Precarious spectatorship: Theatre and image in an age of emergencies 9781526138422

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Precarious spectatorship

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Precarious spectatorship Theatre and image in an age of emergencies SAM HADDOW

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Sam Haddow 2020 The right of Sam Haddow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9781526138415 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: Paddy Haddow, Boom (2019)

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

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For Dylan. Because he’s brilliant.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  Note on images and content 

page viii x

Introduction: Emergencies and spectatorship  1 Enemy/​image  2 Two tales of my dying neighbours  3 ‘in the grip of the monster’  4  Theatre, exposure and the exterior 

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Epilogue  Appendix: A brief history of emergencies  References  Index 

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to Matthew Frost, Rebecca Willford, Victoria Chow and the people at Manchester University Press for granting me a contract, and for their help and attention along the way. Research for this project began with conversations at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. I am especially grateful to Robin Nelson and Simon Shepherd, as well as to the students who took my ‘Performing Emergencies’ module and helped to foment these ideas. I owe a lot to my colleagues at the University of St Andrews, who provided me with a supportive environment in which to work. Gill Plain, Andy Murphy and Dina Iordanova helped the proposal through its infancy. Anindya Raychaudhuri, Peter Mackay, Katie Garner and Kate Cross gave invaluable support and advice during commutes, in pubs and on picket lines. Further afield, Piotr Cieplak, Clare Finburgh, James Hudson, Dan Hunt and Mark Robson read through chapter drafts and were far too pleasant about them. Thanks to Kirsty Sedgman, for her constructive and thoughtful feedback on the manuscript, to Vanishing Point for granting me access to the script of The Destroyed Room, and to Zinnie Harris for the generous conversations about How to Hold Your Breath. Some of this material has been road-​tested at conferences and symposiums. I would like to thank everybody at the Theatre and Performance Research Association who gave me guidance on my reading of How to

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Hold Your Breath, the people at the International Federation of Theatre Research who offered their counsel on the end of Chapter 1, the people at the Irish Society for Theatre Research who first heard my work on suicide, the people at Leeds University who hosted the ‘Reframing Disaster’ conference in which the IS material was first publicly aired, and the Theoria and Marxism events at the University of St Andrews where I was given advice on material from Chapters  1 and 4.  I  also want to thank everybody who listened to the ‘Stage Blether’ podcast, where many of the ideas in this book were first trialled. Sara, Paddy, Alys, Dave, Selina, Dylan, Penelope and Rex deserve unending thanks. You all helped me retain my fragile grip on the world, and you form the best familial group I could ever have hoped for. (I did it, mum –​I wrote a book.) Thanks also to Renée, for everything she does for Dylan. I owe more than I can say to the city of Edinburgh, a place that after a long time of being adrift finally made me feel at home. Two of its institutions, the miraculous Forest Café and the magnificent Beltane Fire Society, took me in when I  was utterly lost and gave me purpose and hope when I didn’t think I deserved any of either. Without them, I’m not sure I would have survived the past four years. I would like to lend especial thanks to Ieva Gudaitytė, Polly Edwards, Lila O’Leary and Doogie Cameron, whose conversations proved highly influential in writing this book. I am lucky to know these people, and I am lucky to live in this city. I would like to thank a range of others whose fingerprints are visible here. Those who are still living will hopefully know why they have been included. Maureen Mitchell, Barbara Robinson, Richard Rowland, John Ginman, Danny Weston, Paul Whickman, Harry Gallagher, Louise Chamberlain, Bart Verhoeven, Shan Vahidy, Alex Crampton, Amber Martin, Jo Robinson, Gordon Ramsay, Jim Moran, Hannah McIlhinney and Tracy Cruickshank. Thank you. You’re splendid. I also feel that I should thank the woman on the train who informed me that she wanted to slam my laptop screen down onto my fingers because of my nervous tic of sucking air through my teeth, in whose terrifying presence I first started thinking about emergencies.

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NOTE ON IMAGES AND CONTENT

Although many images are discussed in this book, I  have reproduced only one –​a photograph taken by Burhan Ozbilici, which is printed in Chapter 3. For the rest, I have chosen not to include them within the text because much of my argument concerns the corrosive effects that circulating such images can have on both the image’s presumed subject, and the spectator who witnesses it. Every image referenced in the following pages is easily accessible through an Internet search –​I will leave it up to the reader to choose whether or not she wishes to view them. This book discusses instances and representations of violence that include torture, execution and suicide. I have taken pains to deal with this material as sensitively as possible, but, as I argue at various junctures, it is my belief that an ethical response to violence must at some level engage with the pain that is being inflicted. The experience of reading this book, therefore, may prove at times to be painful.

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Introduction: Emergencies and spectatorship

Extended state of emergency. Wow. These are the perfect words to describe like just your normal now. Kieran Hurley, 2017, p. 23

Performing emergencies In late 2015, the organisation known as ‘Islamic State’, ‘IS’, or ‘Da’esh’, the self-​declared Sunni Muslim caliphate operating out of Iraq and Syria, seemed to be gaining on its objective of becoming a viable ‘state’. Intractable conflict with the Syrian government and other rebel factions, as well as an international campaign of airstrikes led by the US, in which the UK had bombed IS strongholds in Iraq, had seemingly failed to halt this advancement. In retaliation for the strikes, IS had released grisly videos in which they executed foreign hostages, and had conducted and inspired numerous terror attacks around the world. On 13 November that year, IS affiliated militants killed and wounded hundreds of people in multiple locations around Paris city centre. Spurred on by these events, the British parliament hosted a one-​day symposium on 2 December

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to discuss proposals to extend their bombing campaigns to include IS positions in Syria. Three months before this, the UK Labour party had passed an ‘emergency motion’ that declared they would not support military action in Syria unless four conditions were met. These were:  that the action received UN authorisation; that a comprehensive plan was created to assist any peoples displaced by such action; that assurances were made that only IS positions would be targeted; and that military action would always be subordinated to diplomatic efforts to end the war in Syria (Syal, 30 September 2015). But despite the fact that there was no plan sufficient to assist the displaced peoples, the most feted contribution to that December symposium came from Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn. Benn declared that the question which confronts us in a very very complex conflict is at its heart very simple. What should we do with others to confront this threat to our citizens, our nation, other nations and the people who suffer under the yoke, the cruel yoke, of Da’esh? (Gripper, 3 December 2015)

His speech included an exhaustive and bloody itemisation of IS violence, a reminder of their proximity and enmity to citizens of the UK and an emphasis on necessity and speed in terms of ‘acting now’ and ‘playing our part’. ‘Our part’, of course, being unequivocally linked to increasing the bombing campaigns. The speech received cross-​party ovations, was repeatedly broadcast in full by various channels and was hailed by many reporters and politicians as one of the great political orations of recent history. The vote passed, and bombings started within hours. What Benn had done, following in the footsteps of many politicians before him, was to help legitimise emergency protocol through the conventions of theatrical performance. ‘Emergency’ is a complex and nebulous term, one that will come under repeated scrutiny throughout this book. The geographers Ben Anderson and Peter Adey (2015) broadly define it as ‘an event or situation of limited but unknown duration in which some form of harm or damage is in the midst of occurring’ (p. 5). They go on to point out, however, that abstractions must be weighed against the ‘excessive exactness’ which renders each emergency a singularity, irreducible in its entirety either to comparable events or to a generalised definition (2015, p. 6). It is an obvious point, perhaps, but one that is worth making, given the gravity of this topic. The political theorist Nomi Clare Lazar (2009) approaches the problem by conceiving a ‘family of characteristics’ such as ‘urgency’ and ‘scale’, rather than a formal definition (p. 7). Following

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Lazar, I  will generally employ the term in the plural, both to observe the irreducibility of singular emergencies, and to track a duality within the term which integrates events with their articulation. The term ‘emergency’, in short, always presupposes some kind of performance. In order to start unpacking this statement, let’s begin with the fact that the December symposium took the form of a ‘show’. It was broadcast in its entirety by the BBC, and in sections by various news channels. It was accessible by live stream on the Internet, was the subject of numerous live blogs and it trended on the social media platform Twitter. Every effort was taken, in other words, to make this event accessible and attractive to the spectator. And the engine giving force to the event was fear. As I show in Chapter 1, IS had directly targeted western spectators with their carefully curated propaganda and terror tactics. The audience were afraid, and those who wished to extend the bombing campaigns merely had to appropriate this fear in order to legitimise their position. Benn’s speech was effective because he co-​opted the fearful qualities of IS’ violence into his own performance, vividly illustrating the horrors of their recent actions and projecting doom laden scenarios of what would happen if military interventions were not increased. As he put it, the ‘carnage in Paris brought home to us the clear and present danger we face from them [IS]. It could just as easily have been London, or Glasgow, or Leeds or Birmingham and it could still be.’ His speech employs techniques that Anderson and Adey describe as common to the rhetoric of emergency, where ‘promissory and threatening futures achieve some form of presence in the here and now’ (2011, p. 1096). Their observation is that emergencies undertake a dialogue with the emergencies to come, as such occupying an ‘interval’ between present and future. Anderson and Adey thus affirm emergency as a criterion of response, as well as identification, which is where it differs from related terms such as crisis, catastrophe or disaster. To name an event an ‘emergency’ is to open a dialogue with its strategies of redress. Their analysis is built on the work of Michel Foucault, who observed that in liberal democracies the citizens are regulated by a ‘system of correlation between juridico-​legal mechanisms, disciplinary mechanisms, and mechanisms of security’ (ibid., p. 1095). These systems become highly visible in the heightened states of ‘urgency’ and ‘scale’ constituted by emergencies. Anderson and Adey seek, however, to ‘take Foucault beyond Foucault’ because his model breaks down at the point where ‘promissory futures’ begin to be created. In this shadowy realm, it is the affective qualities of the projected future that legitimise the security mechanisms in the here and now. In his speech, Benn demonstrated an implicit awareness of this, not just through the highly evocative nature of his rhetoric, but

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also through the tone and timbre of his performance, as his variations in pace, volume and invective sought to capture the imaginations of his audience. It is therefore little surprise that Anderson and Adey’s work comes into contact with performance. One of their studies opens with a discussion of an exercise in which government and emergency service workers addressed a simulated outbreak of swine flu. Hearing a stifled laugh from the tired participants at an inappropriate joke, and sensing an air of anxiety and stress in the room, they surmise that ‘the conditions of response are made present through the composition of particular atmospheres and sensibilities’ and that it is ‘by making those conditions present affectively that the exercise can function as a technique of equivalence’ (ibid., p.  1093). They are drawn to the contingencies of theatre, in other words  –​the atmospheres, irruptions and unpredictability which are the hallmarks of live performance –​as the means through which the mechanical processes of emergency response are both created and activated. Despite this, however, the signifi cance of performance to Anderson and Adey’s study remains largely unacknowledged. Up to the time of writing these words, in fact, very little consideration has anywhere been made of the link between performance and emergencies. Most scholarly work on the latter is concerned with practicalities: legal and political frameworks, humanitarian responses, historical precedents, strategies of containment (the term itself, and its function within different discourses, is historicised in the Appendix to this book). But to overlook the performed nature of emergencies is to miss a fundamental aspect of their being, defined through Anderson and Adey as the affective quality latent in the interval between the projected future and the uncertain present. As I have argued through the cases of Benn and IS, emergencies are also dramatised through the conventions of performance and directed at targeted audiences, whose receptiveness they require in order to function. The British government needed the support of a percentage of its members, and in order to do that it had to mount a show to convince the populace of the necessity in ‘acting now’ and ‘playing our part’. IS would have been unable to terrorise and recruit people without carefully orchestrating their violence so that it reached large numbers of the viewing public. Emergencies need audiences, and audiences are accessed through performance. This book, then, explores the performance-​based relationship between emergencies and the spectator. In terms of the ways in which emergencies are performed for the spectator, I have chosen to focus primarily on the framing and distribution of images. Because they are cheap and easy to

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produce, because they can be quickly and limitlessly distributed, because they are instantly affective and because they can be easily overwritten, images have become a pre-​eminent tool in the performance of emergencies. In terms of theatre itself, I have elected not to pursue Anderson and Adey’s valorisation of the medium as a tool for conceptualising emergency protocol. Rather, I am focussing on the theatrical event, with all of its contingencies, as a space in which the relationship between the spectator and emergencies may be critically examined. My reasons are to do with a suspicion that perpetual exposure to emergencies through the apparatuses of contemporary technology creates what I  define as ‘precarious spectatorship’, where the spectator’s opportunity to rationalise herself, or her relationship with the thing that she is spectating, is compromised. This precarity has become a key instrument in the presentation of emergency narratives, which operate on the level of the individual (the spectator, who is made to feel imperilled) but assume the position of a collective in their subsequent propositions of redress. Benn’s speech trades on this function when he first lists the domestic spaces of British people as possible targets of terrorist violence, and counters this with proposed bombing campaigns on behalf of the British government. As I  will go on to show, this location of the vulnerable individual in contradistinction to an assumed collective prioritises a sense of exclusion, where the spectator is cut off from the other spectators to whom the emergency is presented, and from the subject of the presentation itself. The precarity, then, is established in the relationship between the spectator and the object of spectatorship. A broader question about agency emerges at this juncture, of course –​to what extent is the spectator responsible for their reaction to emergencies, or to what extent might they hold some responsibility for the ways in which emergencies are constructed, since these are always tailored to a given spectatorship? These questions are at the core of this book’s endeavours, and many of my responses try, through analysis of images and videos, to expose mechanics employed within the presentation of ‘emergencies’ that attempt to manipulate the spectator. I’m also interested in the potential effects of repeated exposure to emergencies upon the individual. As Kieran Hurley muses to his audience in his play Heads Up, the modern world is a place where ‘extended state of emergency’ can become a person’s ‘normal’ situation. Theatre, I argue, offers a useful form through which to examine the kind of precarity that this ‘normal’ produces, and the theatrical pieces that I analyse are ones which critique the figure of the spectator, and the act of spectatorship. ‘Spectator’, ‘theatre’ and ‘image’ are thus key terms that require definition within the context of the following arguments.

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Spectator, theatre and image In order for there to be a spectator, there must be both an object and a framework of spectatorship. A  spectator can follow a sports match in a stadium or at a computer, see a painting in an art gallery or in a book, watch a film at a cinema or on a television. The spectator is always connecting to an object of spectatorship through a point of access. Now, the above list features a few of the frameworks and objects specifically designed for the purposes of spectating. Murkier waters are encountered in the frameworks and objects that are accidental or problematic –​what about spectators to a riot, or a crime, or a car crash, for instance? This question unveils a queasiness in our thinking about spectating, which sees a complicity between the spectator and the object of spectatorship. If the framework or object is problematic, the worry arises that either ‘you should not be watching’ (rather avert your eyes or make yourself useful and act), or, worse, ‘perhaps this is happening because you are watching it’. The former case raises a standard critique of spectating as somehow passive and voyeuristic, and the latter an uncomfortable thought of the ways in which spectatorial appetites  –​especially those that spectators are unwilling to admit  –​may be catered for by people who produce spectacles. I consider this latter worry in Chapter 1, in a discussion of the IS murder videos produced for western spectators. In terms of the debates around spectatorial ‘passivity’, Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator is still one of the most valuable contributions of recent years. Rancière dismisses the ‘passive’ argument, calling spectating our ‘normal’ and ‘active’ state, one in which we compare and deliberate, and produce ourselves in dialogue with what we experience (2009, p. 17). He criticises artists who try to ‘educate’ their audiences by presupposing the latter’s ignorance, as well as those who try to ‘awaken’ audiences from a presumed state of torpor and indifference. For Rancière, these are patronising devices which mask contempt for the spectator, and a fear that her agency might somehow compromise the authority of the artist. His argument is compelling, but there are two critical ways in which it does not resonate with my project of study. The first is that he does not seem to recognise a difference between the image and theatre as objects of spectatorship, and the second is that he does not seem to recognise any value in the proximal relation of bodies within the processes of theatre itself. Neither argument, I believe, can be upheld when considering the spectator in relation to emergencies.

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In addition to requiring an object and framework of spectatorship, the spectator must maintain a dialogue with the other in order to learn and rationalise herself. This contention is adopted from Emmanuel Levinas, who I shall return to in a moment. Rancière agrees with this, but says that we must dispense with the idea that theatre has any special ability to facilitate this dialogue. This is because he considers the notion of theatre being necessarily communitarian to be a myth because in a theatre ‘there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things’ (ibid., p.  16). For Rancière, the theatrical spectator appears to be no different to the spectator of an image, who is presented with a ‘complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the said and the unsaid’ (ibid., p. 93). In other words, the separation between the spectator and the thing that they are spectating must be maintained in order to provide the former with a space to learn and know themselves, and through which to develop their relationships with others. My problems with Rancière’s model are twofold. First, whilst I  find his debunking of the communitarian myth to be useful, he does not take into sufficient account the differences between the ‘thing’ of the image and the ‘thing’ of theatre. Both trade on representation, certainly, and both open themselves up to reading, but amongst their manifold differences there is a key distinction in the ways in which they approach what Levinas referred to as the ‘face’. This is not necessarily the actual face of a person, but rather the point of communication through which the person is approached and apprehended. For Levinas, the face makes an ethical demand upon the self because it provokes fear, as the boundary to the other, but also reminds us of our responsibility to the other –​the face is the entity which says ‘thou shalt not kill’. In her reading of this argument, Judith Butler observes that: the human is not represented by the face. Rather, the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give. (2006, p. 144, emphases in original)

She goes on to explore the ways in which images –​particularly portraits of the enemies of the west –​are presented in such a fashion as to saturate the entire text with a concept of ‘evil’. She sees this as an effacement of the Levinisian face and retorts, quite brilliantly, that ‘reality is not conveyed by what is represented within the image, but through the challenge to

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representation that reality delivers’ (ibid., p. 146). In this she chimes with Rancière, for whom the image becomes ‘intolerable’ if it is oversaturated with explication and cannot therefore provide a space in which the spectator may explore and rationalise for themselves. The reason that my argument is going to put me at odds with Rancière is that I believe that certain images, not because of their content, but by dint of their distribution in line with given ‘emergencies’, are intolerable. Given that one objective in declaring an emergency is to alert a targeted audience to a dangerous situation, in order to mobilise and legitimise protocol, it follows that the function of the image must be overwritten with explication. In emergencies, the spectator cannot be left to ‘plot her own path through the forest of things’. That is not to say that the image can’t provide a space for resistance and rationalisation in conjunction with emergencies, but rather that images are intolerable when specifically employed in the service of emergencies. Further, the image is ubiquitous within emergencies: images are cheap, images are affecting, images can be easily overwritten with other images, and images can now be distributed to the entire world at the click of a button. I place theatre in contradistinction to the image because, as I will argue, its relationship with the spectator offers a space in which this figure may be critically examined, and encouraged to examine themselves. Theatre may, of course, be saturated with explication –​and, equally, many theatre shows employ images within their construction. Again, to be clear, I am not claiming that all theatre necessarily challenges the spectator and encourages critical reflection on their position with regards to emergencies, any more than I  am claiming that all images preclude such reflection. Simply that the distribution of bodies and the emphasis on face-​to-​face encounters can, in some theatre, provide an opportunity for a privileged investigation of spectatorship. An example of theatre that does trade on explication is Ten Billion, written and performed by the climatologist Stephen Emmott and directed by Katie Mitchell (London, 2013). The performance comprises an hour-​ long illustrated lecture which guides audiences through a series of data-​ sets concerning population increase, rising levels of ocean temperatures, water use, global flooding, automobile manufacture and carbon monoxide emissions. As well as drawing connections between these, Emmott also relates his studies to societal phenomena such as the so-​called Arab Spring of 2011, and makes gloomy projections about the implications our disintegrating ecosystem will have on human life. Whilst he offers some hope of humanity’s survival if we alter our living habits, his general tone is pessimistic, and he concludes by repeating an associate’s belief that the best way of preparing for the future is to ‘teach my son how to use a gun’ (2013, p. 198).

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Emmott declares near the beginning of the piece that he views the current ecological situation as an ‘unprecedented planetary emergency’ (ibid., p. 7). In articulating this emergency, he moves away from science and scientific writing and into theatre, adopting a more ‘theatrical’ register in order to re-​present his findings. The reason he gives for this is telling: If we discovered tomorrow that there was an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and –​because physics is fairly simple science –​we were able to calculate that it was going to hit Earth on 3 June 2072, and we knew that its impact was going to wipe out 70 per cent of all life on Earth, governments worldwide would marshal the entire planet into unprecedented action. Every scientist, engineer, university and business would be enlisted: half to find a way of stopping it, the other half to find a way for our species to survive and rebuild if the first option proved unsuccessful. We’re in almost precisely that situation now, except that there isn’t a specific date and there isn’t an asteroid. The problem is us. (ibid., p. 191)

Emmott is talking about the necessity of capturing the imagination of targeted audiences in order to both impress upon them the gravity of the situation, and to motivate them to respond. He is, in other words, turning to performance to try to speed up the remodelling of eco-​ disasters into emergencies. There is a clear reflection here of the ‘promissory and threatening futures’ outlined by Anderson and Adey. There is also, palpably, no space for argument or alternative, because the nature of Emmott’s project is underwritten by the ‘urgency’ and ‘scale’ of the threat posed by ecological deterioration. To be clear: I am in no way disputing Emmott’s topic. Rather, I am pointing out that his use of the theatrical form is not the way that it will function in my analysis. His text is saturated with explication because that is exactly what it is designed to be: an act of explication. Even saying this, however, Emmott appears to be aware of the power of proximal bodies in a theatre space  –​this is presumably a factor in communicating his message through drama, rather than the more distributable forms of image, text or video. In opposition to Rancière’s dismissal, I  argue that the proximity of bodies and the contingency of performance are wholly significant to the construction of meaning within a theatrical text. This is especially visible in the recent rise of so-​ called ‘immersive theatre’ shows, examples of which will be analysed in Chapter 4. But, more broadly, theatre is capable of exposing and critiquing what I’m terming ‘precarious spectatorship’, a term that I have corrupted most egregiously from Butler. For Butler, ‘we address others

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when we speak, [and] in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails’ (2006, p. 130). It is through the ‘structure of address’ in which we approach and are approached, that the self and other are created. If ‘structure of address’ is substituted for ‘object of spectatorship’ –​Butler does this herself with images, in fact –​then an oversaturation of that object with explication will inhibit or damage the production of self and other. The object no longer provides space either for rationalisation, or, coming back to Rancière, ‘commune’ between spectators. As such, the process of spectatorship is destabilised:  it becomes precarious. Addressing this precarity, I  contend, is therefore a matter of shifting the object of spectatorship and identifying the differences between the ‘thing’ of the image and the ‘thing’ of theatre. And in opposition to Rancière, addressing this precarity is a matter of bodies, because the structure of address in theatre is expressed through and for the body. The importance of commune between bodies is starkly illustrated in Rachel Bagshaw and Chris Thorpe’s The Shape of the Pain (2017), which I offer now as a brief case study into some ways that theatre can offer a chance to critically reflect on spectatorship. This is a dramatic piece based on Bagshaw’s experience of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, where a person suffers perpetual pain regardless of physical stimuli. The show exploits the peculiarities of theatrical performance to address issues of physical and psychic interrelation, and also raises another topic that will prove important throughout the analyses of this book: storytelling. The Shape of the Pain Before the performer, Hannah McPake, even enters the stage, her voiceover describes her physical form, the topographies of the stage and set, and the nature and function of the audience. We can see her standing to one side, unmoving and mute: the voiceover is pre-​recorded and the theatrical image highlights the disjuncture between performer and performance. When she begins to speak live, McPake emphasises this disjuncture by explaining herself as a performer, and referring to an offstage woman, Bagshaw, whose experiences she will recount. She clarifies an ‘experimental’ nature to the show, with the ‘experiment’ being an attempt to convey Bagshaw’s pain to the spectator, via the performer. Since pain cannot be communicated under its own terms, or as pain, it is required that alternative languages which are foreign to the experience of pain are used to describe (but never traverse) that experience. Although everybody in the audience has had this experience, we cannot

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join in a collective comprehension because pain is non-​conveyable. What is more, it is inaccessible to the subject unless they are in direct contact with it at this moment. You stub your toe and instantly remember all those other times you stubbed your toe. The pain is an access point to the past. But once the pain has gone, you cannot remember in its entirety the sensation of stubbing your toe, at any point in your life, until it happens again. Pain may thus be described as a non-​conveyable singularity, one that frames our experiences but which, without direct experience, is something that we tell ourselves in a language that is alien to it. What is more, at the denouement of the show  –​when the lights and sound reach fever pitch and McPake delivers a speech about intense pain  –​ she utters the remarkable words ‘at this point she’s no longer there and I have to take over’. In other words, Bagshaw (as subject) steps outside of the framework of spectatorship and McPake is left to affirm not just the failure of theatre to represent pain, but the failure of pain to represent itself to the subject. At the centre of pain is an absence –​not just a non-​ conveyable, but a thing that does not exist. Seen from this perspective, pain pulls towards what Giorgio Agamben argues as a principal function of storytelling. In an essay called The Fire and the Tale, Agamben recounts an allegory about the founder of Hassidism, who would go to a certain place in the woods and light a fire and meditate in prayer, and by doing this would then be able to perform a difficult task. A generation later, his successor would go to the same place in the woods and pray, but had forgotten how to light a fire. But because he was in the right place and praying, this was ‘sufficient’. His successor would go to the same place in the woods, but he did not how to light a fire or how to pray. But because he was in the right place, this was also ‘sufficient’. His successor did not know how to light a fire, how to pray or where to go in the woods, but because he knew how to tell the story of these things, this was ‘sufficient’ too. Agamben’s point is that at the heart of all stories lies mystery; the story emerges from practices that are mysterious, or forgotten, or impossible, and assumes their place. He goes on to say: The fire and the tale, the mystery and the story are two indispensable elements of literature. But in what way can one of the elements, whose presence is the irrefutable proof of the loss of the other, bear witness to this absence, exorcising its shadow and memory? Where there is the tale, the fire is out: where there is the mystery, there cannot be the story. (2017, p. 8)

With The Shape of the Pain, the mystery being explored –​which no longer exists in a tangible sense, as Agamben says, because this is where there

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is only story –​is the non-​conveyable experience of individual pain. At the core of the phenomenon of pain there is a void in which no representation is possible because there is nothing to represent. It is an aporia, the Greek word meaning ‘impasse’, which describes the point where we reach the limits of the known and are forced to dismantle and remake our knowledge in order to create new apparatuses for the negotiation of this unknown thing. McPake closes the show by informing the audience that if we cannot accept that some things cannot be represented, then we’re ‘fucked’. However, if we can accept this, then, she reassures us, we are ‘a bit less fucked’. The failure of the story, this process of ‘being fucked’, returns us to Butler’s point about the ‘challenge to representation that reality delivers’. Throughout the show we have been emphatically reminded of our status and function as spectators, and of the impossible objective attempted by the production. It is the opposite of ‘saturating through explication’  –​rather, The Shape of the Pain resists explication because of the inaccessibility of its subject. It also locates the force of its argument within the physical embodiment of its performer and its audience. Although it does not seek to create communities of spectators, it makes a demand on the material presence of the individual spectator and invites us to consider the relationship of our corporeal forms, both to ourselves and to the show. This invitation could not be successfully conveyed through an image, since it must be delivered through the demonstrative example of the performer’s body (already foregrounded before she enters the stage). This prioritising of the corporeal is, as I will go on to argue throughout this book, one of many strengths that theatre can offer in a critical examination of the relationship between spectators and emergencies.

About this book Precarious Spectatorship: Theatre and Image in an Age of Emergencies is divided into four chapters, an Introduction, Epilogue and Appendix. Chapter  1, ‘Enemy/​ image’, conducts an in-​ depth discussion of the ways in which Islamic State (IS) murder propaganda was produced and distributed in the UK, in the years 2014–​2015. By focussing on the careful construction of personas by both IS and the UK government, my aim is to demonstrate the ways in which emergencies may be packaged and deployed in order to inspire specific responses in targeted audiences. On the one hand, IS used their technological fluency to ventriloquise

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their victims in order to demonstrate absolute mastery and justification for their cause, inspiring potential converts around the world. On the other, the British press carefully repackaged ‘Jihadi John’ as a monster, in order to stoke public anxiety about IS and draw support for military reprisals. In this chapter I begin a discussion of the image, and the ways in which the disconnect between the image and its subject may be exploited in order to produce affective responses within the spectator. Where Chapter 1 argues that obscuring the subject of an image may in some ways weaponise that image, Chapter 2, ‘Two tales of my dying neighbours’ explores the effect that this obscuring has on the spectator themselves, specifically in their relationship to the other. My case study is the so-​called ‘refugee crisis’, an ongoing set of mass migrations in which images have frequently been manipulated or overwritten in order to divorce western spectators from the plight of 1 per cent of the world’s population. Using examples such as the photograph of Alan Kurdi’s drowned body, I assert that the presentation of refugees within the visual economy is designed to hijack their bodies and preclude spectatorial empathy. A secondary function of this process, however, is that without access to the other, the spectator is unable to rationalise herself and is brought into a state of precarity. I approach this notion of precarity through a continued discussion of Levinas’ concept of the ‘face’, and introduce live performance as a means of reopening the ‘face-​ to-​face’ encounters of self and other. I discuss Vanishing Point’s 2016 theatrical production The Destroyed Room as a show that dramatises the degeneration of the spectator, by putting that spectator on stage and forensically deconstructing their incapacity to relate to others or know themselves. This is a state that Bernard Stiegler calls ‘spiritual misery’, or the block of psychic circuits that make intrapersonal development and cohabitation possible (2013, pp. 51–​79). A further consequence of the emergency phenomenon is uncovered in the destruction of story and storytelling, which I investigate through Walter Benjamin to explore the ways in which this destruction alienates the spectator from herself and from the other. I then look at Zinnie Harris’ 2015 play How to Hold Your Breath, which relocates the spectator within the place of the refugee, and demonstrates the traumatic consequences of the destruction of the face of the other from within. Both shows resolve themselves through apocalypse, and so the chapter concludes –​in dialogue with Stiegler’s dire warnings –​in a discussion of the apocalyptic potential in predicating a visual economy upon the destruction of the face of the other. Chapter 3, ‘in the grip of the monster’, draws together key arguments that emerge in the first two chapters, under the aegis of suicide. It begins

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with a discussion of tragedy, in particular the figure of the ‘scapegoat’ who must be sacrificed in order for the polis to reproduce itself. In the early twenty-​first century, I argue that this figure has been replaced with images, and that the world they bring into being is one of objects, rather than subjects. The extremities of this process lead spectators to make images out of themselves which, I argue, is suicidal. I develop this argument through analysis of the rhetoric of the 45th US President, Donald Trump, and examples taken from events between 2016 and 2018 where images of suicide were circulated on the Internet. Drawing the conversation back into tragedy I conclude with an examination of Alice Birch’s (2017) play Anatomy of a Suicide, which, I argue, recasts the tragic hero in the light of a society that has become suicidal. Chapter 4, ‘Theatre, exposure and the exterior’, reappraises both the destruction of the exterior and the ‘empty centre’ that I have theorised as hallmarks of emergencies, and proposes a survey of some recent theatrical texts in which these ideas have been variously tackled. The intention here is not to offer a programmatic set of approaches or texts that expose absolutely the mechanics of precarious spectatorship. Rather, I am seeking to illustrate some ways in which theatre, with its partialities, contingencies and failures, can offer spaces of potential identification or resistance to this process. I begin with the concept of a ‘rigged game’. This idea, which underpins Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic, Ontrorend Goed’s £¥€$ (LIES) 2 Magpies’ Last Resort and Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical (all 2017), offers a way of conceptualising through performance the restrictive limits imposed by emergency protocol. Addressing each in turn, I  explore the ways in which they create theatrical languages to challenge the orthodoxies latent within emergencies and, importantly, destabilise the notion that there is no other choice. My second cluster of productions are Andy Duffy’s Crash (2015), Mark Thomas’ The Red Shed (2016), Kieran Hurley’s Heads Up (2017) and Darkfield’s Flight (2018), which are shows that borrow conventions from storytelling and dramatise, in different ways, the imperative of retaining a sense of historical context to the present, and the awful consequences of what can happen if this relationship is overwritten. The Epilogue locates my research within my own experiences of being exposed to images of violence, contextualising this study and offering some thoughts on a personal experience of precarious spectatorship. I  also discuss the work of Antonin Artaud, one of the key critical voices in theatre, to warn against the violence of representation, and conclude with an analysis of Alice Birch’s (2018) La Maladie de la Mort, a play that addresses the suicidal consequences of a world predicated on images.

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As an Appendix, I  offer a brief history of emergencies themselves, in order to give some sense of where our current understanding of the term comes from. I begin with the spiritual coinage of John Donne, and then examine the influence of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke upon Carl Schmitt, the philosopher whose theory of the ‘state of exception’ underscores our contemporary understanding of emergencies. I explore some of the ways in which states of emergency became common legal practice during colonialism, and how cultural artefacts try to redress this legacy in discourses of post-​colonialism. This work is included as an Appendix because although it contextualises the work undertaken in Precarious Spectatorship (in a way that, to my knowledge, does not exist elsewhere), it operates outwith the arguments that I  construct in the main body of the book. As such, although it speaks to the overall concerns of the book, it is also intended to function as a standalone text.

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Not knowing how to share with another gaze our own passion to see, not knowing how to produce a culture of the gaze: this is where the real violence against those who are helplessly abandoned to the voracity of visibilities begins. Marie-​José Mondzain, 2009, p. 20

An indefinite state of emergency On 13 November 2015, nine gunmen carried out a series of coordinated mass-​assassinations in Paris, killing 130 people and wounding a further 368. The attacks were claimed by the organisation known variously as ISIL, ISIS, Da’esh and Islamic State (IS), a self-​declared Sunni Muslim caliphate operating out of occupied territory in Iraq and Syria that was at its strongest between 2014 and 2017. In the aftermath of the assassinations, President François Hollande declared a state of emergency, which was immediately ratified by the French parliament. This state of emergency, permitting the police and interior ministry to act without judicial approval or warrant, and allowing searches, arrests and detainment of suspects without the need for evidence, was swiftly

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extended to a three-​month period. By late January 2016, the Prime Minister Manuel Valls was calling for it to be continued ‘until we can get rid of Da’esh’ under the justification that it is right ‘to use all means in our democracy under the rule of law to protect the French people’ (Stothard, 22 January 2016; Sharkov, 22 January 2016). Then on 10 February 2016, the National Assembly voted in favour of an amendment to the French constitution, which would enable any sitting president to declare a state of emergency without parliamentary approval (Christafis, 10 February 2016). The amendment was shelved due to lack of Senate approval, but the 2015 state of emergency was prolonged five times before finally expiring in November 2017. In effect, the emergency precipitated by the 2015 Paris attacks spurred a reordering of the law to consolidate its authority beyond the contemporary threat and above the rule of democracy. Judith Butler offered an eloquent objection to what she saw as the hijacking of temporary panic in order to permanently increase state power. Drawing on her research into ‘grievability’ (the factors that elevate the significance of some deaths whilst obscuring others) she warned against the vulnerability of hysteria, and the dangers of bartering away civil liberties on the promise of increased security. I  will quote from her at length, as she sketches out many key points of reference for this chapter. Mourning seems fully restricted within the national frame. The nearly 50 dead in Beirut from the day before [the Paris attacks] are barely mentioned, and neither are the 111 in Palestine killed in the last weeks alone, or the scores in Ankara. Most people I know describe themselves as ‘at an impasse’, not able to think the situation through. One way to think about it may be to come up with a concept of transversal grief, to consider how the metrics of grievability work, why the cafe as target pulls at my heart in ways that other targets cannot. It seems that fear and rage may well turn into a fierce embrace of a police state. I  suppose this is why I  prefer those who find themselves at an impasse. That means that this will take some time to think through. It is difficult to think when one is appalled. It requires time, and those who are willing to take it with you. (2015)

Foremost amongst Butler’s concerns are the ways in which ‘emergencies’ distort notions of time and space. At one level, they overload their subjects with a sense of urgency, which creates a paralysis (or ‘impasse’), whilst noisily asserting that something must be done, and now. A key purpose to declaring an ‘emergency’, after all, is to signal that whatever has already happened, things can still get much worse. In conjunction with this, emergencies involve vivid demarcations of space in order to localise the threat, identifying those who will be protected and marking

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out those who will not. This is why the ‘national frame’ became so important in the aftermath of the Paris assassinations, reinvigorating the hyper-​nationalism that had spread through France after the IS-​related attacks on the staff of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, which had happened in January of the same year. Although the French military increased its bombing campaign against IS positions in Syria and Iraq, the principal focus of the state of emergency was the policing of domestic rather than international locations (Wazir, 6 January 2016). Its legitimacy and force was built upon a solidified conception of ‘France’ and ‘French nationality’. State apparatuses then set about emptying (or ‘cleansing’, with all of that term’s horrifying implications) any spaces that resisted this suddenly rigid, incontestable model (Toor, 29 January 2016). Activists with no ties to IS were placed under indefinite house arrest; Muslim domestic and community areas were subject to police raids; and many people were detained without stated cause or corroborative evidence (Rubin, 17 February 2016). In this instance, the emergency reveals its potential to act as a political device, a tool for the conversion of panic into a new orthodoxy. In the case of France, the sovereignty of the nation was already a pre-​eminent concern  –​this particular emergency simply exploited that concern to promote an agenda of exclusion and exclusivity. In this chapter I will focus on the subject of IS, and discuss ways in which they have fostered (and been used to foster) a sense of emergency amongst countries such as Britain, France and the US. I  am defining ‘sense of emergency’ as the organisation of events into a cohesive threat in order to facilitate or provoke response on the part of a governing body. This is not the formal ‘state of emergency’ invoked by the French government in the example above, but a more dispersed and intangible entity that nevertheless permits extraordinary measures to be taken in the name of emergency response. To clarify these processes, I will be paying particular attention to the propaganda produced by IS for audiences in the US, UK and Western Europe since, as I will argue, they were crucial to establishing the ubiquitous menace of IS during its heyday, justifying both retributive military campaigns, and the ceding of civil liberties amongst their enemies. Although this propaganda proved all-​pervasive in mainstream media and the unregulated spaces of the Internet, very little attention was paid to the ways in which it functioned as propaganda, in the service of both IS and the states with which it is at war. This chapter, then, seeks in part to redress that omission, and in doing so to observe some ways in which the ‘emergency’ constituted by IS was prepared and orchestrated in the public domain. To be clear from the outset: I am not arguing here against the circulation of images

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of violence. In the visual cultures of the early twenty-​first century, this would anyway be pragmatically untenable. What I am arguing against is rather the distribution of such images in a way that does not encourage critical reflection on the image and our relationship with it, and looking into some of the consequences that such distribution may produce.

