conceptual possibility. This ‘something unconditioned’ Deleuze designates as ideational material or stratum (i.e., sense). It stands for the eternal truth or pure event. In: Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 14 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 41.

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abstract. It is closely linked to an unliveable event without any ideology that exists in itself and that henceforth cannot be experienced. While the Deleuzian theory of affect garnered the attention of performance scholars, much less attention was paid to the theory of Jacques Derrida. Unlike Deleuze’s theory, which asserts that affective states derived from the perceptible evolve from the pure immanence, from the immediacy of self-relation, Derrida’s deconstructivism suggests that affective states, or affections, derived from the sight of the phenomena can only be understood from the mediate relation, that is, in relation to some sort of exteriority, or the other. A distinction between the immediate and the mediate understanding of affects can perhaps be best explained by taking a closer look at ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’, two notions which were of vital concern to both Deleuze and Derrida. Both thinkers took Nietzsche’s notion of ‘eternal return’ (a belief that all events in the world repeat themselves eternally) as their starting point. But from there, their theories diverge. One of the most important questions that arises from a view of existence as eternal return is the notion of difference. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze opposes ‘repetition’ to representation and concept. He equates repetition with the essence of movement. Distinct from general, which is understood as universal, repetition is singular, it is a movement in itself. As such, it interiorises and reverses itself infinitely. Deleuze writes that difference lies in infinite repetition. It is through repetition, he explains, that objects escape representative concepts. Repetition is hence difference without a concept and without a representation. Unlike the negative, static repetition which is ‘repetition of the Same, explained by the identity of the concept or representation’ (i.e., difference between objects represented by the same concept), the positive, dynamic repetition includes difference because it ‘includes itself in the alterity of the Idea’.15 It is a pure presence ‘internal to the Idea’. This is why, according to Deleuze, difference must be understood as immediacy. It cannot be found in words. Words, Deleuze asserts, ‘possess a comprehension which is necessarily finite’.16 As he claims, it is through

15 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 24. 16 Ibid., 13.

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speech and writing that repetition becomes a pure fact of concepts and representations without difference. In Writing and Difference (1967), however, Derrida suggests an opposing view. For him, repetition and difference lie precisely in words, and, more specifically, in writing. Using the writing of a book as an example of repetition, Derrida says that repetition, ‘does not reissue the [original] book but describes its origin from the vantage point of a writing which does not yet belong to it, or no longer belongs to it, a writing which feigns, by repeating the book, inclusion in the book’.17 Repetition is in fact the first writing that tracks down the signs of the disappearance of the origin. It does not replace absence with presence, but rather leaves ‘a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present’.18 In other words, repetition is represented by the structure and functioning of writing. As writing, repetition contains a trace of that which it excludes, which is absent, preceding that which is relationally determined as presence and thus ‘erases the myth of a present origin’.19 Difference, hence, lies in the act of eternal repetition. Derrida calls this act différance which points at a play between presence and absence. As I explained in Chapter 6, différance is a polysemy, a contingent construction which has many meanings. Différance, therefore, can never be conceptually determined but only represented through discursive and performative operations, as a play of differences. This way différance, which is always mediated, does not repeat representation but defers any final meaning. Deleuze’s and Derrida’s theories of repetition and difference give rise to disparate views on the relationship between affect and artistic practices. For Deleuze and his followers, affect is the potential of differential elements that are in themselves and that resonate together within the eternally recurrent temporality. Artists are creators of affects and every work of art is ‘a bloc of present sensations that owe their preservation only to themselves and that provide the event’.20 In other words, every work of art is a being of sensation and exists in itself. Derrida’s

17 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Repetition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1978), 372. 18 Ibid., 372. 19 Ibid., 203. 20 Deleuze and Guattari, Philosophy, 167.

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theory, however, suggest a way of thinking that strays from the immediacy of art, suggesting an alternative view of the relationship between affect and artistic practices which might best be understood through his understanding of affection. Borrowing the notion of ‘auto-affection’ from the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Derrida explains that affection: is a universal structure of experience […] And only a being capable of symbolizing, that is to say of auto-affecting, may let itself be affected by the other in general. Auto-affection is the condition of an experience in general. This possibility—another name for “life”—is a general structure articulated by the history of life, and leading to complex and hierarchical operations. Auto-affection, the as-for-itself or for-itself—subjectivity—gains in power and in its mastery of the other to the extent that its power of repetition idealizes itself. Here idealization is the movement by which sensory exteriority, that which affects me or serves me as signifier, submits itself to my power of repetition, to what henceforward appears to me as my spontaneity and escapes me less and less.21

This extract emphasises the historical dimension of auto-affection. It stresses that auto-affection performed through writing has to pass through that which is excluded and outside, which is the other. This means that one is affected by the other (i.e., by the original book) and that in writing which implies repetition (i.e., of the original book) one describes affects. In writing one does not reissue the original, but performs the freedom of writing, seeking a ‘being’ which cannot affect one by itself, in its immediacy, but rather through mediation, that is, through symbolisation, or theorisation achieved through reading and writing as relational activities. This means, as literary scholar Joseph Zappa so aptly observed, that ‘it is through a theorisation of affect’s legibility, its passage into a mediated process of reading and writing, that we can better articulate its [affect’s] semiotic and temporal conditions’.22 By these means, Derrida introduces a view of affect by placing a reader/writer at the centre of affective experience. As Zappa’s observation suggests, Derrida’s approach, which takes the audience into account, 21 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, [1967] 1997), 165–166. 22 Joseph Zappa, “Deconstructing Affects and Affects of Deconstruction,” Derrida Today, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2019): 197.

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demonstrates that no artwork, artistic performance, or performing body, can be experienced in a vacuum, or in emptiness. Artistic performance does not preserve affects only in or for itself, as Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory suggests. On the contrary, it discloses affects in the presence of the audience, that is, in relation to the audience. This means that artistic performance mobilises affects by means of symbolisation, enabling the audience to experience particular affective states that manifest as emotions of pleasure and unpleasure in response to the mediated character of affects. This, however, does not mean that the audience copies the feelings of the performers. Neither does the audience necessarily empathise with the performers by feeling what they (performers) feel, as Leigh Foster suggests. The audience may be affected by the performing body in different ways, eliciting different feelings. For instance, one assumes that black bodies in performance will affect the audience in former colonial countries differently than in other communities. The possibility of the performing body to mobilise affects through the processes of symbolisation emphasises that the body is inscribed within a particular geographical, political or cultural context and hence carries trace as the memories of past. As performance scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz maintains, it is thanks to the ‘generosity of memory’ that the dancing body can enliven an unknown space.23 To suggest the existence of affective memories is to also suggest that the rapport between the members of the audience is shaped by affective states which are historically constructed through repetition. In fact, the audience’s affections are governed by affects invested in the bodies that are discursively constructed through languages, practices, symbolic frameworks and institutions, which are regulated by politics. The kinesthetic organisation of the performing body shows that affects cannot be grasped in mime, if mime pertains merely to reactions on the surface of the skin, outside their linguistic and, more importantly, discursive competences. It must be recognised that mime is historically constructed and institutionalised through the use of scores pertaining to linguistic propositions linked to physical, bodily or movement notions. It is thanks to the linguistic and extralinguistic dimension of mime that receiving apparatuses, such as the family, the media, the school, or the church, regulate affective 23 Thomas F. DeFrantz, “Afrofuturists Remains: A Speculative Rendering of Social Dance Futures v2.0,” in Choreography and Corporeality. Relay in Motion, eds. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Philipa Rothfield (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 213.

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states, focusing on particular movement or a gesture to either sustain a hegemonic politics or contest it. One possible way of approaching the mechanism of mobilising affects and modalities of affection through artistic performances is via opinion formation.

Opinion Formation If affects can be understood only through theorisation and in relation to the discursive practice of symbolisations, can artistic performance, and art in general, co-extend and express unconditional truths as Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theory of affect suggests? Is art about processes of truth? Statements such as ‘performance expresses the immanence of the act’, ‘dance stands for the alignment of the body with movement’, the ‘political dimension of performance manifests in moving slow’, ‘mime decomposes movements outside semantic structures’, or ‘tragedy is a superior form of theatre’, once accepted as truth, preclude polemics and deny the possibility of opinion formation to take place. One might suggest that these statements, as well as variations of them, are dogmatic. In fact, they demonstrate what the unconditional perception of truth is. They are not concerned with the conditional operations such as persuasion and opinion which are generated by affective experiences. More importantly, they do not take into account other opinions which would be a gesture of political thinking and an aspect of political life. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us that political logic implies that ‘I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them’.24 According to Arendt’s convincing view, the process of opinion formation is a question of ‘being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not’.25 For the most part, opinion is the liberation from private interests. Arendt states: ‘I can make myself representative of everybody else’.26 For Arendt, this detachment from private interests relates ‘the world of

24 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (London: Penguin Books, [1961] 2006), 542. iBooks. 25 Ibid., 543. 26 Ibid., 544.

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universal interdependence’ in which all positions and opinions are impartial and interdependent. In such a world, people freely associate in the public sphere in which a plurality of opinions co-exist in harmony. The associative type of relations between differential positions and opinions gives rise to a democratic politics of agonism. Political philosopher Oliver Marchart stresses an alternative view which recognised that collectivity is ‘established through an external antagonism vis-à-vis an enemy or constitutive outside, that is, by way of dissociation’.27 In contradistinction to Arendt’s writings on associative relations, Marchart posits that a dissociative type of relations between differential positions and opinions enables a view of democratic politics in inherently conflictual terms. It acknowledges that agonism is always traversed by antagonism and that antagonism can never be eradicated from society. From this stance, public space is striated space inhabited by agonistics who are always threatened by antagonistic acts. This view is closely related to political philosopher Chantal Mouffe’s view on democracy. These two models of pluralist democracy—Arendt’s pluralism, which assumes a collective established through associability and Mouffe’s pluralism, which assumes a construction of collectives through disassociability—suggest different logics of opinion formation. From the point of view of Mouffe’s theory, social practices are not simply consequences of the aggregation of opinions, or of the abundance of opinions coexisting together in ‘the world of universal interdependence’, as Arendt’s theory suggests. On the contrary, social practices imply acts of exclusion of certain opinions, giving rise to conflicts, tensions, and polemics. How can we then envisage agreement in opinions within the context of a dissociative politics? Mouffe writes that ‘in order to have agreement in opinions, there must first be agreement in forms of life’.28 On the one hand, this implies agreement in the ways we use language and terms. On the other hand, ‘if language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as it may sound) in judgements’.29 These agreements are necessary so that various procedures can be put in 27 Oliver Marchart, Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2007), 41. 28 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London and New York: Verso, 2009),

97. 29 Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in Mouffe, ibid., 68.

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practice. It is then for the reason of their inscription in the shared forms of life, that procedures ‘should be envisaged as a complex assemble of practices’.30 Mouffe writes that ‘[t]hose practices constitute specific forms of individuality and identity that make possible the allegiance to the procedures’.31 This implies that procedures presuppose ethico-political values that are accepted and an allegiance to these values that are constitutive to social practices. This is how procedures give rise to individuality and identity through collectively established social practices, laws, or policies. It is for that reason that procedural and substantial, or procedures and practices, cannot be separated. What the co-constitutive character of procedures and practices shows is that political thought is not a matter of unconditionality, but, on the contrary, of conditionality. This, does not, however, mean that political thought stands for fidelity to truth processes, as Deleuze’s philosophy suggests. As we have seen, such a view implies the existence of a ‘natural’, or a fixed locus of origin. Conditionality stresses the impossibility of avoiding human forms of life from political thinking that requires democratic ethos and language, i.e., discourse. As Derrida suggests,32 in the absence of a fixed locus of centrality—specifically of the transcendental signified such as energeia, ousia, or alétheia—everything is discourse, including procedures and practices. He emphasises that discourse is ‘a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences’.33 Even more importantly, ‘the absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely’.34

30 Mouffe, Paradox, 97. 31 Ibid., 68. 32 Derrida criticised centrality sedimented in the history of metaphysics and the history of Western thought in general. He writes that its matrix ‘is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence—eidos, arché, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), alétheia, transcendentality…’; and, that the centre cannot be thought ‘in the form of a presentbeing’, that it has no ‘natural site’. In: Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279–280. 33 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 280. 34 Ibid.

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Performance as Object-Cause of Affects Political philosopher Ernesto Laclau reminds us that to embody something which is discursively constructed, which in fact has no consistency on its own, ‘can only mean giving a name to what is being embodied’.35 This view affirms that any social construction stands for an embodiment achieved through the performative practice of naming. Naming resides in the realm of discursivity, in the realm of opinion, political thought, and political action. This is so, because naming, as Laclau stresses, implies exclusion due to the impossibility of ‘fulfilling the names of universality’. Names of universality, such as ‘equality’ and ‘liberty for all’, can never fulfil or represent all the demands of various associations or societies. This is why naming as a performative practice of opinion formation that embodies the names of particularity (that assume the role of universality) has to be seen as a dissociative practice that manifests through tensions between different opinions. Given this, Laclau suggests that without a constitutive unevenness of opinions, there would be no jouissance, that is, no affective investment. Lacan’s psychoanalysis provides an important view on the processes of affective investment. He distinguished the real from the imaginary and the symbolic. According to Lacanian theory, the real stands for the organism’s pseudo-totality while the imaginary stands for its mental schema. The imaginary is constructed in relation to the other, and governs the investment in objects that acquire symbolic value. This mechanism inscribes the real within the symbolic. The symbolic is hence a result of a desire for the mythical fullness of reconciled society or something universal— such as ‘equality’ or ‘liberty for all’. Nevertheless, since such a desire cannot be satisfied, what follows is the particularisation of the drives into a plurality of objet petit a.36 Laclau reminds us that jouissance is achievable only ‘through radical investment in an objet petit a’.37 If we agree that jouissance, that is affect, is the very essence of investment then we can

35 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 119. 36 In Objet petit a, ‘objet’ stands for Freud’s object of desire which is mediated by

‘a’, whereas ‘a’ stands for otherness, for the other (autre in French). To be sure, Lacan insisted that objet petit a should remain untranslated. On this interpretation of objet petit a, see, for instance: Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (Routledge: London and New York, 2001). 37 Laclau, On Populist Reason, 116.