Making an enemy ‘I want Jihadi John to face justice.’ The first time that the then British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered this proclamation was at the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, 2014 (Leftly, 16 November 2014). At that time, ‘Jihadi John’, an anonymous masked executioner for IS, had appeared on four short films, in each decapitating a foreign hostage. The hostages were US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning. As each of the videos were released, they were quickly reposted by Internet users to an uncountable number of websites. In Britain, Scotland Yard responded by warning that accessing these videos in their unedited format ‘may’ constitute a terrorist offence (Evans, 20 August 2014). In support of their warning, they cited Section 2 of the Anti-​Terrorism Act 2006, which declares the ‘dissemination of terrorist publications’ to be an offence under the law. This rather vague legislation enabled British state apparatuses to ban the unedited videos from all mainstream media. Regulation of the Internet proved, as ever, to be much trickier, with various Internet companies reported to be facilitating the distribution of Islamic State material, either without their own knowledge or without their concern (Katz, 9 January 2019; Thomson, 18 November 2015). In the mainstream press, however, photographic stills and edited clips of the videos were distributed, largely free from critical engagement and mostly involving hysterical condemnation of the executioner. In response to the killing of Sotloff and Foley, the US launched air strikes against IS and reported ‘Jihadi John’ wounded in early November 2014. These reports were later proven false, as he appeared in two further films, decapitating Japanese hostages Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto. He also featured in a longer propaganda video, at one point standing next to the severed head of US aid worker Peter Kassig and at another leading a group of IS militants in the decapitation of eighteen Syrian soldiers. When Cameron first delivered his proclamation, he stressed a desire for ‘Jihadi John’ to ‘face justice’ after being captured alive. A year later

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a US drone strike was reported to have killed Mohammed Emwazi, the man who had since been identified as ‘Jihadi John’. Cameron immediately declared this a ‘strike at the heart of ISIL’ and the satisfaction of his (and, given his own symbolic position, ‘our’) desire for justice (Dathan, 13 November 2015). On reflection, however, it was difficult to discern the exact terms of this satisfaction. Through the worldwide distribution of the films in which he features, ‘Jihadi John’ gained international notoriety and significant political capital, both for IS and for their adversaries. This notoriety and capital far exceeded the limitations of Emwazi himself, and were not terminated with his death. Long after his demise, his picture was still being used to inspire fear and admiration; his videos were still reproducing the violence that he actually and symbolically wrought upon his victims. His name became symbolic of the broad and brutal reach of IS propaganda. And that name is highly significant. ‘John’ was one of four Beatles-​inspired monikers given by hostages in a Syrian jail to their anonymous tormentors (Anon., 26 February 2015). The composite ‘Jihadi John’ was then coined and distributed by the British press ostensibly for its catchy alliteration, and the easy styling of archetypal villain that it afforded. But there are deeper implications to this composite. For one thing, the name precluded the division of its points of reference. Since at least the events of 11 September 2001, ‘Jihad’ (a Muslim’s duty to maintain their religion, translatable as ‘struggle’) has become shorthand in western press and politics for armed conflict, with the derivation ‘Jihadi’ commonly applied as warrior, soldier or terrorist. In terms of self-​identification, the ‘Jihadi’ is a ‘warrior’ or ‘soldier’ involved in a holy obligation. Alain Badiou defines such figures as creatures of excess, who exist at the intersections between ‘courageous death and immortality’ and do things that are beyond the limits of ‘our vital and social determinations’ (2012, pp. 43, 41). Clearly, however, the moniker ‘Jihadi John’ was not created either for or by Emwazi. As Simon Cottee pointed out, he would never have embraced the nickname on his own terms because ‘in his mind he [was] a warrior, not a banal John’ (Saul, 3 March 2015). ‘Jihadi John’ was a name externally applied to a ‘terrorist’, a process designed to highlight an inverse, passive quality of ‘excess’. We did not name him a terrorist simply in order to clarify what he could do, but also to justify what could be done to him. Which brings us back to the final part of Cameron’s statement. On behalf of the ‘we’, ‘I’ desire (where desire carries the full force of a national government and its international allies) that ‘Jihadi John’, this persona who embodies qualities that exceed the ‘human animal’ should ‘face justice’. But ‘face’ how? Turn towards, be faced with, or experience?

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None of these definitions are interchangeable, nor is it clear to which Cameron is referring. In the act of my citation I can now assume what Cameron understood by the final word of his statement, because ‘Jihadi John’ was killed. The ‘justice’ was death. Cameron legitimised this definition of ‘justice’ by citing Article 51 of the UN Charter, which guarantees ‘the right of individual or collective self-​defence if an armed attack occurs against a UN member’ (Bowcott, 13 November 2015). He called the killing of Emwazi both ‘an act of self-​defence’ and ‘the right thing to do’. Thus, the exceptional acts that may be done to the Jihadi are circumscribed within international law. Justice, we are to assume, was ‘faced’. Or at least, Mohammed Emwazi was killed. Mohammed Emwazi and ‘Jihadi John’, however, were not the same entity. The latter was a persona, created by its enemies in order to be an enemy.1 His name indicated that he both came from and othered the interior, and was thus the product of a divided self. Once his progenitor had been unmasked, there were numerous excavations of Emwazi’s past, and attempts to uncover precisely what had led him to ‘become’ this person. Most of these excavations, however, failed to ask why the British press and politicians had felt it necessary to create this persona in the first place. And the jubilant reports of Emwazi’s death completely missed the point. In destroying the man who had performed as ‘Jihadi John’, that figure was immortalised, and his division of the British self was set in stone. It was an example of what Jacques Derrida, in a response to the attacks on 9/​11, called ‘autoimmunitary suicide’: self-​destruction by virtue of aggressive defence (Borradori, 2004, pp. 94–​96). The journalist Patrick Cockburn wryly supposed the killing of Emwazi a ‘symbolic victory in a war that is full of symbols’. But as he pointed out, since martyrdom for the faith is the key objective for many IS militants, the symbolism of Emwazi’s death was entirely one-​sided (Cockburn, 13 November 2015). In fact, the principal consequence of the death was the absolute severing of the man from the persona. ‘Jihadi John’ never ‘faced justice’, since juridical process might have uncovered Emwazi’s face and depleted the power of enemy that was bestowed upon him. As it is, he will always be a masked (faceless) man, and the actions for which he has become known will continue to be repeated, thus enacted, in the videos and in the photographs. True, he will not murder any more foreign hostages on video; but the masked executioner is an easily replaceable figure. In January 2016, in fact, IS released a video showing a different

For an examination of the relationship between persona and personal identity through performance, see Lazar (2013).

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masked man with a British accent, later identified as Siddhartha Dhar, executing a hostage by shooting him in the back of the head. Eager to play their part, the British press immediately consolidated this persona as the ‘new Jihadi John’. The enemy without a face is easily recycled. Given this recyclability, it was always clear that the prevalence and popularity of the films in which the original ‘Jihadi John’ appears would quickly decrease in circulation. But this is of little consequence if they are simply replaced with newer figures that fulfil the exact same function. And even taking this into account, the political expediency of ‘Jihadi John’ did not end with Mohammed Emwazi’s death. In fact, in the short run, it was amplified –​as a rallying cry for IS, and as a justification for the suicidal aggression of its adversaries. Killing the actor only strengthened his signature performance. In the aftermath, however, very little attention was paid to this performance as a performance, which is where this chapter now turns.

Filming executions In December 2014, the journalist and presenter Victoria Coren Mitchell issued the following entreaty to her readers: Our readiness to be spooked by murder footage from Syria benefits three groups: the propagandists behind it; those who would restrict our civil liberty in the name of ‘terrorism prevention’; and a modern media so obsessed with hits, traffic and advertising sales that it has long forgotten a world where it did not depict corpses, or irresponsibly cover suicide, for fear of causing further damage. In a very deep way, these groups are all taking part in the same sick game. Don’t let us play along. (Coren Mitchell, 14 December 2014)

Although Coren Mitchell’s concerns and sentiment are highly laudable, the strategy of complete disengagement that she proposes had by that point become pragmatically untenable. The propaganda produced by IS continued to draw new recruits just as it provided ever-​more legitimacy to restrictions on civil liberty –​in November 2016, for example, the so-​called ‘snooper’s charter’ became law, which provided the British police and security services unprecedented access to personal information and new powers of ‘hacking’ data en masse (Travis, 29 November 2016). The charter, inevitably, was energised with arguments of ‘security’ in the face of terrorist threats.

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This, of course, is nothing new. A.C. Grayling points out that ‘emphasising security over civil liberties’ was a prevalent feature of UK legislature in the 1990s, often as a response to the perceived threat of the IRA (2009, p. 18). It is in the professional interests of such legislators to amplify a contemporary threat to the maximum degree, and the IS execution videos were purpose-​built for such amplification. The instantly iconic aesthetics of the masked executioner and the shaven-​headed, orange jumpsuited victim were effortlessly integrated into popular culture, attaining a power through notoriety that was exploited by both IS and its enemies to shore up militaristic, political and ideological agendas. Were it not for this widespread distribution and exploitation, perhaps Coren Mitchell’s advice could have been feasible  –​although this is doubtful, since they were always made to be seen. Foley, Sotloff, Haines, Henning, Kassig, Yukawa and Goto were killed for the purposes of creating films, not vice versa. So when speaking of ‘execution videos’, it should be remembered that the video is not reducible to the execution. What is more, in fact, the term ‘execution video’ is imprecise for these particular films, because the executions themselves were not included in the final edits. In each of the six films focussing on the execution of the individual hostages, the screen fades to black at the point of decapitation. This is unusual, as IS did not otherwise shy away from depicting extreme and gruesome acts of violence in their propaganda. In fact, after the decapitation videos produced by Abu Musab al-​Zarqawi for Al-​Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in 2004, IS and its forerunning organisations intensified both the extremity and production values of their recordings of violence. Omitting the decapitations in these six films was a choice, and understanding why this choice was made is fundamental to comprehending the videos’ functions as propaganda. In her book Performance in a Time of Terror Jenny Hughes examines Zarqawi’s decapitation of the British hostage Kenneth Bigley in 2004. She points to the iconography of Bigley’s orange jumpsuit, and argues that the execution directly referenced the ‘states of exception’ (spaces beyond the rule of law) constituted by the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility on Cuba. In a consideration of the ‘performance complex’ materialised by the beheading, Hughes makes two statements that are significant here. The first is to observe the controversial nature of Zarqawi’s actions within militant Islam at the time –​a letter was later discovered from Osama bin Laden’s ‘second in command’ Ayman al-​Zawahiri criticising the video for undermining the ‘race for the hearts and minds of the global Muslim community’ (Hughes, 2011, p. 39). The second is a technical assessment of the relationship between the execution and its recording:

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Precarious spectatorship The beheading is shown in three shots, and the cuts reveal that what is exhibited is in fact the attempt to behead rather than the actual beheading. The physical struggle to sever head from body is edited out of the screen performance as the difficulty of the act undermined the display of mastery over the other […] In the actual act of killing, in the final disappearance of life –​there was no performance (ibid., pp. 47–​48, emphases in original).

In Bigley’s execution, as with those six videos under consideration here, the death is removed from the final edit. And in part, Hughes’ disavowal of performance at the point of death is a reminder of the limitations of this form of critical enquiry. Whilst performance analysis can explore the narratives informing a publicised killing, its application to the act of dying risks repeating the violence done to the victim in the first place. Hughes acknowledges this much herself, and her solution is to restrict her focus to the ‘jumps, cuts and absences in the video’ (ibid., p.  39). In other words, her principal point of interest is presentation. On these grounds, a secondary enquiry is made into the editing out of Bigley’s death. Hughes suggests that the purpose of the film was to demonstrate control over the other, and that the difficulty of decapitation would compromise this demonstration. But if these contentions are applied to the videos produced by IS, they are quickly revealed as invalid. For a long time, there was no queasiness within that organisation about advertising brutality.2 Prior to the production of these videos, Sami Moubayed points out that it was in fact standard procedure for IS militants to share photos and video clips of violent acts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter (2015, p. 151). This hardening of resolve was complemented by an increased efficiency in performing beheadings, and technical proficiency in capturing and editing together footage of those acts. In the fifteen-​minute video that includes shots of Kassig’s severed head, ‘Jihadi John’ leads a group of militants in the simultaneous decapitations of eighteen Syrian soldiers. Where the footage of Bigley’s execution was amateurish, with few edits, low-​quality visuals and sound, this video is highly sophisticated –​multiple roaming cameras, slow-​motion and sped-​up shots of high-​quality, well-​edited footage with a synchronised incidental soundtrack. And in this video, the decapitations are shown in full. ‘Jihadi John’ looks in to camera halfway through beheading his victim and pauses, in fact, to amplify the affect of that moment. At IS’ leader, ‘Caliph’ Abu Bakr al-​Baghdadi, did eventually issue a ban on showing the actual moment of decapitation in videos, in June 2015, on grounds that such images would upset Muslim children.

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this point, the footage slows down: the editor understands the dramaturgical significance as well. From which, three observations should be made. First, since the IS execution videos were staged as performances in order to amplify their affect, performance analysis can –​and should –​ be employed in order to break down that affect and attempt to combat the overinscription of the victims death with a propaganda narrative. Second, IS not only had no qualms about advertising brutal killing but also, when it chose, made the moment of killing a focal point of its propaganda. And third, since the producers demonstrated dramaturgical comprehension of the affect of their propaganda, it can be contended that editorial choices were made not to disguise inept technique or soften the violence, but rather to address the peculiarities of an intended audience. My argument proceeds from this point: whilst the execution of Bigley formalised the aesthetic principles of these subsequent videos, IS refined their propaganda techniques in order to ensure distribution across a wider network. In order to examine how (and why) they did this, it is necessary to briefly consider the development of IS itself.

The digital caliphate Abdel Bari Atwan traces the origins of IS back to the insurrections in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq, 2003 (2015, p. 46). In 2004, Osama bin Laden officially recognised Zarqawi’s Tawhid al Jihad group as Al-​ Qaeda in Iraq (Napoleoni, 2014, p. 10). It appears to have been Zarqawi who initially promoted both the vilification of Shi’i Muslims and the digitised recording of gruesome violence that became IS trademarks. IS regarded Zarqawi as their first emir, and whilst his technological capabilities paled in comparison with their own, his organisation established the iconicity and format of their propaganda (Hughes, 2011, pp. 35–​37; Bari Atwan, 2015, p. 48). In addition to beheadings, Zarqawi began filming successful attacks carried out against coalition forces and his militants edited the footage together with Islamic hymns. These short films were uploaded to YouTube, which was conveniently launched in 2005. In contrast to the technophobic edicts of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Zarqawi’s AQI was thoroughly versed in digital technology. This established the precedent for IS, an organisation that recruited IT specialists, had a dedicated propaganda wing that produced ‘documentary’ films, a television station, and encouraged all of its fighters to upload images and

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videos straight from the frontlines to Twitter and Facebook. They even hijacked Twitter-​storms by attaching high-​trending hashtags to their own tweets (Napoleoni, 2014, pp. 17, 31). Patrick Cockburn pointed to this as a curious contradiction in their ideology: The jihadists may yearn for a return to the norms of early Islam, but their skills in using modern communications and the Internet are well ahead of most political movements in the world. By producing a visual record of everything it does, ISIS has greatly amplified its political impact. Its militants dominate social media and produce well-​made and terrifying films to illustrate the commitment of their fighters as they identify and kill their enemies. (2015, pp. 127–​128)

Following the death of Zarqawi in 2006 the organisation underwent numerous name and leadership changes. IS consolidated into its final form by capitalising upon the violence and confusion of the Syrian civil war, as well as the resentment felt by its majority Sunni population against their mistreatment at the hands of Assad’s regime. Their leader at the time of writing, ‘Caliph’ Abu Bakr al-​Baghdadi, is a consummate performer. Until he declared the caliphate in a live video feed in June 2014, there were only a couple of photographs of him in circulation. Up to this point, Napoleoni observes that Baghdadi ‘covered his face even in front of his most trusted lieutenants, earning him the nickname “the invisible sheikh” ’ (2014, p. 15). This was partly for security –​Zarqawi had been tracked down and killed by American troops after they recognised his location from a video he posted online (Hosken, 2015, p. 81). But the anonymity was also a powerful weapon for Baghdadi –​ without a face, he could operate as a pseudo-​mythological entity. This understanding of the power of ‘facelessness’ was subsequently, of course, exploited to great effect in the persona of ‘Jihadi John’. In addition, as Napoleoni points out, Baghdadi’s low profile stood in direct contrast to the ‘parading and pontificating Western politicians and Arab dictators, whose ubiquitous images, plastered everywhere, boost their cult of personality’ (Napoleoni, 2014, p.  16). Baghdadi’s theatrical skill was further evidenced by his well-​publicised preparations before declaring the caliphate: Baghdadi used a miswak (cleaning twig) to clean his teeth before delivering his famous sermon at the Great Mosque of al-​Nuri in Mosul on 4 July 2014. In this he was emulating the Prophet Muhammad’s reported practice. Thus he was linking himself through word, gesture and blood lineage to the Prophet, as well as referencing the Salafist’s desire to return to the lifestyle of the first Muslims. (Bari Atwan, 2015, p. 111)

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What emerges here is an organisation with a clear understanding of both the power of performance, and of the global distributive capacities of contemporary technology. It is for this reason, according to Napoleoni, that IS was able to take an unprecedented step into quasi-​nation-​building ‘by simply keeping abreast of a fast-​changing world in which propaganda and technology play an increasingly vital role’ (Napoleoni, 2014, xxii). A consequence of this technological proficiency was, of course, that the extreme violence accompanying this nation-​building was thrust into the public gaze, to widespread horror and condemnation. Again, however, not only is extreme violence a key ingredient in the formation of all nation-​building, but IS is not even unusually violent in comparison to other modern armed organisations: ‘In Kosovo, in the 1990s, similar atrocities were committed, including cutting off children’s heads to play football with them in front of their parents’ (ibid., p. 45). What distinguished IS was their ability to dramatise and distribute this violence in such a way that it worked to their advantage. It is also worth pointing out that the organisation’s policy of kidnapping, torturing and in some cases publicly executing foreign journalists granted them unusual editorial control over ‘information’ coming from their geographical centres of power. This enabled the organisation to create false impressions of situations on the ground, inflating their accomplishments and occluding their failures (Cockburn, 2015, p. 63; Napoleoni, 2014, p. 62). The importance of performance through technology in establishing their ‘caliphate’ cannot be underestimated. What also becomes clear is the peculiar and ‘irrational’ performativity that emerged from interactions with the online propaganda. The language that Napoleoni uses here is significant: The rising number of followers around the world, people seduced and lured into violence by the propaganda of the Islamic State, confirms the global appeal of its message:  a message that the virtual world in which we now live can also produce new, irrational, and barbaric acts of violence. The failed attempt by a group of Australian Muslims to randomly kidnap and behead an individual simply to post its [sic] execution online, shows us the potential degeneration of the Islamic State propaganda narrative in a virtual environment where everything is a video game, including real life warfare. (2014, pp. 47–​48)

The distribution of propaganda across a virtual sphere produced dispersed acts of violence independently of the geographical and ideological centres of IS’ power. This was very much in keeping with Baghdadi’s military tactics  –​as Moubayed observes he preferred ‘to allow others to do the fighting on behalf of Islamic State’ (2015, p. 202). The establishing of a

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‘virtual’ caliphate was thus essential to the group’s overall functioning, as was the stimulation of violent irruptions within the global network of locations from which that ‘caliphate’ was accessed. The overlaps between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘geographical’ caliphate were numerous –​from the hacked, online version of Grand Theft Auto (renamed Clashing of Swords) to the surreal reports that expendable foreign Jihadis were often sent to unknown battlefields with only Google Maps for navigation –​and would often get lost on the way (Bari Atwan, 2015, p. 19; Moubayed, 2015, p. 156). Moubayed goes so far as to say that IS’ nostalgic ideology ‘transported [militants] into an imaginary world that was extremely detached from the real one in which they were living, forcing them to walk blindly towards an illusion’ (2015, p. 66). The wholesale incorporation of digital technologies and virtual environments gave tangible form to that imaginary world, one in which everybody from embedded militants to potential recruits could participate (Rose, 7 October 2014). Paul Virilio calls this phenomenon a ‘meta-​geophysical reality’, one that stretches ‘from one edge to the other of present reality’ and –​importantly –​‘destroys cultures which are precisely situated in the space of the physics of the globe’ (1997, p.  9). What better way, then, of trying to establish a new ‘Islamic caliphate’ that required the dissolution of existing spatial territories, than by expanding the space of that caliphate in a virtual terrain. For the physical spaces that it occupied during its peak years 2014–​ 2016, IS maintained a Foucauldian ‘spectacle of the scaffold’, with the punishment of beheading routinely carried out on enemy soldiers and domestic ‘criminals’. In June 2014, the UN reported the decapitation of more than fifty Syrian soldiers in al-​Raqqa (Anon., 26 July 2014). At these public executions the presence of all ‘citizens’ –​men, women and children  –​was apparently a legal requirement (Cumming-​Bruce, 27 August 2014). In these performances of violence, then, the brutality served as a mechanism to secure obedience, reasserting the power of IS by dramatising its sovereignty over the bodies of its adversaries. In the virtual world, films of these executions were often distributed in unedited fashion –​many captured on the smartphones of militants in attendance. Thus there are films of people being shot, battered, stoned, crucified, burned alive, pushed off buildings and drowned in submerged cages, to name but a few methods of torture and execution, with the largest part unstinting and unremitting in their depiction of the violence. The victims included Turkish, Syrian, Kurdish, Jordanian and Lebanese soldiers and citizens, Egyptian Christians, Afghan police and their family members. Many IS soldiers of varying nationalities, as well as Iraqi and Syrian civilians living under occupation were publicly executed in accordance with the organisation’s interpretation of Shar’ia law. But,

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inevitably, it was the videos of Foley, Sotloff, Haines and Henning that made the biggest impact in the British media. Thus, these were the iconic images for Britons in the pageant of violence carefully orchestrated by IS. The reasons for this selection are as obvious as they are problematic –​as Butler reminds us, some lives will always be more ‘grievable’ than others (2004, p. 12). So it is not a stretch to say that IS appreciated the tendency of the UK (or any state) to prioritise the lives of its own citizens, and that they exploited this tendency to suit their own objectives. To see how, it is necessary to consider the ways in which the propaganda strategies employed by IS intersected with contemporary notions of ‘terrorism’.

Terroristic film There have been a great many attempts in recent years to create a clear definition of an act of terrorism. These definitions are continually evolving, and any attempt to provide a complete overview here would be impracticable. For brevity’s sake, I will turn to that offered by Louise Richardson (2006) which, although a little outdated, remains one of the highest-​profile works in this field. Richardson suggests that there are seven features to distinguish an ‘act of terrorism’. It is politically motivated; it is violent or contains threat of violence; it communicates a message; it (and its victims) has symbolic significance; it is committed by a sub-​state group rather than by a state; the victims and audience are not the same; it targets civilians (pp.  21–​22). The fifth point was cast into controversy by IS, whose very name (and hence the rejection of that name by many of its adversaries) referenced its self-​fashioned operation as a state. During their most powerful years, Napoleoni observed that if IS had managed to gain international recognition for this state, built using terroristic methods, then it would ‘have proven what all armed organizations have professed:  that its members are not criminals but enemies engaged in an asymmetrical war to overthrow illegitimate, tyrannical, and corrupted regimes’ (2014, xxi). Certainly, consensus grew that IS came closer than most ‘terrorist’ organisations to creating a fully fledged state, and that even in failure they set a formidable precedent for future organisations to follow. IS also posed a problem to Richardson’s sixth premise, which I quote here at length: A sixth characteristic of terrorism is that the victim of the violence, and the audience the terrorists are trying to reach, are not the same. The point of

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Precarious spectatorship the act is to use the victim as a means of altering the behaviour of the larger audience, usually a government. Victims are chosen either at random or as representative of some larger group. Particular victims are interchangeable. […] This is different from most other forms of political violence in which security forces or state representatives are targeted in an effort to reduce the strength of the opponent. (2006, 22, emphases added)

The IS beheading videos adhere to most of these principles. The first four victims read pre-​prepared statements blaming their native governments for their own imminent execution. All victims were chosen at random, with the spectacle of their executions determined on the basis of their nationalities. In each video, the executioner declares the killing to be a response to military aggression, and warns of more deaths if that aggression does not cease.3 But there is a key development in these videos away from Richardson’s definition of terrorism. Whilst particular victims were ‘interchangeable’ at the point of selection, they were individualised, and in a very macabre sense immortalised (in the manner of celebrity), by their execution. This could be called an ‘upgrading’ of Richardson’s diagnosis, since the change in terror tactics is contingent upon developments in technology. The execution video amplifies into perpetuity and enhances the ‘terroristic’ capacity of the act. This inverts the logic of large-​scale terror attacks, whose significance is often proportional to the body count. In these videos, the killing of one person trumps the killing of thousands, since a vast number of people see it happen, in close and gory detail. And, of course, in addition to the viral networks that people access in their homes and bedrooms around the world, further amplification occurs in our public and private spaces, as clips and videos are distributed by and in the global networks of mainstream media. Writing in 2004, the journalist Jason Burke tracked the use of video as a favoured propaganda method by various terrorist organisations since at least the early 1990s. He noted a similar ‘power’ to the martyr videos produced in anticipation by suicide bombers. There ‘the audience were thrilled and fascinated by the knowledge that they were watching a man who knew he was going to die and was probably dead at the time of broadcast’ (Burke, 21 November 2004). For Burke, these ghoulish reactions are –​at least on some level –​an intended outcome of the appropriation of video by terrorist factions working out of the Middle East. Critics at the time, however, argued that the purpose of the videos were in fact to provoke further aggression, fulfilling an apocalyptic element of the IS belief structure (Miles, 26 September 2014).

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Following Virilio he points to the speed by which global satellite television and the Internet suture disparate parts of the world together, and that this suturing may induce violent reactions. Specifically, modern television, with its talk shows, news agencies, action films and pornography, is seen as a colonising force, an ‘invasion of local, Islamic and private space’ (ibid.). The beheading videos produced by Al-​Qaeda at that time inverted the colonising process, turning western technology back on itself and flooding airwaves and the Internet with images and videos of recorded violence. Since then the cultural parameters have not so much shifted as dissolved. In speaking of the conflict with IS, it is no longer possible –​if indeed it ever was –​to hygienically separate ‘the west’ and ‘the Islamic world’. In the global audiences of the beheading videos, the propaganda produced by IS was ubiquitous as an invasive force, capable in theory of discovering and creating converts wherever these videos can reach. This also aligns with Hughes’ perception of Zarqawi’s beheading videos as rejoinder and reflection of the stateless zones in occupied Iraq, 2004. There, the decapitation of a victim on film sought to confront ‘an invasive power with a mirror of the violence concealed by its false perceptions as orderly, democratic and rule-​bound’ (Hughes, 2011, p. 43). This is a beheading as a microcosm, the site of an individual body inscribed with the power struggles at play in the broader context. Hughes’ ultimate focus is on the systems of mimetic interaction –​how does terroristic violence reflect a broader context of violence, for example, or how do responses and representations of violence enable engagement with violence itself? Working through the layers of performance that surround the filmed decapitation of Bigley in 2004, she presents the following formulation: Violent acts thus destroy the distinction between the symbolic capture of the enemy and the material flesh of his body. The process of performed violence can be described therefore as a degradation of the symbolic into matter, recomposed as performance. (ibid., p. 48, emphases in original)

The language here resonates with the killing of Emwazi –​as Cockburn termed it a ‘symbolic killing in a war full of symbols’. But it is this translation of the ‘symbolic into matter’ that ultimately pulls away from Richardson’s description of terrorism. Whilst there is certainly a random ‘symbolism’ to the selection of the victims and the elevation of the executioner, both parties attain a significance that supersedes this symbolism in the event of –​and through –​the videos. This is because the spectator’s comprehension of the victim’s death is superimposed with an endlessly, helplessly repeating view of that victim as they are about to die. The uncanny horror of this view is compounded as each

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victim begins their video with a declaration of their own name. Just as with ‘Jihadi John’, that name is annexed from the victim’s person and becomes property of the video; the person is no longer a person, but is ‘a victim in an execution video’ whose identity is exploited by the killers. This hollows out the victim and makes them citable. This is visible in the film of James Foley, the first hostage to be killed in a video of this template. The final words that Foley utters in the film are directed to his brother, John, a US combat pilot, in reference to a recent bombing campaign against IS: I died that day John. When your colleagues dropped that bomb on those people, they signed my death certificate. I  wish I  had more time. I  wish I had the hope of freedom, of seeing my family once again. But that ship has sailed. I guess all in all, I wish I wasn’t American.

The repeated references to ‘I’ are confusing. Is it possible to suppose that ‘I’ is Foley? He is speaking, and speaking his final words, which grants them a terrible significance. But, of course, it is precisely this significance that the video exploits, and the words he speaks are not his. And what of the gruesome employment of the past tense? A  person cannot refer to their own death from the future. But a person whose identity has been completely repossessed by a digital recording (and is thus no longer a person) may do so. Foley has become citable –​his identity repossessed for the purposes of the film. As he appears on the video, he is not himself, but rather the persona created for him by his captors. This capturing and repossessing of his identity is also achieved through other strategies: his shaven head and clothes, for example, are the costume of this victim-​persona. This persona, with its infinitely reproducible last-​words and death, offers the killers a cheap and efficient method of fulfilling the objectives of terrorism. In contrast to bombings or assassinations, these killings do not require meticulous planning or complex orchestration, and may be carried out by a few militants with sufficient technological awareness and talent for performance. The execution can be easily recorded on film and its projected distribution is, in the current era of a largely unregulated Internet, potentially limitless. Moreover, as Frances Larson argues: ‘The murderers are offering their viewers a front-​row seat at their show; and what they want to show is their strength, their organization, their commitment to the cause, their complete control and domination of their subject’ (2015, p. 83, emphases added). As Larson goes on to argue, the principal point of a filmed execution is the ‘using of the individual’ in order to capitalise upon their death in line with a particular narrative. Thus the performance of the execution requires that everybody involved play their part, from the executioner to the victim, the

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camera operator to the eventual spectator. The authenticity of the video is maintained in the act of killing itself, but that act is contingent upon a host of performance conventions which are by definition inauthentic, inasmuch as they are ‘staged’ or ‘unnatural’ occurrences that have been rehearsed, choreographed and stage-​managed. One of the most gruesomely ‘inauthentic’ conventions in the IS videos is the fact that the victims were probably unaware they were about to die even as they delivered their ‘last words’. According to a translator who worked for IS, it was standard practice to inform victims that the film was just a ‘rehearsal’ created to ransom their home governments (Ratcliffe, 10 March 2015). This further demonstrates the sophistication of IS propaganda, and its militants’ understanding of a particular performance convention. Larson outlines this convention in her description of the public execution of Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, in 1793. Du Barry’s comportment prior to execution differed strongly from the stoic dispositions of her fellow aristocrats: Madame du Barry did not know her role. She suffered from a dreadful case of performance anxiety, and as she screamed and collapsed the executioner grew anxious and the crowd began to respond. […] Perhaps du Barry’s intoxicating fear, her inability to play along, reminded the spectators that they, too, were playing a part in the show. (2015, p. 106)

The most widely noted success of the guillotine during the Great Terror was its ability to decapitate large numbers of people in quick succession, with little margin of error. But Larson uncovers a secondary function to the apparatus: its mechanical efficiency relieves the spectator’s culpability for the death. Execution is carried out by the flick of a switch, which all but removes the executioner from the aesthetics of the spectacle. The gruesome pantomime of the black-​hooded man with the axe or sword is replaced by a systematic process that is ordered, neat and inevitable. The actual killing of the condemned is no longer an ‘event’, in the sense of an occurrence worthy of note, but a formality. The condemned themselves, stripped of the significance afforded to a human being that is about to be killed (with all of the technical difficulties that this poses to the killers) is downgraded to the status of a component in the overall process. All of which relegates death to a banal routine, and the spectators –​alienated from the horror of what they are witnessing –​offer no challenge. But as Larson points out, public executions are ‘a tenuous collaboration between all the players’ and ‘even a condemned criminal can upset the script’ (ibid., p. 106). In a filmed execution, however, the killers have much more control over what is shown, and can ensure to a greater degree that all concerned ‘play their part’.

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As with the mechanically efficient decapitations of the guillotine, the nature of the performance of the IS videos was shaped by the technology involved. Certainly these were not ‘routine’ killings, in that they were individually produced and capitalised upon the theatricality of each death as an event. The hooded executioner took a starring role, and the beheadings themselves appeared off-​camera, with all focus drawn towards before and after the decapitation. But two aspects of these videos do bear a marked similarity to the guillotine of Larson’s analysis. First, the sense of inevitability is paramount. But where the guillotine was capable only of making an execution seem inevitable, the videos dramatise an actual inevitability since the victim is already dead before the audience even witness their killing. This enables the killers to retroactively capitalise upon the inevitability of their death –​the victims have died, and were always going to have died, because the executioners have made it so. In a filmed execution, death is a closed loop rather than a final statement, endlessly replayable and always with the same conclusion. But absolute dominion over the body was not enough for the executioners –​ filming an execution advertises only that it is within your power to kill. What the makers of these videos wished to project to the outside world was that they were justified in making the videos; that they were right in killing the hostages. This is one of the reasons why all attention is placed upon the hostage’s speech, and none on the moment of their actual death. It is also the second key component that the videos share with the guillotined executions of the Terrors –​successful orchestration relied upon the condemned retaining their composure and playing their part. Thus the hostages were tricked into believing that they were in no imminent danger by rehearsing the videos multiple times, each time being told that ‘no harm will come to you’. When the hostage speaks on camera, their words are a hollow performance. They are unaware that their identity has already been repossessed in order to be infinitely cited as the victim of an execution. It remained only for the executioner to kill them in order to render permanent that persona, and distribute it to the world. Another word for this kind of performance is ‘ventriloquism’.