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recognise that the embodying entity is always invested with affects. And since the very being of an embodied entity is itself a discursive production, not an ‘essence’, then to invest affects in objects means to represent them on a nominal level. Artistic performance pertains to the processes of naming. It anticipates a co-engagement of the choreographer with the performers and other agents included in the production of the performance, such as the costume designer, set designer, dramaturge, sound and light director, musician, composer, and so on. The principle of co-engagement of the differential agents in the making of a performance stimulates opinion formation, in its call for an agreement between specific forms of individuality and identity allegiant to certain ethico-political values. Relations in performance are hence a result of agreement about shared forms of life. They imply decisions on processes of performance-making, such as who the performers are, why and how the performers are going to perform, what they are going to perform, who is going to perform what, and for whom they are going to perform. Such an apportionment of parts and positions, as philosopher Jacques Rancière proposes, ‘is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution’.38 It is this agreement on shared parts and positions within artistic performance that give rise to certain opinions and exclude others. According to this view, agreement among a group of persons cannot be seen as an unconditioned process, an arbitrary composition of differential and adequate positions. On the contrary, agreement implies a decisive and concrete unity of differential opinions. The choreographer and dance scholar Olivia Millard’s investigation of dance improvisation shows that such a unity is relationally accomplished through the practice of naming. She demonstrates that relations between performers are established through scores that pertain to the processes of naming by use of physical, bodily or movement notions.39

38 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, [2000] 2006), 12. 39 Millard’s view of improvisation challenges Cynthia Jean Novack’s opposition between choreography as a formal movement executed for the audience and improvisation as a spontaneous creative method that generates meaning. See: Cynthia Jean Novack,

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The writer Sydney Finkelstein notes that performance ‘discloses not an actual event but a pattern of outer movement, as a force operating on human hopes and feeling’.40 For that matter, agreement in opinions implies not only a performative practice of naming that embodies different opinions in choreography, but also a collective investment of affects in artistic performances embodied on the symbolic level. To invest affects in a performance is to dramatise the performing body with attributes that give it an identity and enable the audience to distinguish who might be a friend or an enemy. Artistic performances demonstrate that affects, rather than being properties of bodies, objects, and signs, are social constructs that can be invested in bodies, objects, and signs. This is why the performing body is capable of increasing or diminishing affective states through theatricality that relies on signs. This, by extension, can only mean that affect mobilised among the audience, as Ahmed proposed, is an effect of the circulation of signs: ‘the more signs circulate, the more affective they become’.41 As ‘sign of signs’, artistic performance is always already invested with particular affects, and as such addresses the audience. As an object-cause of affects, it gives rise to emotions, polemics, opinions, and decisions, challenging movement, identities, language, forms, cultural taboos, prejudices, and differences. Consequently, one cannot think about performing bodies as incorporeal abstractions that embody or actualise the incorporeal true event into a ‘true’ compossible field. Affects mobilised among ‘us’ are conditioned by the body of’them’, not by abstractions. In fact, affects are invested in the body of the other through various discursive practices; they are conditioned by the corporeal, not by something incorporeal as Massumi invites us to believe. Corporealities, as Leigh Foster stressed, are historically constructed within particular geographical, political, and cultural contexts. This means that ‘affects as semiotics’ always produce a specific symbolic order which bears traces of the past and which, as a partial and contingent construction, is achieved on the

Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Olivia Millard, “What’s the Score?” Ausdance, accessed 5 February 2021, https://ausdance.org.au/articles/details/whats-the-score-using-scores-indance-improvisation. 40 Sydney Finkelstein, Art and Society (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 279. 41 Ahmed’s theory of emotion as economy asserts that affect is produced as an effect

of circulation. See: Ahmed, “Orientations,” 45.

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nominal level. Put another way, an artistic performance that we watch is not an object of thought. Rather, it is the object of knowledge which is historically constructed and symbolically invested with affects. While bearing traces of the past, artistic performance mobilises the audience’s members feelings to form an opinion about what they see and what they feel.

Critical Aspects of Performance If emotion derived from the sight of historically constructed phenomena can only be understood from a mediated relation with affects, artistic performance can no longer be seen to disclose an actual event. The evental approach to performance with its radical immanent account prevents the process of opinion formation, and, hence, the unfolding of tension, polemics, and agreements, which are indispensable for the establishment of a particular type of relations. When performance is envisaged as an event, it becomes difficult to imagine not only how performers establish a relationship between themselves and with the choreographer, but also how the performance establishes a relationship with the audience. By preventing a disclosure of the outer movement through opinion formation this approach, by extension, neglects the indispensable moment of a passionate affective investment in the object of performance. Yet, to envisage performance through opinion formation should not be confused with the kinetic phenomenon. Neither should it be associated with an agreement on a definition of performance. To form an opinion is not about the intellectualisation of performance concerned with what performance is in-itself, what the pure form of performance is, or what is truly a performance. Rather, to form an opinion is to let one capable of symbolising be affected by an array of topics, such as gender, racism, poverty, populism, conflicts, terrorism, neo-colonialism, the accumulation of nuclear arsenal, increased carbon emissions, the extinction of species, and so on. Performance employs the body in such a way that it can affect the audience to feel reality differently and to envisage different possibilities of constructing a democratic politics and of ways of living together. For this reason, the political dimension of artistic performance does not reside in zones of indeterminacy, but rather on the horizon of symbolisation or representation arising from the current state of affairs.

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Representation, however, does not reproduce a fullness. It is a contingent construction that defers any final meaning. Once the members of the audience become affected by the representational framework of a performance, their ‘self-affections’ starts seeping into opinions mobilising polemics, debates, and tensions among them. We can imagine how such a critical collective, articulates its demands through the performative practice of naming, and invests particular affects into a particular symbolic value. By these means, affective investment may lead to innovative symbolic constructions, representations, practices, and politics. This is why artistic performance can be seen as a contesting choreopolitical practice capable of mobilising the constructions of alternative communities. While the art audience does not gather a wide spectrum of identities, artists, curators, scholars, or art programmers, as well as the members of the audience who occupy positions of power whether on the left or right of the political spectrum might still mobilise institutional change precisely because of the power they possess. This is why it is possible to envisage how artistic performance can mobilise the audience to contest a politics that discriminates bodies, by investing specific affects in them.

CHAPTER 9

Identifications

At the outset of this book, I set the following goal: to envisage forms of collectivity capable of contesting neoliberal discourses on individualism and right-wing discourses on intolerance while suggesting more democratic forms of living together. To this end, I have laid out my thoughts against the backdrop of the crisis of neoliberalism and the growing institutionalisation of right-wing politics and authoritarian regimes across Europe followed by civic unrest and movements on the left of the political spectrum. My first goal was to explore how different left-leaning civil movements inspired political philosophers to envisage alternative models of democracy. I have demonstrated that horizontal civil movements without leadership inform a model of absolute democracy which advocates direct rule of the self-organising multitude. I have envisaged the main strategy of this politics in terms of withdrawal from the institutions,

A portion of this chapter subtitled ‘Imagining a popular form of collectivity in Rimini Protokoll’s 100% City’ expands on my ‘Performance and Populism. Choreographing Popular Forms of Collectivity’, first published in The Oxford Handbook of Performance and Politics, edited by Milija Gluhovi´c, Silvija Jestrovi´c, Michael Saward and Shirin Rai, 679–692 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2021). Reproduction with the permission of Oxford University Press. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Petrovi´c-Lotina, Choreographing Agonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79446-0_9

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practices, and symbolic representations which are dominated by a hegemonic politics. In addition to informing a model of absolute democracy, horizontal civil movements were the inspiration for a model of communal anarchism which advocates a self-governing community of the people. I have described the main strategy of this politics as one of rupturing the institutions, practices, and symbolic representations which are regulated by a hegemonic politics. My second goal was to examine how horizontal civil movements, and the models of democracy that emanate from them, offer performance scholars a means to envisage the political dimension of artistic performances. I demonstrated that horizontal politics influenced theories of avoidance and rupture in performance studies. The former, inspired by post-operaist thinkers, advocate avoidance of any form of tension, conflict, or drama; the latter, inspired by theories of anarchism, see rupture as a guiding strategy for challenging existing power relations. Despite such differences, what these theories share is a tendency of doing away with representation. The consequence of this intervention is a view of community as a self-instituting, self-organising, and self-governing collectivity without hierarchy, identity, or identification. In such a community, all markers of difference are supposed to disappear within the smooth space without constitutive divisions. This community must then be the expression of a harmonious collectivity that exists in itself. Were one able to determine society by doing away with identity, a harmonious society might indeed be possible. But philosopher and performance scholar Bojana Kunst demonstrates just how difficult, or rather how impossible, such a task is. As observed in Chapter 4, despite an attempt to avoid any representation of identity by means of duration and concomitantly to enable the embodiment of the self-organised multitude, Kunst’s view on community was trapped by the very problematic she set out to challenge. By ascribing political value to duration, Kunst pre-established identity at the level of a temporal dimension manifested by less work, inactivity, and waiting, rather than by acceleration, flexibility, and efficacy. The consequence of this tactic, which opposes a workers’ identity associated with acceleration against one associated with duration, is the creation of an essentialist identity. Such a view of a democratic form of community simplifies the complexity of social relations, reducing them to the level of determination by economism. Might a harmonious society be possible if one were to do away with the process

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of identification? Performance scholar André Lepecki’s view on community demonstrates the very impossibility of doing so. As observed in Chapter 4, Lepecki defines compossibility as a community brought into existence through the rupture of the existing politics, that is, through a dissensual movement. Reduced to the kinetic phenomenon maintained by isolated a-personalities, Lepecki’s view on community precludes us from imagining how members’ relations are established, how they form opinions, and how they agree on specific forms of individuality and collectivity. In fact, Lepecki’s term, ‘leadingfollowing’, coined to designate moving together towards a new, ‘compossible’ community by blurring differences between the leader and the followers, between the choreographer and the performers, or between persons. Leadingfollowing requires the unity of many dissimilar positions around a common cause, by means of tension, opinion formation, and identification around shared ethico-political values, such as freedom and equality for all. Whether they avoid or disrupt existing discourses, theories of avoidance and rupture in performance studies fail to offer clear answers to fundamental political questions. How to organise across differences in order to contest a dominant politics and articulate society in an innovative way? How to challenge identities that arose as a result of a politics of subordination, oppression, and exploitation? Or, how to transform the audience seen as passive onlookers into active citizens? This is so because they reduce political questions to the kinetic phenomenon, to the movement that avoids or disrupts representation. For example, these thinkers do not allow us to envisage how artistic performances critically engage with the symbolic representations of workers, women, people of colour, LGBTQIA, immigrants, poor, or any other democratic identity dominated by a hegemonic politics and discourses. By extension, they preclude a clear view of a unity of various democratic identities as a popular form of a pro-active collectivity. The question that arises from the post-representational trajectory in performance studies is whether an identity-blind approach to performance studies can incorporate and reflect on the ongoing social process designated by discourses on intolerance towards immigrants, people of colour, people of other faiths and people from other regions. Seeking an answer to this question, I turned to the vertical civil movements with leadership and the model of agonistic democracy. This model sees society in inherently conflictual terms and advocates engagement within the institutions of parliamentary democracy as a way of regulating

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conflicts in agonist terms. I have designated the main strategy of this politics in terms of engaging with the institutions, practices, and symbolic representations that are regulated by a hegemonic discourse. Strategies of engagement enable various groups to transform institutions from within, giving rise to alternative politics. By introducing engagement with hegemonic discourses which dominate reality, my approach throughout this book has been to formulate the contesting political dimension of artistic performance. In dialogue with different theories of performance scholars, I demonstrated that the contesting power of the performing body cannot be simply envisaged through its physical capacity to move, whether fast, slow, or in syncopation. I also maintained that eliminating markers of identity, such as gender, race, or class, as well as any discussion on structural inequality, such as those between men and women, people of colour, and social statuses, leads to the denial of inequality, thus, precluding the critical aspect of artistic performance. With the help of discourse theory, I argued that the performing body is discursively constructed, both through body language and the institutions, practices, and symbolic representations within which it is inscribed. The inscription of the body within the set of these relations is what I call the moment of representation. This implies that the body, including bodily movement, is always already constructed and represented on the symbolic level that manifests itself as identity. This is why the choreography of German dancer and actress Valeska Gert (1892–1978) cannot be interpreted merely as an ensemble of grotesque movements excluding the fact that she grew up in bourgeois family and that she often used her body as a site of critique of that same society by performing characters beaten down by social inequality in the aftermath of the World War I. Unlike a conservative identity-blind approach to performance studies, an identity-conscious approach recognises that we do not possess our bodies. In fact, bodies are properties of political discourses that dominate languages, institutions, and social practices. Such an approach puts forward a view of corporeality as a relational, historical, and symbolic construct and a site of knowledge equally capable of challenging or acquiescing with the particular geographical, political, and cultural context within which it is inscribed. To contest a hegemonic politics that may prioritise class over gender, gender over race, or race over religion, would require critical engagement with the discriminatory markers of the body institutionalised through knowledge production, social practices, and symbolic representations.

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The strategies of engagement with hegemonic political discourses recognise tension as a guiding philosophical, political, and artistic force. As I maintain in Chapter 6, tension is a dynamic force at work between various discursive elements. It sets discursive elements in a particular relation and gives them a particular unifying form. What gives form to performance is a particular configuration of movements that express tension between, for instance, slow and fast, stretched and compressed, or horizontal and vertical. By sculpting the body in a challenging way, performance can create tension in its relation to the audience. It can contest the audience’s perceptual codes thereby enabling the articulation of initial affectivity into alternative forms of representation through opinion formation. Accordingly, I have introduced articulation as a choreographic practice capable of constructing the people or alternative forms of community. In the next section, I will formulate how artistic performances imagine alternative forms of community and expand our knowledge about ways of living together in multicultural societies. But, before turning to the forms of collectivity imagined by artistic performances, I will discuss how civic performances might inform alternative views of community and inspire pro-active forms of collectivity.

Struggle Against the Techniques of Domination In their book, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Global Institutions and Global Social Movements (2000), political theorists Robert O’Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc Williams, examine the relationship between neoliberal, multilateral institutions, such as The World Bank (WB), The World Trade Organisation (WTO), The International Monetary Fund (IMF), and political forms of organisation of resistance and struggle, such as the civic women’s movements, labour movements, and environmental movements.1 Their insightful study lays out the importance of capitalist techniques of domination for understanding political processes and envisaging alternative ways of living together. For the purposes of this inquiry, I will focus my thoughts on the relationship between the World Bank and the women’s movements. By doing so, I do not want to undermine the differences between 1 Robert O’Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte and Marc Williams, Contesting Global Governance, Multilateral Global Institutions and Global Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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various struggles—labour, feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, etc.— but rather have chosen one particular focus in order to emphasise two points. Firstly, the inconsistency of ultimate unity in any constructed identity. And secondly, the co-constitutive relationship between various types of democratic struggle. In return, this approach will allow us to envisage possible ways of transforming a dominant politics. My goal is to suggest alternative answers to some of the questions that are central to democratic politics: how do we organise across differences; how can we articulate the popular struggle for the recognition of the diversity of democratic demands and ethical concerns; what kind of subjectivities might be constructed in democratic societies; how can citizens exercise their democratic rights and, finally, how might artistic performances contribute to the construction of new communities? Before going any further, it is important to mention the role of multilateral economic institutions. In the post-war period, states became increasingly influenced by international institutions and multinational corporations. To be more precise, the multilateral economic institutions that were established after 1944, such as the WTO, WB, and IMF, gradually transformed the nature of governments by moving the concentration of power away from the nation states to global economic institutions. The World Bank—henceforward called ‘the Bank’—is a useful case-study for understanding this process. Established in 1944, this multilateral economic institution became the world’s largest reconstruction and development bank. The Bank’s decision-making lies in the hands of its Board of Executive Directors who are appointed by twenty-five member states, with the US exercising disproportionate influence on its work.2 The main task of the Bank is to provide policy-based loans, predominantly in developing countries.3 As a result of the neoliberal economic orthodoxy prescribing state withdrawal from the markets, particularly from the early 1980s onwards, the Bank gradually increased its loans to the private sector. As O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte, and Williams’ study shows, it was the

2 The Board of Directors consists of the World Bank Group President and 25 executive directors. Source: ‘Boards of Directors’, The World Bank, accessed 13 February 2017, http://www.worldbank.org/en/about/leadership/directors. 3 ‘What We Do’, The World Bank, accessed 13 February 2017, http://www.worldbank. org/en/about/what-we-do.

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private sector, least controlled by the Bank, that had enormous impact on labour, environmental, and gender standards.4 In order to limit the power of the private sector and to promote ‘good governance’, from 1990s onwards the Bank started to ‘encourage greater participation in national institutions of governance’ stimulating global social movements ‘to make the Bank’s work more transparent and accessible to those most affected by it’.5 At the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995, the Bank’s rhetoric was easily detectable.6 At this conference—composed of official delegates representing United Nations member states—a range of women’s issues was discussed, such as health care, education, employment, and poverty. It was the site of the launch of The Women’s Eye on the Bank campaign which featured a ‘Platform for Action’ that listed a series of demands for increased participation of grassroots women in the Bank’s economic policy making. Demands included greater investment in women’s education and health, the institutionalisation of a gender perspective in the Bank’s policies, and legal and human rights, among others.7 James Wolfensohn, the Bank’s president at the time, attended the conference, met with women’s civil society groups, and accepted The Women’s Eye on the Bank petition that called on the Bank to fully implement the Platform’s demands and to increase women’s civil society involvement in the Bank’s activities. As a consequence, that same year, Wolfensohn set up the External Gender Consultative Group (EGCG). Consisting of fourteen women who belonged to different women’s movements around the world, the EGCG was to be consulted by the Bank on issues such as applying gender equity to work in the private sector, or gender equity in the institutional change processes.8 The next step that the Bank undertook was to establish a Gender Sector Board (GSB) in 1997, concerned with family and poverty issues on global and national levels.9 With these initiatives, the Bank appeared to not only

4 O’Brien et al., Governance, 25. 5 Ibid., 26. 6 The conference took place from 4 to 15 September 1995. 7 ‘The World Bank External Gender Consultative Group’, The World Bank, accessed 13

February 2017, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/688621468325436522/ The-World-Bank-external-gender-consultative-group. 8 O’Brien et al., Governance, 43. 9 Ibid., 44.

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foster economic development but to also encourage the development of social justice. At the same time, the global women’s movements appeared to challenge the Bank’s economic policies by entering into a dialogue with local governments and by having access to the Bank. Nevertheless, the EGCG and the GSB were criticised by women’s grassroots movements on four fronts: the selection of representatives was far from transparent; the selected women did not represent a variety of women’s movements; women’s demands for change were not put into action; and, neither the EGCG or the GSB had any real influence on social justice, assigning value to women’s work, improving women’s rights to ownership, or their access to education.10 As O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte, and Williams detail, the incapacity of the Bank to institutionalise various gender demands can be explained by the gap in policy discourses between the Bank’s demands and the women’s demands. They note that while the Bank’s neoliberal economic discourse departs from the level of macroeconomy, the feminist discourse begins at the level of microeconomics and a politics of decision-making between women and men.11 Furthermore, in contrast to the macroeconomic discourse which aims to improve market efficiency, the feminist discourse aims to improve gender or social justice.12 In the neoliberal economic environment, this equates to setting the economic case for gender equity above the ethico-political or feminist case for gender equity. The authors write that ‘[i]n interactions between gender equity advocates and the Bank, the terms of discourse are set by the Bank, as the more powerful interlocutor, obliging feminist critics to work within the framework of the neoliberal concern with efficiency’.13 This is a crucial point. It highlights the fact that the Bank’s organisation of the process of production implies not only techniques of production put in motion by means of flexibility, efficiency, capital accumulation, and competition—as post-operaists Virno, Kunst, and Lazzarato observed. It also implies techniques of domination which are propelled by the hegemony of neoliberal discourse by means of obligations, bureaucracy, data collection, and surveillance, thus exerting control over the women’s ethico-political

10 Ibid., 46. 11 Ibid., 47. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 48.

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demands for social justice. Recognising the distinction between capitalist techniques of production and capitalist techniques of domination, it becomes obvious that the capitalist process of production necessarily implies the struggle of women (women in particular, and people in general) against capital’s exercise of domination. What becomes clear, then, is that both the Bank’s aspirations to dominate and the women’s struggle against the techniques of domination influence how processes of production are organised. As the analysis of O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte, and Williams demonstrates, the gender equity concern for girls’ education and women’s health influenced the Bank’s investment in these spheres and affected the organisation and expansion of productive forces on both sides. Similarly, the gender equity concern with poverty was addressed through the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (C-GAP) by offering micro-credit to the very poor whose borrowers were mainly women.14 On the one hand, these examples show that the EGCG and C-GAP programmes are affected both by the neoliberal logic of capital and by the logic of women’s ethico-political demands for social justice. On the other hand, they testify that capital is capable of appropriating women’s discourses on equality, anti-hierarchy, decentralisation, and autonomy, in order to secure the production of capital. By means of the appropriation of discourses on different women’s demands, capital clearly exerts control over the process of production in a variety of fields—economic, social, cultural, and political—thus strengthening its hegemonic position through network economy. This observation shows that capital is not only reactive. Rather, both capital and social movements play a pro-active role in the process of transformation of productive forces and enable the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism in the past, or, more importantly, from post-Fordism to an alternative economic model in the future. Taking into consideration that within the framework of neoliberal hegemony the Bank has power over discourses in a variety of sites, and that both capital and various civic groups play a pro-active role in the transformation of the existing economic model into an alternative one, it is important to recognise that the practice of contesting the Bank’s hegemonic neoliberal discourse requires an action of women’s movements wherever the relations of domination between the Bank and women are

14 Ibid., 50.

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articulated and wherever women are subordinated to capital. In the postFordist era, such an action requires a measured sublimation of women’s multifarious ethico-political demands into a hegemony thus ‘launching’, as Mouffe suggests, ‘a counter-hegemonic offensive in a variety of fields where the nodal points securing the new post-Fordist mode of regulation of capitalism have been established’.15 Similarly, O’Brien, Goetz, Scholte, and Williams, argue that in order to influence dominant politics, women’s movements ‘must seek constructive engagement and “entry” into institutional processes and cognitive frameworks’.16 It goes without saying that this tactic calls upon the mobilisation of many women’s sectors in a unity constructed around collective decision. On the one hand, a collective decision-making process goes beyond women’s civic organisations to include trade unions, grassroots, and other social groups in which women take part, such as people of colour, LGBTQIA, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, human rights advocates, rural groups, immigrants, and many others. From this point of view, feminism is a ‘dissident’ movement that includes race, class, sex, migration and human trafficking analysis.17 On the other hand, a collective decisionmaking process implies the engagement of these groups with a broad variety of social practices, movements, institutions, and cognitive frameworks, that play out nationally and internationally, locally and globally, or unilaterally and multilaterally, wherever the demands of women, and people more generally, are subordinated to capital.18 Accordingly, feminism, as the writer Reni Eddo-Lodge puts it, is ‘a movement that works to liberate all people who have been economically, socially and culturally marginalised’.19

15 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 73. 16 O’Brien et al., Governance, 33. 17 Philosopher Marina Gržini´c adds nuance to Paul B. Preciado’s notion of ‘dissi-

dent feminism’ in: Marina Gržini´c, “Dissident Feminisms, Anti-Racist Politics and Artistic Interventionist Practices,” p/art/icipate, Kultur Aktiv Gestalten, Issue 03 (2014):1–10. 18 This approach goes beyond Hardt’s and Negri’s proposal that globalisation may be fought beyond the State, exclusively on the global level. See: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Empire (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 310. 19 Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury 2018), 181.

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This notion of unity suggests that the strategic engagement of many women’s movements in the struggle against the hegemony of capital could induce the transformation of the Bank’s cognitive framework from ‘the economic case for gender equity’ to ‘the ethico-political case for gender equity’. While the former contributes to the instrumentalisation of women, the latter empowers women in decision-making processes, improves women’s equality and, finally, replaces the neoliberal discourse on gender. The goal is to establish an order in which gender-based demands would neither be perceived nor addressed through particular interventions and solutions offered by macroeconomic strategies. Rather, gender would be recognised in terms of relations present on all social levels and, finally, would render gender differences irrelevant in the domain of politics. The closing of the moment of a pre-established harmonious unity in which essence—such as, gender, class, race, and other markers of identity—underlies common, opens up the possibility of a global contest, struggle, and dis/articulation. The complexity of this strategy implies that the unity of many movements around a common cause of struggle—not a ‘common good’ that implies a pre-established common—should not be sought in any privileged subject position. Once we have acknowledged that workers’ identity is a symbolic unity discursively constructed on the basis of economic interests which are inserted into the relations of production, and that women’s identity is discursively constructed due to the division between the private and the public in which economic interests play an important role, we can propose that the struggle against capitalism requires a form of unity constituted out of the ensemble of social relations in which those of production and womanhood are only a few among many. Therefore, the workers’ and women’s unities should not be perceived as being rational, but rather as being relational. In fact, they should be conceived as the consequence of identification of different subject positions with a set of shared ethico-political values that, consequently, unite them in the struggle against post-Fordist techniques of domination over the ‘workers’ and the ‘women’. As Mouffe explains: ‘as the result of the construction of nodal points, partial fixations can take place and precarious forms of identification can be established around the category “women” which provide the basis for a feminist identity and a feminist struggle’.20 Similarly, one

20 Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso [1993] 2005), 87.

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can envisage the category of ‘workers’ which embraces the workers’ identity and labour struggle, or any other category, whether environmentalist, anti-racist, or LGBTQIA. Such a view implies that feminist identity and feminist struggle, just like workers identity and labour struggle, play a foundational role in the transformation of politics when acting collectively with other marginalised groups to establish the power of the people over a subjugating politics. Such a view on subjectivities in relational and collective terms sheds light on an alternative view on ways of living together.