Ventriloquised bodies Steven Connor traces the origins of the term ‘ventriloquism’ to Classical Greece. The word is a Latin translation from the Greek engastrimythos (‘in’ ‘the stomach’ ‘word or speech’) and originally referred to a style

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of performance undertaken by spiritual diviners and after-​ dinner entertainers. The trick, in these performances, was to disrupt the natural relationship between body and voice by making it seem that your voice was emanating directly from your stomach (2000, pp. 49–​50). From its earliest recorded usage, therefore, ventriloquism has stressed both the separation and the interdependence of ‘voice’ and ‘body’. Voices are often thought of in terms of process and direction. Voices move (and, conversely, have the power to move others); they proceed out from a speaker and towards a listener. They carry and they transmit  –​they can be affected and interpreted through nuances in their tone, timbre, musicality, volume, pitch, pace, pause and inflection. They are also critical to establishing identity. As Connor points out, if I dye my hair, burn off my fingerprints or have reconstructive surgery done to my face, I am altering something that already exists. But if I change my voice I am ‘producing differently something which is in the first place an active production and not a mere condition of my being’ (ibid., p. 4). At some level, my voice is me –​a part of me that I send out into the world. What is more: As a kind of projection, the voice allows me to withdraw or retract myself. This can make my voice a persona, a mask, or sounding screen. At the same time, my voice is the advancement of a part of me, an uncovering by which I am exposed, exposed to the possibility of exposure. I am able to shelter behind my voice, only if my voice can be me. But it can only be me if it has something of my own ductility and sensitivity: only if it is subject to erosion and to harm. My voice can bray and buffet only because it can also flinch and wince. My voice can be a glove, or a wall, or a bruise, a patch of inflammation, a scar, or a wound. (ibid., p. 5, emphases added)

The deep-​set intimacy of the relationship between voice and self make the former a cherished and protected entity. Describing oppressed or marginalised people as ‘voiceless’ does not indicate merely their lack of recognition, but also a deficiency in self-​authorship. To have a voice is to (be able to) transmit a self. All of which serves to emphasise the significance, the wonder and in a critical way the violence of a voice without an origin: a ventriloquised voice. If a voice is ventriloquised it has become detached from its point of referent and –​to follow Connor’s logic –​is no longer a shelter to the self, no longer of the self. Which speaks to the ‘I’ that is constantly referenced in the video of James Foley’s execution. What is presented in the digital recording is a ventriloquised voice, a persona, a mask. This mask is carefully constructed by the propagandists in order to serve their function, after which they confer upon it an ultimate value by killing the performer. It is not James Foley who dies in the video: James Foley is already dead. Rather, it is ‘James

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Foley, sacrificial victim’ who dies, because his death is a performance, a death that occurs within digital reproduction so that it can be endlessly repeated, its symbolism asserted with each repetition. I  have argued that the omission of the moment of death itself is evidence of audience targeting on the part of the propagandists. Thinking of this video as ventriloquism adds a further question, however. If, as Hughes argues, there can be no performance in the moment of death, would inclusion of this moment in the video undermine the subservience of Foley-​as-​character to his murderers, by restoring the autonomy of a man dying his own death? It is a complex question, as it incorporates what might be called the ‘limits of the visual’. A person can only die once; can we really say then that we can ‘see death’ in a video? This question will be examined more fully in the final section of this chapter. For now, I turn back to the ventriloquism, and what is made visible in the IS videos. Specifically, the production of a severed head. For Larson, a severed head taps into intense personal vulnerabilities. Recalling her own experiences of witnessing heads in museums and private collections, she describes a ‘knowing submission, to them [the heads] and to my own dark desires, wondering whether I am pushing myself too far, whether I  will have nightmares, but unable to resist their suffocated gaze’ (2015, pp. 8–​9) Transferring these thoughts to the decapitation videos, however, highlights a turn away from the severed head, and rather a concentration on the active, speaking, alive head prior to decapitation. In the unedited videos, severed heads are presented on the supine torsos of the victims in long tracking shots, and in some instances are wielded triumphantly by the murderer, but the concentration is upon the victim who is both about to die and already dead. This was also, of course, the exclusive interest of the edited videos and images that were distributed by the mainstream media. But although this form of attention may be less obviously gruesome than concentrating on a severed head, it is a highly effective strategy for inspiring terror since the video serves as a kind of anticipatory display case for the victim’s head. The spectator knows it has already been severed even as she sees it speaking. This indicates a further development from the formulation offered by Larson: a severed head upsets our easy categories, because it is simultaneously a person and a thing. It is always both and neither. Each state reaffirms the other and negates it. It is here with us and yet utterly alien. The severed head is compelling –​and horrific –​because it denies one of the most basic dichotomies we use to understand our world: that people and objects are defined in opposition to each other. It presents an apparently impossible duality. (ibid., p. 10, emphases in original)

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The beheading video shows this ‘impossible duality’ in the form of a speaking subject. The spectator is not presented with the severed head as an object –​rather, she experiences the fact of its construction through the recording of the victim’s final moments. This is why so much attention is paid to those moments, and why the victim is made to perform a pre-​ written text that valorises the act of their murder. What is witnessed in these performances is not a person speaking, but rather the reanimation of the head itself, a reminder of its pre-​existence as the constituent part of a speaking, autonomous, alive human being. A dead person who speaks through the mechanisms of their already-​destroyed body. The recorded film foreshadows a future that has previously happened (and is thus inevitable), and in which the subject has died. Roland Barthes, writing about a photograph of a youth who is about to be hanged, calls this an ‘anterior future of which death is the subject’ (1993, p. 96). But beyond simply documenting this inevitable future, it is possible to ventriloquise the image or film and make that future perform, with the online and televisual networks of the early twenty-​first century looping these performances into constant, inescapable cycles accessible to anybody with the means and intention to view them. It is a corpse that speaks –​or, rather, is seen to speak, since the voice with which it speaks is no more its own than the posture in which it is displayed once the execution has taken place. Corpses have no autonomy, which makes them perfect subjects for ventriloquism. This rather grisly thought has been taken up elsewhere by the British playwright Howard Barker, who meditates at length on the radical malleability of a dead human body: The exquisite vacancy of the corpse is in utter contrast to the active plenitude of the living body with its cultural inhibitions and susceptibility to opinion. It is supremely acquiescent, if never, strictly speaking, collaborative. Its bloodless character seems to indicate a fatigue, even a contempt, for the frantic interrogations of the social world. (in Gritzner, 2010, p. 243)

It should be noted that Barker views the corpse in entirely aesthetic terms, and appears to feel no obligation or responsibility to its former incarnation as a living person. Partly he is able to do this because his examples are drawn from pictorial and literary representations of corpses in art –​ in this case nineteenth-​century anatomy paintings and the descriptions of Dracula’s inamorata. These bodies have been created as objects, and although in the former case they may represent previously living beings, there is no direct material connection. The painting has never been

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alive, so there is no duty to respect its living precedents. Even the actual corpses Barker identifies  –​the subjects of the anatomy classes  –​have been disconnected from their former lives. When he identifies a ‘prospect of infinite permission’ intimated by the corpse in these classes, that permission is enabled by the recasting of the corpse into its role as surgical specimen. Even though the frisson of pleasure is afforded by the knowledge that the specimen was previously a person, it is the specimen that is the subject of the class. From this it can be deduced that what Barker calls the ‘eroticism of the corpse’ is attained either through its representation or its presentation. Either provides a separation between the corpse and its living precedent. This separation is crucial for Barker, since it allows him to abstract the corpse’s ‘erotic’ qualities (the province of spectatorship) without having to address any of the moral turpitude surrounding necrophilia. His proposal is that the spectator craves acquiescence in their viewing subjects and that the corpse  –​although few would be likely to admit it –​provides the ultimate satisfaction for that craving. To spectate is to demand compliance, and nothing is more compliant than a corpse because it does not possess the agency even to comply. That, at least, is Barker’s argument. Accepting this argument for a moment, then, how do films or photographs of dead bodies serve the spectator? And what about films or photographs of people who are about to die and are thus already dead? On the one hand, the proximity afforded by what Susan Sontag calls the ‘trace of something brought before the lens’ should presumably increase spectatorial stimulation (2004, p.  21). Just as students in the anatomy classes were permitted unparalleled access to the previously inviolable body of the cadaver, so the photograph or film opens up the cadaver to complete exposure. The dead cannot act for themselves; they are acted upon, or, in fact, ventriloquised. On the other hand, of course, the material connection to a previously living being –​the film or photograph is never of ‘a’ corpse, it is always of ‘this’ corpse, even if the identity is unknown –​prevents the aesthetic separation offered in literature or painting. But does this mean that any spectatorial revulsion experienced when presented with a film or photograph of a corpse is purely superficial, the result of socially constructed obligations to the previously living subject? To put it another way, if the spectator could separate herself entirely from its living subject, would she find herself excited by the ability to ventriloquise the corpse? It is, perhaps, a monstrous question, but I believe it to be of fundamental importance to the subject of this chapter. In recent years there have been various studies of the politicisation of corpses. Margaret Schwarz (2015), for example, describes the circulation

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of images of lynched or tortured bodies as instances where ‘the materiality of the dead human body becomes an anchor in a counterhegemonic symbolic regime’ (p. 54). Schwarz reminds us that images of Hamza al-​ Khateeb, the thirteen-​year-​old Syrian boy tortured to death by the Assad regime, whose mutilated body was returned to his family, generated furious protest and resistance in the city of Daraa (Macleod and Falamand, 31 May 2011). Khateeb’s political significance was produced through the fact of his destroyed body, which became a referent to the violence of the state. Tommy J. Curry, on the other hand, points to the ways in which the living bodies of black men in the United States are ‘configured as barbaric and savage’ in order to legitimise their destruction (2014). Curry argues that the prevalent and racist overinscription of black male bodies prevent any kind of sustained reflection on the ways in which black males are made vulnerable to violence and murder within their contemporary societies. Discussing the case of Michael Brown, who was killed by a police officer in 2014 for the ‘crime’ of jaywalking, Curry asks: ‘We can see the corpse of Michael Brown, but do we really understand the vulnerability of Black boys enough to theorize his life?’ In both cases, what occurs here is an overinscription and ventriloquism of the corpse in which its existence as a corpse outstrips and obscures that of its living antecedent. An awareness of that overinscription, and a critical focus upon the life of the person outwith the circumstances of their death is imperative if any ethical encounters with the corpse are to be attempted. There can be no real controversy in stating that mediated encounters with the corpse have long since become unavoidable, even within the narrow field of my current subject. Between 2014 and 2016, IS produced countless execution videos, and the ubiquitous distribution of these texts at that time made them almost impossible to avoid. Domestic audiences within this period experienced a significant and prolonged exposure to images and videos of corpses; people who had been ventriloquised in order that their murder would profit their killers’ agendas. During this time, no ethics of spectatorship was publicly consolidated (or, as far as I can tell, even encouraged). If there is any hope of counteracting this exploitation of murder in the future, and of uncovering any kind of ethical strategies for approaching the images and videos, we spectators must honestly confront our own actions whenever and wherever we witness this kind of ventriloquism. In order to accomplish this, it is necessary to set our queasiness and our anxieties aside, and reflect soberly upon the ways in which the dead are represented. We must turn, in other words, towards our relationship with the visual.

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Death and the visual In her essay ‘Can Images Kill?’, Marie-​José Mondzain describes the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 in terms of a visual economy: the biggest blow was dealt to the empire of the visible, the servant of all modern forms of the dual powers of economy and its icons. Coming from the sky like exterminating angels, two planes struck down the towers of domination. This was a real crime, with real flesh and blood victims, worthy in horror of the worst massacres committed by dictators. Instantly, the event was treated in visual terms, mixing the visible and the invisible, reality and fiction, real mourning and the invincibility of symbols in the greatest disarray. The enemy had organized a terrifying show. In one sense, in massacring so many people, in striking those towers, we were given the first historical spectacle of the death of the image in the image of death. The unpredictable joined the non-​representable and it was necessary to quickly bury the corpses and deliver a speech of triumph and resurrection. The president of the United States announced a visual fast: no dead bodies on the screen, a purge of TV and film programs, and an invisible war. (2009, pp. 20–​21)

Conceiving 9/​ 11 as a historical partition is common enough, but Mondzain’s argument is unusual in that she treats the events as a shift in visual rather than geopolitical culture. From her perspective it was images, rather than the world they purport to represent, that were changed by 9/​11. Informed by her position as an art historian, Mondzain’s argument is that Christianity ‘convinced the world that the one who is the master of the visible is the master of the world and organizes the control of the gaze’ (ibid., p.  20). That economy of icons, images and edifices established through millennia of Christian (specifically, it feels, Catholic) imperialism has today been absorbed into advanced capitalism, with its omniscient advertising, ever-​expanding financial and commercial complexes, global media conglomerates and mass-​produced entertainment. This is why, as Mondzain goes on to point out, bin Laden’s attack ‘exhibited in full daylight his perfect knowledge of and complete conformity to the world he was destroying’ (ibid., p. 21). Although the attacks occurred as events, they operated (and were always intended to do so) within the globalised visual economy. Comparisons between the attacks and Hollywood cinema have been widely drawn, and analyses prevail that the attackers turned the USA’s own cultural apparatuses

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against them (Parkin, 29 January 2016). Jason Burke, as mentioned, observed this same phenomenon in the execution videos produced by Abu Musab al-​Zarqawi for Al-​Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) a few years later. In their turn, the USA ‘staged’ their own war of and on the visual, combining largely ‘invisible’ assaults upon Afghanistan and Iraq, with a few carefully presented images and films in line with their ‘shock and awe’ campaign. Amongst these were the ‘mission accomplished’ photographs of President George W.  Bush wearing combat fatigues aboard a military aircraft carrier in 2003, announcing the ‘end of the war’ in Iraq. Commentators pointed out the pantomimic nature of this presentation, since Bush’s service record was replete with absences and dishonours (Goldenberg and Burkeman, 12 February 2004). And, of course, his speech hardly coincided with a cessation of military hostilities. But these falsehoods did not matter, because the images were part of a strategy of visual recuperation being staged by the political mainstream in the USA. Further, in fact, the images –​and retroactively, the images of destruction from 9/​11 –​became key components of what the political philosopher John Gray called an ‘apocalyptic’ crusade spearheaded by President Bush and Tony Blair to eradicate evil from the earth (2005, pp. 39–​41). In a key respect, this was a crusade of the visual since it presumed support from the citizenries of Britain and the USA based on what was shown to them (even if, as was later revealed, much of what was shown was an illusion). Yet, as Mondzain points out, the crusade practiced a careful occlusion of death itself from the visual economy. This occlusion applied across the board  –​from the moratorium placed upon media distributions of graphic footage from 9/​11 to the largely unrecorded (with the exception of the Abu Ghraib leaks, although even these were censored) torture and killing of prisoners in the detention facilities set up in occupied Iraq. Even the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 was not broadcast publicly, but was distributed instead via a strange refraction in a photograph showing President Obama and his senior aides themselves viewing the death. Superficially, this image aligned with the logic of the crusade –​ the spectator was reassured that ‘justice’ was being done by their political leaders, without having to expose themselves to the gruesome business of killing. Beneath that, however, is an echo of the same argument that I have advanced in assessment of the IS execution videos: perhaps death is omitted to make the image more ‘real’, since dying is something that is beyond the capacities of visual reproduction. But what of those videos produced by IS that do display the moment of death? As mentioned above, there is a wide corpus of such texts, with varied methods of execution apparently corresponding to the group’s interpretation of Shar’ia law. What is notable about these  –​from the

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burning alive of the Jordanian pilot Moaz al-​Kasasbeh to the simultaneous decapitation of the Syrian soldiers –​is that in almost all cases the victims are not ventriloquised. Or to put it another way, no pre-​prepared words are uttered through their already-​dead bodies. In these cases, it is the event of the death itself that is the focus of the videos, and there is less attempt to provide a grotesque parody of a reanimated ‘person’ delivering a final epitaph.4 These videos were never intended to enter into the mainstream western visual economy in the same way as the executions of Foley, Sotloff, Haines and Henning (Yukawa and Goto do not make this list, as they themselves are mute in the videos of their executions). Rather, the broader corpus of grisly videos that do display moments of death are destined for the murky world of unregulated Internet sites, and postings on file sharing platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Snapchat. In other words, they function in a similar fashion to –​and bear many of the formal qualities of –​hardcore pornography. This is a difficult distinction to make, and requires careful deliberation. At one level, there are severe ethical problems in distinguishing between different kinds of video whose common content is murder. Surely an execution video is an execution video? Perhaps, but it should be remembered that these videos are not simply records of execution:  they are carefully crafted texts designed for specifically targeted audiences. Differentiating between the formal qualities of the videos is therefore necessary in order to understand their intended functions. Saying this, however, there are further problems in suggesting that some of these videos operate at the level of hardcore pornography whilst others do not. To be clear: although I will draw such a division, and present my argument for doing so, I obviously do not believe that either ‘type’ of execution video is ‘preferable’ to the other. To borrow one of Slavoj Žižek’s favourite quotes from Stalin, ‘they are both worse’. The point, however, is that the consensus within British legislative and media organisations appears to be that those videos designed for mainstream distribution are somehow ‘safer’, since they omit the grislier aspects of the executions. Speaking after the release of an execution video in January 2016, David Cameron claimed:  ‘Any normal person watching that video will realise that describing these people as a death cult and as truly repulsive is utterly fair comment and so I don’t mind people seeing, within limits, a little bit of this’ (Withnall, 5 January It should be noted that as this chapter was being written, a video was uploaded showing the execution, by gunshot, of five Arab men accused of collaborating with British forces. This video does include both the moments of death and speeches by the victims, but these speeches were pre-​recorded and do not occur at the place of execution.

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2016). The ‘limits’ are, of course, the omission of physical violence, which is thus supposed to render the video fit for public consumption without any communal, critical engagement. As I have taken pains to argue throughout this chapter, such a position is not only erroneous, but also highly dangerous. In order to proceed with this analysis, then, two statements. First, that the framing of the online videos employs the same techniques and modes of access that have become popular in the distribution of certain genres of hardcore pornography. ‘Tags’ such as ‘graphic’, ‘explicit’, ‘uncut’ and ‘extreme’ will frequently preface a brief statement describing the video’s content. The websites hosting these videos are unregulated, usually full of pop-​up adverts and providing links to other insalubrious material, including, often, pornography. Translating Mondzain’s assessment of the attacks on 9/​11, in the viral existence of these ‘hardcore’ videos can be seen the ‘perfect knowledge and complete conformity’ of IS to the world that it seeks to attack. But in a development away from Burke’s argument, these online videos do not appear to be an attempt to destroy the west by turning our own weapons against us (Cadwalladr, 17 January 2016). Rather, they constitute a contribution towards appetites for violence that have found particular saturation in the age of the Internet. Second, it is not the task of hardcore pornography to present or to display ‘the real’, or even to construct a believable illusion pertaining to it. Instead, hardcore pornography relies upon the explicit documentation of its subject material to sidestep questions of authenticity. Pornographic sex is not ‘realistic’, in other words, but stakes its value on the fact that a sexual act is actually happening at the point of recording. This is not a paradox if it is remembered that hardcore pornography occurs purely at the level of the visual –​the interiority of the act is irrelevant to the way that it looks. Surface is everything. In softcore pornography, the omission of the visually explicit requires a more active engagement from the viewer, and thus can appeal to a level of the interior. For reasons I will detail, I believe that it is advisable to divide the IS execution videos according to a similar taxonomy. The ‘hardcore’ videos are entirely to do with the surface-​based spectacle of killing, and attain their potency through the  fact that the killing actually happened at the point of recording. The videos designed for mainstream distribution are different; they open up a critical gap at the point of what Mondzain calls the ‘unrepresentable’ moment of death. By doing so, they acknowledge the unrepresentability (therefore singularity, therefore monumental importance) of death, and entice the spectator in to fill the gap of the unrepresentable with their own, terrified projections. It is for this reason, as well as for the fact that the majority of state apparatuses appear blind to it, that the latter kind of videos

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including any image or clip taken from them are affecting and dangerous, if they are broadcast without critical engagement. This conclusion is diametrically opposed to the philosophy of much mainstream journalism, which privileges the visual representation of an event over its actual occurrence. This position may be adroitly observed in the following story, quoted from About to Die, Barbie Zelizer’s study of death in the visual media. Here, she discusses a forty-​second video, taken on a bystander’s mobile phone, of the shooting and subsequent death of Neda Agha-​Soltan, a twenty-​six-​year-​old Iranian student, in the election demonstrations in Tehran, 2009: Multiple news organisations offered links to the video, though journalists, worried about its verification, graphicness, low-​resolution, and shaky focus, struggled to explain what it showed. CNN at first blocked the woman’s face, then withheld her name and ran a pixilated version of the video on-​ air before eventually screening the full video; ABC withheld the video altogether and showed instead a few select still images on freeze-​frame, one of its news executives noting that ‘we don’t show people at the moment of their death’. (2010, p. 8)

Agha-​Soltan did not die during the filming, and the video shows the striking spectacle of her terrified face turned directly to camera as people around her try  –​and fail  –​to staunch the bleeding. She died shortly after the filming concluded. But the responses from CNN and ABC show no especial queasiness about the event of her death, only the manner in which her death is made visible  –​in other words, in the relationship, impossible though it may be, between death and the visual. If the spectator knows that a person is both already dead and about to die as she views a recording of their last moments, what does it matter if that person’s face is pixelated, or if freeze-​framed images are instead provided of the ‘unedited’ video? It does not alter the fact of their death, nor does it insulate the spectator from the horror of that death. In fact, because it implicitly valorises the unrepresentability of death, the omission changes, but does not diminish, the affect of death upon the spectator. This is not in itself a bad thing, of course, and in journalistic terms (both in the humanitarian sense of respecting a dying person’s dignity, and the mercenary sense of increasing the market-​value of a story) could perhaps be considered in a positive fashion. However, the reasons behind the omission of death offered in the above example do not account for the unrepresentability of death, only the unsuitability of videos and images that immediately precede the event of death to the broadcasting standards of mainstream journalism. So in omitting the moment of

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death from this small glut of videos, IS complied with these standards and secured a deep and terrible power to their propaganda. To return, then, to the figure of the spectator, and their relationship with the images set before them. For this, it helps to take a closer look at some entries in the Oxford English Dictionary that attempt to define ‘pornography’. These include the ‘explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity […] in a manner designed to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings’ and ‘the explicit description or depiction of violence in a manner intended to stimulate or excite’. In a very significant way, then, it can be said that pornography is defined chiefly in its capacity to precipitate a particular spectatorial response. In addition, ‘a distinction is often made between “hard” and “soft” pornography on the basis of how explicit or taboo the material in question is held to be’. In other words, the nature of pornography is defined at a societal level, where its initial status as pornography is attributed according to the effect it is presumed to have (or presumes?) upon the individual. This assumption of an engendered response leads back to Mondzain, who frames her entire discussion of images by questioning the rhetoric that ‘blames’ images for acts of violence when those acts copy a pre-​existing image. Can images be blamed for the actions taken by spectators after viewing them? It is a curious question since, as she points out, ‘culpability and responsibility are attributable to humans, not things. And images are things’ (2009, p. 6). Certainly, the legal framing of the Anti-​Terrorism Act 2004 attributes blame to those who ‘make and distribute’ images of violence. But the implementation of these laws in banning the IS videos extended only to the explicitly gory elements (i.e., those that involved the moment of killing, and any subsequent showing of the dead bodies). This demonstrated a fundamental misreading of where power –​the power to terrify, the power to seduce –​lay in the videos. That power, rather, resides in the reanimation and ventriloquism of the already-​dead body of the victim in those moments prior to their death, where they are robbed of their humanity and transformed into a mouthpiece for IS propaganda. It is debatable whether this misreading (by both the mainstream media and politicians) was intentional or not, but the effect in either case was the same: rather than restore to the victims their humanity by considering an ethics of spectatorship, their ventriloquism was capitalised upon in support of different propaganda, this time against the executioners. In one sense, in fact, what was accomplished is what Paul Virilio warned would be the emergence of an officially ‘terrorist’ art. For Virilio, the ‘pitiless’ aesthetics of modern art, with its deconstructed and mutilated torsos, has mixed with the ‘pitiless’ sterility of digital capture to produce what he calls a mise-​en-​abyme of the human body

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(2003, p.  19). Virilio uses this term, which generally describes a self-​ reflective device within an artistic work, to argue that repeated exposure to journalistic and artistic depictions of mutilated, atomised bodies has produced a ‘major attendant risk of systemic hyperviolence and a boom in pornographic high-​frequency that has nothing to do with sexuality’ (ibid.). Because the spectator has been saturated with images that formally and technically treat bodies with indifference or contempt, they have lost regard for the sanctity of the body itself. What Virilio shares with Mondzain, therefore, is an absolute insistence that the visual, and particularly the aesthetic, is not separate from the actual. News footage, photographs, videos and art all wield considerable force in shaping spectatorial perspectives, and are thus forces that must be taken seriously. In the following quote, Virilio develops his thinking to include not just the aesthetics of the visual, but also the means by which the visual is recorded: For one brief moment Impressionism  –​in painting and music  –​was able to retrieve the flavour of the ephemeral before the nihilism of contemporary technology wiped it out once and for all. [Thus] To demonstrate or to ‘monstrate’, that is the question: whether to practise some kind of aesthetic or ethic demonstration or to practise the cleansing of all ‘nature’, all ‘culture’, through the technically oriented efficiency of a mere ‘monstration’, a show, a blatant presentation of horror. (ibid., p. 26, emphases in original)

He thus offers a strategy of approach to the murder footage that was carefully prepared by IS. Not only do we need to overcome the ‘monstration’ of death perpetually broadcast through orthodox media channels in order to fuel terror and compliance; we also need to recognise and challenge the existing appetites for which this footage is being created. Whether or not Virilio’s championing of Impressionism is persuasive, what his argument pushes towards is a resanctification of the body in all of its ephemerality. Life and death cannot be captured in visual representation; they can only be ventriloquised into grotesque parodies masquerading as the real thing. In order to have any hope of overcoming this ventriloquism, an awareness of how the body is being treated in and by the visual economy is imperative. But it is not a question of saying ‘images of violence produce violence’, and thus of censoring the visual en masse under some pretext of its corrupting influence. Such an approach only increases the seductiveness of the visual, and lends greater authority to state apparatuses that are concerned less with the wellbeing of the populace than with the assertion of their own agendas. And even if this were not the case, the contemporary world is far too saturated in images

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for abjuration to be a sensible or even feasible course of action. Instead, greater effort must be taken to consider exactly what is being presented. As I said in the opening sections of this chapter, I am not arguing against the reproduction of images of violence. What I  am arguing against is the reproduction and distribution of these images in a fashion that does not account for what is actually being shown and thus facilitates a hazardous reaction (terror, violence, desanctification) within the broader culture. For Mondzain, this is a question of isolation –​without a shared language or platform of response, the spectator is segregated from other spectators, and their situation is rendered precarious: Not knowing how to share with another gaze our own passion to see, not knowing how to produce a culture of the gaze: this is where the real violence against those who are helplessly abandoned to the voracity of visibilities begins. It is thus the responsibility of those who make images to build the place of those who see and it is the responsibility of those who present images, made by the producers, to know the ways of this construction. The image demands a new and singular management of speech between those who exchange looks in the sharing of images. (2009, p. 20)

In the case of the IS execution videos, the ‘place of those who see’ has been left to the construction of the propagandists who made the videos, and the state apparatuses who replay them in line with the orthodoxies of their conflict narratives. Here, then, a sense of ‘emergency’ has been fostered by the spectator relinquishing control of the visual. If this is to be avoided, then it is the responsibility of us spectators –​and, importantly, us communities of spectators –​to build these places for ourselves. Otherwise, we remain isolated and without the means to develop a shared understanding of the images saturating our environments –​indefensible, in other words, against the terror and panic that are the stock-​in-​trades of emergencies.

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2

Two tales of my dying neighbours

We can all be refugees Nobody is safe

Benjamin Zephaniah, n.d.

The refugee’s face At the time of writing, sixty-​five million people, or 1 per cent of the world’s population, have been displaced from their homes, with an estimated 22.5  million of these identified as ‘refugees’ (McVeigh and Townsend, 17 September 2016). The British Red Cross reported in 2015 that 60 per cent of refugees come from five countries, with Syria (4.2 million) and Afghanistan (2.6 million) topping the list.1 It is a moot point to say that the territorial politics of nation-​states have failed to offer acceptable strategies of support. According to the Red Cross statistics, in 2015 the UK received 38,878 applications for asylum, of which just 45 per cent were granted. This was a fraction of those offered by Germany (431,000) See: www.redcross.org.uk/​What-​we-​do/​Refugee-​support/​Refugee-​facts-​and-​figures

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Sweden and Hungary (both 163,000). The US State Department records 69,933 resettled refugees in the fiscal year for 2015, with the majority of these from African countries.2 In none of these cases do the amount of refugees accepted constitute a destabilising risk to domestic populations, and yet the so-​called ‘refugee crisis’ is writ large into global debates around national security, sovereignty, and access to goods and services. Before proceeding, the fallacious nomenclature applied to this situation by and for the populaces of Western European and North American countries in the early twenty-​first century should be acknowledged. The ‘crisis’ is not of the 21.3 million people brutalised by conflict, drowning in open ocean or abandoned in refugee camps. It is the crisis of us: comfortable, un-​displaced populaces fretting over an illusory lack of space and the sharing of our living environments. We make this very clear in our position of address. Saying the ‘refugee crisis’ annexes the speaker from that crisis itself; the naming is a luxury made possible by presumption of distance. And as Judith Butler (2015) points out, to identify and tabulate the worth of a group of people in relation to oneself emboldens a false notion of self-​security, endangering the self at the point of seeming most committed to its preservation. In other words, by differentiating the value of human lives along discursive divisions, which Butler calls ‘grievability’ (discussed at length in Chapter 1), the self initiates a variable economy of life-​worth in which its own is destabilised. The relentless dedication to this division in the names of the domestic issues listed above pushes towards a ‘para-​suicide’ in which the self, by creating and attacking the illusion of an enemy-​other, violates and destroys its own being. It should be also observed that, in a comparable fashion to the Bush administration’s ‘crusade’ after 9/​11, the ‘refugee crisis’ plays out in the language of the visual. As refugees themselves are excluded from this crisis, and since the number of refugees actually admitted to European/​North American countries is comparatively small, a huge opportunity opens up within the visual economy to create and ventriloquise the image of the refugee to serve broader political agendas. This phenomenon is what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls a ‘visualization’: the assemblage of a visual environment over which a governing body has dominion, and within which the subjects are denied the capacity for self-​identification (2011, p. 2). His examples include the slave plantations of the nineteenth century, the theatres of war of the early twentieth century and the contemporary global counterinsurgency resonant within (but not restricted to) the War See: www.state.gov/​j/​prm/​releases/​statistics/​251285.htm

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on Terror. To these despotic arenas could be added the refugee camp, detention facility, customs office and –​because it becomes a site of visual power –​the commandeered or capsized boat, with its cargo of stateless inhabitants, instantly recognisable in their darkly ironic ‘life vests’. These are places in which the distribution of power erases the subject-​hood of specified individuals. Mirzoeff, following Derrida, observes in the construction of such places an authority that is based on nothing but its own force. However, he points out that the ‘self-​authorizing of authority required a supplement to make it seem self-​evident, which is what I am calling visuality’ (ibid., p. 7). It is to the visual production of authority that I  turn to here, with particular regard to the figure of the refugee, and the power exercised upon them within the visual economy. Because the refugee in western discourses is a peculiar figure; much like ‘Jihadi John’ their otherness and distance is maintained precisely by their proximity to ‘us’, both in terms of distributed images and videos, and the rhetoric that stresses their imminent arrival. Unlike ‘Jihadi John’, however, the refugee is nameless –​ their value to the emergency narrative is as the anonymous component of a teeming multitude. David Cameron, it must be remembered, not only called them a ‘swarm’ whilst serving as British Prime Minister, but subsequently defended his decision to do so (Walton and Ross, 15 August 2015). At the time of writing, in fact, the only major manifestation of a refugee as an individual in the global visual economy throughout the recent ‘crisis’ has been the case of Alan Kurdi, the three-​year-​old Syrian boy whose drowned body was photographed by Nilüfer Demir on 2 September 2015. For a brief time, this image was at the epicentre of a surge in public empathy, with charities recording spikes in donations, and European and North American governments under domestic pressure to increase the number of refugees that they would admit (Merrill, 3 September 2015). But the detaching of the photograph from its point of referent ultimately obscured the tragedy of Kurdi’s death, and this empathy –​at odds with the emergency narrative of the ‘refugee crisis’ –​ was rapidly rerouted. What seemed to have emerged in this instance was a glimpse of the face of the other. For a moment, in other words, the photograph of Kurdi’s body created a global face for the ‘refugee crisis’. This could not be allowed to continue, since the significance of ‘facelessness’ in the construction of the refugee figure is paramount. As I will go on to show in a discussion of Emmanuel Levinas, the face constitutes a boundary through which the self is addressed by, and in turn recognises, the other. Without a face, this boundary dissolves and the other is at one and the same time entirely alien and distant, but also, because it cannot

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be located, it is resident within the self. Two examples from recent high-​ profile press campaigns highlight this contradictory process. In June 2016, Nigel Farage, then leader of the far-​ right United Kingdom Independence Party, unveiled a campaign poster. The poster was a late-​stage gambit for the ‘Leave’ campaign in the British referendum for membership of the European Union, and comprised a photograph of a long queue of largely adult male, seemingly able-​bodied and non-​white people waiting, we were given to understand, to enter the EU. The poster abjured any sense of the context of its image, and capitalised upon the partiality of its composition in order to antagonise the spectator. ‘We’ (the intended audience of British people) had no idea who these people were, nor their situations, nor what happened to them before or after the image had been taken. But that did not matter. The point of the image was first to concretise the separation of self and other, and then terrify the former with assertions about the proximity of the latter. The other is coming! The text on the poster is ‘Breaking point: The EU has failed us all’. Within the nebulousness of this statement, ‘us all’ is particularly risible since it excludes people of the majority of ethnic or cultural backgrounds any of whom, for whatever it is worth, may in fact be British citizens. This echoes Butler’s equation  –​the proscribed grievability of the addressee exceeds that of the object of the image. The spectator is deliberately spooked with a vision of their own precarity, and provoked to respond in fear to the manufactured threat of the other. A similar incident occurred in September 2016, when the son of the Republican Presidential Candidate, Donald Trump Jr. shared a photograph of a bowl of Skittles on the social media site Twitter, with the legend:  ‘If I  had a bowl of skittles and I  told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.’ The Wrigley Company, which manufactures the Skittles confectionary, issued a response saying simply ‘Skittles are sweets. Refugees are people. We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy’ (Hauser, 20 September 2016). However laudable its sentiment may have been, however, the Wrigley Company was incorrect in its diagnosis. The ‘refugees’ to whom Trump Jr. referred were in fact not ‘people’, if ‘people’ refers to the physical human bodies displaced from their home states and scattered around the world. The ‘refugees’ to whom Trump Jr. referred were merely the projection of the other, arranged and maintained by groups like the Trump presidential campaign, for reasons of political expediency. Of course, the actual people behind the fabrications always suffer the consequences of this orchestration, but that suffering is irrelevant to the western-​centric discourse of ‘refugees’. As with IS, the emergency narrative operates at the level of the visual, and those who manipulate that narrative are able to

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obscure the real in order to exclude any entities not relevant to their own agendas. Mirzoeff reads this exclusion and expropriation as endemic to visuality, and reminds us that the prevalence of violent content is resonant, but not fundamental, to the visual itself. In the case of Trump Jr.’s tweet, any direct representation of the bodies of refugees themselves was omitted, substituted for confection in order to completely sever the other from its human counterpart. Its audiences were left with an image saturated in violence, but whose content was a bowl of sweets: an exemplar of Mirzoeff ’s ‘visuality’ in which the other is incarcerated and robbed of agency. In a wretchedly farcical turn of events, it was later revealed that the photographer of the image, David Kittos, had himself moved to the UK as a refugee, and sued the Trump campaign for using his image without permission (Evans, 20 September 2016). Again, however, this does not matter: Trump Jr. used the image as a tool for the obscuring and instrumentalising of his subject matter. The fact that the image’s creator had been a refugee was, in the end, ironically appropriate. Mirzoeff ’s resistance to visuality is constructed through a ‘counterhistory’ of the visual, embodied in the ‘right to look’, which he defines as ‘requiring the recognition of the other in order to claim a place from which to have rights and to determine what is right’ (2011, p. 1). In other words, what Mirzoeff is searching for is a structure of address, whereby reciprocity of the gaze may give form and vitality to the rights of the self and other. It is the same idea that Butler outlines in the following formulation: The structure of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of our address, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails. (2004, p. 130)

Butler’s approach to this precarity operates through Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of ‘face’, an icon for the ‘ethical primacy’ of the other over the self: ‘The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying “thou shalt not kill” ’ (quoted in ibid., p. 132). Levinas argues that ethical responsibility is predicated not upon recognising one’s own precarity and transposing it onto an other (the impossible equation unearthed by Freud) but on an acceptance of the precariousness of the other itself, on its own terms. Butler finds his conclusion peculiar, since for Levinas an understanding of that precarity produces both a ‘temptation to kill’ and a ‘call to peace’ (ibid., p. 135). Puzzling through this, she supposes that a battle between self-​preservation and

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ethical responsibility is necessary for the production of discourse, since ‘it is only on the condition that we are addressed that we are able to make use of language. […] If the Other is obliterated, so too is language, since language cannot survive outside of the conditions of address’ (ibid., pp.  138–​139). The problem, and this comes back to Trump Jr., is that personification of the face –​particularly in the making and distributing of images –​can ‘perform its own dehumanization’ (ibid., p. 141). In order for the Levinasian face to create this ethical reciprocity between self and other, it must operate on something that for want of a better term I’ll call common humanity, where both the self and the other can be brought into contact. But in the image that is prepared and distributed in line with a particular narrative, and Butler’s examples range from Osama bin Laden to nameless Afghan women celebrated in the US for removing their burqas after American ‘liberation’, any sense of reciprocity with the viewer is inhibited and so the image is evacuated of humanisation. She continues: And if we are to understand ourselves as interpellated anywhere in these images, it is precisely as the unrepresented viewer, the one who looks on, the one who is captured by no image at all, but whose charge is to capture and subdue, if not eviscerate, the image at hand. (ibid., p. 143)

It is almost impossible not to add ‘the one who eats’, here, and to wonder at the extensive processes of derealisation that can so quickly divert global discourses from horror at a drowned child to revulsion at a bowl of Skittles. But the metrics offered by Mirzoeff and Butler provide a ready enough explanation, which first concerns the arrangement of these images within ‘visualities’ –​optical environments arbitrated by powerful forces who efface the subject in order to enforce political agendas –​and second concerns the inhibition of reciprocity and the cauterising of the gaze of the other. As Butler puts it, ‘[t]‌he first is effacement through occlusion; the second is effacement through representation itself ’ (ibid., p. 147). She ends her study by petitioning for the restoration of the face in all of its precariousness, although a little surprisingly she does not dwell on the potential consequences if this restoration does not occur. Levinas argues that the other is the foundation of all discourse; by his logic, then, the erasure of that other in order to pit humanity against itself is surely an act of suicide. Without the other, the self disintegrates. This, ultimately, is the stake upon which the ‘refugee crisis’ is founded. At no point does the crisis-​narrative intersect with those lives that are imperilled and displaced, but instead it erases the other, evacuates the moral implications of their ‘face’ and fuels broader processes of destruction in

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which a section of humanity is turned against itself. By participating in the dehumanisation of the other (reducing them to a bowl of Skittles, say) ‘we’ destroy our own worth, energising and legitimising subsequent violence against ourselves. And in the years since Butler’s Precarious Life was published, the face of the other has been subject to such relentless and wanton vandalism that not even the image of Alan Kurdi’s drowned body could restore a semblance of its subject-​hood for any sustained period of time. In order to gain a clearer picture of the potential and consequences of this self-​destruction, I propose now to examine the first ‘tale’ of this chapter, Vanishing Point’s theatrical production The Destroyed Room (Edinburgh, 2016). The Destroyed Room The room is an anodyne cross between a city flat and a daytime television studio. There are two chairs and a sofa, a drinks cabinet with bottles of wine and glasses, and a fridge stocked with more wine and various foodstuffs. There is a frail paper screen at the back, onto which footage from two unnamed cameramen is projected. We are presented with two images: a still-​life photograph by Jeff Wall entitled The Destroyed Room (1978), which is an interpretation of the second  –​Eugene Delacroix’s oil painting The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), which depicts the suicidal massacre ordered by the last Assyrian king following news of his army’s defeat. Jane, Jackie and John, introduced only as ‘actors’, arrive and take their places. We are told that one will ask a question to the others, in order to provoke some kind of spontaneous discussion. The question is: ‘if you had to destroy something in your house, what would it be?’ (Lenton and the company, 2016, p. 4). The actors appear to improvise their answers, appealing to the audience for support and affirmation. As the conversation progresses, however, their contributions become clinically structured and the shape of the discussion adopts a pre-​determined focus. The material is scripted. They start to drink, losing their inhibitions and making ever-​more disquieting statements. They range across the ways in which each one accesses, interprets and is affected by representations of violence through the prisms of contemporary technology. Jackie declares a fascination for watching films of natural disasters but is upset by IS murder footage, and believes that she should have more of a say in whether or not it crosses her vision. Jane accuses her of hypocrisy, and of burying her head in the sand. John recounts watching the film of the burning of Moaz al-​Kasasbeh (although the victim’s name is never mentioned) before going in to

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the next room to play with his kids. They discuss refugees, and contrast the threat posed by potentially dangerous people entering Britain with the drowning of children in the Mediterranean Sea. Jane, whose accent marks her as Northern Irish, tells a story about women during the Troubles who would present British soldiers with chocolate boxes stuffed with explosives. She declares that such hazards cannot be avoided, and that to ban all chocolate boxes at that time would have been ridiculous. The conversation butts up against the distinctions between suffering and its representation, and insipid questions are asked about whether or not public empathy has been increased by the saturation of contemporary populaces in images of violence. The cameramen are constantly filming, mixing uncomfortable close-​ups with shots of the surrounding set. As the focus narrows, the actors become more introspective. Before long, the audience are forgotten, and the three are locked within the confines of their stage space. Water seeps on to the floor, unnoticeable at first but eventually covering the entirety of the stage. None of the characters acknowledge this. The cameras pick up the water, and it becomes an overriding element of the projections. The conversation reaches fever pitch when, after Jane delivers a drunken and contradictory speech on the importance of looking at pictures of drowned toddlers, Jackie declares that she lost her child, in circumstances that are not made clear. This intrusion of ‘actual’ pain into a conversation otherwise preoccupied by its representation produces a tension that cannot be resolved, and the actors leave the stage ‘to go to the bar’. After they have left, footage is projected onto a second flat of refugees adrift in the Mediterranean, ending with a shot that shows a swimming man with a baby clutched in his arms. The video cameras zoom in to an image of the water, which is projected on to the screen above, as more water starts to cascade from the back of the stage, destroying the paper screens and flooding everything else. Once the set is destroyed, a figure in forensic overalls picks their way through the debris with a flashlight. At completion of the wrecked scenography, the show is over. The Destroyed Room, then, dramatises some of Butler and Mirzoeff ’s concerns. First there is the issue of the face:  the obscured faces of the refugees and IS victims to which the actors refer but which the audience are never shown; the production of the self-​as-​other by projecting video clips of the actors’ faces onto the screens above; and the face-​to-​face of the actors and audience, which is quickly abandoned as the material of the production takes its shape. It is significant, of course, that this is a stage production and not a video, since those first moments of face-​to-​ face interaction highlight the stakes, and the loss, once the face of the other is overwritten. This overwriting also exposes what Butler calls the

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image ‘performing its own dehumanization’, by dramatising the lack of reciprocity between the image and spectator. In the previous chapter I  cited Mondzain’s plea that ‘the place of those who see’ be protected against those who profit from images and videos of suffering. Part of this urgency has arisen from the isolation of the spectator, which has exposed that figure to intense vulnerability. The isolation occurs at multiple levels: most obviously perhaps the solitary act of Internet access, and the distancing of spectator from spectacle through the prism of digital capture and reproduction. In addition, I also discussed the detaching of the image from its referent in order to commoditise the former within the global visual economy. This, too, isolates the spectator, thinking in terms of Levinas and Butler’s descriptions of ‘self ’. In replacing that which is not the self with a ventriloquised spectacle, the self is robbed of an exterior whereby it can learn and rationalise its own being. Instead, it is faced with the uncanny apparition of its own endeavours made to appear like a foreign body. This is something akin to Julia Kristeva’s diagnosis of the ‘abject’; the revulsion experienced when the self encounters entities that upset the subject/​object boundary, such as bodily excretions, rotten food or corpses. She describes: [A]‌massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-​existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I  acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. (1982, p. 2)

Vanishing Point played with this process by having John speciously wonder what Moaz al-​Kasasbeh must have been thinking as he was set on fire. The abject was John’s safeguard –​he did not recognise the victim as a human, but as an uncanny self-​projection, produced at the level of the visual. Or to put it another way, John did not witness (or relay the witnessing of) suffering, pain and death but merely a video. The actual death that formed the presumptive subject of the video was overwritten by that video’s object-​status. All that he saw in the footage was the reflection of his own consumption. And what was clearly intended to be most unsettling about his speech was the way in which he then described playing with his children in the same flat, emotionless delivery. He was dehumanised (Kristeva might say ‘expelled’), because there was no other in conversation against or from which he could produce himself. The ‘spectator of the video’ and ‘John’ had collapsed in to one another,

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where the latter had lost his border of selfhood. At the risk of stating the obvious, this collapse could only have been made visible through live performance, which is why theatre now takes centre-​stage in my analysis. Theatre requires embodiment, a quality that is destroyed by the ventriloquisation of the crisis-​event in the discourses of visuality. We can experience in theatre what is obscured in digital capture, the condition of the Levinasian ‘face’, even if all we can do is track that face’s destruction. But if The Destroyed Room offers first and foremost a meditation on the ‘destroyed face’, then the vehicle through which that destruction is wrought (itself destroyed in the process), is story.

Storytelling In The Storyteller (1936), Walter Benjamin observes that stories transport communitarian impulses between groups, individuals, times and places. Stories thus produce contiguous points of connection for the making and remaking of collective identities. Now, a striking quality of The Destroyed Room is that despite being almost entirely comprised of three people telling each other stories, the text itself does not provide a story for its audience. The actors talk, offering no especial insight on a set of questions that (we assume) are commonplace to the spectators, and then leave the stage. A video is played; the scenery is destroyed; the show ends. What is dramatised is the absence of a story, and the void that opens up where a story should have been. In addition, within the world of the play the ‘actors’ are conceivable only through the representations of violence that they recount, and any sense of their ‘own’ or ‘proper’ selves is obscured. What is presented is thus both the object and consequence of the emergency phenomenon in the figure of the hopeless, stultified and story-​less spectator. And, since the spectators on stage become avatars for those in the auditorium, this argument has a political quality with strong resonances of Brecht. Famously, in his Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht was appalled by audiences whose ‘relations are those of a lot of sleepers, though of such as dream restlessly because, as is popularly said of those who have nightmares, they are lying on their backs’ (1989, p. 187). His response, of course, was the attempted uncoupling of those audiences from what he saw as an enervating naturalism. The Destroyed Room, however, is not a return to the naturalist mimesis so despised by Brecht. It is rather an attempt to explore the empty centre of the emergency phenomenon,

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through the body and perspective of the spectator. Emergencies may be built on spectacular stories, but these only serve the instigation of the phenomenon. Once instigated, emergencies become annexed and history-​less entities, fed by fear of the exterior and without time or place for anything other than protocol, or that which leads towards it. The story, as Benjamin points out, is languorous and elusive, never fully ‘relevant’ to any given moment, and builds its truth-​claims purely on experience. Emergencies, on the other hand, foreclose communication that is not directly related to themselves and trade only in temporarily relevant ‘information’. From this perspective, The Destroyed Room draws attention to the empty, story-​less centre of the emergency phenomenon, offering a chance to interrogate the effect that such a situation has on the spectator themselves. Let’s return to the two images at the start of the show. A striking feature of Delacroix’s painting is the detachment with which the king views the carnage erupting all around him. This carnage does not stop with the physical violence, but bleeds in to the painting’s formal composition: the room’s dimensions are uncertain, and the characters make no sense in proportion or relation to one another. The art critic Tom Lubbock saw in these uncertainties ‘a world where disorientation has both a spatial and a moral dimension. Nothing and nobody cares about up or down –​right or wrong.’ From this, he hypothesises that ‘a universal catastrophe takes the weight out of mere human terrors. It lightens them. Humanity and the world fall together. This busy doom is almost welcoming’ (Lubbock, 1 July 2010). In his photographic homage, Jeff Wall removes both the presence of human agents and the present tense of the violence:  his image shows only the wreckage of a bedroom already destroyed. The destruction is self-​consciously staged, with support slats clearly visible through a doorway, which reveal the set as an artificial environment in which nobody actually lives. The ‘moral’ dimension to Wall’s disorientation is thus complicated by its self-​awareness. It is as if the viewer sees the pornographic actor reading their lines from a script whilst mid-​coitus, or the politician’s autocued text in a moment of apparent sincerity. The viewer knows the artificiality of the spectacle, but ignores this knowledge in order that the spectacle can function. Wall reminds his viewer that any image of destruction presented as such wreaks artifice upon the wreckage, aestheticising destruction and making a ruin. In their turn, Vanishing Point sought to open this moral dimension to their audience. This is why the shift from apparently improvised to definitely scripted was impossible to pinpoint, and why the seepage of water went unremarked. What began as a post-​modern echo of Jean-​Paul Sartre’s play Huis Clos in which he declared that ‘hell is other people’, was transformed

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into something more perturbing, as the spectators both on-​and off-​stage were absorbed into the image –​therefore, of course, into the wreckage. Hell is the image, and we are of it. This realisation was made strikingly clear in the foreclosure of anywhere else. What was presented was the horror and, in a significant way the boredom, of an omniscient image. Because despite the descriptions and presentation of images within the show purporting to connect to an elsewhere, they were available to the audience and actors only as images; things made for consumption in the place in which they were accessed. The entire show was spent apparently investigating a broader conceit, but nothing could be offered that was not wrought in the language of the actors’ superficiality. Everything, apart from the destruction of the set, played out at the level of the image. That destruction was the only new, surprising and narratively satisfying occurrence, and it essentially served only to show the audience what is done to the crisis event in order to transform it into a representation. To paraphrase Mondzain, it was the ruination of the image in the image of ruin. The precedent for this process is, as mentioned, writ large into Wall’s photograph. Any destroyed room should index a sequence of events culminating in that destruction, but here there is only the process of fabrication. The ruin has no other history: detached from antecedent it is made to be a ruin. What the spectators of Wall’s photograph, and by extension the audience of Vanishing Point’s production witness, therefore, is a manifestation of the world without past or future, where change is possible only as the erosion of surface material to an artificial construct upon which that present has been built. Lubbock saw in Delacroix’s painting the blueprint for such an environment: The spectacle is all. The king relishes his sights. In the same way, the painting encourages us to enjoy this scene. This vast canvas is full of beautiful chaos. There is flesh and rich fabric and gorgeous colour. There is turbulence and cruelty –​and opulence, ruin, decadence, slaughter, luxury, despair, violation, helplessness, sacrifice, the whole business. The massacre is coming to its finale. One after another, the deeds are falling down. (Lubbock, 1 July 2010)

For Lubbock, the viewers’ position as spectators would appear to be with the king. But they are denied this position within the image –​they are not about to be killed themselves, and thus cannot engage in the hallucinatory abandonment constituted by the event of the slaughter. The same logic is at play in Vanishing Point’s production, as the actors agonise their positions in relation to the recorded devastation upon

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which they feed, even as their feet are drenched in the rising waters and the illusions of their ‘real’ selves dissolve. But into what? According to the rationale of the play, there is nothing beyond the immediate. As a consequence, the actors return only to the image-​saturated world of the audience, which is precisely where they have been all along. What is reached here is what Paul Virilio calls a ‘totalitarian techno-​cult in which everyone is caught in the trap not of a society and its moral, social or cultural laws and prohibitions, but of what these centuries of progress have made of us and our bodies’ (1997, p. 39, emphases in original). This ‘trap’ has proven the perfect vehicle for the emergency phenomenon as the spectator’s body, in its obeisance to technology, is harangued by the images that produce and maintain that phenomenon. Alternatives to carefully manipulative states of emergency can no longer be found by searching at the level of the visual. Instead, this search should be conducted through story and for this, it is necessary to pay close attention to Benjamin. Over the course of The Storyteller, Benjamin lays out a lament for what he diagnoses as a dying art form, and an impassioned argument that then, more than ever, storytelling constituted a necessary and irreplaceable corollary to problems plaguing his contemporary context. The art and tradition of storytelling has a number of significant qualities. It is a live retelling of narratives whose supposed points of reference happened either far away or long ago; it hinges upon the talent of a storyteller to attract and maintain the attention of a group of listeners for whom they make the story afresh; it is composed of memorable, affective points and usually has a moral or purpose. Throughout history, according to Benjamin, cross-​cultural practices of storytelling provided a common method of developing and maintaining identity. But by 1936, in Europe, that art-​form was in near-​fatal decline. The reasons he suggests for this decline are that industrialisation had dismantled the groups of bored artisans and journeymen whose quietly repetitive labours rendered them the natural and most receptive audience for spoken stories. In addition, ‘experience’, the building block of the story, had declined in value. This he ascribed both to the First World War, in which mass-​trauma ruined the communicability of lived experience, and an increasing obsession with ‘information’, a commodity relating only to events happening right at the moment, whose complete relevance renders it utterly disposable. Faced with a world addicted to information, how could the story, whose existence and value hinged on the fact that it came from somewhere else (either the local past or the mystical ‘far away’) hope to survive? But the story, by the fact of its communitarian nature and its separateness from the contemporary, had provided a space outside of what Giorgio

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Agamben calls the ‘lights of the century’. Benjamin concludes his essay by saying that it is granted to the storyteller to reach back to a whole lifetime (a life, incidentally, that comprises not only his own experience but no little of the experience of others; what the storyteller knows from hearsay is added to his own) […] The storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself. (2007, pp. 108–​109)

In other words, the storyteller offers a point of connection, counsel and affirmation between the audience and the inaccessible, other worlds from which their art and authority derive. Relating this figure to the examples of preceding chapters, it can be argued that the ‘emergency’ may produce an obverse species of performance which, at first glance, actually has a lot in common with storytelling. Both Hilary Benn and ‘Jihadi John’, for example, have demonstrated some of the formal qualities of storytellers. They have retold pre-​ existent narratives whilst commanding the attention of listeners through charismatic performance; they have drawn authority from events that occur ‘far away’ from the targeted audience, which they have simplified into points that coalesce around a ‘moral’ or ‘purpose’. But they are not storytellers. At least, not in the sense that Benjamin understands, and for two reasons. The first is that their stories have no history, and the second is that these stories abjure experience in favour of information. In both cases, examples from recent events were summoned to justify the force of their argument, but these erupted from no further away than the hysteria of the contemporary situation. There was no distance, and by Benjamin’s definition therefore no authority to their stories. And what is particularly monstrous –​more, obviously, in the case of ‘Jihadi John’, but with echoes in Benn –​is that death, that event which should form the impenetrable core of every lived experience, was downgraded to the status of disposable ‘information’. Benjamin offers a powerful argument as to why such downgrading should not occur: It is, however, characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life –​and this is the stuff that stories are made of –​ first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end  –​unfolding the views of himself under which he encountered himself without being aware of it –​suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very heart of the story. (ibid., p. 94)

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As I have argued, the propagandist intent of the IS execution videos and their redistribution in line with political narratives of retaliation constitute attempts to exploit this authority. Benjamin’s descriptions of a ‘sequence of images set in motion’ and exterior views of the self are eerily prescient, but, as previously concluded, the technological reproduction of these moments of death does not capture that authority, and is capable only of a macabre form of ventriloquism. Benn’s speech, too, because it does not understand or honour the fact of the deaths that it describes, fails to attain the authority of death and is bound entirely within the superficial discourses of information. All of which returns to a major preoccupation of this chapter: as the emergency shuts down the possibility of an exterior, it destroys the key component of storytelling. We can see this more clearly, in fact, in the resonances between Benjamin’s ‘storyteller’ and Agamben’s ‘contemporary’. Considered through Agamben’s theory, the storyteller is contemporary precisely because she stands apart. But if storytelling was a declining art-​form in 1936, then at the time of writing this book, eighty years later, it is in an even more dire state of inattention. Benjamin’s model is still useful for my purposes, however, because it intimates a method of resistance against the pandemonium of the emergency. The temporal axis of storytelling is the darkness of the past, a darkness from which it refuses to fully emerge into ‘relevance’, which is another reason it cannot be absorbed into the emergency’s perpetual present. The spatial axis of storytelling, in building an assembly of relational individuals, also offers a method of resistance against the isolating mechanics that were encountered in Chapter  1. Stories provide an opportunity for collective desire and belief, both of which are fundamental to communal interaction. Seen from this perspective, Vanishing Point’s production underscores the importance of these endeavours since The Destroyed Room shows a world emptied of storytelling –​without an exterior, without engagement, without experience, without history and without future. The Sartrean hell unleashed as a consequence is a profound argument against the destruction of storytelling, with broader implications about the effects that devaluing experience and abolishing distance have on the human. The spectator at that juncture becomes a creature of the image, unable to gain a purchase on any aspect of life around them and seeking ever-​more visceral thrills whilst blind to the rising waters. The Destroyed Room thus provides two essential warnings. First, that the destruction of the Levinasian ‘face’ constituted by (but by no means restricted to) the ‘refugee crisis’ precipitates a form of suicide in which the self, without recourse to the discourse of the other, is obliterated. Second, that the incarceration of the other-​less self within an emergency

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dissolves all distance, alternative and hope, which are the proper qualities of the story. The show thus offers a reductio ad absurdum amplification of the precarious situation of the spectator. But these warnings are insufficient on their own, since acknowledgement of spectatorial precarity merely reinforces the solipsism of the emergency phenomenon. To look outside of this solipsism, it is necessary to broaden the analytic scope and consider alternative methods of engagement. A  useful place to begin, I believe, is with the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler.

Spiritual misery Since his early collaborations with Jacques Derrida before the latter’s death in 2004, Stiegler’s work has been characterised as much by its grounding in concrete societal concerns (education and youth policy; the pharmaceutical industries; the influence of television and the media) as by its distinctive intellectual apparatus. A  key point of connection for these concerns is a concept that Stiegler calls ‘spiritual misery’. This term is used to elucidate multiple instances of apparently irrational violence committed in recent years.3 For Stiegler, ‘spirit’ is that quality which ‘exceeds the I and connects it to the we [… and] which, passing through the organization of matter, opens the process of conjunctions and disjunctions, and thus of trans-​formations and trans-​individuations, in which psychic individuation consists’ (2013, pp. 2–​3, emphases in original for this and all further quotations from this work). We are made human by our ability to exist together:  without ‘we’ there is no possibility of ‘I’. ‘Spirit’, as the relationship between these two entities, is therefore ‘not some kind of vapour or pure idea’ but a tangible force through which all knowledge is made possible (ibid., p. 3). He goes on to describe ‘spiritual misery’ as the ‘blockage or destruction of psychic and social circuits through which the objects of spirit are constituted –​which are the objects of admiration, sublimation, and love’ (ibid., p.  3). In other words, the proper development of ‘spirit’ –​as desire –​is made possible only through networks of interaction. These networks produce objects that, in a cyclical process, enable those networks to function. At the core of these entities is belief, an intangible quality whose intangibility must be both safeguarded and venerated or else it is lost, and the desire that For examples of these, which include riots, school shootings and infanticide, see Stiegler (2013, pp. 1–​2, 14–​15, 49–​50, 83–​85, 117).

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enables psychic and collective development is relegated to the status of a drive (calculable, predictable, mechanical). Thus: Objects of belief are objects of desire and, therefore, they do not exist, yet they are indispensable for existence, unless the latter sinks into the realm of the drives, which is also the reign of despair and stupidity. By calculating these objects of belief, trust ruins them, because one can calculate only with what is existent. [We therefore require] a theory of reason conceived above all as reason to believe and to hope, and which constitutes a particular part of the theory of desire, which is always a desiring to believe. (ibid., pp. 66–​67)

The problem, for Stiegler, is that the hyper-​industrial capitalism of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries operates a theory of ‘value’ that discredits the very notions of belief and singularity, where ‘value must be completely calculable, that is, condemned to become valueless:  such is nihilism’ (ibid., p. 80). There are echoes here of Benjamin’s criticism of ‘information’ being valued over ‘experience’. In a hyper-​industrial society, a tension arises between the desiring subject and the systems through which their desire is expressed and regulated. Thus ‘the consumer [is] devalorized  –​or more precisely, disindividuated. In such a society  –​which liquidates desire, desire being, however, the energy of society, insofar as it is libidinal energy –​value is what annihilates itself ’ (ibid., p. 81). It is this nihilism, the product of an inoperable –​yet hegemonic –​theory of value, that is manifested in the seemingly irrational acts of violence upon which Stiegler focuses. For these purposes, I am interested in the ways in which he conceives of the inhibition of desire by a value system based purely upon calculability as something destructive. And, following this logic, that the reduction of ‘desire’ to a ‘drive’ may unleash chaotic violence that seems irrational at a surface level. This then offers an alternative way of thinking about dehumanisation, and the relationship of the self to the violence that is done to the other. Stiegler refocuses our attention on the systems by which individuals facilitate their relationships, and argues that a fundamental flaw in these systems opens up a space that is easily exploited in order to turn sections of humanity against itself. What is particularly significant to my purposes is that this model of spirit (proceeding from a Hegelian idea of individuation or wholeness) is founded upon the interconnection of all selves through networks of technology, or what he calls technics: ‘All our behaviour presupposes a prior, spontaneous trust in technics, and in the coherence of a system that is clearly not reducible to the sum of the parts of which it is constituted’ (ibid., p. 16). For Stiegler, any violence felt and performed by individuals against one another is the consequence of

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malfunctioning technical processes: systems that are no longer coherent, or from which some individuals become excluded. It is not a question therefore of reformulating the other (and the self), but of rebuilding networks and systems of desire in which all are capable of participating. Seen from this perspective, the emergency phenomenon might potentially serve as an antithesis to Stiegler’s ambition –​it closes down systems of desire, and expropriates in order to destroy some sections of humanity whilst isolating and stultifying others into equivalent destruction. It is necessary to remember that emergencies always operate from a centralised arena of authority, and that this arena is always the position of the spectator. This is because, as I have argued through Mirzoeff, emergencies are principally a question of visuality: events that are codified into an optically coherent trajectory in order to justify an ideological position. The spectator is shown an image of a bowl of Skittles in order to legitimise and help to sanction the drowning of thousands of people. Those who drown are not privy to their role within the emergency, and suffer precisely because they are excluded from its technical processes. By being included, the spectator is privy and productive in the creation of that violence. What is starting to become clear is that not only is the emergency phenomenon consolidated by the spectator, but that the phenomenon itself produces an ethical crisis within her position. The equilibrium of self-​preservation and ethical responsibility that Levinas talks about is kicked off-​balance; the included turn against the excluded and, perhaps without realising it, endorse a value-​economy that will destabilise their own worth. As Butler puts it in her North American context, ‘the US seeks to engender violence against itself by waging violence first, but the violence it fears is the violence it engenders’ (2004, p. 149). It is difficult for the spectator to view the destabilisation that is engendered by following protocol, however, since that very process may become endemic to her relationship with the visual. If this becomes the case, she may never actually see the rising water. Reflecting back on The Destroyed Room, then, Stiegler’s philosophy throws into sharp relief its saturation of the surface, and abolition of depth or distance. In that production, the spectator is presented with a world that has relegated all desires to drives, and functions only at the level of the superficial, whilst the spiritual ‘blocks’ within the psychic and social circuits create an accretion of frustrated energy that eventually explodes into violence. The play is not an allegory, because an allegory uses metaphor and fabulation to reflect a deeper story. In The Destroyed Room there is no deeper story, and the adjacent narratives –​most importantly, of course, IS and the ‘refugee crisis’  –​are composite parts of the same spiritual misery. I thus propose to steer a middle course between

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Stiegler and Butler’s arguments in examination of a further consequence of emergencies. If, as I have argued, emergencies shut down the potential for an ‘outside’, and only that which is material to their proper situation is permitted, then what remains is flattened into a single location: the location of the spectator. This is what engenders the precarity of that location. I  now turn to the second ‘tale’ of this chapter, a theatrical engagement with the ‘refugee crisis’, which examined precisely this facet of precarious spectatorship: Zinnie Harris’ play How to Hold Your Breath (2015). How to Hold Your Breath In scene four of Vicky Featherstone’s premiere production, the protagonist, Dana, sat centre-​stage and delivered a faltering research proposal whilst facing the audience. Behind her, three interviewers in business attire affected a disinterested, menacing observation. The scenography was composed mostly of domestic appliances: fridges, wardrobes, lamps and benches were all piled around the stage, each bearing a cheaply cut neon price tag. Dominating the scene was a billboard depicting a nuclear family in a cornfield, above the strapline ‘Live well’. The Orwellian didacticism of this superscript, juxtaposed with the banal commodities of everyday life spread beneath it, served as a knowing paean to hyper-​consumption. Through the amalgamation of interview, domestic appliance store and billboard, the audience were given to understand that it was for these drab compensations of ‘living well’ that Dana competed against her unseen rivals. Taken as a whole, the aesthetic thus foregrounded its own artificiality, offering a post-​modern sarcasm on mindless consumerism. On top of this, it transpired that the intention of Dana’s project was to further enhance this process by researching ‘Customer Dynamics’. This, she claimed, was a ‘new and exciting theory on customer–​business relationships’, which in a jargon-​heavy set of speeches she described as the alignment of customer–​business contact with other ‘basic human interactions’ such as ‘love’, ‘lust’ and ‘friendship’ (Harris, 2015, p.  36). The interview degenerated into vacillations, equivocations and blusters, until she made a last-​ditch attempt to clarify her position: You might in the same second get a text from your partner, and then from your bank. To maximise the feeling of mutuality, should the text from your bank feel more on your team than from your partner? It is your bank, there to listen to you. […] I think with the right modelling Customer Dynamics could go beyond the transactional nature of the interaction to look at emotions, intent and desires. (ibid., pp. 37–​38, emphases in original)

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The ironic reference to public ownership of banking companies is accompanied here by an internal irony that contradicts the play’s opening scenes. In these the audience sees Dana in the aftermath of a one-​night stand with a man, Jarron, who subsequently offers to pay her for their sex. Appalled at his mercantile views on what she had seen as the expression of mutual desire she rejects the offer, prompting Jarron to declare himself a demon, and to warn of the dire consequences of putting him into debt. As the play progresses, Dana’s continued refusal to accept Jarron’s money triggers the economic and ecological collapse of her native Europe. Setting out from Berlin to Alexandria to attend a follow-​ up interview, she loses her money in a financial collapse, resorts to prostitution in order to support herself and her sister Jasmine, who has just miscarried and is suffering some kind of breakdown, and is then mugged for the wages. Both women eventually drown in an overcrowded boat that sinks in a storm on the Mediterranean Sea. The production ends with Dana being revived by Jarron and delivered to her second interview; withheld from death and restored to consumerism. Dana is accompanied on her journey by the Librarian, a Choral character who serves as a kind of well-​meaning but ineffectual spirit guide. When he protests at her resurrection because she has nothing left to live for, Jarron retorts: she has got everything. What do you mean, nothing? […] She could do her presentation, get the job, decent salary, buy a flat she is one of the lucky ones she could have everything. (ibid., p. 157)

Their respective methods of qualifying a life open up a set of questions about ‘value’ that resonate with both Stiegler’s ‘valueless’ economy, and Butler’s devaluation of the self. But a distinctive quality of Harris’ play is in the displacement of self into the role of the other. Midway through the play, Jasmine responds to Dana’s incredulity at her calmness in the face of peril by saying ‘because we both live in Europe. Because nothing really bad happens’ (ibid., p. 92). Here is the hubris that conceals the contingency of the self, and Harris’ play sets out to examine what happens if that contingency is upended. In Butler’s language, it might be described as the expulsion of self into other, or in Levinas’ as self-​effacement. For Jasmine, the consequences are the reduction of personal tragedy (miscarriage and death) to inhuman statistic: a key instrument of authority within the ‘refugee crisis’. For Dana, the consequences are the destruction of all identity-​principles, and a re-​deployment within a hopeless world built entirely on the predicates of the othered self. This is a familiar

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trap, and can be more clearly perceived through a biblical resonance in Dana’s story. In the rejuvenation of a figure relentlessly punished for their fidelity, there are strong resonances between Dana and the Old Testament character Job. That story sees Satan convincing God to strip Job, a devout and successful man, of all happiness, on the suspicion that his devotion is merely a consequence of good fortune. When Job remains faithful despite a gratuitous array of agonies, God restores him to former prosperity. Now, although there are marked parallels with Job, Dana’s story bears two important deviations. First, it is fidelity to the strength of her own desire, rather than to an external deity, that fuels both her tenacity and the severities of her torment. Second, the quality of Dana’s restoration can rise no further than the desolate simulacrum of her initial situation. Where Job has family, health and affluence as his reward, Dana returns only to the impartial hostility of the interview. This returning is foreshadowed throughout the play, with Dana at one point stepping out of the action to deliver a segment of her presentation, and elsewhere conducting phone conversations with the panel at unlikely moments, such as when she is drowning. This refrain was amplified in Featherstone’s dramaturgy, which reassembled the stage at each of these junctures to reference that initial image. Whatever was happening to Dana, she was always being returned to the interview. Within the refrain of the interview, then, there is a conflict of commercial and individual forces, grouped under a mythological aesthetic that seems to be, at its core, apocalyptic. The term ‘apocalypse’ is a slightly tricky fit for Harris’ play, since it combines the destruction of one set of world-​ principles with (and for) the engendering of another. Although a new world is geographically formed at the end of How to Hold Your Breath, with North Africa replacing Europe as a commercial centre, the operating principles of this new world are largely indistinguishable from the former. The new world begins and ends, as it were, with the interview. But in the biblically inflected (and proportioned) calamities of the narrative, apocalypse –​importantly, one that is precipitated purely through the force of individual desire  –​materialises as a significant concept. How to Hold Your Breath is a play that examines the conflict between individual desire and commercial systems of ‘value’, and finds within that conflict a catastrophic potential. Most of the reviewers failed to see the link between these two entities, and wrote off their ignorance as somehow a fault of the text. Susannah Clapp, for instance, inanely wondered whether catastrophe in the play is ‘inevitable, is it the result of a chain of events, or is it woo-​woo inexplicable?’ (Clapp, 15 February 2015).

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As I  have begun to outline, a philosophical corollary to the merging of personal and geopolitical calamity in Harris’ drama is manifest in Stiegler’s thought, and is something to which he pays particular attention in the emergence of ‘irrational’ real-​world events. One of the most striking of these is the case of the Cartier family. These were two debt-​ridden shopaholic parents who, in a northern-​French suburb in 2002, attempted (in one instance successfully) to murder their five children and then kill themselves (Stiegler, 2013, p. 83). Worrying away at the particulars of the case, Stiegler reasons that: everything had been done to make them [the parents] incapable of loving them [the children], given that ‘to love’ is not synonymous with ‘to buy’ –​ even though the hypermarkets would like their customers to believe that if I love, I buy, and that I love only to the extent that I buy, and that everything can be bought and sold. ‘To love’, however, is not only a feeling –​it is a relation, a way of being and living with the one who is loved, and for them. (2013, p. 82, emphases in original)

How to Hold Your Breath stages a similar short-​circuiting of ‘love’ and ‘buy’, deriving its dramatic impetus from the consequences. At an immediate level, Jarron is incapable of comprehending ‘love’ and in his desperate rage at being unable to reduce it to ‘buy’, he wreaks havoc upon the world that Dana inhabits. What is far opaquer is Dana’s reason for clinging to the inviolability of her desire even at, and beyond, the point of personal and familial tragedy. Jarron queries this when attempting to coerce her: ‘it’s a bit silly isn’t it, for a principle? for pride? /​for your ego, for putting yourself first?’ (Harris, 2015, p.  98). The fact that no answer is offered by the play was often seen as a weakness, but it is here that Stiegler’s ideas offer opportunities to further interrogate the text (Lukowski, 11 February 2015; Evans, 21 February 2015). First, as noted above, Dana’s position on love and desire contradicts the logical (drive-​based, calculable) system of her research presentation. Yet the carefully signposted parapraxes of ‘love’ and ‘lust’ in her presentation prefigure the impossibility of her proposal to go ‘beyond the transactional nature of the interaction to look at emotion, intent and desires’ within such a system (Harris, 2015, p. 38). In fact, it is this impossibility that then erupts into the conflict between Jarron and Dana. Dana’s tenacity is an illustration of the force of desire, and the ‘catastrophe’ that confused Clapp emanates from attempting to corral that desire within a value system predicated upon calculability. In Stiegler’s vocabulary, the play offers a metaphorical consideration of the implosive energies active within spiritual misery. In their dispute, Dana and Jarron signify

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the incommensurability of desire and consumerism. This is made clear when Dana finally attempts to reverse her position but realises  –​too late  –​that she cannot. In opposing Jarron’s mercantile value system through the principles of her own desire, she has unleashed a force that is impossible to curtail except by her destruction (ibid., p. 109). This also offers an explanation for Jarron’s decision to restore her to life:  at the point of her demise she is no longer a desiring subject, and can finally be quantified by the calculable logic of his value system. Or, to put it another way, Dana has become a demon. It can thus be contended that the ‘catastrophe’ depicted in How to Hold Your Breath is neither ‘inevitable’, ‘a chain of events’ nor ‘woo-​woo inexplicable’, but rather a condition immanent within the individual psychology. This is not to make the mistake, as one reviewer did, of cheaply literalising the narrative to something ‘that happens in the protagonist’s head’, but rather to see a potential for unmitigated destruction as latent within the energies of the desiring-​subject (Lukowski, 11 February 2015). How to Hold Your Breath melds the personal and the mythical, and shows a world where the symbolic power of individual action has the capacity to alter or destroy the conditions of its contingent context. In the printed text, the play opens with a speech, omitted from Featherstone’s production, in which Dana recounts a dream where she is ‘howl […] ant under a stone […] the end. The dead […] the abyss in which people dread to fall’ (Harris, 2015, p. 13). The exclusion of the speech from the production rendered Dana’s metaphorical significance more implicit, but the catastrophic capabilities of her desire (and thus her symbolic function within the play) were the chief engine of the production. As mentioned above, the notion of an ‘immanent’ apocalyptic force is deeply problematic. Although the term aligns with the mythological elements of the production (the biblical/​demoniacal aspects, for example, invoke a theological eschatology) there is still the question of rebirth, of a new set of world-​principles being engendered. At the metaphorical level, How to Hold Your Breath offers only the immolation of the desiring subject and its reintegration into society as a demonic –​Stiegler would say disindividuated  –​entity. Calculable value systems that are opposed to the development of ‘spirit’ emerge triumphant. Nihilism wins. This was certainly Billington’s view when he complained that ‘although the play is basically about Dana’s resistance to temptation, what you get, dramatically, is repetition rather than development or debate’ (Billington, 11 February 2015). As I have sought to argue, however, Dana’s actions are not a resistance to temptation but rather a manifestation of the force of her own desire, in conflict with value systems that attempt to quantify (and therefore destroy) it. But the identification of repetition ‘rather than

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development or debate’ is significant, particularly when placed alongside a further assertion of Stiegler’s: [this book’s] hypothesis is that industry, the current model of which is exhausted, is nevertheless spawning a new form of civilization: industrial civilization. In other words, industrial civilization is yet to arrive. […] As pure calculation, it [industrial civilization] denies the very possibility of a future, given that the future cannot be calculated because it is essentially indeterminate: a calculable future is no longer a future but just the consequence of the present. (2013, p. 68, emphases in original)

What Stiegler describes here is apocalyptic: the destruction of a current set of world-​principles in order to engender a new one. His warning, however, is that a world built upon the predicates of spiritual misery –​ that nothing which is not calculable can exist –​will engender what he calls the ‘installation of a system of terror’ (ibid., p. 68, emphases in original). Applying this thinking to How to Hold Your Breath clarifies its eschatology; this is the engendering of a new world, but one that has eradicated the possibility of the future. In fact, Featherstone’s production repeatedly flagged this up by returning its protagonist  –​and its audience –​to the perpetual present of the interview. Far from eschewing development or debate, then, the function of repetition in the performance text was the crux of its debate. The coming into being of a world born from the destruction of desire is one that offers no possibility of a future, only the reproduction of an endless, quantifiable present. ‘Spiritual misery’ is revealed as the guiding force within what I have been describing as the ‘emergency phenomenon’, and the implications of this are alarming, particularly given that Stiegler describes the birth from within the emergency of a new, and unending, reality. By treating the same crisis-​narrative as Vanishing Point from the perspective of the excluded, Harris reaches precisely the same conclusion in a world without hope of an exterior, pushed into suicidal self-​destruction through lack of alternative.