Constructing Alternative Communities When the process of production is understood as the consequence of the struggle of the people against the hegemony of post-Fordist techniques of domination over their practices—and not just as the result of post-Fordist techniques of production concerned with competition and accumulation of the capital—then subjectivities can be envisaged in alternative ways. They can be envisaged beyond reductionism to any pre-established identity that has an ultimate ontological foundation such as workers’ identity, women’s identity, racial identity, or any other essentialist construction of identity. When subjectivities are understood exclusively in terms of either class-based, gender-based, or race-based identities, then, in turn, they preclude the possibility of constructing a political unity that welds together various democratic demands, or—to use Gramsci’s terminology—various people’s wills in a collective decision.21 Following Gramsci’s thought, it is only when a unity is organised around a collective decision that the quantity of various democratic wills becomes the quality of a popular or collective will capable of challenging the power of capital, or the system, on every level that it dominates people.22 This means that the collective decision-making process is a consequence of identification unfolding among various democratic

21 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. III, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 164. 22 Mind that we are speaking about the quality of people, not of things. On quantity and quality see: Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. I, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 226.

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identities to counter a hegemonic politics. The operation of counteridentification does not relate the process of identifying with economic interests but with a shared set of ethical and political values among the people. To envisage the construction of subjectivity in collective, relational, and ethico-political terms does not necessitate erasing the markers of identity such as women, workers, or people of colour. These identities do not disappear. They stand for the feminist, labour, and anti-racial struggles for the equality of women, workers, and people of colour, on every level on which these identities are subordinated to capitalist forces of domination—locally and globally, nationally and internationally, inside institutions and outside institutions. Recognising the identity of so-called minorities is essential to dismantling the system that is producing the class-, race-, gender- and sexuality- based differences. When subjectivities are envisaged in relational terms, community cannot stand for the ‘constant dispossession of collaboration’.23 Indeed, if that were the case, community would be assigned by the biological nature of individuals. Similarly, community cannot stand for ethnos, for what today we refer to as ethnicity. Again, if this were the case, community would be defined, as philosopher Étienne Balibar has pointed out, by membership and filiation.24 Neither can community stand for a unity of workers enabled by the temporal dimension of duration. This view suggests that community is defined merely by capitalist techniques of production that manifest themselves through efficacy, flexibility, and acceleration. It does not take into account techniques of domination by means of which capital produces, dominates, and exploits, various identities, practices, and places. Community must be understood as a system of social relations and differential democratic struggles symbolically united by means of identification around shared ethico-political values for freedom and equality and articulated in a collective which at the same time is the locus of struggle of that collective against various techniques of domination. In such a community, people do not disregard existing identities, economies, universalities, otherness, collaborations, and anything else that can be shared, as the post-operaists’ approach to community proposes. On the

23 Bojana Kunst, Artist at Work (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2015), 96. 24 Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship,

trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8.

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contrary, in a community united by collective decision informed by opinion formation, people strategically engage with all the existing and historical categories that are dominated by capital in order to displace sedimented discourses on supremacy, exploitation, and possession, and to articulate new ones. In fact, in such a community people are active agents of a politics. This view of community does not reduce the complexity of social articulations to the equivalence and parallelism of many dissimilar subjects deprived of relations and collaborations, or, in Kunst’s words, to the ‘strange being-the-one-with-the-other’ in which there is only ‘I’.25 On the contrary, it supports the idea of a community that presupposes that ‘I’ is part of ‘we’. It indicates that ‘I’ is constituted at the point of intersection of an ensemble of social relations that constitute ‘we’.26 In this view, ‘I’ has a social function in which historical processes present themselves. Clearly, ‘I’ is relationally and historically constructed. As such, ‘I’ can belong to different associations of ‘we’, either simultaneously or in succession. This implies that ‘I’, just as any identity, is a contingent construction—it can always be otherwise. Furthermore, we can understand social relations to be expressed by diverse associations of ‘we’ that presuppose one another and whose unity is dialectical, not formal. In Gramsci’s view on social relations, ‘we’ stands for the ‘“equalities” that are felt among the members of an association and the “inequalities” that are felt between associations’.27 Accordingly, community is a collective that is historically constructed out of conflicting encounters between the differential associations which anticipate ‘I’ in terms of ‘we’. When community is envisaged in terms of tension between differential human associations, it’s becoming must be seen in terms of what Gramsci calls ‘“concordia discors” which does not have unity for its point of departure but contains in itself the reason for a possible unity’.28 In other words, community is

25 Kunst, Artist, 96–97. 26 My formulation of ‘I’ is inspired by Kimberle Crenshaw’s notion of intersectionality

which describes the interconnectedness of distinct social discriminations, such as race and sexism, in people who are women and black. See: Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Colour,” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299. 27 Gramsci, Notebooks III , 187. 28 Ibid., 186.

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a form of collectivity consisting of many dissimilar and conflictual associations of ‘we’ which are capable of uniting against a common cause of marginalisation, exploitation, intolerance, or poverty, displacing it, and articulating an alternative order of politics. If an individual as ‘I’ is a member of different groups as ‘we’, and if, as sociologist Didier Eribon convincingly writes, ‘collective movements provide individuals with the means to constitute themselves as political subjects’,29 then an alternative, democratic form of community must be capable of welding together various democratic associations guided by disparate ethico-political values and demands. This refers to values usually dominated or supressed by global capitalist forces, including demands that vary between the workers in the same or different company, country, or continent. Accordingly, a community that embodies various democratic identities is the result of collective identifications around a set of shared ethico-political values. Radical relationalism that stems from the process of identification transforms the multitude of democratic demands, or democratic wills, into what Gramsci calls, a ‘collective’ or, ‘popular will’.30 To embody a popular will that upholds various supressed ethicopolitical values, the people must unite and engage in a struggle against the common cause of subordination: that is, against the hegemonic forces that dominate, possess, and exploit their lives at every level. If a hegemonic politics relies on discourses that govern affects that serve the construction of a popular identity united around symbols that foster the reproduction of capital and silences discourses on gender, race, and, labour, then the critical strategy of engagement with the institutionalised politics requires counter-symbolisation. Such a counter-tactic underscores that every social unity is a potential hegemonic unity constructed at the symbolic level and conditioned by that which it excludes. By articulating a (counter) hegemony, a popular collectivity mobilises affects towards the construction of democratic forms of living together allegiant to shared ethico-political values. Such a community might best be defined as an insurgent community, one which demands emancipation for everyone not merely for those who share identity. When community is seen as a pro-active, insurgent entity then it refuses to freeze the dominated, whether women,

29 Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims (London: Penguin Books, [2009] 2013), 233. 30 Gramsci, Notebooks III , 165.

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immigrant, black, or gay, in what historian Asad Haider describes as ‘a status of victimhood that requires protection from above’.31 It requires emancipation which can be seen as self-emancipation only in relation to identification among the so-called minorities uniting to counter a politics of domination.

Time, Space, and Community A quest for the construction of an alternative order of politics capable of defending the multiplicity of democratic identities highlights the relationship between temporal and spatial dimensions. To envisage alternative forms of community, some performance scholars prioritise the temporal dimension. Kunst, for example, suggests that a new form of community should be united by the temporal dimension of duration which is capable of addressing a specific relationship with movement. As a postrepresentational and durational category, meeting adds nuance to an understanding of community in terms of the potential of closeness, designating that-which-is-still-to-come. According to such a view, the struggle against capital becomes the struggle against all forms of attachment to particular places. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty critiques such a view. Convincingly, he writes that the privilege of duration produces ‘the period of waiting that the third world has to go through for capital’s logic to be fulfilled’.32 Duration, Chakrabarty stresses, is empty, homogeneous, and underdeveloped time. In fact, duration is an expression of Eurocentrism. To understandtemporality differently, time and space must also be imagined differently, that is, in relational, co-constitutive, and mutually engaging terms. In New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1990), political philosopher Ernest Laclau addresses that challenge by proposing that space is a discursively constructed system of contingent relations that exteriorise other possible relational configurations. Since it depends on the exterior, space is always traversed by mere possibility which stands for a form of temporality and enables dislocation. This is to say, that every structure implies the spatialisation of time, while time continuously

31 Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity. Race and Class in the Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2018), 113. 32 See: Dipesh Chakrabartry, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 49.

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dislocates space. In Laclau’s terms, dislocation is both the condition of possibility and the impossibility of total spatialisation.33 When time is spatially represented through a cyclical succession of dislocations, then what is called space becomes a sequence in which relations between different subject positions, or democratic identities, are partially structured and represented within a particular spatial context, precisely by an act of exclusion of other possible configurations.34 Accordingly, every sequence is always threatened by the constitutive temporal exteriority that constantly traverses it, dislocates it, and arrests its total spatialisation. Political theorist Oliver Marchart emphasised that ‘the concept sequence—if it implies putting diachronous elements into synchronous order—is in itself a spatial concept’.35 This allows us to observe that sequence relations between different subject positions, that is, between specific forms of individuality and identity allegiant to certain ethico-political values, become partially structured and represented symbolically within a particular spatial context which is always traversed by the dimension of time. Accordingly, every identity, just like every identification, must be seen as a relational and contingent construction. Identity is context dependent and it can always be conceived otherwise, revealing distinct forms of discrimination, exclusion, and marginalisation that traverse it. Accordingly, identification implies a continuous process of disidentification from one group and identification with another. The struggle against techniques of domination—that may prioritise class over gender, gender over race, race over religion, or economic interests over ethico-political values—aims to dislocate hegemonic politics and discourses spatialised by means of institutions, practices, and symbolic representations that are governed by a hegemonic politics. The techniques of domination thus trigger the process of articulation of a temporal

33 Ernesto Laclau, New Reflection on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 40–43. 34 In contrast to that which Deleuze calls an instant, a sequence has a spatial dimension. See: Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 147. 35 Oliver Marchart, ‘Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s). Some basic observations on the difficult relation of public art, urbanism and political theory’, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (EIPCP), accessed 14 February 2017, http://eipcp.net/tra nsversal/0102/marchart/en/#f9.

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dimension into a spatial dimension. In fact, the process of articulation of affects into symbols, the multitude into people, or the real into representation, enables initial immediacy not only to query the concreteness of any discursive mediation spatialised by a hegemonic politics, but also to establish another order of sequences that will become a common cause of other struggles. When space is constructed through the process of articulation—rather than by the principle of development—it stands for the representation of a possible spatially constituted unity in contradistinction to the techniques of domination. Such a unity, as suggested above, is discursively constituted in a collective will.36 This view suggests that horizontal civil movements, such as the international Occupy movement (2011–2012), Black Lives Matter (2014–),37 or Nuit debout (2016), must transform the durational potential of the protesters that enables resistance into the struggle of the protesters that would institutionalise, that is, spatialise, their demands into rights. Antiracist and feminist thinker, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, writes convincingly that unlike the decentralised and leaderless Occupy strategy, the Black Lives Matter movement needs organisation and leadership in order to target institutions and to strengthen and protect Black rights.38 Furthermore, since every order is a contingent category, then every institutionalised politics must be seen as standing for a sequence in cyclical succession. Such is the drama that brings the sublimation of the protesters’ initial demands into concrete rights that would then be defended by representatives in parliament. It is only by means of struggle, engagement, and institutionalisation that various civil movements may

36 A movement from one to another dimension, from time to space, is not a movement envisaged in Aristotelian terms as a movement from potentiality to actualisation. Neither, as Oliver Marchart shows, it is a movement from activity to passivity. Time is a constitutive outside to space, and it may prevent total spatialisation; space can always be reactivated, it can always be temporised. For this reason, as Marchart shows, Laclau’s theory stands beyond constructivism and post-constructivism. In: Marchart, ibid. 37 The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement started after the shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. In November 2020, Cori Bush, one of the organisers and leading activists of BLM in Missouri, won her U.S. House of Representatives race supported by the Democratic Party and other progressives. Bush became the first BLM activist to earn a seat in Congress and the first Black woman to represent Missouri in the state’s 200 year history. 38 This debate has been developed in: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).

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be capable to not only challenge a dominant politics but to combat them and thus construct different, more democratic forms of community. From this point of view, strategies of avoidance by means of duration are not strategies of political construction; they are strategies of political abstention.

Artistic Practices and the Construction of Community The view on subjectivities, communities, and the common in relational, conflicting, articulating, and representational terms provides an alternative perspective on the role of art and the relationship between artistic performance and its audience. On the one hand, it implies that the political dimension of artistic performance does not manifest itself uniquely in locating an artwork between the audience and the artists, in what Kunst calls ‘the intermediate condition’ of an artwork.39 The ‘intermediate condition’ is merely a setting which provides community engagement and the materialisation of the artwork’s political dimension by means of which artistic performance either assists or challenges spectatorial codes. On the other hand, it implies that the political dimension of performance does not manifest solely in the potentiality of the body to move. This is so because movement (slow or accelerated) does not render the ontological categories of performance practices. But it does open up the possibility of constructing performances in which the political dimension appears. The view that I advocate departs from the hypothesis that all art, including artistic performance, always possesses a political dimension. As I stated earlier, while some art discloses a political dimension by complying with an existing politics, other art discloses the political dimension by contesting it. It is in relation to the complying and contesting forces that we can observe how artistic practices always engage the audience. As performance scholar Joe Kelleher observed, artistic performance always engages us personally and this engagement has to do ‘with feeling ourselves somehow involved in things going on in other times and other places’.40 The strategies of engagement enable performance

39 Kunst, Artist, 71. 40 Joe Kelleher, Theatre & Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 13.

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to either comply with or contest the constructed, historical, and contingent systems that are sedimented in a variety of institutions, practices, and symbolic representations. And, whereas the complying artistic strategies of engagement reproduce the existing order and maintain the statusquo, the contesting artistic strategies of engagement have a tendency to disarticulate the dominant order and articulate an alternative one. One of the significant characteristics of contesting artistic strategies of engagement is that they are capable of challenging the audience’s spectatorial codes. This is to say that they can mobilise affects among the audience against various social, economic, and moral laws which subordinate people to dominant politics, techniques, and representations and impose control over every aspect of human and non-human lives. Since the prime goal of mobilisation is not only to challenge the existing hegemonic order but also to strategically constitute an alternative one, it is imperative that mobilisation implies an articulation of initial affects into representations, a mise-en-sens into mise-en-scène, or self-assertion into counter-hegemony.41 In Mette Edvardsen’s performances, discussed in Chapter 6, time is always structured in relation to space. Reflecting on her performance, Or Else Nobody Will Know, which premiered at the STUK art centre in Leuven, Belgium in 2007, Edvardsen notes: ‘I conceive time not as duration but as exposure, where things can appear, become visible, gain meanings and capacities’.42 Similarly, the performance notes accompanying Every Now and Then, which premiered at the Vooruit, art centre in Ghent, Belgium, in 2009, describe the performance this way: In ‘“every now and then” Mette Edvardsen and Philippe Beloul invite the audience to read a book as a performance. The idea is to create a space and a time inside a book, like a piece [performance] in a theatre’.43 In Edvardsen’s

41 On the distinction between mise-en-sens and mise-en-scène see my text: Goran Petrovi´c Lotina, “Reconstructing the Bodies: Between the Politics of Order and the Politics of Disorder,” in Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance: Danger, Im/Mobility and Politics (Avant-Gardes in Performance), ed. Marina Gržini´c and Aneta Stojni´c (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 42 ‘Or Else Nobody Will Know’, Mette Edvardsen, accessed 14 September 2017, http://www.metteedvardsen.be/projects/oenwk.html. 43 ‘Every Now and Then’, Mette Edvardsen, accessed 16 September 2017, http:// www.metteedvardsen.be/projects/enat.html.

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performances, space becomes a sequence in which various bodily relations are partially structured and represented within a particular context. According to this view, choreography is a decisive symbolic ordering of bodies which stabilises a temporal performative movement in space, as discussed in Chapter 5. It designates a system of differential corporeal movements that are distinct from the range of temporal moves that it excludes. Even more notably, when the choreography acknowledges the contingent character of every social construction, as Edvardsen’s does, we can say that the choreography of articulation of time into space stands for a counter-hegemonic political gesture in artistic performance. When artistic performance belongs to the order of counter-hegemony, it ceases to be a matter of an ontic location, of its form, and becomes instead a manifestation of an ontological principle: a manifestation of contest, struggle, and tension against discourses appropriated by a hegemonic politics sedimented in languages, various social practices, and symbolic frameworks. Against a politics that governs affects, the counterhegemonic and contesting artistic practices provide terrain for confrontation and, consequently, for an alternative construction of politics and societies. By exposing social exclusion, conflict, and tension, contesting artistic practices operate on two levels. They are capable of disarticulating a smooth space without divisions and articulating a striated space. To clarify, striated space is heterogenous. It enables encounters between people with different values, identities and democratic associations. It enables the construction of a collectivity capable of challenging and dislocating hegemonic, capitalist techniques that subordinate gender, race, or class identity. If post-Fordist techniques of domination, not just post-Fordist techniques of production, take place on a multiplicity of strata, what is needed is a kind of mobilisation of human sectors, including artists, in a unity constructed around a collective decision. Such a unity would depend on the support of trade unions, NGOs, grassroots, and civil movements and their strategic engagement with social practices (national/international), institutions (local/global), and symbolic representations (unilateral/multilateral). A mobilised effort, in other words, that could respond wherever the demands of the people are subordinated to capital. It is here that political subjectivity ultimately appears. This, by extension, implies that the political dimension of performance does not reside in a time dimension in which artists as workers gather to wait for a sort of a holy moment to happen. Rather, it resides in struggle

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and—as Kelleher correctly observed—in a concern with participation, ownership, membership, and exclusion.44 From this viewpoint, duration in performance may be seen as a way of resisting the order that excludes particularities but not as an ultimate political principle of performance. Duration does not provide the terrain for complex forms of articulation of different struggles into a unity. On the contrary, it reduces struggle to resistance tied to a specific structural location. By this tactic, duration in fact reduces the political subject to the level of a captive, inactive, passive, and a-political entity.

Imagining a Popular Form of Collectivity in Rimini Protokoll’s 100% City Various performance practices, whether civic or artistic, not only transmit unifying strategies of collective identification, they also enact them by helping citizens to envisage, experience and, eventually, generate alternative forms of collectivity. A number of performance artists have long been concerned with the topic of enacting alternative subjectivities and imaginary forms of collectivity. Rimini Protokoll is a case in point. This Berlin-based team of author-directors Helgard Kim Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, have worked together since 2000. What distinguishes Rimini Protokoll is that they work with ‘ordinary people’ rather than with professional actors. Performance critic Eva Behrendt describes ordinary people in performance as the ‘experts of everyday-life’. Writing on Rimini Protokoll’s play about death, Deadline (2003), Behrendt lists the performance’s experts of everyday life (or, in this case, experts of everyday death!) as the owner of a crematorium, a tombstone sculptor, a funeral violinist, and a medical student.45 Performance critics Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford envisaged ordinary people in performance as ‘real people’, that is ‘contemporary people who have a verifiable physical existence and who usually have not received institutional theatre training and have little or no prior stage experience’.46 They write that ‘[t]hese

44 Kelleher, Theatre & Politics, 5. 45 Eva Behrendt, “The Experts of Everyday-Life,” (2003), accessed 20 July 2020.

http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/text/the-experts-of-everyday-life. 46 Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford, Theatre of Real People: Diverse Encounters at

Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer and Beyond (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 5.

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real people literally appear on stage or are represented—through techniques such as verbatim text, film, pre-recorded or live-feed video—and figure as consensual protagonists in specific theatre forms and genres’.47 Real, ordinary people, members of local communities, are the main protagonists of Rimini Protokoll’s performance, 100% City (2008). Working with 100 inhabitants of a particular city, i.e., Athens (2010), London (2012), Krakow (2013), Philadelphia (2014), Yogyakarta (2015), São Paulo (2017), and elsewhere, they envisaged a city as a collectivity consisting of various democratic associations of people. (On a personal note, I attended 100% City at Kunstenfestival des Arts in Brussels in 2014, a few weeks before the federal elections took place on May 25th). The casting of 100 Brusselaars was determined according to the five criteria maintained by the Brussels Institute for Statistics and Analysis (BISA): age, sex, nationality, place of residence, and family composition. To make the population of Brussels even more representative, the data proceeding from the sociological surveys, such as language, employment, nationality at birth, religion, and sexual orientation, were also taken into account.48 In addition to 100 persons, five undocumented individuals, such as an immigrant, an asylum seeker, a diplomat, an expat, and a foreign student, were also invited to take part. Each participant was asked to select another participant, respecting the aforementioned demographic criteria. As it turned out, the complexity of Brussels’ demographics, as well as the fixed dates of the run, September 2013 to May 2014, required some casting adaptations and, as a result, deviations from this initial casting strategy ensued. Brigitte Neervoort, Rimini Protokoll’s Brussels-based delegate responsible for coordination and casting of 100% Brussels, employed a cluster principle that sometimes meant that she and her six-member team had to find people whose demographic data would match the statistics (2017).49 Afterwards, each participant was photographed and asked to respond to the following questionnaire: ‘I am unique because…; At home I speak…; On stage you can recognise me 47 Ibid., 5. 48 Belgian office BISA gathers information about population based on age, sex, nation-

ality, place of residence, and family composition. All other data are provided by universities, NGOs, or institutes. 49 Based on my phone interview with Brigitte Neervoort, Rimini Protokoll’s Brusselsbased delegate responsible for coordination and casting of 100% Brussels on 9 October 2017.

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by…; I would join a demonstration for or against…; The slogan would be…; I have this tic or idiosyncrasy…; and I belong to the following groups…’.50 The questionnaire served as a basis for the performance narrative and participants’ photos were printed alongside their answers in a brochure that included statistical data, the description of the casting process, and text by a sociologist, Eric Corijn, who described the city of Brussels in all its diversity. 100% Brussels begins when a person steps into the spotlight and starts speaking into the microphone in French and, for a moment, in Dutch. For instance, in French he says, ‘Je m’appelle Benoit Laine’ (My name is Benoit Laine). He then continues in Dutch: ‘Ik werk voor BISA, Staatsinstelling voor het Brusselse Gewest’ (I work for BISA, the Brussels Institute for Statistics and Analysis). After giving some autobiographical information and holding up showing the book that contains demographical statistics of the inhabitants of Brussels as well as a list of the names of the performers, Laine goes on to explain the details of the casting process. This is what he says in French: ‘Afterwards, we had to find 100 persons that would represent the city following a [statistically based] sampling plan. I live in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, just like 8% of the inhabitants of Brussels. I should still find 7 [persons from Molenbeek]. Yet, I had to find 14 persons between 0 and 9 years old [from Brussels]. Therefore, I started a chain reaction, and as number 2, I chose my daughter Marion who is 7 years old’.51 Like Marion who appeared on stage wearing a pair of swimming goggles, everyone stepped into the spotlight with a personal object that extended their autobiographical narratives. One hundred inhabitants of Brussels proceeded to the microphone, one at a time, and introduced themselves. Among them, there were families with children, singles, or couples. We were introduced to people of different origins, from different countries, speaking different languages. Some were scientists, teachers, social workers, or volunteers; some retired, some unemployed, some students, or pupils. Among them were people with disabilities, undocumented persons, people of colour, a member of LGBTQIA community… Slowly, people of different origins, language groups, colours, gender, sex, age, weight, or height, filled the stage. An

50 Rimini Protokoll, 100% Brussels (Brussels: Kunstenfestivaldesart, 2014). 51 ‘100% Brussels ’, Rimini Protokoll, accessed 20 August 2020, https://www.rimini-pro

tokoll.de/website/en/project/100-brussels.

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elderly woman, Christian Gabriels, who introduced herself at the beginning as a retired person now dedicated to volunteer work, stepped out of the crowd to explain that the 100 people on stage represent the 1,154,635 inhabitants of Brussels and that each one of them is a representative of approximately 11,546 inhabitants of Brussels. Then, another person, Max Nisol, announced that 49% of Brussels inhabitants are men, 51% are women, and that the transgender community is not officially represented in BISA statistics. At that moment, the other 99 persons on stage split into two groups, one composed of men, the other of women. One hundred persons on stage split into different groups in order to simulate different associations based on age, nationality, or neighbourhood. When one person stated that she lives in Belgium due to the political and economic crisis in her home country, another person joined her on the same side of the stage. Participants expressed different opinions on topics such as ‘I think there should be one common language within the European Union’, or ‘I think the EU should grow’. Based on their opinions about subjects as varied as the pressure women faced to wear a veil, for the unemployed to work, for gay couples to adopt children, and several other local actualities, people continually split into different groupings on the left or right of the line that divided the stage. The same thing happened when questions were asked about capitalism, belonging to political parties, and so on. When those who decided not to vote in the forthcoming federal elections in Belgium were asked to leave the stage, they were left to observe how the rest of the inhabitants of Brussels made decisions about issues that might have been of concern to them, too, such as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), financing the government of the Congo (that is, keeping Congo in debt), paying taxes, and reducing the number of cars in the city. 100% City demonstrated that inhabitants of a city may share a view on some values and disagree on others. It also showed that each citizen may belong to different human associations constructed around mutually disparate and conflicting ethico-political values. This view suggests that the city is an expression of an eternal tension between the multitude of human associations. It is not a smooth space but rather a striated space of constitutive division.52 Accordingly, the articulation of various civil movements, democratic identities, and different demands in a popular 52 Performance scholar Balme suggests that the ‘theatrical public sphere’ too consists of a multiplicity of spaces: Christopher Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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collectivity can only be seen as the result of a collective identification. At the end of the performance, this is clearly demonstrated when ‘all’ inhabitants of Brussels began to dance, enacting an imagined community. In the context of the Belgian federal elections that were to be held just a few weeks after the performance, the practice of dance consisting of discordant movements became a symbolic unity of different social practices, democratic identities, and public spaces in the struggle for freedom and equality, providing ‘we’ with agency. In 100% Brussels, a call for unity does not propose a temporal fusion that avoids strategic engagement of the people with the existing institutions. On the contrary, it suggests a unity through voter turnout which, so far, has proven to be the most democratic way to engage with existing institutions, to contest a hegemonic politics, and to gain power over right-wing political parties. What this means is that a popular form of collectivity does not manifest itself in the temporal dimension of duration, nor in acceleration. In fact, it does not depend on the qualitative properties of humans to move, be it fast or slow. Neither does it manifest itself in a form of unity that inhabits the smooth space without a constitutive division. In other words, it is not a matter of unity in an essentialist identity, whether workers’, women’s, or immigrants’. Rather, a popular form of collectivity is a consequence of identification between the multiplicity of democratic identities that co-exist in tension and that inhabit a striated space, separate and yet connected by shared ethico-political values. As such, it presupposes a unity in struggle against a common cause of subordination, against the capitalist forces that dominate, exploit, or discriminate both separately and collectively. Accordingly, community is the result of a choreographic practice of constructing or, rather, articulating the people, or popular forms of collectivity, that can take many forms. It is the fusion of insurgent social forces rising in struggle against the common cause of subordination. Only when people critically engage with existing institutions, representations, and practices, dominated by the elites, are they capable of contesting and transforming them and of returning popular sovereignty to the realm of politics. In this sense, community, or a popular form of collectivity, can be seen as a counter-hegemonic, choreo-political practice capable of dislocating the status quo and articulating an alternative order of politics, symbolic representations, and discourses that evolve from shared ethicopolitical values of freedom and equality and agonistic relations. Viewed as ‘agonistic choreo-political practice’, artistic performance holds enormous promise as a strategy for mobilising alternative ways of living together and for invigorating democracy.