My dying neighbours But if this is the warning of Harris’ play, then what about its subject? After all, the text treats an issue of contemporary relevance by inverting common prejudice and taking Benjamin Zephaniah at his word. We can

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all be refugees; any notion that a particular group of people is protected is a fiction. What happens if the position of the spectator, who had previously resided within the emergency narrative and based all of her suppositions from that, is switched? What if she finds herself othered, outside of the discourse and her fate determined through the lens of a ventriloquised image? Our attention is drawn to Dana’s recapitulation as an ‘other’ in a brief aside by a doctor who examines her corpse: ‘why do they do it? why do they take the risk? […] we either bury them here or pay to have them shipped back to where they came from’ (Harris, 2015, p. 154). ‘I’, as Kristeva puts it, ‘is expelled’ (1982, p. 4). It is tempting to go back through the vast corpus of western critical thought in support of the othering of the other and use Harris’ switching device to expose its glib, entitled asymmetry. Would Sam Harris (2005), for instance, have been quite as quick to philosophically justify the use of torture if he had been forced to conceptualise his own displacement beyond the protection of the emergency narrative? (For an analysis of these justifications, see the Appendix to this book.) The significance of Zinnie Harris’ device, however, lies in its consideration of what Freud calls the ‘Neighbour figure’. My argument has encountered this figure already, through Levinas, for whom the neighbour is the other whose otherness must perpetually be maintained. The cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek at least in part supports this notion, pointing out that in ‘elitist’ religions such as Judaism, acceptance of the other is possible precisely because of the inviolability of the self, whereas ‘Christian universalism tendentiously excludes non-​believers from the very universality of humankind’ (2009, p. 47). It is a variant of Butler’s argument –​if, instead of destroying the other, the other is incorporated into the self then the same imbalance occurs, and the self disintegrates. Žižek is wary of Levinas, because as he points out ‘the Levinasian other as the abyss of otherness from which the ethical injunction emanates and the Nazi figure of the Jew as the less-​than-​human Other-​enemy originate from the same source’ (ibid., p. 47). Žižek, however, does not see the need to resolve the neighbour problem in ‘reality’, only in representation. ‘Reality in itself, in its stupid existence, is never intolerable: it is language, its symbolisation, which makes it such’ (ibid., p. 57). Further: Though it may appear that there is a contradiction between the way discourse constitutes the very core of the subject’s identity and the notion of this core as an unfathomable abyss beyond the ‘wall of language’, there is a simple solution to this apparent paradox. The ‘wall of language’ which forever separates me from the abyss of another subject is simultaneously that which opens up and sustains the abyss –​the very obstacle that separates me from Beyond is what creates its mirage. (ibid., p. 62)

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By this logic, the construction and manipulation of the refugee as enemy-​ other is not political expediency but the founding principle of the ‘neighbour’ figure itself. What is irritating about Žižek’s argument, however, is precisely the fact that he does not reconnect the ‘symbolised’ other with its real counterpart. It is all very well to observe the mechanics by which Trump Jr. establishes an other through illustrative trickery; that illustration still wreaks havoc and violence upon the effaced countenance of the real, living other. A more productive approach to the same problem is offered by Sara Ahmed, who frames her book Strange Encounters (2000) with a deceptively simple question: how is it possible to recognise a stranger? Recognition, Ahmed points out, means ‘to know again’, and thus the recognition of a stranger is ‘determinate in the social demarcation of spaces of belonging:  the stranger is “known again” as that which has already contaminated such spaces as a threat to both property and person’ (p. 22). The self, in this view, is maintained through a collective identification with its social space, and from there creates literal boundaries through which the other may be constituted and differentiated –​processes which, Ahmed reminds us, are co-​determinate (ibid., p. 23). Following Levinas, Ahmed reads this as a flaw inherited from Martin Heidegger, whose infamous ontology ‘privileges “home” and the world only insofar as it is here or mine’ (ibid., p. 138). Through his focus on the face, Levinas seeks to offer an alternative approach, an ethics that is ‘about finding a better way of encountering the other which allows the other to live, as that which is beyond “my” grasp, and as that which cannot be assimilated into the ego or the body of a community’ (ibid., p. 139). This is where the function of How to Hold Your Breath inserts itself as a corollary; the spectator is reminded of the fabricated identity of the other but is invited to share in the possibility of experiencing that identity through the protagonist, and to witness the violence of this identity’s construction. ‘If you’re trapped in the other’s dream’, as Gilles Deleuze once said, ‘you’re screwed’ (Lotringer and Cohen, 2001, p. 103). In this vocabulary, How to Hold Your Breath can be seen as an attempt to dramatise the experience of being trapped in the other’s dream. The Destroyed Room, on the other hand, may be understood as trying to dramatise the experience of being trapped in the self ’s dream. In both cases, what is significant is the impossibility of change, of development or of the exterior. And, as I have taken pains to argue, this inertia may be traced back to the implementation and maintenance of the emergency phenomenon. However, the above argument is staked upon a problem, neatly diagnosed by Ahmed in the following reading of Levinas. His ethics, she argues, are predicated on the idea that:

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This process maps quite directly onto Harris’ play, where Dana’s translation from self to other is a process of disintegration, and it is only through demonic revivification (exposing the horrors of the self, in this equation) that she is restored to a position of apparent strength. But to bowdlerise the other in what Levinas would call its ‘infinite otherness’ as necessarily weak, or as a category of weakness, is also to do violence to the other. Worrying through the particulars of this, and in a similar fashion to Butler’s ‘structure of address’, Ahmed responds by refocussing attention on the conditions through which the self and other meet, and what she calls ‘particular modes of encounter’: To describe, not the other, but the mode of encounter in which I am faced with an other, is hence not to hold the other in place, or to turn her into a theme, a concept or thing. Rather, it is to account for the conditions of possibility of being faced by her in such a way that she ceases to be fully present in this very moment of the face to face, a non-​present-​ness which, at one and the same time, opens out the possibility of facing something other than this other, of something that may surprise the one who faces, and the one who is faced (the not yet and elsewhere). (ibid., p. 145)

If I have read Ahmed correctly, she seems to be trying to use the intransigence of the moment of encounter (and its reliance on other temporal and spatial zones) as a way of balancing what Levinas calls the ‘infinite responsibility’ of the self to the unknown other, and the need to avoid trapping that other in predetermined categories of being. Opening oneself up to the unknowable possibilities of an encounter may, for Ahmed, help to negotiate an ethical encounter with the other that respects their difference without falsely aggrandising the self. It also dislodges the encounter from a purely present phenomenon, and, rather than dragging it back into a set of predetermined characteristics by which the other is apprehended (and violated), it emphasises the instability of both the self and other in order to try to avert their solidification (and thus destruction). This argument becomes particularly important in the light of my next chapter, where I  examine the fatal consequences of encounters which do not prioritise conditions of possibility, since they occur in the infinitely reproducible (and therefore placeless) domain of the image. What becomes apparent at this juncture is that in emergencies, which happen in this time and place but without recourse to other temporal

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and spatial zones by which their conditions of possibility might be rationalised, there is thus no possibility of ‘facing something other than this other’. In such a situation the other, like the self, is expelled. It is now necessary, in concluding this chapter, to try to draw its disparate threads together in thinking about a potential phenomenology of emergencies.

Towards a phenomenology of emergencies I want to begin this conclusion with a (perhaps long overdue) reflection on ‘our’ agency as spectators. Chapter 1 cites multiple instances in which spectatorial agency may be eroded, and contends the necessity of this erosion in preparing a ‘sense’ of emergency. As Jason Burke argued, for example, the murder propaganda created by AQI and Al-​Qaeda may in part be traced back to the invasion of public and private Islamic spaces by western pop culture. Forcing this culture on an unwilling spectatorship produced resentment which, at its extremes, energised the agendas of extremist groups. In turn, their propaganda was forced back onto western audiences, whose revulsion and horror was exploited by politicians to energise military reprisals. In both cases there is a lack of choice presumed upon the spectator, which is problematic given that the right to look is, first and foremost, a choice. In understanding this paradox, it is perhaps most useful to turn to a well-​documented irony in capitalism, whose recipients are not given a choice to exist outside of its totalising impulses, even though choice is precisely the principle on which capitalism sells itself. Ultimately, under capitalism one can choose from any number of (multiplying) options, provided those options all fit within the principles of capitalism. Žižek provides an uncharacteristically straightforward description of this process in what he calls ‘forced choice’: In the subject’s relationship to the community to which he [sic] belongs, there is always such a paradoxical point of choix forcé –​at this point, the community is saying to the subject:  you have freedom to choose, but on condition that you choose the right thing […] If you make the wrong choice, you lose freedom of choice itself. And it is by no means accidental that this paradox arises at the level of the subject’s relationship to the community to which he belongs: the situation of the forced choice consists in the fact that the subject must freely choose the community to which he belongs, independent of his choice –​he must choose what is already given to him. (1989, p. 165, emphases in original)

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The apparent lack of choice in an emergency does not annul Žižek’s equation; it magnifies it. The operating principles of an emergency amplify the contours of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, and provide a shield to those choosing ‘right’ against any criticism of their actions in the time to come. Witness, for instance, the struggle to respond to Tony Blair’s decision to contribute people and resources to the US-​led invasion of Iraq in 2003. What is significant about this logic is that it performs a sleight-​of-​hand with the relationship between the individual and the community. In order to be brought into a sense of emergency, I  have argued that the individual needs to be isolated. They must be made to feel imperilled and helpless; this produces a sense of stasis and desperation, which drives them towards whatever protocol is being presented as the only choice. The singularity of protocol is always its key strength: it is this course of action or it is catastrophe. Remember that in the day-​ long political symposium outlined in the Introduction, the options were ‘to bomb or to bomb more’… It follows, then, that the phenomenology of the emergency is isolationist: you (plural) are in danger; you (singular) cannot do anything; we can, on the understanding, of course, that we exclude them. The plurality of the origin is obscured as quickly as possible, because if ‘we’ retained a sense of our common imperilment, there is a chance that we might a) pursue a communitarian response that spoke to a collective need for safety and wellbeing from which we did not exclude one another and b) maintain the individuation of spirit that Stiegler sees at the heart of the collective. An iconic demonstration of the ways in which the emergency has been able to break this impulse was in the vast public outcry to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. On 15 February 2003, anti-​war demonstrations took place in 600 cities around the world. In London, the estimated numbers in attendance were around three million, which was (and at the time of writing still is) the largest public demonstration in British history. The slogan was ‘Not in my name’. Why, in such a vast assemblage of people, did they not assume a collective? Because the collective had been claimed by protocol. There was no more ‘we’, because ‘we’ was on the side of the emergency. What can be said, however, is that none of this is inevitable –​inevitability is impossible. A  chief tool for presenting inevitability is, as I have been arguing, the discourses of performance. Benn’s oration, the murders committed by ‘Jihadi John’, the visual recuperations attempted by the administration of President George Bush Jr.; these are desperate attempts to conceal the actual unknowability (what Ahmed calls the ‘conditions of possibility’) of the future, and to convince a docile

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populace that everything has already been already done. When Stiegler points out that ‘a calculable future is no longer a future but just the consequence of the present’, his pernickety semantics are designed to highlight the absurdity of such a situation. Yes, when state apparatuses speak of ‘a future’ they mean anything but, since the actual implications of ‘a future’, something that Jacques Derrida describes as ‘absolute danger […] which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity’ is anathema to their proper function (1997, p. 5 emphases in original). But that monstrosity cannot be prevented, it can only be denied, or, at the point of its occurrence, repackaged and sold as somehow a continuation of the narrative. Even though 9/​11 became a historical partition, the event was codified in the service of political orthodoxies. It was not an unplanned aberration, so much as a confirmation that the existent foreign policies of the United States were not being pushed hard enough. As such it was no rupture, but rather a temporal eruption of the chaos that (supposedly) ensues if protocol is not observed. Stiegler drives this idea further when he states that: This future (avenir) that I  fiction—​ that is to say, which I  desire and fantasize—​I will without doubt never see: it will very probably never take place. But I need that which will never take place in the mode of a fiction, in which I propose that, despite everything, it will be, in the form of an absolute future: a future that will always remain still to come, a sort of pure future. This fiction is called, for example, the messiah. It is but possible infinitely: it involves desire, individual desire. (2008, p. 27, emphases in original)

But in speaking about the future, the argument returns, seemingly inexorably, to the annexed temporality of the emergency. There is no future because the emergency seeks only the appearance of its own conclusion –​which is to say, its own continuation. In his essay ‘On the Concept of History’, Benjamin argues that ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule’ (2007, p. 257). The ‘tradition’ in which Benjamin wrote was the emergence of fascism, an ideology that incorporated a selection of emergencies as an umbrella for its assumption of power in Germany, Italy and countries that became allied with the ‘Axis’. Benjamin observed that the state of emergency presented to German populaces was a sham, and that the real state of emergency was the very body (fascism) being proposed as a solution. It is interesting to note then that Benjamin did not disagree with the implementation of a state of emergency in and of itself, simply that he recognised that the

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orthodoxy being presented was false. It is similar to arguments one hears today about the meretricious nature of terrorist violence or supposed threat of immigration masking the ‘real’ problems of globalisation, resource scarcity, overconsumption and corporate greed. I do not propose to argue against these, but as has been frequently contended in this book, the ‘emergency’ itself has become (if it wasn’t always) too divisive and violent a device to be useful as a tool of remedy.

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The world of the suicide is superstitious, full of omens. […] As in love, things which seem trivial to the outsider, tiresome or amusing, assume enormous importance to those in the grip of the monster, while the sanest arguments against it seem to him simply absurd. Al Alvarez, 1987, p. 144

Scapegoats Amongst the problems posed by Ancient Greek Tragedy is hamartia, the so-​called ‘tragic flaw’. The term appears in book eight of Aristotle’s Poetics, where he describes ‘a man [sic] who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some [hamartia] error or frailty’ (1902, p.  45). Further, they ‘must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous  –​a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other men of such families’, otherwise they will not have sufficiently far to fall for their descent to be considered ‘tragic’ (ibid., p.  47). The idea of the ‘renowned and prosperous’ tragic hero has been challenged across the gamut of twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century tragedies, with one of the more iconic arguments

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being ventured in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In his lowly everyman protagonist, Miller argued that anyone may be elevated to the status of a tragic hero, regardless of their socio-​economic station, seeing this figure as ‘the individual attempting to gain his rightful position in society’, whatever that may be. The driving force behind this attempt is, for Miller, ‘the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what or who we are in the world’ (1996, p. 5, emphases added). To be a tragic hero involves a disjuncture between the subject and their representation, where representation denotes social status. Further to this, the issue of ‘representation’ in Greek Tragedy signifies the point at which the dramatic and the political blur in the origins of European theatre. The plays, and the Dionysian festivals in which they were performed, grew from annual sacrificial rituals designed to bind rural communities together; as those communities spread into larger urban habitats, performance practices were developed as the rituals became representative (Jürs-​Munby et. al., 2013, p. 98). Therefore, as Lehmann puts it, ‘[w]‌here we find the tragic, we hit upon the political’ (ibid., p. 90). A key political function of the tragic hero is to serve as a pharmakos, or scapegoat, who is offered as a sacrifice in place of the broader polis (city/​state) to rectify a malaise and to bind the remaining populace together. In the Greek Tragedies, such a role can only be assumed by those, such as Oedipus, who already represent the polis and thus have a great deal of power to lose and distance to fall. Miller dispenses with this classist presumption of ‘power’ in a fairly cocksure fashion, declaring that in tragedy: for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this stretching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains ‘size,’ the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in his world. (1996, p. 6)

Implicit within this capacity of the ‘commonest of men’ is thus their faculty to symbolise the status of the broader populace, and it is difficult not to ascribe this in some fashion to Miller’s American heritage. His play, which focuses on a failed salesman, Willy Loman, sacrificing himself for impossible dreams, certainly serves as synecdoche for the broader societal malaise of the Great Depression, and so the political function of the scapegoat remains untroubled. Loman is emblematic of the polis, and thus, by his sacrifice, recapitulates the possible unification of that polis –​ even if (at its bleakest) this is only as a community of suffering. This is

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why, for Raymond Williams, tragedy serves as a kind of democratic spur towards revolution, where spectators make the connections, because that is the action of tragedy, and what we learn in suffering is again revolution, because we acknowledge others as men [sic], and any acknowledgement is the beginning of the struggle, as the continuing reality of our lives. (Román, 2002, p. 3)

It is for this reason that I begin with the tragic form of the scapegoat, rather than the sociological model that René Girard extracts from religion, which is a victim mechanism that seeks to abrogate the guilt of the collective by transferring it on to an unwitting victim (see Girard, 2001, pp. 154–​160). What Williams sees in Greek Tragedy is an affirmative stimulus, provided by drama, towards the unification of the polis. As I will go on to argue in this chapter, however, the broader context of the early twenty-​first century has compromised the capacities for theatre to perform this function, and pushed towards something that looks a lot more like Girard’s diagnosis. The problem, briefly stated, and the reason that I frame this chapter with a discussion of tragedy, is that the polis under the aegis of emergencies suspends the criteria through which unification of the populace may be achieved, isolating its citizenry and supplanting their agency through the installation of exceptional measures.1 This unsettles the pharmakos, and its democratic/​revolutionary purpose:  since unification through sacrifice is no longer possible, what are created are figures of an absolute other –​images of humans who can no longer be acknowledged as human  –​whose eviction and destruction do not bring together those who remain, but serve only to drive us farther apart. These are dense and somewhat grandiose claims, but it is my contention that rethinking the relationship between the spectator and the image, through the lens of tragedy, might offer a clearer perspective on what I have been calling ‘precarious spectatorship’. To begin, then, by taking a closer look at the pharmakos. In order to serve their sacrificial function, this figure must enter destruction of their own free will. They cannot be simply condemned, but must in some fashion condemn themselves. This creates a problem, summarised here by Terry Eagleton:

For a lengthy discussion of the ways in which spectators are isolated through the performance of states of emergency, see the discussion of Vanishing Point’s The Destroyed Room in Chapter 2.

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Precarious spectatorship if the hamartia or moral flaw which supposedly causes tragedy is built into our temperament, and is less sin than innocent error, how can we be held responsible for it? Necessity is not always outside us: there is one’s daimon or bent of character […] An ‘authentic’ action is one which springs from the core of the self; but you might as well call it irresistible as call it free. (2003, p. 118)

If a person’s downfall is a product of their character, and thus beyond their control, then they cannot be a tragic hero, since this character-​type relies upon self-​authorship. They are not a victim, but rather an agent of free will whose actions expose the contingencies of a broader concern. Eagleton’s granular study treads a fine line between this concern being the ‘appalling unjust[ness]’ of the wider context and some deeper sense of a ‘moral order’ (pp. 133–​136). Albert Camus picks up a similar thought but arrives at a markedly different conclusion when he says that tragedy occurs when the hero is ‘conscious’ of his fate: ‘Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? … it is tragic only at the rare moments that it becomes conscious’ (2005, p. 117). For Camus, there is no moral order: his sense of tragedy does not arise from Eagleton’s Christian anxieties, but rather from an existentialist notion of an absurd universe in which, nevertheless, in that moment of consciousness, the hero becomes ‘superior to his fate’ (ibid.). It is not within the capacities of my argument to make a decisive interjection into these millennia-​old debates; they are raised to give a sense of the perpetual significance of the tragic form and its rethinking, at each juncture, within the theatrical and political discourses of its context. It is a wholly obvious point, but worth making, that as tragedy constitutes both a dialogue with and function of the polis, the tragic form cannot be determined separately from its environment. The pharmakoi, emblematic tragic figures who are produced by, represent and are expelled from that polis, can thus only be understood under the same aegis. In the time and place in which this book is being written, I contend that it has become necessary to look for the pharmakos beyond the human, and within the construction and distribution of images. This is not to suggest a division between the pharmakos and their representation, but to argue instead that the former has become fully (and disastrously) integrated into the latter. A useful place to begin unpacking this notion is in Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the homo sacer, based on the Roman stricture of the ‘sacred man’, a person who is not permitted to be sacrificed, usually because they are a criminal, and who can thus be killed with moral impunity (1998, pp.  71–​72). The quality of ‘sacred’ is applied because the homo

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sacer is outside of the law, and thus, paradoxically, not sacred. In State of Exception, Agamben traces the modern manifestation of the homo sacer to the Nazi state of emergency, which lasted for the full duration of Hitler’s reign, observing that: modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-​called democratic ones. (2005, p.  2, emphases added)

Agamben here describes both the ways in which the emergency has become enshrined in contemporary political discourse, and its methodical absorption of the excluded into categories of non-​being. His particular concerns are to do with the legal mechanics involved in creating such categories, and it would be plausible to assume that the excluded would simply vanish from view, particularly given that the environments in which the homo sacer are housed (‘taken outside’, which is the root of ‘exception’) are the camps (1998, pp.  170–​171). From Dachau to Abu Ghraib, Agamben finds exterior locations housing those who have been moved beyond the law and stripped to what he calls ‘bare life’, a life in which legal structures have been employed to remove their rights within those structures. What is significant, however, is that in the western democracies about which Agamben is writing, the homo sacer does not remain expelled, but returns to the polis in a form that can be safely manipulated within the domestic environments of the audiences to whom the state of exception is performed: as an image. The logic of this return may be observed in a reappraisal of the following argument, made by Jenny Hughes, concerning the distribution of a video which shows the execution of Kenneth Bigley in 2004: The wider circulation of the performance of the beheading in the media can thus be seen as continuing the process of casting out threat whilst bringing the protective, strengthening effects inside the circulations of discourse. Bigley is brought inside (he is a simple, ordinary man, one of us), the militants are cast out (they are terrorist monsters). (Hughes, 2011, p. 56, emphases added)

Whilst the media may present itself as ‘casting out’ the threat, it rather engages with what Paul Virilio calls a ‘mere “monstration”, a show, a

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blatant presentation of horror’ (2003, p.  50). The threat is maintained and energised within the domestic visual economy, in other words, by virtue of its circulation. The image of Bigley is brought inside in outrage, but the killers are also brought inside, as ‘monstrations’ of the enemy, where their image gains power and traction. We return, here, to Marie-​ José Mondzain’s discussion of the violence of images, and it is significant that when she approaches the dangers posed to the spectator by the image, she uses the language of myth and magic: The unbearable image of evil is a recurrent theme throughout antiquity, from Medusa’s gaze and the polished shield used by Perseus to overcome her to Narcissus’s deadly fusion with his own image. The story of Narcissus speaks to the violence of a deadly reflection. These myths and legends tell us the same thing: images can look at us and swallow us up. All of these structures of belief and fabrication are founded on identification. Becoming one with what we see is fatal, and what can save us is the production of a liberating difference. (2009, p. 27)

Mondzain’s argument is predicated upon the essential otherness of the image; not only to the spectator but to itself. No image is natural to its subject; rather it produces that subject in an alien form. This is why the mirrored shield is the weapon to defeat evil –​it produces evil within a format that may be viewed without the spectator coming face-​ to-​face with evil itself. This, Mondzain argues, is the consolidation of power within Christianity, and is why that religion places such emphasis upon icons and representations.2 In Christianity, the image is the space in which the unrepresentable may be represented and divine authority distributed, and this finds its ultimate articulation in Christ himself, who, crucially, must be sacrificed in order to be produced as an image. ‘The person in this case cannot be the object of a personification, but the subject of an incarnation that is founded on the sacrifice and disappearance of the body’ (ibid., p. 30). As I argued in Chapter 2, maintaining the presence of the excluded at the level of the image both legitimises the fact of their exclusion and strips that person not only of their rights, but, since images are ‘things’, of their very personhood. This is what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls a ‘visuality’; a ‘self-​authorizing of authority’ over a subject within a visual arena (2011, p. 7). The exclusion of the homo sacer is ensured by the proximity of their image, and the spaces that these images Although this emphasis on images seems specifically Catholic, Mondzain only mentions Catholicism in passing, and so I  maintain her preference to address the broader ‘Christian’ religion here (2009, p. 38).

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inhabit are not the spaces of the excluded but the private and public spaces of the spectator’s everyday life. However, as Judith Butler reminds us, ‘the photographed face seems to conceal or displace the face in the Levinasian sense, since we saw and heard through that face no vocalization of grief or agony, no sense of the precariousness of life’ (2004, p. 142). Recapitulating the homo sacer through the image reintegrates them into the symbolic order as an absolute other, the non-​human enemy that we control for (and against) ourselves. Again, however, the spectator’s own position is destabilised through their practice of spectatorship. Although the image is a thing, and the homo sacer has been absorbed into it, the root of that absorption is the death of the subject. What is more, on the other side of that equation, the spectator’s own demise is presupposed in the structure of address by which they comply with the rendering of the other as an image. This is the location of the early twenty-​first-​century pharmakos, and its interchangeability with the homo sacer is disturbing for two principal reasons. The first, as mentioned, is that in a visual culture which erases the Levinasian face (the border of ethical interaction), the spectator destabilises themselves into an image. The second is that it nullifies the constructive function of the scapegoat, summarised by Eagleton as: its role in the building of a new social order, one based this time on the Real, on a mutual confession of finitude and frailty, rather than on fantasies of self-​fashioning and endless pliability. […] The point, however, is not just to champion or sentimentalize this reviled, disgusting excrement of the current power-​system, but to recognize in it the uncanny power to transform the system itself. Thrust out of the city, the scapegoat can turn this exile to advantage, building a new habitation beyond the walls. That which the builder has rejected as a skandalon or stumbling-​block will become the cornerstone. (2004, pp. 287–​288)

But if there is a new habitation to be built in the exclusion and sacrifice of the form of homo sacer that I have been describing, then it runs only towards a fantasy of ‘endless pliability’ since it is formed entirely of the image. And a realm of the image is one that is (to use Virilio’s term) ‘weightless’, in which the spectator cannot be fully integrated unless she too becomes manifested as pure image, which is made possible ultimately through death. In order to see how this new reality is constructed and energised, then, it is necessary to turn briefly to the philosopher Carl Schmitt’s theory of the ‘state of exception’ as it has become manifested within the contemporary visual economy. In his book Political Theology (1922), Schmitt proposed that the law of the polis is legitimised by its

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capacity to be suspended in times of emergency, by the figure of the sovereign (head of state). His theory is highly controversial, as it was employed in part as justification for the ascension of Hitler and the Nazi party –​for a discussion of this, see the Appendix to this book. As I am writing this chapter, there is arguably no noisier, nor more egregious example of Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’ being invoked than in the rhetoric and strategies of the forty-​fifth US President, Donald Trump.3

Mourning in America On 21 July 2016, Donald John Trump, a property businessman with an inherited fortune who had risen to prominence in America through reality television, was nominated by the Republican Party as their candidate for President of the United States. Trump’s acceptance speech, whose moroseness earned it the nickname ‘Mourning in America’, contained the following statement: Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country. Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have been its victims. (Bump and Blake, 21 July 2016)

In support of these claims, Trump offered a series of uncited data-​ sets that declared amongst other things that violent crime was on the increase, that uncontrolled immigration had allowed large numbers of dangerous criminals into the US, and that international conflict had made the world less safe for Americans. The advocacy site vox.com ran a fact-​check which debunked the majority of his claims, but this did not prevent their widespread distribution (Anon., 22 July 2016).

As this book is being finished, President Trump has declared a national state of emergency in order to build a border wall between Mexico and the United States. In his press conference, he admitted that he ‘did not “need” to take the step now, and was only doing so for speed’ (Smith, 15 February 2019). Paul Virilio is now dead, so I can only imagine the dark irony that he would have gleaned from this strange state of affairs.

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Trump’s campaign had been built on such hyperbole, accompanied by outrageous and untenable promises such as banning all Muslims from entering the United States, building a wall on the southern border with Mexico and making Mexico pay for it, reintroducing torture with ‘water-​ boarding and a lot worse besides’ and committing war-​crimes against those suspected of terrorism (McCarthy, 7 February 2016). His nominee acceptance speech evacuated any pretence of rationality when he assured his audience that ‘the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon –​and I mean very soon –​come to an end. Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored.’ There was little need to pretend any feasibility to these assertions, since his campaign rhetoric was predicated upon alarmist soundbites rather than executable policy. On 8 November 2016, Trump was elected to the office of the presidency. Eight days later, in a bleakly ironic move, the Oxford English Dictionary declared ‘post-​truth’ to be its word of the year. Trump’s language is constructed squarely upon Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’, where the law is built upon the condition of its own suspension, and the sovereign may enact that suspension under extraordinary circumstances. The unapologetic transparency of Trump’s falsehoods is unusual, but in principal his polemic follows the same ‘there is no alternative’ logic that has been referenced elsewhere in this book through the speeches of Hilary Benn and David Cameron. By dramatising a broader threat, the discourse is divorced from contextual interrogation and narrows to a single course of action, which is defined and legitimised under the aegis of emergency protocol. What happens is thus a form of forgetting –​forgetting alternative strategies of approach not directly connected to protocol, or, as in the case of Trump, forgetting reality and subscribing instead to a fiction. The audience is bombarded with provocative rhetoric, whose consistency and frequency overrides critical engagement. As David Denby points out, ‘[f]‌or the audience, his fervent incoherence makes him that much more present, for it is Trump alone who matters, the vividness of him standing there, in that moment, embodying what the audience fears and desires’ (Denby, 15 December 2015). What Denby describes is a preclusion not only of critical distance, but of factuality itself, replaced with a mesmerising performance whose entire value lies in its promise of instant gratification. The significance of Trump’s presidency to my argument is that it casts into sharp relief a self-​destructive logic within the ‘state of exception’. By eschewing coherence and context in favour of ‘fear and desire’, Trump’s administration emptied itself of meaning, relying rather upon the volume (in both senses of the word) of unverifiable hyperbole. The vividness of its rhetoric fuelled its distribution, which, in addition to

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orthodox channels of communication, made particular use of social media, most notably Twitter. Founded in 2004, Twitter came to political maturity a few years later when it allowed information to be distributed from sites of crisis that were otherwise inaccessible to journalists or aid organisations. These ranged from wildfires in Southern California in 2007 to the 2009 protests in an Iran that was labouring under a media deadlock. This process is generally referred to as ‘crisis informatics’, or ‘the use of communication channels and messages to coordinate activity and convey information among citizens, rescue workers, government agencies and others’ (Kavanaugh et al., 2011). As an unregulated site that operates on an open-​source web framework, Twitter is ideally placed to offer individuals the opportunity to circulate material without surveillance or censorship. IS, it should be remembered, encouraged their fighters to send messages via social media direct from theatres of war. Some of the projected longer-​ term downsides of social media platforms like Twitter are suggested to be addiction, estrangement and physical isolation (see, for example, Eslit, 25 March 2017; Weale, 1 September 2015; Udori, 16 September 2015). Attention is commonly drawn to the gratification experienced by users at the immediacy of information exchange, which produces a value system based solely on the anticipation of forthcoming material. For Nicholas Carr, this means that ‘social media is inherently destabilizing. What it teaches us, through its whirlwind of fleeting messages, is that nothing lasts. Everything is disposable. Novelty rules’ (Carr, 26 January 2018). Bernard Stiegler finds this destabilisation profoundly toxic, since: The computational system as it functions today produces a standardisation, a homogenisation of existential spaces, which leads to a destruction of society. Increasingly, people are seen as the mediated reports of algorithms, and these are substituted for social systems. This results in a loss of a sense of existence that causes frustration, violence and madness, which is to say: despair and desensitisation [denoétisation]: the destruction of cognitive capacities. (Kinsley, 28 June 2016)

Stiegler’s warning maps with alarming accuracy onto Trump’s political strategy, which rests on a combination of inflamed rhetoric and unrelated outbursts, training his spectators to value the instant gratification of his statements. Carr suggests that Trump and the social media platform have somehow fused, where Twitter’s formal qualities of immediacy and ephemerality ‘mirror and reinforce the impulsiveness, solipsism and grandiosity that define Trump’s personality and presidency […] Banal yet mesmerizing, the president’s Twitter stream

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distils our strange cultural moment –​the moment the noise became the signal’ (Carr, 26 January 26 2018). This transition from signal to noise speaks directly to my concerns, where the disposability of online communication and data exchange promotes an active forgetting in order to maintain focus only on what happens next. After Trump’s election, his method of governance settled comfortably onto this principal of forgetting, where only what is in front of the spectator is relevant, and its relevance is assured by the fact that it must be instantly replaced (see Tisdall, 17 July 2018; Helmore, 19 July 2018). The danger, as Stiegler warns us, is an addiction to impermanence, where the spectator learns to associate value with what is designed to destroy itself. The self-​destructiveness emerging from this process is not restricted to the image, but, because the image assumes the place of the reality in which the spectator exists, in order to commit to the reality that she learns and knows, the spectator is encouraged towards a place of suicide. This suicidal logic is not unique to Trump’s administration, of course, but is symptomatic of much broader cultural discourses. We have already seen, for example, the ways in which AQI and IS created similar destructive cycles for the spectator by playing to existent appetites for savagery in their western audiences. In order to understand those discourses, and to chart their effects upon the spectator, it is necessary to examine some instances where spectators have crossed entirely into the world of the image, where their self-​killing has been appropriated into the visual economy  –​and to examine those processes of reappropriation, which are ultimately processes of consumption. This uncovers a model of the homo sacer translated back into the figure of the spectator herself, who has been trained to associate value with the abject figure of the excluded as an object, into which she then transforms herself.

Suicidal image On 30 December 2016, Katelyn Nicole Davis used her mobile phone to set up a live stream on Facebook. She spent twenty minutes explaining to her viewers that she had decided to kill herself, and cited as her reason sexual abuse that she had suffered at the hands of her stepfather. After around twenty-​four minutes she positioned her camera so that it faced a tree in her garden, and then stood on a bucket, in view of the lens, with her head in a noose. She continued to speak for another ten minutes before kicking over the bucket and hanging herself. Forty-​two minutes

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after the live stream had begun the police arrived, cut down her body and turned off the camera. After two weeks, the video was taken down from Facebook, but by this time it had been copied and posted to an unquantifiable number of websites (Phillips, 15 January 2017). According to news-​gathering organisations, tens of thousands of people watched the film in real time; and countless more have seen it since. At the time of her death, Katelyn Nicole Davis was twelve years old. The story of Davis’ death received international coverage, not because of her age or circumstances, but because of the technical nature of the event. This was the first suicide live-​streamed on the social media site Facebook. Davis’ act broke new terrain and set a precedent, opening up her death to anybody and everybody with the capacity and appetite to view it. She turned her mobile phone into the impassive eyes of innumerable strangers, into whose voyeuristic silence she spoke her final words before succeeding (and this term is important) in ending her life. Simon Critchley maintains that suicide notes are ‘failed attempts in the sense that the writer is communicating a failure to communicate’ (2015, p. 45). But Davis’ suicide constituted an upgraded version of the ‘note’ where the subject is transformed into spectacle to the extent that her communication succeeds at and because of the point of death. From the moment that she began her broadcast, Davis was an obliterated self. And the figure by whom this self was determined, for whom the obliteration was performed, was the spectator. Those spectators reversed the criterion of value, pulling focus away from a failed life and onto a successful death. It is also important to note that by opening up channels of communication between strangers, and facilitating intrapersonal relationships at a distance, Facebook had provided a new way to die. Davis’ suicide was a hidden function of its programming. An accidental function, but no less real, powerful or influential for its unforeseen existence.4 On 31 December 2017, Logan Paul, a young American YouTube performer, travelled with his entourage to Aokigahara, the ‘suicide forest’ on the slopes of Japan’s Mount Fuji. Filming as he went, he quickly discovered the body of a young man hanging from a tree. In the ‘vlog’ that Paul subsequently posted, including footage of the hanging body with its top half pixelated, he claims that this marks a moment in YouTube history, and, further: On 25 April 2017, in Phucket, Thailand, Wuttisan Wongtalay killed his baby daughter and then himself in a Facebook live stream. The precedent set by Davis was thus expanded by another spectator, who crossed over into the field of vision and made an image of themselves. There have been others since (see, for instance, Guynn, 1 March 2017; Harper and Mullin, 28 February 2018).

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This literally just happened. He did it this morning. Obviously experiencing it in real life and first hand… Suicide is not a joke, depression, mental illness is not a joke. We came here with an intent to focus on the ‘haunted’ aspect of the forest. This just became very real, and obviously a lot of people are going through a lot of shit in their lives… This is the most real vlog I’ve ever made. Four hundred plus vlogs, and I’ve never had a more real vlog than this. (Spangler, 2 January 2018)

The emphasis upon recapitulation and ownership as contributors to the ‘real’ are as predictable as they are depressing. It is an extension of the logic that produced the IS execution videos –​the victim’s death is overwritten, in this case posthumously, in order to exploit that death within an exterior text. The tacky and idiotic register of this particular text amplifies the horror of the overwriting, but in all honesty Paul is just playing out the logical extremes of philosophies of the image that eradicate the human to create a commodity. Naturally, his video was hysterically condemned from all corners of mainstream and social media, but this didn’t stop it increasing his revenue and followers (Griffiths, 25 August 2018). In a similar fashion to Davis, the technological facilitation and reproduction of suicide had refocussed the act away from a failed life and onto a successful death. In order to proceed, it is necessary to recapitulate a set of assumptions that have emerged over the preceding chapters. One, quite simply, is that the viewing of an image may be injurious to the spectator. This position carries legal support if we think in terms of documentation of torture, child pornography, or indeed films such as those described above. These are texts that are understood to reproduce, at some level, the act of violence which they represent. A  second assumption is that, whilst blame for an image’s construction may lie elsewhere, the spectator is the arbiter of their own act of viewing. Any injury caused in this process is the consequence of their action, even if it is not their fault. The assertion is problematic because, of course, any number of opportunities exist for the spectator to be presented with images that they did not choose to witness. My point, however, is that what is happening when they see the image is an interaction between themselves and a thing. If the thing were a knife, rock, pistol or some other hazardous object, focus would shift towards the intent of the spectator –​was the injury an accident or self-​ harm? But this simplifies the relationship between spectator and image by assuming that the spectator is cognisant of the image’s injurious qualities, and makes a fully informed decision about their interaction. Clearly this is not the case; for one thing, a person can only know an image’s affect by seeing it. For another, even having seen an image, she can be unaware of the effect that that image will have had upon her.