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Index

A Abramovi´c, Marina, 70 absence, 2, 24, 31, 75, 81, 83, 84, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93–95, 99, 102–105, 124, 129 abstract/abstraction(s), 15, 25, 41, 58, 63, 72, 76, 89, 99, 102, 104, 122, 132 abundance, 81, 90–93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, 105, 114, 128 abundance and lack, 81, 90, 93–95, 99, 100, 102, 104 abundance or lack, 94, 95, 100 act, 25, 41, 49, 60, 65, 71, 83, 86, 97, 109, 112, 113, 124, 151 decisional acts, 62, 65 impromptu (bodily) acts, 73 actions, 32, 33, 49, 56, 64–66, 69, 74, 79, 83, 84, 87, 107, 108, 111, 116, 122 bodily actions, 108, 116 symbolic actions, 108 adversary/adversaries, 7, 26, 59, 60, 75

aesthetic(s), 45, 62, 69, 71, 81, 87 affect(s) affected, 13, 18, 86, 111, 125, 126, 133, 134, 141, 143 affection(s), 121, 123, 125–127 affective experience, 120, 125, 127 affective investment, 130, 133, 134 affective memories, 126 affective states, 66, 121–123, 126, 127, 132 auto-affecting, 125 auto-affection, 125 self-affection, 134 Aganaktismenoi, 19, 29 agonism agonistic choreographic practice(s), 76 agonistic democracy, 25, 38, 59, 76, 96, 99, 102, 137 agonistic encounter, 76 agonistic objectification, 76 agonistic pluralism, 60 agonistic(s), 2, 5, 7, 8, 26, 59–62, 68, 72, 76, 77, 100, 128, 160

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Petrovi´c-Lotina, Choreographing Agonism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79446-0

171

172

INDEX

choreographing agonism, 4, 67 agreement/agreement in opinion, 66, 98, 101, 128, 131–133 Agustín, Óscar García, 37 Ahmed, Sara, 119 Akkerman, Tjitske, 20 Althusser, Louis, 43, 57 anarchism, 136 anarchic, 1, 8, 44, 45 communal anarchism, 5, 38, 45, 52, 136 antagonism, 3, 7, 26, 58, 59, 61, 63, 66, 68, 72, 77, 99, 128 antagonistic, 7, 21, 23, 41, 58, 60, 75, 76, 128 antagonistic limits, 58 anthropology/anthropological, 6, 69, 79, 80, 98 a-political, 102, 156 apperceiving, 112 Arditi, Benjamin, 30 Arendt, Hannah, 46, 48, 62, 127 Argentinazo, 29, 31–33 art artistic performance(s), 1, 4–6, 9–11, 15, 38–41, 44, 45, 54, 68–71, 76, 77, 80, 101, 104, 108, 116, 119, 120, 126, 127, 131–134, 136–140, 153, 155, 160 artistic practice(s), 6–8, 14, 15, 17, 40, 41, 50, 62, 63, 65–67, 69, 81, 100, 102, 105, 107, 124, 153, 155 artist(s), 6, 7, 40, 54, 65, 121, 124, 134, 153, 155, 156 complying artistic strategies, 154 contesting artistic practices, 14, 66, 67, 155 contesting artistic strategies, 154 articulation(s)

articulate, 5, 9, 14, 15, 26, 30, 32, 36, 51, 52, 54, 64, 69, 75, 81, 87, 94, 98, 99, 125, 134, 137, 140, 148, 154 articulatory practice, 64 choreography of articulation, 2, 35, 37, 155 choreography of articulation, 34 disarticulate, 73, 154 disarticulating, 14, 76, 155 disarticulation, 15, 67, 103 practice of articulation, 11, 12, 14, 36, 69 rearticulate, 36, 57, 60 rearticulating, 11 rearticulation, 67, 77 associative/associability, 111, 128 audience, 2, 5, 6, 9–11, 13, 15, 40, 41, 54, 63, 66–69, 73–76, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 103, 104, 107–109, 111, 112, 115–117, 119, 120, 125, 126, 132–134, 137, 139, 153, 154 Aufstehen, 21 Austin, John Langshaw, 108 avoidance avoid, 2, 42, 47, 114, 136, 137, 160 strategic avoidance, 40 strategies of avoidance, 1, 39, 40, 51, 53, 54, 153 B Balibar, Étienne, 147 ballet, 72, 81 Behrendt, Eva, 156 being, 11, 17, 22, 33, 35, 41, 63, 65, 67, 71, 83, 84, 86–96, 98–100, 105, 110–113, 121, 122, 125, 130, 131, 145 being-in-itself, 91–95 lack-of-being, 91, 93–95, 99

INDEX

Bel, Jérôme, 72 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 152 Bondi, Antonino, 113, 114 Briziarelli, Marco, 37 Burke, Kenneth, 116 Butler, Judith, 108, 116 C capitalism, 17, 40, 144, 145, 159 capitalist, 40, 42, 44, 51, 139, 143, 147, 149, 155, 160 capitalist forces, 44, 51, 147, 149, 160 Casullo, María Esperanza, 24 Chakrabartry, Dipesh, 150 choreography(ies) agonistic choreographic practice, 76 choreographer, 2, 6, 10, 47, 48, 72, 74, 81, 131, 133, 137 choreographic, 11, 70, 73, 75, 76, 102, 104 choreographic practice(s), 6, 28, 73, 77, 139, 160 choreographing, 5, 11, 68, 101 choreographing agonism, 4, 67 choreographing system, 72, 73 choreography of articulation, 2, 34, 35, 37, 155 choreopolice, 45–47 choreo-political, 2, 46–48, 77, 134, 160 chorepolitics, 47 counter-hegemonic choreography, 73 horizontal choreography, 37, 38, 47 protest choreographies, 44 vertical choreography, 37, 38 circulation/circulating, 45–47, 132 civil movements, 2–5, 20, 24, 28–30, 38–40, 135, 152, 155, 159 horizontal civil movements, 5, 40, 44, 135, 136, 152

173

vertical civil movements, 25, 29, 137 collective collective decision, 144, 146, 148, 155 collective experience, 114, 115 collective identifications, 104, 149 collective investment, 132 collective practice(s), 46 collective will, 27, 146, 152 collectivism, 17, 51 collectivity, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 14, 16, 21, 22, 28, 45–47, 49, 52–54, 128, 135–137, 139, 149, 155–157, 160 popular collectivity, 53, 149, 160 Collett, Elizabeth, 20 common common cause, 27, 137, 145, 149, 152, 160 common place, 25, 41, 97 common use, 41, 42 community(ies), 148 immanent community, 43 insurgent community, 149 self-governed community, 53 self-organised community, 53, 136 comply complying, 15, 66, 153 complying artistic practices, 66 complying artistic strategies, 154 compossible, 132, 137 compossibilisation, 49 compossibility, 49, 137 concept(s) conceptualisation, 56 conceptual practice, 13, 69 expressive concepts, 101, 102 conditional conditionality, 87, 129 conditioned, 57, 65, 92, 112, 113, 132, 149

174

INDEX

conditions, 25, 43, 46, 61, 90, 125 unconditional, 127 unconditioned, 48, 49, 122, 131 conflict(s) conflictual, 7, 14, 54, 60, 64, 73, 75, 95, 128, 137, 149 conflictuality, 61, 66 non-conflictual, 60 Conquergood, Dwight, 4, 8 consensus consensual identity, 10, 51 consensual politics, 21, 22 consensual subjectivity, 45 consensus at the centre, 18 constitutive co-constitution, 34, 88 co-constitutive relationship, 35, 66, 140 constitutive outside, 65, 128 contest contestable, 31, 77, 88, 103, 104 contestation, 8, 38, 67, 75 contesting, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9–11, 14, 15, 51, 53, 63, 66, 67, 75–77, 102, 105, 117, 134, 135, 138, 143, 153, 155, 160 contesting artistic practices, 14, 66, 67, 155 contesting artistic strategies, 154 contesting political dimension, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 63, 77, 102, 105, 138, 153 context, 2, 50, 61, 64, 65, 67, 68, 75, 100, 104, 119, 120, 126, 128, 151, 160 context-dependent, 87 contextual, 12, 87, 109 contingent contingent construction, 13, 37, 55, 65, 66, 124, 132, 134, 148, 151 contingent discourse, 88

contingent identity, 148, 151 contingent objectification, 76, 104, 105 contingent practice, 61 contradiction, 60, 104 Corbyn, Jeremy, 21 corporeal, 49, 50, 71, 73, 76, 108, 122 corporeality(ies), 46, 50, 108, 109, 111, 120, 132, 138 corporeal movements, 71, 73, 76, 155 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 148 crisis crisis of neoliberalism, 2, 18, 21, 135 debt crisis, 3, 19, 20 migrant crisis, 20 Cveji´c, Bojana, 101 cyclical succession, 151, 152 D dance dance performances, 45, 46, 120 dancing, 47–49, 70, 72, 120, 126 dancing bodies, 46, 72, 126 dissensual dance, 47 Danto, Arthur, 72 decision decision-making, 3, 19, 61, 100, 140, 142, 144, 145 undecidability, 56, 61 undecidable, 55, 58, 95 deconstruction, 125 deconstructivism, 123 DeFrantz, Thomas F., 126 De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, 70 Deleuze, Gilles, 89, 90, 93, 96, 97, 101, 120–124, 126, 127, 129 demands democratic demands, 11, 26, 33, 36, 37, 43, 140, 146, 149

INDEX

popular demands, 23, 29 women’s demands, 142, 143 democracy absolute democracy, 5, 25, 38, 96, 97, 99, 100, 135, 136 agonistic democracy, 25, 38, 59, 76, 96, 99, 102, 137 democratic demands, 11, 26, 33, 36, 37, 43, 140, 146, 149 democratic identity(ies), 26, 27, 44, 53, 137, 147, 149–151, 159, 160 direct democracy, 8, 24, 35, 40 post-democracy, 18 radicalisation of democracy, 59, 61 representative democracy, 35 social democracy, 17 Denegri, Ješa, 70 Derrida, Jacques, 89, 123 desire, 83, 86, 91–95, 130 determination, 43, 44, 57, 136 determined, 12, 15, 43, 65, 67, 76, 90, 94, 96, 103, 104, 124, 157 determining, 13, 15, 50, 53 dialectics/dialectical, 57, 104, 148 différance, 90, 94, 124 Dilon, Martin C., 113 dimension political dimension, 1, 7, 11, 14, 15, 37–39, 54, 62, 63 spatial dimension, 150, 152 temporal dimension, 40–42, 136, 147, 150, 152, 160 discourse discourse analysis, 11 discourse formation, 14 discourse theory, 11, 12, 34, 35, 54, 56, 67, 98, 108, 115, 138 discursive, 11–15, 23, 34–36, 56–58, 63–66, 68, 80, 87, 90, 98, 103, 108, 115, 120, 124, 126, 131, 132, 139, 152

175

discursive configuration(s), 13, 64, 65 discursively, 2, 12, 13, 51, 63, 68, 77, 87, 102–104, 119, 126, 130, 138, 145, 150, 152 discursive mediation, 34, 35 discursive relation(s), 90 discursive totality(ies), 34, 56, 98 economic discourse, 142 feminist discourse, 142 nationalist discourse, 21, 22 non-discursive, 34, 37 dissensus/dissensual, 46–49, 137 dissociation, 128 dissociative politics, 128 domination dominate, 10, 13, 14, 36, 37, 51–53, 120, 136–138, 143, 146–149, 160 dominating, 120 techniques of domination, 44, 51, 139, 142, 143, 145–147, 151, 152, 155 doubt, 20, 80, 86, 97 Douglas, Mary, 75 drama drama of positions, 77, 95, 112 dramatic, 10, 11, 14, 15, 76, 108, 116, 117 dramatically, 107 dramatic encounter, 117 dramatism, 116 dramatisation, 107, 108, 116 dramatises, 107 dualism, 5, 63, 81, 88, 100, 103, 112, 113 dualist, 117 dualistic, 113 duration, 40–42, 136, 150, 154, 156, 160 durational, 40–42, 150, 152 durational potential, 152

176

INDEX

E economy economic inputs, 51 economic institutions, 17, 140 economic interests, 22, 26, 43, 51, 59, 60, 145, 147, 151 economics, 43, 58 economism, 43, 136 Eddo-Lodge, Reni, 144 Edvardsen, Mette, 6, 81–88, 99, 103, 104, 154, 155 El Conde de Torrefiel, 70 elite(s), 3, 18–21, 23, 24, 27, 160 emancipation/self-emancipation, 149, 150 embody(ies) disembodied, 89, 102, 122 embodied, 10, 13, 23, 40, 42, 44, 50, 51, 71, 72, 130–132 embodiment(s), 40, 42, 73, 81, 130, 136 embodying, 76, 131 enacting/enact, 48, 156, 160 encounter, 10, 11, 15, 69, 88, 90, 107, 109, 112, 113, 116, 117 agonistic encounter, 76 dramatic encounter, 117 enemy(ies), 59, 128, 132 friend-enemy grouping, 58 engagement co-engagement, 131 co-engaging, 37 mutually-engaging, 100, 150 strategic engagement, 15, 35, 160 strategies of engagement, 8, 9, 11, 13–15, 33, 39, 51–54, 139, 153 Eribon, Didier, 149 essence de-essentialisation, 55 essentialisation, 62 essentialism, 56, 104

essentialist, 42, 102, 136, 146, 160 eternal return, 123 Europe, 2–5, 20, 29 Eurocentrism, 150 Eurosceptic, 21 exclusion, 57, 65, 68, 72, 73, 102, 103, 128, 130, 151, 155, 156 excluded, 6, 13, 51, 57, 59, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76, 81, 90, 99, 104, 125 excluding, 58, 84, 138 existence, 9, 25, 47, 55, 60, 61, 63, 65, 87–89, 92, 98, 103, 108–110, 123, 126, 129, 137, 156 expression, 9, 12, 25, 97, 110, 114, 136, 150, 159 expressive concepts, 101 expressive totality, 43, 102

F Fabre, Jan, 7 Farinelli, Franco, 66 feminism, 144 feminist identity, 145, 146 feminist struggle, 145, 146 Finkelstein, Sydney, 132 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 111, 112, 115 force(s) capitalist forces, 44, 51, 147, 149, 160 conflicting force(s), 61, 96 force of tension, 2, 10, 81, 117 forces of compliance, 67 immanent force, 48, 97 labour forces, 52 productive forces, 143 social forces, 31, 44, 51, 52, 54, 160 strategic force, 75 Fordism, 40, 44, 143

INDEX

post-Fordism, 40, 44, 143 post-Fordist, 40, 42, 51, 144–146, 155 Foucault, Michael, 56, 62, 98, 102, 114 Freud, Sigmund, 57, 119, 120, 130 friend, 132 enemy, 59, 60, 132 enemy-friend grouping, 58

G Garde, Ulrike, 156 gender/gender equity, 9, 16, 57, 73, 79, 108, 119, 133, 138, 141–143, 145, 149, 151, 155, 158 Gert, Valeska, 138 Goetz, Anne Marie, 139, 140, 142–144 Goffman, Erving, 70, 107 Goossens, Jan, 8 Göpffarth, Julian, 21 Gramsci, Antonio, 27, 51, 52, 57, 146, 148, 149 Guattari, Félix, 120–122, 124, 127

H Haider, Asad, 150 Hall, Stuart, 43, 102 Hamera, Judith, 68 Hardt, Michael, 24, 89, 97, 144 harmony discordant harmony, 27 disharmony, 95 harmonious, 9, 15, 18, 22, 25, 43, 97, 104, 136, 145 politics of harmony, 81, 99 Hawkins, Kirk, 22, 23 hegemony

177

counter-hegemonic, 13, 14, 33, 37, 50, 53, 61, 67, 68, 71, 73–77, 117, 144, 155, 160 counter-hegemony, 11, 13, 35, 154, 155 hegemonic, 5, 7–10, 13–15, 18, 26, 29, 30, 33, 36, 37, 53, 60, 62, 67, 68, 71, 74, 76, 96, 99, 115, 117, 119, 136–139, 143, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 160 post-hegemonic, 29, 31–33, 37 post-hegemony, 31, 34, 35 Heidegger, Martin, 89, 109 Hewitt, Andrew, 71 history(ies) ahistorical, 15, 42 historical, 41, 63–65, 73, 104, 105, 108, 110, 112, 113, 125, 138, 148, 154 historically, 37, 108, 114, 120, 126, 132, 133, 148 Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 97, 98 Holmes, Brian, 6 horizon, 1, 8, 37, 67, 95, 104, 133 Husserl, Edmund, 109, 125 I idealism, 63, 104 identification collective identification(s), 104, 149, 156, 160 counter-identification, 147 (dis)identification, 151 identity(ies) class identity, 42, 51, 52, 155 democratic identity, 26, 27, 53, 137, 160 essentialist identity, 42, 136, 146, 160 feminist identity, 145, 146 identity-blind, 10, 137, 138 identity-blindness, 51

178

INDEX

identity-conscious, 10, 138 identity-consciousness, 51 pre-established identity, 136, 146 women’s identity, 145, 146 workers’ identity, 40, 42, 43, 136, 146 Iglesias Turrión, Pablo, 5, 19 imagination imaginary, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 130, 156 imagine(d), 6, 9, 24, 43, 52, 54, 81, 84, 93, 97, 103, 108, 133, 134, 139, 150, 160 imagined community, 160 immanence absolute immanence, 89, 93, 96 immanent, 43, 48, 55, 62, 96, 97, 122, 133 the philosophical trajectory of immanence, 1, 90, 93, 96, 101 immediacy, 12, 34, 35, 37, 94, 123, 125, 152 immediate governance, 33 immediate rule, 29 immigrants/migrations, 3, 20, 26, 43, 137, 160 indetermination, 67, 121, 122 individual(s) individualism, 4, 5, 7, 17, 51, 56, 59, 135 individualist, 59 individuality, 96, 129, 131, 137, 151 in-itself difference, 89 institution(s) cultural institutions, 65 democratic institutions, 26, 60 economic institutions, 17, 140 extra-institutional, 38, 100, 103 institutional apparatus, 114, 115 institutionalisation, 3, 15, 32, 33, 36, 100, 135, 141, 152

institutionalised, 8, 11, 14, 23, 33, 52, 99, 126, 138, 149, 152 international institutions, 54, 140, 147, 155 multilateral institutions, 139 uninstitutionalised, 23 intensity, 100 interiority, 58, 65 intermediation, 41 intermediacy, 41 intermediary, 41 interpretation/interpretative, 37, 60, 101, 109–111 intersection, 90, 148 Ivarsflaten, Elisabeth, 20

J jouissance, 130 Jullien, François, 8, 15, 50, 52, 80

K Kaprow, Allan, 70 Kelleher, Joe, 10, 153 kinesthesia, 120 kinesthetic, 120, 126 kinesthetic organisation, 120, 126 kinetic/kinetic phenomenon, 48, 133, 137 Kitschelt, Herbert, 37, 38 Klein, Gabrielle, 74, 88 Klunchun, Pichet, 72 Kunst, Bojana, 9, 40–44, 51, 53, 136, 142, 147, 148, 150, 153

L l’adéquation adequate, 59, 75, 93, 97, 100, 101, 131 adequation, 101 adequational, 37

INDEX

Lacanian, 91, 95, 130 Lacan, Jacques, 80, 91, 92, 94, 98, 130 lack constitutive lack, 92, 99 lack-of-being, 91, 93–95, 99 negative ontological imaginary of lack, 96 ontological imaginary of lack, 91, 95, 96, 100 positive ontological imaginary of lack, 96 Laclau, Ernesto, 7, 22, 23, 30, 32, 34, 44, 55, 56, 89, 98, 130, 151 La France Insoumise, 21 language game(s), 56, 64 Lanigan, Richard, 110 leader(s) leaderless, 24, 28, 30, 32, 38 leadership, 5, 19, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31, 44, 48, 135, 137 leadingfollowing, 47, 48, 137 Le Coz, Camille, 20 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 49 Leigh Foster, Susan, 73, 108, 120 Lepecki, André, 9, 44–50, 52, 72, 137 LGBTQIA, 26, 137, 144, 146, 158 limit(s), 13–15, 58, 65, 73, 90, 103 antagonistic limits, 58 limitation(s), 34, 57 Linehan, Daniel, 70 linguistic extralinguistic, 12, 56, 68, 69, 98, 103, 115, 126 linguistic mediation, 94 linguistic play, 87, 104 non-linguistically mediated, 94

M Mantia, Francesco la, 113, 114

179

Marchart, Oliver, 55, 56, 91, 128, 151, 152 Martínez-Ávila, Daniel, 114 Martin, Randy, 9, 10, 71, 75 Massumi, Brian, 122 material materialise(d), 13, 56, 69, 83 materiality, 64, 69, 92, 111 material properties, 64, 69 McKenzie, Jon, 103 mediate discursive mediation, 34, 35 mediated, 12, 28, 29, 34, 110, 113, 120, 122, 124–126, 133 mediated rule, 29 mediate relation, 123 mediation, 12, 34, 35, 125, 152 unmediated, 23, 93, 96 meeting/temporal dimension of meeting, 42 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc, 21 memory(ies), 86, 126 affective memories, 126 Menzo, Cherish, 71 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 110, 112 metaphysics/metaphysical, 55, 89, 90, 104 Millard, Olivia, 131, 132 mime, 6, 69, 84, 122, 126, 127 mobilisation, 2, 3, 26, 31, 75, 76, 100, 144, 154 mobilise, 6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 21, 60, 66, 67, 73, 75, 81, 83, 86, 99, 103, 105, 117, 119, 120, 126, 132–134, 149, 154 mobilising, 1, 2, 6, 9, 50, 54, 117, 127, 134, 160 Moffitt, Benjamin, 22, 23 Momentum, 20, 21 Mouffe, Chantal, 7, 8, 12, 20, 22–26, 30, 32, 34, 35, 39, 44, 55–62,

180

INDEX

64–68, 76, 89, 98, 99, 128, 129, 144, 145 movement(s) bodily movement(s), 40, 46, 68, 71, 76, 101, 138 civil movement(s), 2–5, 20, 24–26, 28–30, 37, 39, 40, 44, 52, 100, 135, 136, 152, 155, 159 corporeal movement(s), 155 dissensual moving, 48 horizontal civil movement(s), 5, 27, 40, 44, 135, 136, 152 impromptu bodily movement(s), 73, 76 movement-party(ies), 3, 5, 38, 52 populist movement(s), 3, 19, 21, 22, 33 protest movement(s), 2, 28, 47, 70 submovement(s), 122 temporal movement(s), 71 vertical civil movement(s), 5, 25, 29, 52, 137 move(s), 37, 45, 71–74, 76 surplus moves, 73 temporal moves, 71, 155 Movimiento 15-M , 3, 19, 27, 29 multitude, 11, 24, 25, 27, 31–33, 35–37, 42, 96–99, 136, 159 Mumford, Meg, 156

N name(s) names of particularity, 130 names of universality, 130 naming, 64, 130, 131, 134 nominal, 57, 131, 133 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 42, 56, 128 nationalism/nationalist discourse, 4, 21, 33 Ne davimo Beograd, 36 Neervoort, Brigitte, 157

negativity negate, 94 negating, 84 negative, 91, 96, 123 negative ontological imaginary of lack, 96 phenomenon of negativity, 93–95, 100 productive negativity, 91, 94, 95 radical negativity, 58, 60 Negri, Antonio, 24, 89, 97, 144 neoliberalism crisis of neoliberalism, 2, 18, 21, 135 neoliberal, 4, 5, 7, 15, 17, 19, 31, 33, 51–54, 135, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145 neoliberal discourse, 4, 51–53, 135, 142, 143, 145 nodal points, 57, 144, 145 Noeth, Sandra, 75 Nuit debout , 24, 29, 33, 152

O object(s) agonistic objectification, 76 contingent objectification, 76, 104, 105 geometrical objectification, 66 objectification(s), 68, 88, 104 objective, 17, 43, 63, 65, 104, 109 objectivity, 43, 58, 61, 65, 81, 96, 103 object of knowledge, 102, 133 object of thought, 102, 133 objet petit a, 130 O’Brien, Robert, 139 Occupy, 5, 29, 33, 40, 44, 134, 152 ontic, 61, 66, 67, 69, 95, 155 ontic-ontological, 61 ontology

INDEX

ontological, 55, 56, 60–62, 66–69, 88–91, 93, 95, 96, 100, 102, 155 ontological formation, 91 ontological imaginary of abundance, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100 ontological imaginary of lack, 91, 95, 96, 100 ontology of abundance, 105 ontology of lack, 91, 105 opinion(s), 2, 25, 66, 117, 121, 122, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 137, 139, 148, 159 agreement in opinion(s), 128, 132 opinion formation, 117, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 137, 139, 148 opposition(s), 7, 71, 104 opposing totalities, 104 opposite(s), 26, 93, 99, 113 oscillation/oscillatory, 112, 115 overdetermination/overdetermined, 13, 57, 65, 99

P paradox/paradoxical, 56, 58, 59, 65, 76, 81, 88, 94, 95, 100, 104, 105, 117 parallelism/parallel, 42, 93, 95, 100, 101, 104, 148 party (parties) movement-party (parties), 3, 5, 38, 52 party politics, 19, 33 political party (parties), 19, 25, 30, 35, 37, 100 populist party (parties), 21 perception, 13, 110, 111, 114, 127 percept(s), 121 perceptual experience, 12, 75, 108, 111–116, 119 performance(s)