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The fact remains, however, that agency in the interaction between the image and the spectator is that of the spectator, and thus we are forced to conclude that an injury caused through looking is at some level an act initiated by the self. My third assumption, then, is that this act extends not only to the effects of viewing images of men who are about to be decapitated, or the body of a drowned child lying upon a beach, but also to the connections that she perceives between the image and its relationship to the real. By confusing the image with the reality that it appears to represent, the act of self-​harm experienced with the image affects the spectator’s interactions with the real. This is Jean Baudrillard’s point in The Spirit of Terrorism where he talks about 9/​11 being prefaced by ‘countless disaster movies [that] bear witness to this fantasy, which they clearly attempt to exorcise with images’ (2002, p. 7). The problem for Baudrillard is that the image does not wound on behalf of the real that it represents, but the one that it constructs. This is a significant part of the horror of Davis’ suicide: in making her video she transforms herself into a text, and thus the existence of the girl in the film depends entirely upon the spectator. She exists for us because she kills herself for us. Can the spectator avoid this awful responsibility? Or does the fact that her presence is assumed in the making of the video always render her partly culpable for its construction? In asking this question, we are moving into what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘intolerability of the image’, which was discussed in the Introduction to this book. For Rancière, an image becomes intolerable not necessarily because of its representation of a real horror, but because of the ways in which it does (or does not) facilitate space for interactions or relations between spectators: What is called an image is an element in a system that creates a common sense of reality, a certain common sense. A ‘common sense’ is, in the first instance, a community of sensible data: things whose visibility is supposed to be shareable by all, modes of perception of these things, and the equally shareable meanings that are conferred on them. Next, it is the form of being together that binds individuals or groups on the basis of this initial community between words and things. (2009, p. 102)

If I have understood Rancière correctly, he also sees the image as constitutive rather than representative, a space where points of connection between selves may be facilitated. The image becomes intolerable when that space is saturated by explication, which regulates the image’s ‘meaning’ and inhibits spectatorial engagement. Conversely, for Rancière, the notion that public discourses are ‘flooded’ with images is a myth:  rather, we are given carefully selected images that fit into

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simplified and state-​regulated narratives. What we do see are ‘too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having the chance to speak’ (ibid., p. 96). His is a compelling argument because it redirects agency in the image/​spectator relationship to communities of spectators, as well as flying in the face of the tiresome adage that image consumption produces spectatorial apathy. But it sidesteps the issue of hazard or injury in that relationship. This makes sense, since Rancière’s ultimate goal is to re-​enfranchise the spectator by democratising the gaze, away from explications which claim that ‘not just anyone is capable of speaking and seeing’ (ibid., p. 96). His focus thus turns to images that hold horror at one remove, in order to provide a democratic space of viewing. My concern, however, runs in the opposite direction, where, having mistaken the image for the real, the spectator retreats further into the false reality that is constructed for them –​a grim example of which is provided by the thousands of impassive spectators who watched Davis’ suicide unfold through the Facebook live stream. There are overtones here of The Destroyed Room, where subjects are absorbed into an artificial nightmare from which there is no possibility of escape. But I want to keep hold of Rancière’s argument too, because there is a significant concern which emerges when the spectator crosses over into the reality generated by the image, and in turn makes an image out of themselves. By doing so, they are reconstructed as bodies that can neither return ‘our’ gaze nor speak for themselves. The subject of the image is annihilated in the process of its construction  –​the image is suicidal. The following example helps to unpack this complex and disturbing phenomenon. On 19 December 2016, Mevlut Mert Altintas is photographed multiple times in an art gallery in Ankara. He is immaculately dressed in a black suit, white shirt, charcoal grey tie and black leather shoes. He is twenty-​two years old, clean-​shaven, with a stylish haircut and a model’s physique. In one particular image, he trains an automatic pistol to the floor with his right hand, and holds his left hand high above his head as he points to the ceiling. His legs are parted and braced, and his face is contorted with rage as he shouts at presences that the viewer is unable to see. The room in which he stands is clinically white, and there are framed pictures on the wall behind him. The figure of another man is slumped on the floor away to the left, again dressed formally in a black suit and expensive-​looking shoes. This is Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey. Moments before the photograph was taken, Altintas shot Karlov nine times in the back, and then paced around

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the gallery waving his pistol and shouting at a crowd of terrified people who cowered in a corner, waiting for the police –​Altintas’ colleagues –​ to arrive. When they did, Altintas was shot and killed. Footage of the attack was captured by a video camera that had been set up to record Karlov’s visit, in which Altintas can be heard shouting ‘God is Great!’ and ‘Don’t forget Syria! Don’t forget Aleppo!’ (a Syrian city under bombardment by the Syrian President Bashar al-​Assad’s army at that time). One of the most striking, and the most circulated records of Altintas’ last moments is the photograph described above, taken by Burhan Ozbilici, who was held hostage until Altintas was finally killed (Worley, 19 December 2016). The photograph is entirely in focus, well-​framed and positioned at head height. From which it can be inferred that Ozbilici stood face to face with his subject, considered the composition of his image and did not shake or lose focus as it was captured. This measured depiction of a terrifying situation adds to the strange artificiality prompted by the killer’s stylish appearance and self-​conscious pose: this looks like death as performance art. The art critic Jerry Saltz saw ‘a radically self-​determined picture, instantly polemical, powerfully formal’ (Saltz, December 20, 2016). Although Saltz is disinclined to pursue his thinking, the ‘radical self-​determination’ of this image materialises in its function as an act of suicide. By keeping his weapon raised, Altintas knows that he is going to die. His cognisance is demonstrated in the fact of his performance, and his poses, expressions, words and actions function as a kind of suicide note. Saltz is wrong in one key matter, however: the composition of the image may be ‘radically self-​determined’, but the image itself, as an entity forged through Altintas’ death, was never determined by its subject. True, he does try to wrest control of his last moments into the service of a broader political narrative through construction of this image, but the politics of his performance are manifested in its mise en scène, not in his dialogue. The perverse attractiveness of his appearance, the sterile art gallery and the elegant composition are the message conveyed. Aleppo is not present here. The British tabloid Sun newspaper, who a year later self-​righteously condemned Logan Paul’s tacky appropriation of suicide, emphasised this elision by running an article on Altintas’ death entitled ‘Honey Trap Assassin?’ (Stewart, 29 December 2016). This article made vague claims that Altintas had been ‘brainwashed’ by an anonymous Russian woman posing as his lover, who had been planted by ‘Western Intelligence Agencies’ to mastermind the killing. The story was reprinted from the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, and the Sun acknowledged that ‘no evidence had been produced for the claims’, but that was hardly relevant to the sensationalism of their story. The article included sexualised

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People react to the shooting of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, at a photo gallery in Ankara, 19 December 2016 (Ozbilici/​AP/​REX/​Shutterstock). Courtesy of: Ozbilici/AP/REX/Shutterstock

photographs of Altintas’ sister, and an embedded video clip which shows Altintas standing behind Karlov for a minute and a half, whilst Karlov gives a speech. Altintas then pulls his gun and shoots Karlov, as the camera falls to the ground. In this reproduction of the video, nothing of Altintas’ political motives –​just as nothing of his being –​remain. Saltz offers some astute assessment of this strange form of self-​killing in a discussion of a different image by the same photographer, showing the group of terrified onlookers: As in great paintings of differing individual dramatic reactions in crowds, this photo is an encyclopaedia of reactions. The weeping woman on the left is held by a man […] he keeps an eye on the still-​unfolding action in front of him. He gives the picture its eternal now (this is helped by the still-​ rolled-​up magazine he holds). […] Finally, what passes as the old wisdom figure in this picture. Maybe he’s Jewish. He’s older, with a bush of curly, thinning hair, looking on forlornly, knowingly, like he’s aware that this is history happening beyond his control. Half outside the frame is a woman in blue. The only person getting out of the picture is in color, entering another existence. Looking at her, we are stuck in this configuration —​looking for, but unable to find, a way out. (Saltz, 20 December 2016)

These figures complete the theatrical quotient of Altintas’ suicide, since they reveal the contingency of his death upon the act of viewing.

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Unprotected by the camera lens, computer screen or proscenium arch, these spectators are forced into a confrontation with the ultimate performance. The fact that they themselves are then absorbed into this performance through the circulation of Ozbilici’s images is depressingly inevitable, but for now let’s remain with Saltz’s description. Two particular elements jump out –​the ‘eternal now’ and the identification of the viewer with the half-​concealed woman’s failed attempts to find an exit. Suicide, in theory, should provide at least the option of an escape, but there is something about the intermingling of suicide and spectatorship that breaks this tenet. Perhaps it is because death eludes the visual, to the extent that the visual overwrites and recapitulates the authority of death in its production. But there is also something here that echoes Rancière, and bodies that can neither return the spectator’s gaze, nor speak for themselves. In his book Terror and Performance, Rustom Bharucha considers this same objectification of the subject through violent and public death, in a discussion of suicide bombing: In this ‘necropolitics’, where ‘resistance and self-​ destruction are synonymous’, the target is not so much other ‘persons’ but bodies in all their multiplicity, corporeality, and presentness. Death in the act of suicide-​ bombing jettisons the dignified constructions of ‘the self ’ and ‘the other’, into a scattering of ‘pieces of inert flesh’. (2014, p. 163, emphases in original)

Although he does kill his victim within his own act of suicide, Altintas is not a suicide bomber, but rather uses the temporal zone between murdering Karlov and being killed as the stage of his performance. This is where he concentrates on the postures, dramatic images and (he hopes, erroneously) words that will resonate with his targeted audience. At this point, the fallacy of ascribing motives to Altintas the man should be dispensed with. Altintas is dead. Altintas the character, however, is continually both alive and dead, held in a frozen image or pacing about an art gallery/​murder scene, delivering his monologue and waiting for the bullet that will end his performance. A  dialogue is maintained between the image/​video constructions of suicide, and the fact of their construction. In the above quote, Bharucha seems to be talking about the ways that the violence of a suicide bombing ruptures the temporal fields within which the subject is constituted as a subject, in the process reducing them back to object. Thus, he does not see much actual value in the death of the suicide bomber, asking is it not ‘more likely that the bomber becomes expendable, after precipitating a lot of damage in the process of his or her self-​detonation?’ This is a chilling configuration of flesh as matter, as Bharucha’s ‘presentness’ involves a rejection of the human.

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If the entirety of the spectator’s being-​present is forced into that present, they are robbed of subject-​hood. Saltz, on the other hand, is not talking about corporeality at all, but rather the translation of bodies into a flattened, fixed and transferrable image. His ‘eternal now’ is semiotic, with the unnamed hostage staring off into a void that the spectator cannot access, which contains the still-​ living body of the suicide-​ murderer. But the conclusion of Saltz’s argument also brings us face-​to-​ face with the destruction of subject-​hood. Death is not within the grasp of the visual, and so when the visual encounters death it either corrupts and manipulates death into a grotesque kind of ventriloquism, or else it defers the act into an absence, in which the viewer must actively engage with their own imaginings. In the examples of Davis and Altintas, what I have been proposing is a condition of the image that inverts the ‘common sense’ community of Rancière’s aspiration by drawing the spectator into the image’s construction. This is the image in revolt, in other words, against its capacity to construct alternative realities, by swallowing this one –​the spectator is absorbed into the image, and nothing of her remains behind except that which is made visible (that which cannot die, and that which is already dead). Once again, therefore, we are faced with the realisation that the marketing of death within the visual economy forecloses the possibility of the future, from the othering of the faces of refugees to serve domestic political agendas, to pornography derived from the suicide of teenagers. A  visual economy built on the unreflective ventriloquising of death opens up an emptiness at the core of the ways in which we as spectators (as Rancière puts it) ‘learn and teach, act and know’ and, ultimately, rationalise ourselves (Rancière, 2009, p. 17). This is the arena in which the emergency phenomenon is forged and maintained, and in order to understand this fully we must attend more closely to the shut-​off world of suicide itself. Prevented access to the image-​subject –​who, as we have seen, is erased in the production of the image –​this analysis must return to the only subject who actually participates in the interaction with the image: the spectator.

Suicidal spectatorship In the first season of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian television series Black Mirror, there is an episode entitled Fifteen Million Merits (2011). The central character lives in a world in which all genuine experience has

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been replaced by computerised graphics. In desperation, he enters a reality television competition and interrupts his own performance by holding a shard of glass to his neck, threatening to kill himself live on air and delivering an impassioned speech against the iniquities of mediated experience. After a pause, the judges applaud his performance and offer him the chance of his own show, where he may repeat his criticisms of wider society in weekly rants. The final scenes of the episode show him standing in a large room, staring out at a forest vista which is, in all probability, another computerised graphic. A key contention of the episode is that the culture industry is capable of neutralising and incorporating any and all material which stands in opposition to its mercantile appetites. There is nothing that cannot be absorbed into the image, not even the threat of suicide. If anything, Brooker was being too optimistic  –​as has been demonstrated with Davis, Paul and Altintas, suicide itself, never mind its threat, can be easily repackaged as entertainment. What is also significant about the episode is the absolute hegemony of the image. The central character is, we assume, genuinely willing to die, having been suffocated in a world devoid of physical contact. Even his girlfriend is taken from him, then displayed back as an image performing sex acts on ubiquitous pornographic websites. But the reward that he attains for his close contact with self-​killing is merely another image. It is the argument of The Destroyed Room, and it provides no hope of escape. Yet, as Albert Camus reminds us, there is always somewhere else to go, even if that place is death (2005, pp. 1–​2). This is ultimately Camus’ model of existence, in which the subject chooses to embolden life with a purpose by not killing themselves. But if they do decide to kill themselves, then between the decision and the act there is always a temporal gap. This environment is the place in which the suicidal image may trace its lineage –​these, after all, were the places where Davis and Altintas, as they exist as images, were born. They are separate and strange terrains, with their own codes of meaning. In The Savage God, Al Alvarez elaborates this phenomenon in a discussion of the individual who, having made the decision to kill themselves: enters a shut-​off, impregnable but wholly convincing world where every detail fits and each incident reinforces his decision. An argument with a stranger in a bar, an expected letter which doesn’t arrive, the wrong voice on the telephone, the wrong knock at the door, even a change in the weather –​they all contribute. The world of the suicide is superstitious, full of omens. […] As in love, things which seem trivial to the outsider, tiresome or amusing, assume enormous importance to those in the grip of the monster, while the sanest arguments against it seem to him simply absurd. (1987, p. 144)

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This description resonates closely with the relationship between the spectator and the suicidal image. The difference is that here, the spectator is not responding to external stimuli and warping them to fit her own agenda: those stimuli have already been warped, and the agenda is not her own. As Rancière argues, when the logic of explication saturates the image, the image is rendered intolerable. In so doing, the affective quality of the image –​stasis, hopelessness and a rejection of futurity –​ are assured. The spectator destroys themselves by looking, or more precisely by looking without realisation. The image should, according to Rancière, fulfil the criteria of Stiegler’s ‘objects of belief ’ –​that is, objects designed to facilitate the participation of subjectivities in the process of their encounter and comprehension. But the saturated image, when that image has been produced by an instance of self-​killing, permits no such interactions and instead conjoins the spectator into its grisly machinations. It is a phenomenon that elsewhere leads Mark Robson to observe that ‘suicide has always been a question of repetition’ (2004, p. 71). Robson’s conclusion is drawn from an image of a Palestinian baby dressed as a suicide bomber, circulated by the Israeli government in order to decry the ‘brainwashing’ ideologies to which Palestinians were supposedly subjecting themselves. The chief power of this image, according to Robson, is the way in which it makes the child a symbolic threat, and thus legitimises aggression against those who have not yet committed acts of violence under supposition that one day they will. The photograph, in other words, disrupts the temporalities of both childhood and adulthood, and crime and punishment: The fear that this image evokes, then, is a fear of repetition. Paradoxically, this fear of repetition leads to the reproduction of the image in newspapers and on television and computer screens across the world. Far from forestalling reproduction, fear of this image (a fear which is itself replicated across the West following September 11 and the use of suicide bombers in the wars in Iraq, in Chechnya and elsewhere) gifts to this picture its reproducibility. Such reproducibility is always an opening to the question of temporality. (ibid., p. 72)

These are temporalities to which the spectator is exposed, since as Susan Sontag points out, all ‘death haunts all photographs of people’ (1977, p. 64). And for Robson, the photograph of the suicide bomber amplifies the precarity of the spectator because ‘in instrumentalizing his death, in making his own body an instrument, the suicide bomber suspends all our categories of the legitimate’ (2004, p.  73). Robson pursues his

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arguments through Derrida, who sees a ‘traumatism’ in the ways in which images of 9/​11 were used not to mourn, thus provide a space of healing and recuperation, but rather to keep open the wounds and shock of the attacks, and so to justify military reprisals. Here there is a repetition of violence, maintained in the perpetual present of the images employed in order to reproduce the ‘trauma to come’, which is where effects of suicidal images, carefully deployed in line with emergency narratives, start to become visible upon the spectator. Isolated instances such as Davis and Altintas wreak a damage equivalent to the destruction of the Levinasian face, and contribute to the erosion of self that happens when one section of humanity is pitted against another (as we saw in Chapter  2). But, as Derrida and Robson observe, there is a sleight-​of-​hand performed when spectators are alienated from one another by such images and then corralled as a group in the same ideological direction. Remember Trump’s speech at the beginning of this ­chapter –​appealing to individual Americans who have seen images of violence (it is always as an individual that we are at our most vulnerable), he sets out a programme of collective response with, of course, himself as figurehead. Another aspect of Robson’s argument that is significant here is the emphasis on technology as the apparatus by which fear, and specifically fear of repetition, is produced in the representation of suicide. Technology continues to provide ever-​new ways to die. And although public suicide is not a new phenomenon (Alvarez points out that it is far less fashionable in recent history than it was in Ancient Rome, for instance), the mixing of modern technology and suicide maps on to a broader societal conceit. Thus, Alvarez goes on to assert: In suicide, as in most other areas of activity, there has been a technological breakthrough which has made a cheap and relatively painless death democratically available to everyone. Perhaps this is why the subject now seems so central and so demanding, why even governments spend a little money on finding its causes and possible means of prevention. We already have a suicidology; all we mercifully lack, for the moment, is a thorough-​going philosophical rationale of the act itself. No doubt it will come. But perhaps that is only as it should be in a period in which global suicide by nuclear warfare is a permanent possibility. (1987, p. 160)

Alvarez stops short of pursuing the connections between his two topics –​ his project is more concerned with the relationships between suicide and art. He has a materialist’s conviction that art has a tangible societal role, and that in the mid-to-late twentieth century of his own writings, this is to become ‘an imitation of death in which [its] audience can share’ (ibid.,

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p. 282). But his book The Savage God was written before the advent of the Internet, when the reproducible texts that suicide victims made of themselves in digital capture would be present in all of the world’s public and private spaces. The ‘democratization’ that Alvarez speaks of through pharmaceutically aided suicide also operates through the method of the modern suicide’s transmission. This can be observed in the case of Bridgend, the Welsh country borough in which 25 people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-​eight killed themselves in the years 2007–​2009, all apparently connected via macabre conversations on social media sites (Shoumatouff, 27 February 2009). Press coverage was generally sensationalist and offered little in the way of cogent analysis, but this was, broadly speaking, the point. The suicides became a spectacle, and the spectacle instrumentalised the suicides. Or the 2016–​ 2017 ‘Blue Whale’ phenomenon, where an online ‘game’ is orchestrated by an anonymous handler, who instructs the player to undertake a series of increasingly demeaning tasks and finally to kill themselves (see Worley, 13 July 2017, 19 September 2017). What is more, any discussion of the technologisation of suicide cannot, owing to the principles of reproducibility and expansion that are at the heart of the technological revolution, stop with the localised example. The images of Altintas are metonymic: not only do they emerge within a genre, they also multiply out into a broader discourse whose implications are far bigger, and far more terrifying than a murderer with a gun using his last moments to stage a failed protest. What Alvarez starts to say is expanded upon by Virilio in The Information Bomb. Here, Virilio discusses the case of Bob Dent, a patient whose doctor, Philip Nitschke, invented a machine that would help him to end his life. The machine worked by administering a lethal injection nine days after being triggered, giving Dent the legally required amount of time to change his mind. The conclusions that Virilio draws from his considerations of technically assisted suicide are the logical extension of Alvarez’s; he observes that this process ‘had already been in play in the age of the balance of programmed terror, with the system of “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) between East and West’ (2005, p. 6). This, ultimately, was a machine ‘capable of deciding the passive euthanasia of humanity by automatically triggering the nuclear apocalypse’ (ibid.). A question that Alvarez and Virilio seem to be asking is: what connections does technology create between the efficiency and the ontology of suicide? Or to put it another way, if you continually increase the ease with which a person can end their life, how does that reshape their conception of life itself and, in a broader sense, how much of this reshaping is the product of developments in wider society?

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A useful response to this question may be found in Stiegler’s ideas on ‘spiritual misery’. In his terms, in the societal constructions that offer no alternatives except suicide, compliance diverts the energies of the desiring subject in a counterintuitive fashion which, eventually, corrodes into self-​destruction: it is a process of culture, that is, of elevation, of maintaining a desire for the most high which, if it does not find in a super-​ego the authority that binds such desire as the very energy of socialization […] invents itself from motives that, departing from the search for the better, lead to the worst. When desublimation liquidates the super-​ego, desire gives itself new figures. But it then becomes the hideous beast of all abominations, liberating that which takes the form of negative sublimation. (2013, p. 48, emphases in original)

Without collective agency and shared desire, in other words, the psychic energies of the individual are relegated to the status of drives, in which they manifest a new goal: destruction. Stiegler calls this a ‘suicidal tendency –​both individual and collective’ and he charts this tendency in public acts of violence such as school shootings, terrorist attacks and the collective self-​killings of religious cults. Not without controversy, he proposes these acts as the culmination of, rather than aberrations against, the logic of industrial capitalism. Moreover, he reasons that ‘these passages of action are lived by their authors, in one way or another, as a form of testimony, and even as this need to do evil in order to have, at least once in their life, the feeling of existing’ (ibid., p. 49 emphases in original). Where the image is the sole arbiter of value, suicide becomes a viable option insofar as transforming oneself into an image promises a valuable –​or, rather, valued –​ existence. In each of the arguments advanced in this chapter, a common thread is the capacity for the spectator to rationalise herself in response to the reality constructed for her by the image. From the corrosive presentism of Trump’s political rhetoric, to the misplaced desire for recognition that underscored Davis and Altintas’ performance-​suicides, to the fear of repetition that accompanies the increased technologisation of suicide itself, the position of the spectator has been illustrated as being incessantly under siege. In order to find the contours of this siege, and to try to locate some strategy of resistance, it is necessary to return to the discussion of tragedy with which this chapter began. If, as I have argued, the pharmakoi of the early twenty-​first century have merged with Agamben’s homo sacer through the production of the image, then this necessitates a reappraisal of the tragic form itself, in order that its political function within the polis –​that of a sacrifice and a skandalon –​may be rescued.

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For this, I  will spend the remainder of the chapter discussing Alice Birch’s (2017) Anatomy of a Suicide, a play which, I argue, offers precisely such a rethinking of the conventions of tragedy, and which from my own experience sparked a striking reflection upon the polis of its production. Anatomy of a Suicide In Katie Mitchell’s premiere production, the central conceit of this play –​ three stories that unravel in unison  –​is realised by dividing the stage into thirds, each confining a central character. The play proceeds for two hours without interval, and its protagonists, three generations of women from the same family, never leave the stage. When costume changes are required, the women are roughly stripped to their underwear by other actors in the role of stage hands or puppeteers. The register is low and numb, with floor microphones blending the actors’ voices into a squall of electronic music and inaudible chatter. On stage right in 1973 is Carol, an elegant and composed woman who has been collected from hospital by her enraged husband, John, after her attempted suicide. As they speak, Anna emerges centre-​stage in 1998, with a young man in medical greens. She is physically unsteady, bleeding from her head, and seems to pull her words at random into an oscillating and chaotic timbre. As her story begins, Bonnie, a guarded and defensive doctor, emerges stage left in 2033. Carol is harassed by a series of men into social roles that she neither wants nor understands, resolving to stay alive only long enough to raise her daughter to a suitable age. ‘I will try to stay /​For as long as I possibly can [but] No one ever regretted living /​So much’ (Birch, 2017, pp. 117–​118). Her final scenes are in the offices of psychiatrists attempting to force her into further programmes of electro-​shock therapy. She leaves, and her passing is marked by a conversation in which her husband informs their daughter, Anna, that Carol has thrown herself under a train. Centre-​stage, the adult Anna enters a rehabilitation programme and is visited by her unkempt and estranged father. She encounters a man making a documentary about rehab patients, to whom she unsparingly recounts a life of itinerancy, instability and drug abuse. Their relationship develops and they move into the house that her father bequeathed her. Anna becomes pregnant and has the baby, though her joy at the pregnancy diminishes. As she shows signs of regression and despair, a bath is brought onto stage in which she offhandedly electrocutes herself with a hairdryer. Stage left, Anna’s daughter, Bonnie, drifts through a casual relationship and a series of baffled social engagements before attempting to sell her grandmother’s house. Whilst Anna is sitting in the bath about to kill herself, Bonnie visits a doctor’s surgery to request sterilisation.

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She endures a humiliating set of questions designed to dissuade her from this and then, whilst Anna dies, shouts ‘I have to know –​biologically, completely, with absolute certainty that I am where it ends’ (ibid., p. 235). Bonnie’s story is then absorbed into the stage as the close, claustrophobic walls that have incarcerated the characters are lifted and, for the final few moments, the audience is treated to the spectacle of a well-​ lit and spacious house. A child –​the same actor who played numerous children throughout the stories –​skips down the stairs, followed by her mother who declares warmly that they ‘love the house’. As they leave, Bonnie calls after them to gather some plums from the garden, as these are ‘lovely’ (ibid., p. 237). There are echoes here of an unsettling conclusion in Simon Critchley’s Notes on Suicide (2015). Having tracked a chronology of ethical positions, Critchley arrives at the idea that suicide is the single guarantee of freedom available to the subject, but that to complete the act destroys the possibility of this freedom since suicide is always a capitulation to failure: To be human is to have the capacity, at each and every moment, of killing oneself. […] For as long as we keep this power in our hands, then we are, in some minimal but real sense, free. […] Suicide is like an oxygen tank from which we breathe in a world that has become, in Hamlet’s words, a prison. (2015, p. 72, emphases added)

The equation resonates with both the thematic preoccupations and the rethinking of tragedy that emerge in Birch’s play. At one level, Carol makes repeated references to suffocation through the period of raising her daughter, declaring that ‘I have been living in a burning building for fifteen years, and have only just crawled my way to the window’. Her speech raises the idea of a life that is lived only by force of subjection, a theme prefaced in Birch’s earlier play Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, where a succession of women respond violently to linguistic and state apparatuses that try to force them into docile servility. The tension there is between self-​authorship and systems of governance, and so it is with Anatomy of a Suicide. Authorial powers are wielded at every turn, from the psychiatrist who refuses to acknowledge Carol’s rejection of electroconvulsive therapy, to the idealisation of Anna by her prospective lover, to the forces of history that entangle Bonnie in perpetual hopelessness. These forces are also, in a meta-​theatrical turn which again references Revolt, exposed in the machinations of theatre, where the actors’ bodies are stripped and redressed under the voyeuristic gaze of the spectator. The characters are subjected to forces that prevent their selves from coming

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into being, even at the extremities of freedom identified by Critchley, which is as suicides. There is here an unanswered question as to whether suicide would have been sought under less constrictive circumstances, which is where Birch begins to engage with the tragic form. The protagonists in Anatomy of a Suicide cannot exist purely in opposition to authorial forces, and this is underscored by the stories taking place side-​by-​side. They are beholden to one another, in a more-​or-​less inalienable notion of responsibility. Carol thinks that this responsibility may be entirely fulfilled within a given length of time. She is mistaken, which is underscored when we witness her daughter being told of her mother’s suicide and collapsing, never to properly recover. Unlike her mother, Anna’s downward trajectory is given a point of origin, although this, of course, is obscured by the mystery surrounding Carol herself. We encounter here a common consequence of suicide, where a life is stained by the violence of its ending. As Critchley puts it, suicide ‘might grant life coherence, but only by robbing it of complexity by viewing it through the instant of one’s death’ (ibid., p. 66). Birch’s play both acknowledges and challenges this conceit, corralling her protagonists within the aegis of suicide whilst voicing all stories simultaneously. If suicide simplifies a life, then playing three suicides together mocks that simplicity, and the spectator becomes disoriented by seeing the same ‘simple’ story iterated three times over. At the same time, of course, the spectator cannot escape the question of repetition, and there is thus a programmatic element to Birch’s text which flattens the individual women into the extant category of ‘suicide’. But the simultaneity foregrounds the differences in their approaches to death. Where Carol is meticulous, driven and largely predictable, Anna is chaotic –​she does not plan, nor warn, nor give impression of inevitability, but acts rather on impulse. Bonnie is left as custodian to the two other women’s stories, perplexed at her own inability to escape the physical location of their suffering. Her trajectory may or may not be classifiable as a suicide, in that she sterilises herself. Resistance to procreation is characteristic of Birch’s work, at least where procreation is seen to be necessary to the production of the female subject. Bonnie does not succeed in self-​authorship, however; rather she cauterises herself from the question of responsibility. She has learned what her grandmother failed to do, that the possibility of self-​authorship is contingent upon the isolation of the self from consequence. When we see her last, her responsibilities remain only to Carol and Anna, who are dead. To describe voluntary sterilisation as a suicidal act is highly suspect, particularly given the revolutionary function that it serves elsewhere in Birch’s work. Here, however, the issue becomes clear once Anatomy of a Suicide is considered in its relation to tragedy.

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To address the obvious point first; there have been plenty of occasions where the tragic hero is a suicide. Initially, in fact, it is possible to view all tragic heroes whose narrative ends in their death as a suicide, if we see the process of tragedy as the operation of free will (although, as Eagleton points out, such a belief is fraught with problems). But because the tragic hero is symbolic of a broader society, their suicide is elevated beyond a mere cessation of individual life, and they become a sacrifice, their excremental remains forming the cornerstone of a new polis. This is the material of Bonnie’s anguish, as she searches through her family house, trying to find a way to create a future. Eventually she realises the impossibility of this hope, and the world, as she declares, ends with her. The same mechanism has been encountered throughout this book in conjunction with emergencies, which are worlds designed to end with themselves. These are what Stiegler calls ‘suicidal societies’. That is, societies constructed according to principles that alienate citizens from one another, creating large groups of disenfranchised and ultimately violent people. Stiegler’s ambassadors are the suicide-​murderers of the US Columbine massacre, 9/​11 and the 2005 London bombings. These fringe figures are read as emblematic of the world-​to-​come, because in being alienated they have learned to turn the technological artifices of modernity against itself. For Stiegler, as mentioned earlier, wellbeing always hinges upon the relationship between the human and their technical systems, and he sees disastrous consequences where this fails: as for ‘human nature’, there is none: it is a process of culture, that is, of elevation, of maintaining a desire for the most high which, if it does not find in a super-​ego the authority that binds such desire as the very energy of socialization, and that passes through the possibility of sublimation granted to all individual desires, and if necessary of sacrifice (but a sacrifice must have an object), invents itself from motives that, departing from the search for the better, lead to the worst. (2013, p. 48, emphases in original)

Suicide and sacrifice are the twin poles of what Stiegler calls ‘sublimation’ –​in his vocabulary the transformation of ‘desire’ into actionable purpose. Sacrifice is the potential consequence of the desire for the ‘most high’, where suicide is the product of ‘negative sublimation’, the transference of desire to the ‘absolute worst’ which occurs at the point where the subject is prevented access to the ‘energy of socialization’. The model of suicide being engaged with here is markedly different to those already encountered, which have generally been questions of agency, failed or otherwise. Stiegler does not really consider the suicide as a subject whose actions are attributable to themselves, but rather the sum of a series of

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technical processes which will, independently of personal motives, drive them into an appalling semblance of being. By considering the subject in this way, he is able to draw parallels with the exploitation of natural resources pushing humanity to the limits of our ‘geophysical system’ and the death throes of ‘global financial capitalism’ that tries to constitute a ‘hyper-​powerful oligarchy, producing a reign of terror [in a system] that is nevertheless becoming obsolete because it is incompatible with rational existence’ (ibid., pp.  48–​49). It is not just that the individual upon point of killing themselves strips their death of symbolic function; their death reveals the inoperability of society itself, and the absence of unifying principles or hope for a future in the world that they inhabit. The fates of the individual and the state are thus equivalent when viewed through the lens of their technical processes. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Stiegler turns to tragedy in the course of his work, naming the above process ‘the Antigone Complex’ (ibid., p. 36). In Sophocles’ play, Antigone defies her uncle’s edict that her rebel brother Polynices should be buried without honour, is then buried alive and completes her suicide. Stiegler argues that she starts out as ‘sublime, because she makes her love for Polynices into the love of the city’ but that this love is ‘sublimated as the energy of despair’ and ultimately constitutes ‘a danger for the city’ (ibid., pp. 36–​37). Unable to rationalise her desire in the elevated status of the ‘most high’, she becomes a creature of excess whose ‘sacrifice […] is itself like the sublimation of that death drive that is called, at times, acting out, the passage to the act, or, more specifically, suicide’ (ibid., p. 37). The transference of sacrifice through negative sublimation results in suicide, but it is a suicide which begins in a profound connection with the polis. For Stiegler, the intervening period between Antigone and his own time sees a rotting away of what Hegel calls the Sittlichkeit, or ‘ethical order’, previously represented by localised laws that tied the individual and the polis together, until these two entities have nothing more in common and the ‘tyrant who seizes the law’ (against whom Antigone rebels) is ‘the market that no longer knows any limits’ (p. 39). This relates back to the problem of the tragic hero that opened this chapter, and the ways in which tragedy in theatre does –​or does not –​function in accordance with its broader context. No longer the individual and the polis, but the individual and the systems of industrial capitalism. The question of how to approach and illustrate this relationship is addressed by Hans-​Thies Lehmann, in his essay ‘A Future for Tragedy’: Tragic experience is bound to a process where we are taken to the edge of normative and conceptual self-​assurance, and this process cannot be

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Precarious spectatorship achieved by purely theatrical subversion but by the uncanny mental and physical experience of entering the twilight zone, where the sustainability of cultural norms which we adhere [sic] is put in doubt. This, however, can also be said about the dimension of the political where the latter is understood in the sense of questioning the fundamental structures of our being together in a polis, rather than taking positions on concrete political issues. In theatre this condition can easily be translated into one formula: one precondition of the tragic –​and as we may add now: of the political in theatre –​ is the momentous undermining of key certainties:  about whether we are spectators or participants; whether we perceive or are confronted with perceptions that function ‘as if ’ or for real; whether we dwell in the field of aesthetic make-​belief or actual reality. (Jürs-​Munby et al., 2013, p. 99)

What Lehmann argues for is a repositioning of the tragic experience away from a ‘worn-​out’ model of tragic drama. Instead, peripheral and liminal experiences that are at the fringe of the dramatic experience should be brought into the fold, and the spectator’s view confused by their uncertainty about what belongs in ‘make-​belief ’ and what in ‘actuality’. In fact, my own argument has trod this course all along but with a far less optimistic bent –​the emergency phenomenon trades precisely on the ‘twilight zone’ of spectatorial uncertainty by obscuring ‘the real’ in order to dogmatise specific views on a given set of events. As we have seen, bodies (alive and dead), groups of individuals, even buildings and natural environments are overwritten in order to build a visual economy within which the spectator is held within a sense of emergency. It is a common critique of Lehmann that his work prioritises the aesthetic over the political, with Elinor Fuchs, for example, seeing him dispensing with ‘all social and political theorizing of the past quarter century’ in pursuit of an artistic vocabulary somehow divorced from the conventions and traditions from which it arises (see Jürs-​Munby et al., 2013, p. 32). Certainly, valorising a disjuncture that undermines ‘key certainties’ may be appealing in a theatrical sense, but it does have rather troubling consequences in the light of my study. These may be perhaps most adroitly articulated in a brief coda concerning my own experience of Mitchell’s production.

‘I hope you’re safe’ After attending the opening night of Anatomy of a Suicide, on 3 June 2017, a friend and I stayed in the Royal Court’s subterranean theatre bar and then left around 11.30, taking the underground from Sloane Square.

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Throughout this time, the only contact from the outside world I  had received was an obscure text message saying ‘I hope you’re safe’. It was not until we noticed a couple sat opposite us on the train, clutching their phones and visibly shaking, that we understood anything was amiss. We were informed that there had been an ‘attack’ at London Bridge, and that people had been killed. We then embarked upon a surreal scramble through London, as we were evacuated from various underground stations and redirected through overpopulated and increasingly fraught public transport services. Police officers jogged around in large groups, mixing with bemused revellers clutching half-​drunk pints still determined to enjoy the warm June evening. The sensation was of being trapped in a malfunctioning video-​game which looked almost (but not quite) the same as the city that we had woken up in that morning. The attack had taken place just after 10pm, when a white van was driven into a crowd of pedestrians on London Bridge. Three men wearing what turned out to be fake suicide vests emerged from the van and began stabbing people with knives. Police officers arrived and shot the three men dead (Anon., 30 May 2018). The event was comparable in form to an attack that had happened a couple of months earlier, where a man ploughed his car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and then ran towards the Houses of Parliament, randomly stabbing at passers-​by and police officers until eventually being shot and killed. Part of the power of such attacks, of course, resides in the revelation of the violent potential of apparently benevolent technology. Automobiles are ubiquitous, and their convenience is often marketed through a warm patina of safety. This is one of the reasons why Islamic State used to delight in encouraging supporters to kill people with their cars (Bayoumy, 22 September 2014). The fear experienced in being reminded that domestic technology is also a tool for violence could be felt on the underground trains that were no longer simply methods of transportation, but potentially the dwelling of dangerous people or, worse, weapons in and of themselves. Similarly, the non-​spaces into which we were directed –​train station platforms, bus-​stops, pavements, escalators and vehicles  –​were revealed as theatres-​of-​fear, at once holding pens and potential targets. What was particularly unnerving about the experience was the ways in which the subterranean passages of London were not ‘transformed’ by the experience of being under attack, but that the attacks exposed an otherwise concealed function, something that Virilio calls the ‘city of panic’, in which: the viewer is now subject, not to the reproduction of the stereotyped pictures Walter Benjamin talked to us about, but to the collective hallucination of a

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Precarious spectatorship single image, the optical theatre of a revolving terrorist panorama. What I propose to call the iconoclasm of PRESENTATION in real time now outdoes by a long shot the old iconoclasm of REPRESENTATION in real space of painted or sculpted images. (2005, p. 86, emphases in original)

This is the city itself as an image; the absorption of the urban environment into the visual economy. This argument accounts for the hallucinatory quality I experienced in the scramble around London’s suddenly besieged central zones, and the disconnect from the tragic account of the polis in the production that I had just experienced. What is of particular significance here is Virilio’s division of the temporal and spatial, saying that the modern city has destroyed its reliance on the latter by turning exclusively to ‘presentation’. It is an echo of his term ‘monstrate’, where the apparatuses of image capture are bent into the service of an anti-​interpretive mimesis offering no critical or cultural analysis of its source material, but rather practising ‘the cleansing of all ‘nature’, all ‘culture’, through the technically oriented efficiency of a mere ‘monstration’ (2003, p. 26). The difference is that the horror is in the street rather than on the canvas or the stage. Perhaps, rather than an ‘officially terrorist art’, we should be talking about an ‘officially terrorist space’, which would certainly account for the disjuncture between my experience of Birch’s tragedy and the polis within which it was performed. Virilio might define this as the zone in which the polis currently exists, where: escape velocity has wiped out the territory that was once the basis of the legitimate state, and the world of business, like the world of war, has found itself ever since suspended in weightless conditions, in the anguished wait for the great accident, this GLOBAL CRASH that won’t fail to occur one of these days. (2005, p. 103, emphases in original)

It is strange to contrast Virilio’s emphasis on speed and acceleration –​ a telos that is recognisably tragic  –​with the cyclical, atavistic time structures of Birch and Mitchell’s play. It echoes Lehmann’s valorising of the disjuncture between tragedy and its antecedent practices, where the new and ‘weightless’ environment produced through constant acceleration becomes incapable of integrating the relationship between the polis and the individual. The death of the tragic hero does not prompt the ending of a world in order for the birth of a new one, and so they are sublimated from a sacrifice to a suicide. The deaths just keep repeating, until eventually there is no option but to draw a line under the tragic process and say that it just has to finally end. Despite this, however, there remains a fundamental importance to the ‘weighted’ environment that theatre inhabits since it constitutes, in

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the last instance, the world in which people are capable of living. The weightless environment that Virilio explores is a reality comprised purely of image. To transfer the individual to that new and terrifying polis, which exists in no place but only in an acceleration of time, would be to abandon the sacrificial, and thus constructive function that is tragedy’s communal purpose. As we have seen, an individual may be overwritten by their representation and metamorphosed into an image both after and because of their death. This character has no ‘weight’, and exists only in the hellish landscapes of Virilio’s study. They are the spectator who, trapped within the world of the image, becomes incapable of rationalising themselves outside of it, and makes an image out of themselves through their suicide.

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Theatre, exposure and the exterior

The culture industry and marketing… try to develop the desire to consume but, when consumption becomes nothing other than the ordeal of pure banality, it deceives and frustrates desire, kills desire, because it reinforces the death-​drive:  instead of sustaining desire, the culture industry and marketing provoke and exploit the repetition compulsion. They in this way thwart the life-​drive. And because desire is essential to consumption, this process is self-​destructive. Bernard Stiegler, 2011a, p. 127

Exposure and the Exterior I began this book with Ben Anderson and Peter Adey’s definition of ‘emergencies’ as events in which ‘promissory and threatening futures achieve some form of presence in the here and now’ (2011, p.  1096). Much of this ‘presence’, I have argued, is achieved through the framing and distribution of images, which may be rapidly circulated in order to dramatise the severity of a given situation to targeted audiences. In order to emphasise this severity, I have observed that the subject and representation of such images are often blurred, which poses an attendant risk to the spectators of becoming estranged from the other (the presumed

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subject of representation) and, by consequence, themselves. Tracking several examples of this estrangement, I have argued that at its extremities, where the spectator valorises the image to the degree that they seek to make an image of themselves, the process may become suicidal. An over-​ dependence on images without critical engagement, in the construction of emergencies, has also been seen to contribute to what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘futureless present’, a decontextualised contemporary without recourse to alternative narratives by which dominant ideologies may be challenged. Where theatre has been considered in these arguments, it has generally been as a space of potential rebuttal to the above processes. Theatre might offer a chance to publicly scrutinise spectatorial manipulation, as with The Destroyed Room, or stories may be staged that occur outwith the totalising logic of the ‘futureless present’. In this final chapter, I want to turn to these strategies more fully, and consider in depth some ways in which theatrical performance might productively respond to what I have been calling a ‘precarious spectatorship’. This idea of a precarious spectatorship started to take form in Chapter  1, in dialogue with Judith Butler’s theories on ‘grievability’, where ‘presentation affects our responsiveness’ to suffering (2016, p. 63). Butler locates this process within the ‘timeless’ and ‘spaceless’ quality of the image itself, described here in relation to the Abu Ghraib torture photographs that were released in 2004: They are shown again and again, transposed from context to context, and this history of their successive framing and reception conditions, without determining, the kinds of public interpretations of torture we have. In particular, the norms governing the ‘human’ are replayed and abrogated through the communication of these photos; the norms are not thematised as such, but they broker the encounter between first-​world viewers who seek to understand ‘what happened over there’ and this visual trace of the human in a condition of torture. (ibid., p. 78)

There is something about the endless circulation of images that obscures and overwrites their relation to the bodies that they purport to represent, which, in turn, compromises the rationalisation of the body itself. Where I  have positioned theatre in response to this process, it has not been my intention to claim any kind of inherent superiority in its presentation of (or engagement with) bodies, but rather to focus on the relationship between the spectator and that presentation, which has potential to bring the spectator into tangible contact with herself. I contend that this form of contact might be used to forge perspectives upon what happens when her ‘response to suffering is affected’ by the presentation of that suffering.

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The two main strategies that have emerged over the course of this book as to how theatre might productively respond to a ‘precarious spectatorship’ can be roughly summarised as ‘exposure’ and ‘appealing to the exterior’. Notions of exposure were encountered in Chapter 2’s analysis of The Destroyed Room, where theatrical spectators were shown the damaging effects of abandoning the other to their representation, and the consequent hazards that this poses to the spectator herself. The first part of this chapter opens that argument out, considering performances that have challenged both the role and position of the spectator in relation to the thing that she spectates. For these purposes, I have selected pieces that play with the idea of a ‘rigged game’. My reasons will become clearer as the chapter goes on; I propose that there is a formal connection between rigged games and what Slavoj Žižek calls the ‘forced choices’ that are presented to individuals in the industrial democracies of the early twenty-​first century –​the locations of Stiegler’s ‘futureless present’ (Žižek, 1989, p. 165). And although they share many qualities, there are key points of conflict between games and theatre, most significantly for these purposes the idea of an ‘objective’ or ‘goal’, which make theatre a useful medium for exposing the fallacies of games whose outcomes are pre-​determined, or, in some cases, impossible. Opening out the mechanics of a rigged game in a theatrical production offers a chance to dramatise methods of manipulation that resonate with those in the broader contemporary context. Questions of the ‘exterior’ emerged in response to the ways in which emergency protocol forecloses the possibility of alternative solutions, with the imperilment of a given situation overriding all other concerns. The identification of this process led my analysis to Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, whose theories of storytelling rest on the authority of an inaccessible ‘outside’. Stories stand apart from the contemporary, which grants them particular value in challenging a hegemonic structure that asserts the irrelevance, or, worse, non-​existence, of an alternative to itself. The second part of this chapter, therefore, looks in more depth at this question of an exterior, through analysis of storytelling and monologue performance from the years 2015–​2018. The goal is not to provide any kind of authoritative survey of theatre in the early twenty-​first century, but through detailed analysis of a small number of shows, to think through some ways that theatre can critique practices of spectatorship. I finish with a brief discussion of Darkfield’s Flight, a participatory show that played with temporalities in order to undermine the idea of a fixed narrative trajectory in which there are no alternatives; precisely the logic that I  have argued underpins that of contemporary interpretations of ‘emergency’.

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One final note on the shows considered in this chapter. Many of them are not about emergencies, in the sense that their subject material does not relate to an event that correlates with the definitions of that phenomenon that I have generally been adopting. They have been selected for this chapter because each one attempts to interrogate some form of spectatorship, and a recurrent theme is that of a spectatorship that has been damaged by the contemporary environment. Thus, these performances offer the chance to broaden the interrogation of the phenomenon that I have observed occurring as a response to the performance of emergencies –​that of a precarious spectatorship. Real Magic Richard, Jerry and Clare appear on a garishly illuminated stage. One of them is dressed as a chicken. There are stools, some clumsily made cardboard signs and discarded costumes, including a sparkly dress and a pair of oversized boots. Everything is tacky and the performers look exhausted. One takes the role of a gameshow host, addressing another who takes the role of a contestant. The host runs through a script, to which the contestant provides appropriate responses. ‘We’ve never met each other before, have we? How are you feeling? You feel happy? Feel confident? Feel safe? Okay, so what is the word?’ The contestant has three attempts to guess words that the third performer holds up on signs, invisible to the contestant but visible to the host and audience. The contestant guesses ‘electricity’, ‘money’ and ‘hole’. The actual words on the signs are ‘caravan’, ‘algebra’ and ‘sausage’. At the third mistake, there is a laughter track and a burst of mournful violin music. The host says ‘let’s swap’, and the performers change roles before re-​enacting the same script. They swap again. And again. And again. There are some minor variables between iterations: the roles, registers and costumes adopted by the performers, and an occasional juncture where they perform an awkward ‘chicken dance’, but that’s it. Otherwise they just keep repeating. And the show, Forced Entertainment’s Real Magic (2017), continues in this fashion for an hour and a half. Once it becomes clear that the on-​stage game will never be won or lost and will rather just keep repeating, my attention is drawn back to the minute differences between iterations. But these are emptied of meaning by the relentless repetition. The kind of hackneyed gameshow being mimicked on stage is one that relies absolutely upon a telos. Stripping the game of that telos by repeating it over and over without conclusion divorces the game from its function, restoring the on-​stage action to an infuriatingly banal performance whilst at the same time layering this

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banality into strangeness. It is a use of repetition that recalls an argument made by Gilles Deleuze: The more our daily life appears standardized, stereotyped, and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate –​namely, the habitual scenes of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death […] Each art has its interrelated techniques or repetitions, the critical and revolutionary power of which may attain the highest degree and lead us from the sad repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and then to the ultimate repetitions of death in which our freedom is played out. (2014, pp. 383, 384)

Deleuze rejects the idea of the ‘original’ as precondition to repetition, valorising instead the ‘essential power of difference’ at work within the act of repeating, which undermines the singularity of identity through a quality of ‘differentiality’. He thus sees ‘interrelated techniques of repetition’ as liberating, since as Steven Connor observes, they uncouple identity from the ‘constricting untruth of difference and repetition in the service of the Same’ (2007, p. 8). By distinguishing between the surface and the submerged, this rejection of ‘service of the Same’ offers a useful model for unpacking Deleuze’s ‘positive’ repetition. Rather than the repeated act seeking the restoration of an original meaning, it tries to locate and expose a difference that is only visible through its own recurrence. It is an idea that Jenny Hughes has elsewhere expanded in her theory of critical mimesis; a ‘doubling and decaying, vivifying and mortifying practice of mimesis that plays with bodily and spatial forms to provide uncertain habitations for life in a violent and alienating world’ (2011, p. 190). In other words, repetition has the capacity to enrich and develop the conditions of its production, to mirror biological processes and, if critically aware, to interrogate the contingencies of its presumptive subjects. A wry example of the latter function was the comedian Tina Fey’s impersonations of Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for the Vice-​ Presidency in the 2008 US elections. Fey’s habit of repeating Palin’s self-​ styled down-​to-​earth, gaffe-​ridden interviews almost verbatim, led to witless phrases being associated with Palin (such as ‘I can see Russia from my house!’) that reflected her persona but which she had never actually said (Pilkington, 21 October 2008). The accuracy of Fey’s repetition exposed the meretricious nature of Palin’s own cant, blurring the two women’s performances and compromising the latter’s credibility. A  similar event occurred in 2017, when the Dominican newspaper El

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Nacional mistakenly published a photograph of the actor Alec Baldwin impersonating the US President Donald Trump, in place of an image of Trump himself. Again, Baldwin’s mimicry closely attended to the oafish, vainglorious elements of his target’s persona, seeking to delegitimise Trump through close and unsparing repetition (Evans, 11 February 2017). In Real Magic, however, the repetitions are drained of critical reflection and oppressively mired within the ‘dreary repetition of habit’. Here, surface acts are tied to a submerged ‘repetition of the Same’. What is curious about this oppression is that it emerges from within the show’s overlapping of theatre and gameplay, each of which are used to oppose and undermine the efficacy of the other. Games, broadly speaking, operate according to mechanics that include some kind of victory conditions. These demonstrate what ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ may look like and provide impetus for the players’ participation. In Real Magic, the victory conditions are presumably the correct guessing of the word:  however, we learn through the ceaseless repetitions that this will never actually happen. The game’s internal logic collapses, even as its external actions continue to grind along. The performers register the hopelessness of their situation but are compelled to continue regardless, which leaves the spectator trying to interpret a game and/​or show that does not function as either. In short, and to coin a phrase, the game is rigged, and any distinction between the theatrical and the ludic blurs at the point where both collapse. As I will go on to argue, that blurred region offers a privileged lens through which to expose and critique a particular kind of precarious spectatorship. For James Frieze, dramatising a rigged game exposes something of theatre’s political mechanics. Discussing the Belgian company Ontrorend Goed’s Fight Night (2015) in which spectators vote for candidates using electronic pads, he observes that the show ‘plays electoral logic against theatrical logic, which is a logic of ‘both/​and’. […] Theatre trades in doubt, doubleness, duplicity, contradiction’ (Frieze, 2015, p. 225). Frieze points out that this ‘doubled’ logic exposes the deceptions of contemporary electoral systems, where voting ‘affirms the principle that the recognition of the individual is a constitutive element of democratic society’, yet we live in ‘a culture within which the collection of information functions not just to measure but, to a significantly increased extent, to constitute our individuality’ (ibid., p. 222). In other words, by participating in a system that claims to affirm individuality, we transform our actions into data that is then used to mass-​produce that individuality for us. This contradiction is exposed in Fight Night by deploying the gameplay mechanics of voting in a theatrical context. The audience witness

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themselves participating in a process in which their participation is modelled, styled and, ultimately, manipulated into creating a theatrical spectacle. This exposing of the spectator to themselves is something that I  have proposed as a privileged facet of live performance. I  have also argued that the closing down of alternatives is a common strategy in legitimising emergency protocol –​the two rigged games discussed here, then, resonate with the subject of this book in something of their formal construction. A game is generally presented as finite, with its victory conditions serving as the teleological impetus for its conclusion. As they have been defined here, emergencies operate a sleight of hand in which presentations of finitude are employed to legitimise the conditions of a single outcome; that of the protocol built into establishing an emergency in the first place. ‘There are multiple possible outcomes, but all of them are bad apart from this one.’ In emergencies, the spectator is faced with coercion dressed up as participation, a coercion in which there was never any choice to begin with. What Real Magic and Fight Night stage is the operation of this kind of logic without the dishonesty of a utopian telos; participation in a process that demands collaboration even though there is no desirable outcome. Stripped of the illusion of the end, the process becomes the object of scrutiny, and what is exposed is what Bernard Stiegler calls the relegation of ‘spirit’ (desire and belief) to the drive of stupidity. Instead of striving for ‘objects of belief ’ which stimulate development, improvement and pleasure, the appetites of the subject are rerouted towards worthless and disposable products. In their dissatisfaction, the subject consumes ever-​more of these products, with their unquenched ‘repetitions of habit’ descending rapidly into the mindless nihilism of addiction. For Stiegler, combatting this descent is a function of art, which, in a venture that is partly indebted to Deleuze, he describes thus: The challenge of any process of psychic, collective, and technical (or technological) individuation is to constitute its motive, that is, its desire. This is neither purely psychic nor merely social. And hence it is capable  –​since imagination is for Valéry the spiritual faculty par excellence, which Kant called transcendental, and which in Deleuze stimulates ‘transcendental’ stupidity –​of engendering a god, or God, but also the triangle, or any ideality, and indeed any sublimity, in particular that sublimating activity par excellence that is artistic labour. And thus, for Nietzsche, only art can penetrate beyond nihilism: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’ For art is what trans-​forms and trans-​values the groundless into motives –​into motives to live and to love, into motives of desire. (2013, p. 121, emphases in original)

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‘Art’ is seen here as something energised  –​for Deleuze, by the emancipatory subtleties of repetition; for Stiegler, by the transformative motivation of desire. Both kinds of energy also occur in games, and in a markedly transparent fashion since games (unlike the majority of artworks) have goals. Removing these goals, rigging the game, and then translating it back into art, creates a work that exposes the affective qualities of what Stiegler calls ‘spiritual misery’; the relegation of healthy and productive desire to self-​destructive addiction. The dramatisation of a rigged game can therefore help to demonstrate to the spectator something of the precariousness of her own position in relation to a given discourse. By recapitulating the gameshow or the voting system –​or, in the later examples of this chapter, the leisure industry or governments –​into theatre, practical examinations of concealed, coercive mechanics may in theory be produced for engagement by the spectator. I will now offer a few further examples of this exposure, in order to consider how theatre may challenge what I have been describing as ‘precarious spectatorship’, a situation where the spectator is manipulated to the extent that she cannot rationalise her relationship to the text, the other or (as we saw in the previous chapter) herself. Since theatre, as I have argued, has the capacity to highlight these relationships and emphasise the face-​to-​face interaction that may be elided in a visual economy built on the image, it is important to consider how this highlighting may be achieved. I  will explore a few more examples of shows that have used the notion of a ‘rigged game’, each show drawn from the popular participatory form often referred to as ‘immersive’ theatre. As the chapter progresses, I will examine theatre which, shifting the dynamics back on to the performer and employing the conventions of storytelling, seeks to indicate exterior discourses through which the dominant ideologies of the present may be challenged. Last Resort, Foreign Radical and £¥€$ (Lies) Edinburgh’s Summerhall is an imposing former veterinary college. The conceit of 2Magpies’ (2017) Last Resort, which is performed in its rather brutalist concrete basement, is that the spectators are future tourists in a ‘luxury island resort’ built in the former ‘Guantanamo Bay’ detention facility on Cuba. The two performers are tour guides who seat each spectator in a deckchair, furnishing us with a Cuba libre in an orange plastic cup and inviting us to put our bare feet into orange plastic bags filled with sand. Moist towels are distributed and one guide leads a meditation session which morphs into a description of waterboarding. The centrepiece of the show is a game called ‘one more drink’, where we are

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asked questions about information delivered previously in the performance. If an incorrect answer is given, the spectator is instructed to pour an assigned alcoholic drink into an orange plastic petrol can, on the understanding that one of the guides, Tom, will be force-​fed the can’s entire contents at the end of the game. The final question is, ‘If a suspect is deemed too dangerous to release, yet there is insufficient evidence to convict them, should we detain them inevitably?’ We are given two minutes to debate as a collective, whilst Tom stands in a stress position. The drink to be consumed is a litre of rum. Eve, the other guide, refuses to clarify whether the question is a moral speculation or a reference to existing policy. The group, assuming that it is a matter of policy, answers ‘yes’. We are told that this answer is ‘unacceptable’, although it is clear that this would have been the outcome whatever our response. Tom dons a snorkel, into which the liquid is poured whilst he gags and splutters. Once he has recovered, she congratulates him on an excellent first day. Beneath the somewhat patronising comments about the contingence of domestic consumerism upon state violence, there are a couple of ideas here that resonate with the use of a rigged game to expose broader iniquities. The first emerges within the tactility of the theatrical encounter. The plastic bag of sand and the smell of people’s feet (mine included) as they take off their shoes on a rainy Edinburgh morning. The bad taste of cheap alcohol and sugary soft-​drinks from a plastic cup. The synthetic fibres and garish colours of the performers’ uniforms. The stained concrete and merciless strip-​lighting of the basement venue. All of these elements served, ultimately, to exacerbate an acute physical discomfort, which focussed my attention on the negative aspects of the ‘package holiday’ itself. Rather than expose western cosiness to the violence upon which it is built, what I encountered was a dialogue between two hells, and the drinking of the Cuba libre felt less like a guilty sign of compliance than a masochistic act of solidarity. Last Resort scratched down into the mediocrity of my contentment, suggesting some uncomfortable parallels between leisure and torture. Leisure, or the regulation of ‘free time’, forms a cornerstone of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s critique of contemporary cultural production. In Dialectic of Enlightenment they discuss ‘the prolongation of work under late capitalism […] sought by those who want to escape the mechanised labor process so that they can cope with it again’ (2002, p. 109). Leisure is the regulated zone in which workers/​consumers reinvest the conditions of production, and recharge their productive capabilities in a state of receptive boredom. All of this is achieved through a culture of homogenised ‘sameness’, a repetition that is irresolvably toxic; ‘[b]‌ecause of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is supposed to fall

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in love is, from the start, a copy of himself ’ (ibid., p. 112). Mass production ruins singularity, which haunts Stiegler’s thoughts on desire: only that which is singular, and to that extent exceptional, is desirable:  I only desire what to me seems exceptional; there is no desire for banality, but there is a repetition compulsion that tends towards banality –​and that the psyche, within which Eros and Thanatos are composed, originally harbours. The culture industry and marketing thus try to develop the desire to consume but, when consumption becomes nothing other than the ordeal of pure banality, it deceives and frustrates desire, kills desire, because it reinforces the death-​drive: instead of sustaining desire, the culture industry and marketing provoke and exploit the repetition compulsion. They in this way thwart the life-​drive. And because desire is essential to consumption, this process is self-​destructive. (2011a, p. 127 emphases in original)

These views on the redirection of desire towards disposable commodities align with Freud’s death drive, a theory suggesting that repetitive habits ‘assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death’ (2010, p. 65). As Connor points out, however, Deleuze challenges Freud on this ‘simple opposition of life and death’ because ‘death is the last form of the problematic, the source of problems and questions, the sign of their persistence over and above every response’ (Deleuze, 2014, p. 143). In Stiegler’s thinking, this suggests that the culture industries do not aim for death, but rather for an eradication of death, which, in the futureless present, can be exploited to stage an endless cycle of production and consumption. This is where Last Resort dovetails with Real Magic in its presentation of a rigged game –​there are no victory conditions because these would disrupt the anti-​telos of the endless repetition. True, the ‘drinking game’ does bookend the piece, but this is merely one repetitive instance in the hell of the holiday, a cogwheel of the leisure complex mapped on to the spectre of the torture chamber. The congruent factor is that both places are somehow ‘timeless’, and thus any act occurring within them is a repetition of something that does not exist. The inmates at Guantanamo Detention Facility were legally taken out of existence, thus, as Judith Butler points out, they could not be killed, nor grieved for, because they were not officially alive. This is why the leisure complex, a place that is held ‘out of time’ so that its patrons can enjoy their tightly scheduled stints away from work (and it is always in terms of work that leisure is defined), is mapped on to the torture chamber. It is also a vindication of Deleuze’s clear-​eyed claim that our freedom plays in our death; to remove a place from time, and thus from ‘vivification and mortification’ destroys its habitability. Nobody can live in a holiday complex, for the same reasons that nobody can live in a torture chamber. I am not for

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a second arguing an equivalence between the package-​holiday tourist and the torture victim; I am merely pointing out a quality of ‘timelessness’ upon which the locations designed to contain them both are built. It is the same quality that I have been arguing throughout this book as the epicentre of the emergency  –​a zone in which no exterior is permitted, and no story may be told. A further significant quality of Last Resort is, of course, the ethical demand placed upon the spectator by its subject material. Through the recitation of data-​sets concerning various atrocities committed in the detention facility, the show attempts to bridge the gap between two temporalities. But nothing is presented to us in the language of the other. Even the torture scenes are ‘performed’ by a tour-​guide. Rather, it is in the parodying of the audience’s freedom, that ‘our’ relationship to foreign policies which oppress ‘other’ people in the name of ‘our’ security are made visible. This is particularly apparent in the minute or two given to us to debate a critical question whose response will lead invariably to torture, and in which the illusion of choice is maintained only to expose its own fallacy. It is another dramatisation of a rigged game, and beyond the inevitable conjectures about spectatorial agency there is a kind of haptic dissonance, in which our disjuncture from one another, and from the subject itself, is revealed in all of its grotesqueness. Sat in lurid deckchairs and drinking cheap cocktails, we are insulated from considered engagement with the ostensible subject. Despite the production’s repeated attempts to segue in to a condemnation of western compliance with torture, by choosing tourism as a vehicle for their show, they make explicit the separation between spectator and spectacle. This rigged game is revealed in the last instance as zero-​sum, and we spectators are left alone with ourselves; isolated and ignorant. By contrast, Theatre Conspiracy’s Foreign Radical (2017) noisily introjects its audience into one another’s personal spaces, reframing the spectator in the place of the other by subjecting them to the kinds of profiling exercises by which that other is apprehended. The show takes place in a large room which is partitioned into quadrants by a combination of black cotton and white muslin sheets, and occurs in two principal forms. The first is played out in short films and vignettes. The films are mostly reportage concerning ‘The Watchlisting Guidance’, a US government text that was leaked in 2014 by a grassroots organisation called ‘The Intercept’. This text details the means by which those suspected of terrorism are profiled, put under surveillance and apprehended by the US government. The vignettes revolve around an Iranian actor, Aryo Khakpour, who first appears naked, static, standing over a table and staring at a coil of rope. At other junctures, he is illuminated ranting

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behind the sheets, or convulsing on a table in simulated torture, shouting that he will ‘spew his hate’ all over his oppressors’ country. Towards the end he delivers a speech about a friend who was profiled and from whom he had to distance himself. The main form of the piece is orchestrated by a hyperactive gameshow host, Milton Lim, whose invasive questions we answer by standing in designated squares. These begin with things like ‘Have you watched any form of Internet pornography in the last twenty-​four hours?’, ‘Do you use encryption when sending messages?’ and ‘Do you regularly change your Internet passwords for security?’ At intervals, we are asked to single out people whom we believe to be the most paranoid, the most suspicious, and the most radical. I  am chosen by a majority as the most suspicious, and ushered into a side quadrant with two other singled-​ out spectators, where we are given tasks relating to a broader surveillance subplot. Later the whole group are reunited and we are told to stand in line and take a step forward each time we can answer ‘yes’ to questions such as ‘Have you ever lied to a border guard?’, ‘Have you ever smuggled illegal drugs across a border?’, ‘Have you been detained and/​or strip searched, or cavity searched at a border?’ and ‘Have you ever been deported?’ The tone becomes more personal as we are asked to respond to questions like ‘Are there secrets you will take to your grave?’, ‘Have you ever been shunned because one of your secrets was revealed?’, ‘Have you used another’s secrets against them?’ The mechanics by which individuals are marginalised become our points of access to the broader issues at play, as we exploit personal information, or bias, to categorise and separate ourselves. A striking quality of the gameplay here is the perverse attractiveness of its telos. Unlike the other shows considered so far, there are victory conditions, but these amount to little more than the humiliation of the other. At the moment at which I am singled out as the most ‘suspicious’ member of the audience, for example, the person next to me points her finger close to my face and laughs whilst exclaiming ‘definitely you!’ I respond with a polite smile. It is through the moment of play that the mockery is legitimised –​I suspect that neither she nor I would have acted in this fashion had we met under different conditions, but by participating, the spectator gives temporary licence to some degree of their own mistreatment. This, after all, is a standard ingredient of much stand-​up comedy. But the willingness to humiliate, or to participate in the humiliation of one’s neighbour, is obviously not a phenomenon localised to the theatre, even if in theatre it seems more acceptable. This conceit has elsewhere been explored more pitilessly –​in Ontrorend Goed’s Audience, for instance, a performer insults a woman spectator

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in the front row and informs the audience that he will not stop until she opens her legs to the view of his video recorder (Costa, 7 November 2011). The intention is to pillory the excitement of bullying, and question the pleasure that can be experienced in inflicting harm upon the other from a position of apparent security. This is a fine line to tread, and in the case of Foreign Radical doubly so, since a ‘game’ recasts people as ‘players’, to be approached through rules and regulations rather than through moral or ethical demands. And if the game is rigged –​as it is in Foreign Radical, reflecting the broader discourses of racial, cultural and religious stereotyping that restrict the freedoms of some people whilst supporting those of others  –​this does not detract from the pleasure of gameplay, since some are merely ‘winning’ whilst some are merely ‘losing’. What is dramatised, then, is an overlapping of the processes of gameplay and everyday life, to expose the normalised prejudices upon which the spectator’s reality is built. It is a crude mechanism, certainly, but effective inasmuch as the recasting of other people into ‘players’ (not protected by the ethical rights by which we presume to apprehend the other, although as I  argued in Chapter  2, these have long since rotted away) demonstrates the extent to which that other is held separate from the self in everyday life. In this way, Foreign Radical tries to revise and exploit a form of repetition to document the ultimately suicidal logic of tabulating the worth of the other according to exterior criteria of value. Foreign Radical plays with a fairly common anxiety of reflection, where acts performed or permitted in the heat of the moment are subsequently dissected for their iniquity. It is a tricky element to manage, as it easily slips into coercion, which is a criticism often levelled at Ontrorend Goed. An earlier work of theirs, Internal (2007) sent spectators on ‘dates’ with performers, in which sensitive information was extracted under promises of confidentiality, which were then betrayed when that information was broadcast to the whole audience (Perkovic, 12 March 2014). A similar problem occurs in a later work, £¥€$ (Lies) (2017), which takes as its focus the ‘casino capitalism’ that fed in to the financial collapses of 2007 onwards. In this show each spectator assumes the role of a bank, sitting at gambling tables that represent fictional countries in a global economy. Dice games simulate the stock market, and spectators contribute to their domestic economies by betting on various goods and services. As the games gain in complexity (loans, shorts, bonds and various other financial products are introduced) the stakes and losses become higher, and tension amongst spectators is stoked by music that rises in tempo and pitch. The currency being exchanged on the table becomes an ever-​more confusing morass of bonds, loans and currencies from other countries and the competition between tables to climb the rankings in

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terms of national economies becomes more palpable. At intervals, one of the performers delivers news bulletins concerning the general development of the various economies, and a reading of the temperature in the room, which continues to rise. Eventually the inevitable happens. One of the tables is unable to pay their bonds when these are demanded to be sold, and therefore defaults. The bubble that has propelled the game forward comes to a halt, as we are informed that the three most financially successful tables are about to crash, and that we remaining poorer tables may only save one of them. My table opts to buy bonds and currency from one table only, and eventually that table is bailed out, with losses of hundreds of millions. The show ends with all performers reciting a speech in unison, where they exhort us to ‘re-​establish [your customers’] trust. Remind them that there is no alternative.’ ‘There is no alternative’ is a phrase commonly attributed to Margaret Thatcher in her description of neoliberalism as the sole option for the management of the global economy (Robinson, 7 March 2013). The purpose of £¥€$ was clear –​by operating under gameplay rules that reflected a simplified version of the principles of advanced capitalism, the show sought to demonstrate the inevitability of collapse for a system whose sole objective is deregulation and growth. The actors’ hectoring of the audience at the close mocked our collusion in an openly malfunctioning system designed to degrade its participants. This echoes an argument of Stiegler’s concerning the ‘irrationality’ of financial systems that deprive participants of a stake and which, ultimately, leads to the destruction of both participants and system. He calls this the ‘impotence of the rational’, where industrial democracy relies upon the ‘blind trust’ of its component parts and all of its players, even, and especially, at the occasion of its malfunction (2013, pp. 15–​17). I will turn to this ‘irrationality’ in more depth in a moment, when discussing Andy Duffy’s play Crash. In terms of £¥€$, the curious consequence of engaging with this vast ‘irrational’ system through the auspices of a participatory performance was not, as might have reasonably been assumed, the exposure of a rigged game that benefitted some at the cost of the many, but rather to illustrate the hopeless irrationality of the game itself. True, the roles that were taken by participants were of a higher function within the socio-​ economic sphere than we spectators were assumed to hold –​the publicity offered the chance to ‘get under the skin of the well-​to-​do’, where ‘you’re in the centre of our economic system’ and ‘you’ll do things differently, for sure’. But since there was no chance of our ‘doing things differently’ within the mechanics of the gameplay, we were shepherded down predetermined channels that always concluded with financial collapse. It

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is precisely the kind of drained repetition that occurs in Real Magic, with an attendant sense of inevitability and despondency. In this instance, however, those qualities seemed to play too closely into the intentions of the actual system which the show had sought to attack. Partly this was a question of audience culpability:  we spectators were criticised by the performers for exploiting our positions by playing according to the established rules, yet there was little at stake within (or indeed after) the gameplay to dissuade us from doing so. Unlike Foreign Radical and Last Resort, we had no personal investiture (beyond small sums of money which we kept hold of anyway) and so the unfolding calamity felt entirely detached from our activities. This was likely a desired function of the game –​certainly the ambivalence of organisations involved in the post-​2007 financial collapses proved to be a common source of dismay –​ but without critical intervention that could drive home the iniquities of the global financial systems on a personal level, the experience remained for the most part quite straightforwardly enjoyable.1 We had followed the rules and played the game. That there were negative consequences for groups or individuals with whom we had never come into contact did not encroach upon the pleasurable nature of the activity. Again, it is probable that this was an intended consequence of the show, but all that then happened was that £¥€$ became too smoothly reproductive of its source material, and the kind of repetition that it practised did not open up a space for critical reflection or engagement with the ideology that it set out to attack. At this juncture, it becomes necessary to ask to what extent the explication latent in staging of a ‘rigged game’ might compromise that staging’s ability to point beyond the claustrophobic ‘there is no alternative’ that operates in the logic of emergencies. Throughout this book I have tried to maintain a clear differentiation between texts which seek to challenge or unpick the apparatuses of emergency, and those that simply reproduce them. Clearly, the shows discussed here offer an array of e­ xamples –​ Real Magic, by dint of its opacity, rejects explication and requires critical examination in order to be meaningful (if that is even possible), where Last Resort and £¥€$ (Lies) quite literally trap the spectator in clearly demarcated topical and physical arenas, attempting to drive them towards particular conclusions. It is this coercion that proves to be something of a sticking point, since the challenge of exposing manipulative

As I am writing this chapter, the Lehman Brothers investment bank, whose declaration of bankruptcy heralded the onset of the crisis a decade ago, are about to hold a party commemorating the event (Sparrow, 20 August 2018).

1

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strategies in a given discourse requires the assertion of an exterior, a belief in alternatives. And although exteriority is a prerequisite of performance, too close a reflection of that exterior might risk the abolition of critical distance within the theatre –​this, after all, was a core warning of Brecht’s ‘Epic Theatre’. Which returns us to the arguments concerning repetition that opened this chapter, where what is needed for practical (and hopeful) engagement with broader societal malfunctions is what Jenny Hughes calls a ‘critical mimesis’ within performance, an approach that distorts aspects of the contemporary world in order to provide spaces for examination. Special consideration must be taken of the ways in which spectatorial engagement is handled –​particularly in the context of a rigged game, which disrupts the conditions by which the spectator involves themselves in the action. Otherwise, the risk is that the rigged game is once again accepted as the only one in town. Crash An alternative response to the problems arising from the use of images in the service of emergencies has emerged, in this book, within theatre that employs the conventions of storytelling, to which I will now attend more closely. From the outset, I must confess that I am focussing on scripted plays, which is contentious since scripts belong to a written, rather than an oral tradition. My reasons for doing so are that the qualities of storytelling in which I am interested –​the eschewing of immediate action in favour of events that happened in another time and place; direct address from performer to audience; authority borrowed from death –​are central to the performances that I analyse. I thus contend that these shows, Andy Duffy’s Crash, Mark Thomas’ The Red Shed and Kieran Hurley’s Heads Up, are conversant with these conventions of storytelling. There are several reasons why I return to storytelling here; partly it has to do with offering a contrasting genre which, instead of involving the spectator at the level of action, removes action from the stage and focuses on the performer’s articulation. Rather than simulate the conditions of an exterior, in which it can be too easy to reproduce the ideological structures that govern that exterior itself, storytelling takes place in a realm that is apart. This can be of particular use when engaging with the kind of emergency logic that has been encountered in this book since, as we saw with The Destroyed Room, storytelling rejects the here and now, instilling a certain impossibility in its engagement with crisis events. And, in fact, that impossibility provoked a criticism of Andy Duffy’s Crash (a play that also engages with post-​2007 financial instabilities) by the theatre critic Lyn Gardner.