181

artistic performance(s), 1, 4–6, 10, 11, 15, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 54, 68, 69, 71, 76, 77, 80, 101, 102, 116, 119, 120, 126, 127, 131–134, 136–140, 153, 155, 160 chore-political performance, 47 civic performance(s), 2, 4, 5, 11, 39, 139 dance performances, 45, 46, 120 performativity, 2, 69, 108, 115 performative, 13, 35, 64, 76, 90, 111, 112, 115, 124, 130, 134, 155 performative practice, 13, 27, 35, 76, 99, 115, 130, 132, 134 performer(s), 2, 10, 13, 40, 47, 49, 69, 76, 81, 83, 85, 86, 104, 107, 111, 116, 126, 131, 133, 137, 158 Peronism, 36 Phelan, Peggy, 9, 80 phenomenology discursive phenomenology, 115, 119 existential phenomenology, 109 semiotic phenomenology, 110–113, 115 phenomenon kinetic phenomenon, 48, 133, 137 phenomena, 12, 64, 81, 111, 112, 123, 133 phenomenon of negativity, 93, 95, 100 phenomenon of positivity, 92, 93, 95, 99 philosophy, 12, 34, 61, 77, 89, 91, 107, 129 the philosophical trajectory of immanence, 1, 90, 93, 96, 100, 101

182

INDEX

the philosophical trajectory of quasi-transcendence, 90, 95, 96 Piqueteros , 31, 32, 36 place(s)/common places, 25, 40, 41, 80, 90, 97, 147, 150, 153 plural agonistic pluralism, 60 never-receding pluralism, 96, 100 pluralism, 4, 62, 128 plurality, 23, 24, 26, 31, 59, 75, 96, 97, 115, 128, 130 Podemos , 3, 5, 19, 25, 27, 30, 35, 38, 52 polemics/polemical, 7, 10, 54, 58, 66, 80, 88, 127, 128, 132–134 politics choreopolitics, 46, 48 consensual politics, 21, 22 counter-hegemonic politics, 13, 33, 53, 75, 77, 117, 160 democratic politics, 7, 59, 61, 62, 68, 128, 133, 140 dissociative politics, 128 hegemonic politics, 6, 8, 13, 15, 26, 36, 67, 68, 73, 115, 127, 136, 147, 151 horizontal politics, 25, 30, 136 party politics, 19, 33 politics of harmony, 81, 99 politics of tension, 100 vertical politics, 27 viral politics, 31 popular sovereignty/popular demands, 6, 18, 21–23, 26, 29, 59, 160 populism left-wing populism, 26, 27 left-wing populist movements, 19, 21, 33 populist movement(s), 21, 22 right-wing populism, 20 right-wing populist movements, 3, 4, 20, 21, 27, 33

positivity delimited positivity, 56, 98, 99 phenomenon of positivity, 92, 93, 95, 99 positive, 91, 95, 100, 123 positive ontological imaginary of abundance, 96 post-foundationalism/postfoundational, 55, 56, 89 post-Marxism/post-Marxist, 7, 34, 56 post-operaists, 97, 142, 147 post-representation/postrepresentational approach, 5, 40, 42, 150 power/power relations, 6, 8, 9, 13, 14, 18–20, 23, 27, 33, 41, 45, 50, 54, 75, 114, 121, 134, 136, 146 practice(s), 2, 4, 6, 8–10, 12–14, 23, 36, 44, 52–54, 58, 61, 63, 66–68, 71, 77, 81, 98, 107, 108, 113–115, 125, 128, 129, 132, 138, 147, 153, 155, 156, 160 civic practice, 69 practices of resistance, 51 Pravo na grad, 30, 36 praxis , 51, 52 presence, 2, 13, 69, 81, 83, 84, 86, 88–96, 98–100, 103–105, 107, 111–113, 123, 124, 126 procedures/procedures and practices, 129 protests protest choreographies, 44 protesters, 3, 19, 31, 33, 36, 152 protest movements, 47, 70 psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic, 6, 35, 91, 98, 119, 130 Q quality, 82, 146

INDEX

quantity, 146

R radicalisation of democracy, 59, 61 Rancière, Jacque, 8, 18, 22, 23, 25, 45, 46, 48, 131 rationalism rational, 145 rationalise(s), 63, 68, 104 rationalising, 63 rationalist, 59, 63 realism, 63, 104 reductionism/reductionist, 43, 51, 146 Reinelt, Janelle, 24, 69 relation discursive relation, 90 radical relationalism, 88, 149 relationally, 15, 100, 120, 124, 131, 148 repetition, 67, 108, 123–126 representation representational, 5, 11, 66, 71, 73, 80, 134, 137, 153 representational approach, 5, 10, 69 representational aspect of art, 66 representing, 6, 53, 65, 66, 116, 141 resistance/resisting, 42, 51, 70, 76, 139, 152, 156 reversal(s)/reversed, 93, 95, 99 Rimini Protokoll, 6, 156, 157 Rosenthal, Victor, 113 Rothfield, Philipa, 73, 126 Royo, Victoria Pérez, 88 rupture rupture interval, 48 rupturing, 9, 13, 47, 136 strategies of rupture, 8, 9, 14, 39, 46, 51

183

S Salamon, Eszter, 70 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 109, 110 Schechner, Richard, 79, 116 Schmitt, Carl, 58, 62 Scholte, Jan Aart, 139, 142–144 score(s), 5, 71, 75, 121, 126, 131 sector, 17, 141 private sector, 17, 140, 141 public sector, 17 semiogenetic, 113 semiotic(s), 110–115, 125 sensation/sense, 10, 46, 71, 84, 111, 117, 120–122, 124, 160 sequence, 12, 23, 64, 151, 152, 155 sign(s), 107, 110–112, 115, 122, 132 signification, 31, 107, 111, 116, 129 signifying chain, 91, 92 singular a-personal singularity, 48 singularities, 24, 31, 33, 96, 97 singularity, 31, 48, 49 Smiraglia, Richard P., 114 social, 1–3, 5–7, 10, 11, 13, 22, 30, 38, 43, 44, 51–53, 56, 57, 61, 63–68, 71–73, 77, 98, 104, 107, 116, 128, 129, 132, 137, 138, 141–145, 148, 154, 155, 158, 160 social contract, 98, 99 social justice, 142, 143 social practice(s), 7, 11, 12, 30, 44, 51–53, 57, 63–65 sovereignty, 3, 6, 18, 21, 22, 26, 28, 59, 60, 160 popular sovereignty, 3, 6, 18, 21, 22, 26, 28, 59, 160 space(s) public space, 31, 45, 75, 128, 160 smooth space, 9, 25, 76, 97, 100, 104, 136, 155, 159, 160

184

INDEX

spatial dimension, 150, 152 spatialisation, 150, 151 spatialised, 54, 151 spatial(ly), 71, 151 striated space, 26, 76, 100, 128, 155, 159 spectator(s), 11, 68, 81, 88, 117, 119 spectatorial codes, 10, 11, 69, 81, 87, 102, 116, 153, 154 speech theory, 108 Spinoza, Benedict de, 24, 89, 96, 97, 101 Stavrakakis, Yannis, 34, 35, 37, 67, 89, 95 still-act, 72 strategy(ies) strategic, 14, 26, 30, 45, 50, 53, 54, 75, 99, 145, 155 strategically, 15, 29, 50, 81, 148, 154 strategic avoidance, 40 strategic engagement, 15, 30, 35, 53, 54, 99, 145, 155, 160 strategic withdrawal, 35, 99 strategies of avoidance, 1, 39, 51, 52, 54, 153 strategies of engagement, 8, 9, 11, 13–15, 33, 39, 50, 52–54, 138, 139, 153 strategies of rupture, 8, 9, 14, 39, 44, 46, 51, 53 strategies of withdrawal, 5, 8, 9, 13–15, 32 struggle(s) counter-hegemonic struggle, 61, 71 labour struggle, 10, 146 women’s struggle, 143 subject(s) a-subjective, 93 consensual subjectivity, 45 dissensual subjectivities, 46 political subjectivity, 155

political subjects, 45, 149, 156 subjectivity, 11, 16, 25, 28, 40, 41, 45, 46, 80, 81, 96, 110, 111, 120, 125, 147 symbol counter-symbolisation, 149 symbolic, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 36, 41, 50, 52, 57, 62, 63, 65, 69, 92, 99, 103, 108, 110, 115, 116, 126, 130, 132, 134, 138, 149, 155, 160 symbolically constructed, 56, 63, 64, 98, 107 symbolic construction, 98, 99, 103, 134 symbolic framework, 6, 52, 69, 126, 155 symbolic order, 27, 58, 62, 114, 132 symbolic representation, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 35, 36, 50, 119, 136–138, 151, 154, 155, 160 symbolic unity, 13, 23, 57, 99, 145, 160 symbolic value, 119, 130, 134 symbolisation, 10, 58, 63, 69, 92, 94, 99, 120, 125–127, 133 symbolise, 26, 98 symbolising, 99, 133 Syriza, 19 T Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta, 152 techniques, 10, 14, 44, 51, 53, 111, 139, 143, 146, 151, 152, 157 techniques of domination, 44, 51, 143, 145, 147, 151, 152 techniques of production, 42, 44, 51, 142, 146, 147, 155 tension, 2, 10, 11, 14, 26, 38, 55, 66, 69, 75, 77, 80, 81, 88, 90, 94, 95, 98–100, 103, 104, 107, 112,

INDEX

117, 119, 128, 130, 133, 134, 137, 139, 155, 159 politics of tension, 100 Thatcherism, 18 Thatcher, Margaret, 18 theatricality, 111, 112, 115, 132 the body(ies) bodily movement, 40, 46, 68, 71, 76, 101, 138 body language, 69, 138 dancing bodies, 46, 72 impromptu bodily acts/movement(s), 73 the idea, 14, 63, 123, 148, 154 theory, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 24, 35, 40, 56, 59, 93, 94, 101, 112, 116, 120, 122, 123, 128 theorisation, 125, 127 theorising, 75, 120 the other, 13, 15, 25, 35, 57, 59, 62, 65, 80, 91–95, 99, 108, 110, 112, 113, 123, 125, 128, 130, 132, 143, 144, 153, 159 the people, 3, 5, 18, 19, 21, 23–29, 32, 33, 35–40, 43, 44, 46, 50, 53, 60, 98–100, 114, 136, 139, 146, 147, 149, 155, 160 the police, 45 the political/a-political, 1, 5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 17–19, 21–23, 29, 37–39, 54, 55, 58, 60–63, 65–68, 71, 75, 76, 88, 100, 102, 122, 133–136, 153, 155, 159 the World Bank (WB)/the Bank, 3, 17, 19, 139–143, 145 Thomassen, Lasse, 91–93, 95, 96 time(s) recurrent temporality, 124 temporal, 40, 71, 125, 150, 155, 160 temporal dimension, 40–42, 136, 147, 150, 151, 160

185

temporal exteriority, 151 temporality, 40, 41, 110, 124, 150 temporal movement(s), 71 temporal move(s), 71, 155 Tønder, Lars, 91, 92, 95, 96 total absolute totality, 67 discursive totality, 34, 56, 98 expressive totality, 43, 102 objective totality, 63, 64 relational totality, 63–65 totality(ies), 13, 37, 43, 55–59, 61, 62, 81, 87, 90, 93, 94, 101, 103 trace(s), 99, 114, 124, 126, 132, 133 transcendence quasi-transcendence, 76, 88, 102 quasi-transcendental, 90, 95, 104 the philosophical trajectory of quasi-transcendence, 90, 91, 95, 96 transformation transform, 2, 11, 22, 26, 37, 51, 52, 60, 99, 137, 138, 152 transformative, 9, 114 transforming, 11, 21, 33, 37, 46, 49, 53, 67, 76, 140, 160 Tsípras, Aléxis, 19 Turner, Victor, 72, 104, 116

U unity, 2, 13, 22, 27, 41, 43, 52, 104, 122, 131, 137, 144–146, 148, 149, 152, 155, 160 symbolic unity, 13, 23, 57, 99, 145, 160

V value(s) cultural values, 35, 76

186

INDEX

ethico-political values, 2, 8, 16, 26, 27, 51, 129, 131, 137, 145, 147, 149, 151, 159, 160 symbolic value, 119, 130, 134 viral politics, 31, 32 Virno, Paolo, 8, 24, 40, 53, 89, 97, 142 virtual, 122 virtuality(ies), 89, 100, 122 Visetti, Yves-Marie, 113 W Wagenknecht, Sahra, 21 want-to-be, 91–93 welfare state, 17, 20, 21 Weyland, Kurt, 22, 23 will, 2, 9, 23, 27, 28, 37–39, 51, 54, 63, 80, 81, 86, 91, 95, 99, 107, 108, 120, 126, 139, 140, 152 collective will, 27, 146, 149, 152 popular will, 149 Williams, Marc, 139 withdrawal strategic withdrawal, 35, 99 strategies of withdrawal, 5, 8, 9, 13–15, 32, 33

withdraw, 55 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 56, 87, 128 women women’s demands, 142, 143 women’s identity, 145, 146 women’s movement(s), 139, 141–143, 145 women’s struggle, 143 workers, 3, 20, 26, 40, 42, 43, 69, 137, 145–147, 149, 155 labour struggle, 10, 146 worker’s identity, 40, 42, 43, 136, 145, 146

Y Yvonne Rainer, 70

Z Zagreb je naš , 36 Zaides, Arkadi, 6, 72, 74–76 Zappa, Joseph, 125 Združena levica, 30 Žižek, Slavoj, 32, 100