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Crash’s nameless narrator begins his story with a denunciation of ‘truth’ and warns about his own untrustworthiness: ‘you can trick yourself /​Tell yourself some story […] Soon you can’t tell your story from the truth /​So it becomes truth’ (Duffy, 2015, p. 7). The story he then tells, which is performed in a flat, emotionless register, parallels events in his personal and professional life. At the outset, his partner Allison dies in a car crash, in which he is temporarily wounded. As part of his recovery, a colleague suggests a meditation class where he meets Kate, a bookseller with whom he builds a relationship. Kate convinces him to leave his job as a trader and set up on his own, which he does with some initial success. She falls pregnant and he suspects her of having an affair. Whilst socialising with her and one of her colleagues, he beats up a stranger in a nightclub. His behaviour becomes more violent, and, as he begins to lose all of his money in the financial crash, he murders Kate. Gardner’s problem with this play was its quality of detachment  –​ regarding his hapless victim in the nightclub the narrator observes ‘I guess his face looks pretty bad /​He looks like he’s been in a car accident’ (ibid., p. 26). This lack of empathy led her to diagnose the character as a creature who knew only ‘how to sound like a human being, but who is hollow and heartless’ (Gardner, 8 August 2015). Her chief complaint, which is my starting point, was that she did not understand his purpose in talking to us. A confessional from a man who feels no impulse to confess, a story whose overriding sentiment is indifference; these hardly reflect the social imperatives of storytelling outlined by Benjamin. These conditions  –​the valorisation of experience over information, and an authority drawn from distance –​are absent from the world of the play. This is a world characterised by isolation, in which violence emerges from an inability to separate the logic of market trading from the matter of human relationships, despite the narrator’s observation that the ‘nervous system wasn’t made for the stock market’ (Duffy, 2015, p.  38). It should be stressed here that I  have no interest in recent high-​profile studies that have tried to prove links between banking and psychopathy (see, for instance, Gregory, 2014). In his author’s preface, Duffy admits that ‘[d]‌emonising those who work in the financial sector is too easy’ –​ what is on trial here is a broader environment in which everyone is culpable. Responding to Kate’s initial protestations that she isn’t interested in money, the narrator expresses disbelief, saying ‘Money’s power and freedom /​Who’s not interested in that?’ (2015, p. 19). Much as with Dana in How to Hold Your Breath, Duffy’s narrator serves as a kind of barometer for the financial and spiritual philosophies governing the world within which the audience live –​and the catastrophic potentials latent within these. Duffy’s target is the same as Ontrorend Goed’s in £¥€$

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(Lies), in other words, although he employs markedly different tactics in its pursuit. A wry argument concerning the ubiquity of advanced capitalism is forged in a subplot that sees the narrator attending a series of meditation classes with Kate, in which they receive a ‘oneness blessing’ from a man who looks ‘a bit like Charles Manson’. ‘All is one he says/​Be filled with the love of the universe’ (ibid., pp. 33, 34). The irony of the murderous market trader seeking spiritual peace from a mountebank guru who resembles a serial killer is one of the play’s few comic reliefs, but there is a serious point here too, which is highlighted by the fact that the guru’s core tenet is ‘Nothing ever happened you didn’t allow to happen’ (ibid., p. 14, emphases in original). And in fact, that is the narrator’s philosophy as well: ‘You’re not a victim /​You make yourself a victim’ (ibid., p. 38). It is this logic, ultimately, that leads him to murder his pregnant partner when he suspects her of infidelity, and who in his current financial situation would be too much of a strain on his resources: ‘Getting married to certain positions is what kills you’ (ibid., p. 35). The apparently spiritual logic of self-​affirmation is, in the narrator’s eyes, stimulus for pitiless isolation and murder. And the very fact of the play’s theatricality, its dependence upon a live narrator and group of spectators, turns this into an argument about the inhuman, or the antihuman consequences of a world evacuated of stories. To try to make sense of this antihumanism, it is useful to look at the play through what Stiegler defines as ‘spirit’. This, as mentioned before, is a combination of belief and desire, inherited partly from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and which Stiegler elaborates in States of Shock: This phenomenology of spirit is a processuality, wherein it is a matter of abandoning the individual as point of departure (as Cartesian subject, the transcendental subjectivity of the I think.) […] For Hegel, in other words, it is a matter of overcoming the opposition between the psychic and the collective –​a philosophical imperative that, by thinking the individual on the basis of the process, contrary to transcendental idealism, and as historical idealism, leads to the question of the substance-​subject. (2015, p. 110)

In order to overcome the frantic ‘disindividuation’ of industrial capitalism, which drives people apart from one another and implements the addictive logic of consumerism (in the process corrupting desire to the status of a drive), it is necessary to think the individual in terms of continual development and expression. Stiegler calls this the ‘exteriororization of spirit’ (ibid.). In Hegel’s words, ‘[t]‌he force of spirit is only as great as its expression; its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its display’ (2018, p.  8). Spirit is made by

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its comingling with that of the other, which is possible only through active conveyance. With this in mind, the function of stories –​and of the storyteller –​can be viewed as both productive in the development of the exteriorisation of spirit, and as a consequence of this same process. In the latter case, this is what Gardner misunderstood in the play’s DNA: the narrator exists in a place in which there is no exteriorisation of spirit, and therefore no method of overcoming the ‘opposition between the psychic and the collective’. He spells this out for us by documenting, in an ironically detached fashion, the ways in which second-​rate ‘spirituality’ runs parallel to his own business-​driven logic. In addition to converting his guru’s soundbites into a justification for murder, he recalls words that the guru himself spoke at Kate’s funeral: They’ve asked him to do a reading He likens Kate’s life to a wave in the ocean He says, our separation from her now, is an illusion Because our separation from each other is an illusion. (Duffy, 2015, p. 47)

Superficially of course, the construction of this philosophy pays lip service to the exteriorisation of spirit, and that is the point: it is a capitalist recapitulation of the same idea without any attempt to ‘abandon the individual as point of departure’ since it is an entirely selfish venture that doesn’t scratch the Cartesian ideal, let alone rethink this into a historical trajectory. Duffy’s scorn for this kind of chicanery reaches its bleakest when, recalling a set of books presented to him by Kate, the narrator describes ‘one for me called Trading, a spiritual journey’ (ibid., p. 23). In terms of the act of storytelling prefiguring an exteriorisation of spirit, or perhaps being immanent within it –​Benjamin, after all, described the art form as stemming from communities of artisans precisely because of their collective activity –​the play is perhaps less nihilistic. In order to see this, it is necessary to first take Gardner at her word, but consider the contradiction of the narrator’s position as a fault in society, rather than in Duffy’s writing. The storyteller cannot function in a place where information is privileged over experience, nor can they practice their art in a place where there is no external, inaccessible authority (the only authority in the narrator’s world is the impassive randomness of the stock market). This question of why choose to dramatise the storyteller in an impossible location returns us to the earlier problem encountered in the relationship between the rigged game and the exterior. A possible answer might be found in a story told by Stiegler himself, concerning a drive he took in Morocco in 1987, where he was advised to avoid ring roads late at night because children in deprived areas threw

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stones down on to the tarmac. From this experience he hypothesises a ‘spontaneity of trust’ between all given members of a society which ‘is possible only if everyone who lives within the local technical system profits directly or indirectly from its power’ (2013, pp. 15–​16). Clearly, this trust does not occur when the wealthy, comfortable motorist uses roads that travel through the habitats of those who do not benefit from the system, and so violence begins to occur. As the technical systems become more complex and widespread, so the stakes  –​as well as the numbers of people affected –​begin to rise. Thus: By failing to give everyone, and in principle, reasons to live and to hope in this world for something better to come, trust will before long be ruined and the system will cease to function, and will no longer, therefore, supply anything to anyone –​not even to those oligarchs who today more than ever use and abuse a power that destroys all reasons for hope, a power that is therefore irrational. (ibid., pp. 16–​17, emphases in original)

The ‘political rationality’ that Stiegler lays out includes a ‘re-​enchantment’ of the world, a tenacious resolve to create and invigorate reasons to believe. What Duffy does by recapitulating the storyteller in this way highlights this current paucity of belief  –​the spectator is confronted by the gap where stories (and where they themselves) should be. It is significant that the narrator is a person of supposed power, especially because that power resides entirely within the ‘valueless value’ of money. He dramatises, in his psychopathy, the irrationality of the world from which he springs, and he does so by demonstrating the resistance of that world to the art of storytelling. True, neither he nor the play offer alternative strategies to combat this irrationality, but that work is left to the spectator to identify and begin to address their own precarity, by turning (or returning) to the significance and power of stories. And because the spectator is not coerced into bodily replaying their own participation in that irrational world, they encounter an exteriority which might –​possibly –​indicate the existence of an alternative. It is a very slight glimmer of hope, and it is exposed only in the marginal sense of placing the spectator in an impossible position, but in doing so it exposes something of the out-​of-​joint-​ness of our own time, and reasserts storytelling as a tool for this exposure. A  text that also asserts this necessity, and elaborates some arguments about how it may be addressed, is Giorgio Agamben’s The Fire and the Tale, which was discussed in the introduction to this book. In this short, dense text, Agamben begins with Gershom Scholem’s parable of the founding of Hassidism. Generations of Jewish elders

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endure a process of forgetting, by the end of which they can no longer recall the location of a sacred place, nor how to make a sacred fire, nor the words to a sacred incantation, but they can tell stories of these things, which act as suitable replacement. This, for Agamben, is the function of literature, where ‘[e]‌ach tale –​all literature –​is, in this sense, a memory of the loss of the fire’ (2017, p. 3). At the core of all literature is mystery, a mystery that must be maintained lest all memory of the fire, its driving force, is lost. He notes a complex relationship in this process of retaining mystery, through literature and history itself: The element in which the mystery is dispersed and lost is history [storia]. We need to think again and again about the fact that the same term designates both the chronological progress of human events and what literature relates, both the historical gesture of the researcher and that of the narrator. We can access the mystery only through a story [storia], yet (or maybe we should say, ‘in fact’) history [storia] is that in which the mystery has put out or hidden fires. (ibid., pp. 4–​5)

In the light of my recent discussion, it is important to note here Agamben’s prioritisation of historical consciousness. Rather than reduce his argument to a simple teleology, he finds in history ‘a fundamental illusion, but an illusion without which, in temporal reality, no insight into the existence of things is possible’ (ibid., p. 5). It is the inverse of Stiegler’s ‘futureless present’, and it is highly telling that the value of this belief is staked upon the acceptance of an illusion in order to gain insight into the existence of things. This is my principal reason for returning to storytelling. ‘Accurate’ reproduction, of the object or the event, has been repeatedly criticised in the arguments engaged with in this book. For Butler, the image has value not in its representation of reality, but for the challenge to reality that it delivers. For Virilio, precise reproduction of the physical world leads only to pitiless sterility, in which sanctity for the human body (amongst other things) is destroyed. I have cited multiple examples of this phenomenon, from the ventriloquised corpses of the IS victims, to the overwritten death of Alan Kurdi, to the performed suicides of Katelyn Nicole Davis and Mevlut Mert Altintas. The illusion of accurate reproduction too easily voids that reproduction of critical engagement, whilst masking the ideological apparatuses that produce and manipulate the reproduction in the first place. This is obvious, perhaps, but it is a point worth emphasising, and forms the crux of one of Hughes’ arguments when she asserts that, rather than reproducing the image (and its attendant ideologies), ‘the most effective examples of political performance […] turn to the sensate affects and effects of decay,

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ruin and debris to regulate the powers of mimesis in order to sustain life’ (2011, p. 190). Mimesis should be grounded in the wreckage and debris of what Hughes, following Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, calls ‘a time of terror’, in order to seek out and illuminate places and methods of survival. My own argument has been concerned less with restoring focus to the ‘waste’ produced in and by modernity, and more with exposing and challenging the dead-​end present into which the spectator is channelled under the logic of emergencies. Nevertheless, it is invariably from such ‘waste’ that the texts that I have examined are constructed. In describing the clearing out of Calais refugee camps in 2008, Hughes observes that ‘here, waste and wasted life […] are removed, and the beautiful fiction of an ordered, equitable world restored’ (ibid., p.  189). The worlds proposed by the public advocates of emergency narratives (exemplified in this book by people like Hilary Benn, IS operatives, David Cameron, Donald Trump, etc.) are quite the reverse of ordered or equitable, but operate an equivalent disdain for what, quoting Zygmunt Bauman, Hughes describes as the ‘unintended and unplanned “collateral casualties” of economic progress’ (ibid.). Now, however, these are recapitulated within the orthodoxies of a mainstream narrative and distributed in the visual economy –​deprived of their function, in fact, as waste, as the skandalon for the existing world and which has the potential to build the world anew. A large part of the transition from the expulsion of waste to its repackaging in line with given orthodoxies has to do with what Derrida calls iterability, or the distance of a text from itself, which is produced by its ability to be cited. Digital images have no physical existence outside their circulation, which results in a lack of contextual resonance or –​worse –​ complete separation from the world that they purport to represent. Basing the value of a text on literal fidelity to its subject material suppresses its relation to any exterior authority and, in Agamben’s terms, obscures its mystery. This has been one of the key points of connection between emergencies and their communication, where the compliance of the spectator has been secured through a process of destabilisation. The endlessly iterable, endlessly rewritable digital image produces a visual economy whose criterion of value breaks its connections with the ‘fire’, leaving the spectator disoriented and alone. Before moving on, it is useful here to briefly reflect on Agamben’s own definition of precarity, which offers a markedly positive spin and will assist in this discussion of storytelling: ‘Precarious’ refers to what is obtained by means of a prayer (praex, a verbal request, as different from quaestio, a request that is made with all available

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Precarious spectatorship means, even violent ones) and is, for this, fragile and adventurous. Literature is itself adventurous and precarious, if it wishes to preserve the right relation with the mystery. (2017, p. 7)

Agamben’s definition casts Butler’s use into a new and rather telling light. For Butler, following Levinas, it should be remembered that precariousness refers to the vulnerability of the self in relation to the other (2006, p. 134). As she puts it elsewhere, ‘[l]‌et’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something’ (2004, P.  19). Writing for the Oxford English Dictionary, Peter Gilliver points out that the first time the term ‘precarious’ was included in that dictionary was 1638, when it meant ‘given as a favour’ or ‘depending upon the favour of another person’. Within a century, the term had transformed to the physical sense of vulnerability or hazard that it commonly means today. But what is significant here is the fact that in Butler and Levinas we assume the hazard of ‘precarity’ only because we assume hostility on the part of the other. Because to be reliant upon the favour of the other is to put oneself at their mercy –​and the other is assumed to be merciless. In his view of literature as a method of communication between the present and the past/​mystery, Agamben valorises ‘precariousness’ as something potentially positive, something necessary if art is to maintain its power and its value. Here, then, begin methods of conceptualising storytelling performances which offer alternative perspectives upon the emergencies of the present. The example I will offer is a show by the comedian Mark Thomas, entitled The Red Shed (2016). The Red Shed The Red Shed takes the form of a memorial investigation, through two principal approaches. At one level, Thomas explains that the show forms part of a broader retrospective celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Red Shed venue in Wakefield, a wooden structure that has improbably survived half a century’s political, social, communitarian and entertainment usage by various left-​wing organisations. Thomas delivered his first stand-​up gig there as a drama student, and has been involved in organising and performing work there ever since. The retrospective is partly nostalgic, although he does express concern that the venue is becoming an archive for former glories, ‘a wooden time capsule, a nostalgia cocoon where you can nurse pints and relive noble defeats’ (2016, p. 39). Such overwhelming introspection would, he observes, destroy any chance for the venue to foster meaningful political activity in the future. In one of the show’s recurring conventions, he plays a quote, delivered by

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his friend, on a battered old Dictaphone (the history of this object, like many objects in the play, is described to the audience in order to establish its authenticity): The modern world is all about making you forget, isn’t it? It is all about you’re in this immediate moment and then it’s gone. Whereas the Shed […] places you in a historical struggle, it has got that sense that you are part of a history. And this history is genuine and it is about people and about how people have worked hard to make their lives better and sometimes that is through politics and sometimes that is through social and artistic pursuits. (ibid., p. 39)

What is notable is the assumption of a ‘genuine’ history that is not rooted in factual reproduction, but rather in lived experience. In this light, it makes sense that Thomas adopts a storytelling format to stage his show since, as Benjamin points out, stories gain their authority through engagement with experience, as opposed to information. In the above quote, the disposable nature of information is parsed through the lens of contemporary technology, which, Thomas points out, by investing itself absolutely in the present, is divorced from historical consciousness. It is a witty attack on repetition in ‘service of the same’, emphasised by being played through a digital apparatus designed to make ‘accurate’ repetition possible. The experiential heritage of the show was manifested in Joe Douglas’ staging through objects with direct connection to the story. In addition to the Dictaphone, for example, there were a set of chairs loaned from the building itself. The intention was to create a place of memory in which a subsequent investigation could occur. This investigation, as Thomas declares near the beginning, is the second level of enquiry, and seeks to establish the veracity of a particular memory which appeared to him, upon prompting by a journalist, as to where his politics had come from. Whilst forming an answer, he claims that a story rose unbidden in his mind. The story concerned Thomas in 1984 marching with striking miners in a pit village somewhere near Wakefield, on the eve of the strike’s cessation. Passing a school, he noticed a line of schoolchildren pressed against the railings, watching the miners and singing in unison ‘Solidarity forever /​for the union together is strong’. Singing to their brothers, fathers and uncles, he recognised their action as ‘singing into the future’. Once you have had an experience like this, he reasons, ‘a door is opened inside you which can never be shut’ (ibid., p. 31). His investigation, then, is to establish the location of this school, and track down anybody else who may have been present, in order to validate the actuality

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of the memory and thus help to find, in the past, a vision of hope for the future. The self-​awareness of his performance in employing the metrics of storytelling is clear and concise –​he says: Truth has no place in our stories, does it? Whenever it turns up it’s as an accidental walk-​on part, stands there and has a cigar, then fucks off. [But] If my story is to offer any kind of alternative, then it has to be true.2

There is a recurring push in Thomas’ show to elevate the everyday into the status of a story –​as well as the physical objects with which he performs, he also employs face-​masks depicting people he has interviewed. These are assigned to six members of the audience who sit on stage with him, taking central positions and donning their masks at his instruction. Audio recordings of interviewees are played through clicks of the Dictaphone. Situated around this investigation are present activities, such as attempts to unionise workers in various fast-​food retailers in the area. At a key juncture, he reveals that friends who also attended the march don’t remember, and therefore don’t believe, the story about the schoolchildren. Thomas stops the action for a moment and creates what he calls an ‘audience within an audience’, asking a small group of spectators, in view of everybody else, whether he should simply lie and pretend that he had managed to find the village where the schoolchildren had been singing (ibid., pp.  53–​54). This caveat in mind  –​much like Duffy, he has warned his audience against blind acceptance of ‘fact’ in stories –​he then, in the manner of a detective, pieces together leads and witnesses, populating his story with strikers, local councillors, the schoolteacher and eventually the children themselves. Almost every detail of the story is verified, apart from the singing, and as he admits ‘it is a lot to ask a 5-​ year-​old to remember one moment on one day’, continuing: But I cannot help feeling that we have allowed them to forget. That we have let their history slip through our fingers, a time when their class believed that they could change the world for the better, for everyone through unity and community. (ibid., p. 71)

As with Agamben, the emphasis on historical consciousness is paramount  –​whilst they were ‘singing into the future’, the generation of This quote is taken from Thomas’ performance of his show in Edinburgh 2016, and differs from the printed text, which reads ‘We don’t like facts getting in the way of our stories. If truth makes an appearance it is as a walk on part, a cameo, then it is off ’ (ibid., p. 32). The difference between the printed and performed statements seemed wryly appropriate to my analysis.

2

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children were abandoned to the present. Thomas’ meliorist views on ‘changing the world’ may be criticised as idealistic, certainly, but there is a relation here with Agamben’s ‘fire’, in that the coalescing principles around which collective identities were formed in Northern England were the stories told about the strength and endurance of those identities in the past. The processes of active forgetting which, as explored in Chapter 3, may be accelerated through the development of contemporary technology, work against this kind of collective identity formation. But Thomas’ argument is not anti-​technology, insofar as he foregrounds technical apparatuses of memory production within the material of his show. The significance is that, employing a range of spectatorial lenses which rely upon collaboration between performer and spectators, the limits of these apparatuses are exposed and the need for a broader, intangible other (what Agamben would call the ‘mystery’) emerges, in Thomas’ show, at the point at which accurate reproduction of the past becomes insufficient for the task of its recollection. In an attempt to sidestep potential controversies, it should be stressed here that my focus is upon the ways in which recollection is instrumentalised as a tool of collective resistance, rather than in valorising an invented history. This recalls the earlier arguments concerning Deleuze’s ‘positive’ repetition, where an underlying principle finds repeated articulation without becoming –​as has been encountered in this book through the works of Butler and Virilio –​a mindless ‘monstration’ in the ‘service of the same’. In some thoughts on cinema and memory, Stiegler echoes Butler in his own summation of repetition: Reproducibility always contains an element of transformation regarding what it reproduces. If we were to imagine that to describe is to reproduce, the result would be that a description would always also be a transformation: there is no such thing as constativity; there is always, in some respect, performativity. (2011b, p. 218, emphases in original)

He defends his rather grandiose debunking of constativity (a term which may be proven correct or incorrect) using a form of relativism that borrows rather dubiously from scientific study, but the general thrust of his argument lends support to the ideas about the construction of the spectator with which I have been engaging. The content of the images and videos with which I have worked, which have all been works of violence, were presupposed by the nature of their intended instrumentation. Men have been killed to make videos; children have completed acts of suicide to remake themselves as online texts; bowls of Skittles have been digitally reproduced in order to legitimise the drowning of

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refugees. The description of the subject, in each case, has transformed –​ and often destroyed –​that subject, in the service of the reproducibility of the image under construction. This is at the darker end of what Stiegler calls the ‘performativity’ of reproducibility, and in order to defend against the kinds of violence it is capable of enacting, perpetual exposing of this blurring of ‘describe’ and ‘reproduce’ must be maintained. Again, the value of the image, as Butler reminds us, is not in its accurate reproduction of reality, but in the challenge to reality that it delivers (2006, p. 146). By extension, the same logic is at play in Thomas’ complex engagements with ‘the past’, recapitulated as memory and in aversion to the totalising activities of technological reproduction. By providing a critical framework (i.e., a performance) within which his friend’s quote is specifically and deliberately instrumentalised, Thomas dismantles its presumed  –​ and false –​connection to an absolute past, emphasising the quality of experience over information. Heads Up and Flight Taking a markedly different approach to storytelling and temporality as a method of engaging with emergency is Kieran Hurley’s one-​man show Heads Up. This play, performed by the author, is a present-​tense report on the imminent destruction of a city, and, by inference, the world itself. The city is described to the audience as being ‘like this one’, with a cast of ventriloquised characters representing a cross-​section of society. However, although the cataclysmic denouement of the text is inevitable, and flagged from the very start as such, the tone is ultimately affirmative. At one level this is quite predictable, as the impending apocalypse strips the lives of the people depicted of the needless, useless, value-​less clutter which otherwise besieges them in the opening sections. The cocaine-​ addled pop star forgets his egotistic Twitter campaigns and heads to the maternity ward where his girlfriend is giving birth. The beleaguered barista abandons his job, and his paranoid act of violence against an interloper. The betrayed girlfriend speaks her mind to her terrified ex and then spends her last moments in his company. The world of the play resolves to end at peace with itself, despite being characterised by panic, desperation and conflict from the beginning. In order to frame this conclusion, Hurley opens with the words ‘This is a story about the end of the world /​It is a story about a city. Like this one. Here and now. /​It is a story about me. And it is a story about you. /​It begins as it ends. With a breath’ (2017, p. 7). Which is, of course, a point of confluence between all stories and all lives, but the breath is coded into this performance as a device, amplified at moments of tension

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in order to draw attention to the idea of life examined at the point of its end. Harris uses a similar device in How to Hold Your Breath, although in her play the final breath marks the beginning of the new world, a hellish place in which the future has been eradicated and humans have been replaced by demons. In Heads Up there is no indication that humanity will be succeeded, and so focus is returned to that moment before the end, a zone of near infinite significance by dint of being the last moment remaining. Looking at the two plays together, it might be initially surprising that the text in which the world comes completely to an end should be the more positive of the two. But in fact, the sentiment that is given off in Heads Up is one of care, because in the centre of an emergency, he and his characters stop casting about for a projected future, or being ready to accept any alternative to calamity, and instead attend to those final moments of being alive. One of the most remarkable acceptances of this occurs at a late point of reflexive analysis in which all present are bound together: And you are a man, sat at a desk, telling a story about the end of the world. And you are sat in a room in this city, listening to a man tell a story which he has told you is about the end of the world. And he knows that you know that it’s only the end of the world in this story because he’s decided that it has to be, as he speaks and says I am here. And you are here. And what we have is now. […] And he’s decided that it has to be because the weight of the world that you live in is killing you, because your bodies and hearts cannot carry it. And he’s decided that it has to be because it’s easier to imagine the end of this world than it is to imagine what a new one might look like. And he’s decided that it has to be because he wants you, each of you […] to face up to something that you all deeply know […] That this world cannot continue. That this will not continue. That this has to stop. That this has to stop. That this has to stop. (ibid., pp. 46–​47)

It is a complex set of statements, requiring some untangling. First, it is significant that Hurley paraphrases Frederic Jameson’s (2003) much-​ cited quotation in an essay on urban degeneration that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’. The second part of Jameson’s sentence, which usually goes unsaid, is that we ‘can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world’ (ibid.). And this, broadly speaking, was what Harris gave us in the resurrection of Dana as a desire-​less demon at the end of her play. Jameson finds precisely this phenomenon in the work of the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, whose dystopian essay ‘Junkspace’ focuses on ‘a single baleful tendency’, in this

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case commercial urbanisation, which ‘expands and expands until the tendency itself becomes apocalyptic and explodes the world in which we are trapped into innumerable shards and atoms’ (Jameson 2003). Hurley, however, seems to be gently mocking this kind of alarmism, by turning the spectator’s attention away from alternatives and refashioning a more committed perspective through a kind of acceptance. Time has actually run out. If there really are no alternatives, then what happens when we stop casting about for them (in the process, lending credence and authority to whichever ideology is best able to capitalise upon our desperation)? What, ultimately, is left at the end? Given the broader remit of the arguments engaged with in this book, particularly thinking back to Stephen Emmott’s impassioned analysis of ecological disasters which reached the same conclusion as Hurley but with far less positivity –​‘I think we’re fucked’ –​it could be justifiably suggested that Hurley’s soft-​focus capitulation simply isn’t enough. He certainly provides no useful solution to the problems facing his audience, but that is not the point. He is not examining the problems, but seems rather to be pointing at the ways in which we respond to them. And perhaps accepting destruction (rather than frantically declaring an emergency) is productive, inasmuch as it rejects the ideologies governing the present moment. Whatever comes next, if anything did come next, would be unable to be a continuation of the present. And it is, as he reminds us, ‘only’ a story, decided by the storyteller in order to address the people who have come to listen to him. By acknowledging the final destruction of distance and thus the rendering impossible of storytelling, a space is opened for the story to be able to perform its own ending. Staying with this idea of a story performing its own ending in a way that somehow conflicts with its broader performance environment, I  want to finish with a brief discussion of Flight (2018), by Darkfield. This piece, which took up a similar topic to Hurley in finding points of connection between storytelling and notions of the end, was performed in a shipping container whose interior had been designed to look like a section of a passenger jet. Spectators were assigned random seat numbers and asked to take their seats, storing their luggage in the overhead containers. Once seated, we put on bucket headphones and began hearing a three-​dimensional collage of sounds that included the wheeling of service trolleys, the jostling of other passengers and the occasional announcement from the captain. At the commencement, the lights were turned off and we were plunged into complete darkness. The conceit of the show was that our flight was experiencing turbulence and that in all probability the plane was about to crash –​we were encouraged to follow protocol, but at one juncture the voice of the air stewardess came over

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the tannoy and encouraged passengers to swap seats with each other in a hunt for the ‘luckiest’. Her voice then appeared to whisper in each of our ears informing us that we did not need to move, since we (and only we) were already sat in the luckiest seat. The theatrical trickery involved then prompted something of an anxiety –​it was difficult not to believe that the sounds of jostling playing through my headphones were actually redolent of people getting up and moving. From here, it became increasingly difficult not to wonder in some strange fashion whether I was actually on a flight –​the motors under the container skilfully simulated the plane’s movement, and there was a certain sense of vertigo that persisted in my experience. The stewardess’s voice affirmed this by returning to a theme that had been introduced at the beginning with the announcement of a passenger called ‘Mr Schrodinger’; owing to the many-​world hypothesis that stems from an infinite number of possible outcomes to any given action, in many realities I was in fact on a plane, and it was crashing. This was the end, and I had been given priority seats to witness my own destruction, a destruction that was inevitable but was happening elsewhere –​that is, in the world of the story. I left the performance feeling uplifted. It should be born in mind, of course, that ‘elsewhere’ is a key part of the emergencies that have been encountered in this book. Hilary Benn reminded his audience that the targeted city of the 2015 IS attacks in Paris ‘could just as easily have been London, or Glasgow, or Leeds, or Birmingham, and it still could be’ (Gripper, 3 December 2015). Part of the terror of the execution videos is the selection of everypeople who are not the spectator –​but who could be. The sleight-​of-​hand that occurs in the construction of such emergency narratives is to position the spectator within a catastrophic eventuality, in which their agency is supplanted, in order to implement a new and different eventuality, in which –​again –​ their agency is supplanted. What Heads Up and Flight do is open spaces that are beyond eventuality and trade rather on certainty: the world ends in Hurley’s story, and we end with it, and the countless billions of worlds in which we have already died become the stage for Darkfield’s show. The fact that in both of these cases the theatre-​makers succeed in producing a sense of ‘hope’ is not as paradoxical as it seems, if it is remembered that spectating is initially founded upon the agency of the spectator herself. This is why, in the creation of emergency narratives that have been encountered in this book, considerable efforts are often taken to convince her that she has no agency. It is a tactic that leads to what Rancière calls intolerability –​texts that have become so saturated in explication that they are no longer capable of being conceived as spaces of debate. This is reflected in Hurley’s description of a world that has become too

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much to carry, so he situates his story (much as Bagshaw and Thorpe do in The Shape of the Pain) in a place that is beyond explication; the end. In that end, where there can be found no more hope (thus no more space for explication), ultimately, there is to be found freedom. And in this hopeless place, Hurley’s story, which stands apart from the conditions of its context, is hopeful.

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EPILOGUE

‘I am disgusted with living, Mr Latrémoliere,’ he wrote after three months of silence, ‘because I see that we are all in a world where nothing is stable.’ Lotringer, 2015, p. 50

Ethology of threats It is October 2014. I am sitting with my six-​month-​old son on my knee, watching the evening news. Some by-​now familiar images appear on the flat-​screen. A hooded figure standing next to a kneeling, shaven-​headed man in an orange jumpsuit. Edited clips of the hooded figure speaking, his deep voice filling the room. Banners flashing at the top and bottom of the screen, cutaways to presenters saying ‘some viewers may find these images disturbing’. Three months later, David Cameron will declare that he ‘does not mind, within limits, people seeing a little bit’ of these videos, in order to understand that IS is a ‘death cult’ (Withnall, 5 January 2016). Although Cameron is likely unaware of it, his words are rendered ironic by a warning made by Paul Virilio twelve years earlier, that:

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Precarious spectatorship [t]‌elevision –​a ‘museum of horrors’ or a ‘tunnel of death’ –​has, then, gradually transformed itself into a kind of altar of human sacrifice, using and abusing the terrorist scene and serial massacres; it now plays more on repulsion than on seduction. (2004, p. 259, emphases in original)

By asserting that people should see part of these execution videos, without any kind of critical engagement or consideration, Cameron was confirming the victims’ role as sacrifice on that altar. The violence does not end with the act of killing; it is reproduced by the image, and fed to the spectator by newsgathering organisations, through the apparatuses of contemporary technology that populate our homes. With, it seems, the blessing of our political institutions. Although I am not aware of Virilio’s words on that day in 2014, the presence of my son in front of the television brings home to me how entrenched our common practices of ingesting violence have become. The man in the orange jumpsuit is being killed for my consumption. His killers, an organisation with whom I  have no contact or commonality, have understood the appetites for violence that people like me have (consciously or otherwise) developed, and they have tailored the murder to suit these appetites. What is more, they have employed conventions from theatrical performance –​costume, scripting, mise en scène –​to amplify the exposure of their act. I look at my son and think with dread that although he is not yet the targeted audience, at some point in the future he will be. I turn off the television. I consider trying to ignore these images, but of course they have become too ubiquitously ingrained in my everyday society to be avoided. After delivering a short paper at a conference in Leeds on the IS videos and/​as performance, I resolve to start work on this book. My intention, in the early stages, is to contribute to a conversation about how we as spectators respond to IS videos, and to try to consider an ethics of spectatorship that does not play straight into the hands of people who create murder propaganda. As the book develops, the subject expands beyond IS and focuses on the spectator themselves, and the framework of ‘emergency’ within which the spectator is addressed. Another of Virilio’s bleak diagnoses becomes pertinent: The media scale of catastrophes and cataclysms that dress the world in mourning is, in fact, so vast that it must necessarily make the amplitude of the perceptual field the first stage of a new understanding –​no longer solely that of the ecology of risks in the face of environmental pollution, but that of an ethology of threats in terms of the mystification of opinion, of a pollution of public emotion. (2004, p. 260, emphases in original)

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The idea of an ‘ethology of threats’, a set of behavioural traits conditioned by a sense of being continuously imperilled, seems again prescient in 2018’s era of ‘post-​truth’, where political realities are forged upon feelings instead of –​indeed, often in opposition to –​verifiable fact. Whilst I am writing this book, the UK votes to leave the European Union, and the United States elects Donald John Trump as president. Both events are stage-​managed by campaigns that play upon codified senses of fear, and make outlandish, false claims which nevertheless energise whole swathes of domestic populaces into compliance. It seems that we are indeed people whose behaviour is conditioned by a sense of fear, rather than informed engagement with our surrounding environments. Undertaking a project that I had initially hoped that somebody else would write (being uncertain that my mental health was sufficient for the task), I  spend the first five or six months researching everything I  can about IS propaganda, and watching the films, both edited and unedited, that they have released for their targeted audiences. By now it is the winter of 2015, and I am alone in a new city, with a new job and no immediate support network. Within a couple of months I am being treated for a moderate depressive disorder, and have begun experiencing a recurring nightmare, which, in the hope of expunging, I describe in an email to a friend: I am stuck in a desert desperately trying to escape. Usually walking through crowds of similarly directioning [sic] people and trying to avoid the notice of armed guards. One or two of my party will be spotted and shot in the back at a distance, which precipitates a scramble. Time then divides into phases, and I understand that each phase will shorten in length until I am eventually decapitated, a process that I know will take precisely 30 minutes to kill me. (I have no idea where I  get 30 minutes from  –​it takes a lot less than that in actuality, of course, but in each nightmare I have a clear memory of a Canadian security advisor declaring this time limit –​and the pain suffered –​to a room full of journalists, which include myself). Each phase is then undergone, with more people offhandedly killed, until eventually I am captured. I wake up at the point of decapitation and it is morning.

On reflection, what is perhaps most striking in this account is the preoccupation with temporality. It appears that, when experiencing the nightmare, the gaps between the ‘phases’ were more terrifying to me than the inevitable act of violence. In one respect this seems obvious –​ because the fact of death is conceived as an absence in many of the films and images that I was studying at the time, it would make sense that I  would turn to those absences as the location of terror. Still, the

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narrowing time lapses, whose diminishing lengths spiralled towards my inevitable fate, in contrast to the regimented (and false) half-​hour of dying time, seem significant. Thirty minutes is the standard unit of many television programmes, and has become a common arbiter of free time. ‘I will leave the house in thirty minutes’, ‘I have thirty minutes to spare’, ‘I will take a thirty-​minute break’, ‘I will run late for this or that engagement in order to take my full thirty minutes of viewing time’. There is a connection between thirty minutes and the rhythms of our lives, so why not the rhythms of our deaths as well? To die in a period lasting longer than thirty minutes would disrupt a viewing schedule; any less and the audience might leave feeling cheated. I am disturbed by the thought that I have apparently connected violent death with subservience to televisual entertainment, but not particularly surprised. It is moot to point out that the seepage of violence through the regimented channels of television, radio, newspaper and the Internet is a common trope of twenty-​first century life, alongside the actual violence that continues to characterise the age in which we live. It is a core contention of this book, of course, that violence has become inseparable from its forms of representation, and from the networks through which those representations are distributed. Representation itself may be a language of violence. This is Marie-​José Mondzain’s point when she sees Christianity declaring that ‘the one who is master of the visible is master of the world and organises the control of the gaze’ (2009, p. 20). In theatre and performance studies, the great critic of this language, who warned of its consequences and suffered immeasurably for his perceptiveness, is Antonin Artaud. It seems fitting, if not inevitable, that this book should encounter him at the close.

Antonin Artaud In an essay entitled No More Masterpieces (1933), Artaud famously declared that ‘We are not free and the sky can still fall on our heads. And above all else, theatre is made to teach us this’ (2017, p. 57). The statement arrives after a lament for a public who ‘tremble’ before unfolding disasters but who ‘slake their thirst with inanities’ because ‘we have not given [them] a worthwhile show’ (ibid., p. 54). This diagnosis was employed to fuel his insistence of a ‘theatre of cruelty’, an iconoclastic and contradictory set of artistic practices designed to act bodily upon the spectator, pulverising their senses in order to bring them, physically, into being. His statement, and its uncompromising assessment of

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the position of spectatorship, reappears in a wealth of early twenty-​first-​ century scholarship that is concerned with the relationship between ‘terror’ and performance. For Jenny Hughes, Artaud’s words cast theatre as ‘a precarious front line to our encounters with an unpredictable and uncertain world’, in which we try, and fail, to assert our agency (2011, p. 11). Hughes insists upon a distinction between performance and the world it represents, in order to enable the former to ‘negotiate our existential terror’ at the increasing violence and instability of the latter. This distinction also serves as the basis for Rustom Bharucha’s analysis of the same statement, where he surveys a special edition of Theatre Journal in which various academics draw connections between it and the events of 9/​11. Bharucha claims that Artaud is not addressing the possibility of calamity in the physical world, so much as: something a lot more lethal, a state of emergency which has become habitual –​nothing less calamitous than the logocentricity which determines the cult of ‘masterpieces’ in the theatre, marked, in his words, by ‘boredom’, ‘inertia’ and ‘stupidity’. (2014, p. 49)

It is a mistake, according to Bharucha, to ascribe Artaud’s rhetoric to any given event because to do so would curtail the power of terror latent within its open temporality –​the sky has not yet fallen, and ‘it is in this interim of the ‘not yet’ that terror resides and mutates’ (ibid., p.  51). From here, Bharucha’s reference to a ‘state of emergency’ makes sense, since, as I argued in the Introduction, it is in the disrupted temporalities of an event that can always get worse that an emergency is developed and energised. Bharucha’s ‘terror’, then, offers an affective dimension to the logic of emergencies, but I want to reconsider the terms of his and Hughes’ analysis away from a distinction between performance and its object, and rather –​as this book has sought to do –​to trace the affect of performance upon the site of its inscription. I  turn to Artaud here because I believe that his work anticipates a model of what I have been calling precarious spectatorship. As is well known, Artaud began his career as an actor, appearing in early French cinema, but like all of his artistic pursuits he abandoned cinema because it did not live up to the apocalyptic ambitions that he had for his art. These are impossible to summarise, but often involve a sense that late capitalist society is (for manifold reasons) corrupt, and must be destroyed, with art playing a central role in its destruction (Artaud, 2017, p. 29). He was also a lifelong heroin addict, having been prescribed opiates at a young age in order to cure a nervous disorder, and spent significant parts of his adult life incarcerated in psychiatric institutions. The

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longest consecutive period of incarceration was in the years 1937–​1946, in which he was moved around various institutions in France, narrowly avoiding death by starvation, or execution at the hands of the occupying forces. The following anecdote, told by Sylvère Lotringer, describes his experience in one such institution in a manner that draws an alternative perspective upon Bharucha’s diagnosis: The patients of Ville-​Evrard were not unaware of the danger to which they were exposed. Maeder suggests they read newspapers and were aware that the Germans had massacred the mentally ill in Poland, which they had just invaded. ‘One night Artaud approached Ms. Barrat (the intern at Ville-​ Evrard) and asked her, “Are we going to be killed?” But she didn’t know.’ In fact, after one half-​hearted search of the hospital, the Germans never came back. The French psychiatrists would finish the job. Their inertia in times of emergency shows how little value was placed on human life in the hospitals where Artaud was confined until Dr Ferdière admitted him to Rodez. (2015, pp. 17–​18)

It is significant, of course, that the patients’ only access to information regarding their potential slaughter was through the press. Facing the ‘inertia’ of those supposedly charged with their protection, they became dependent upon media representations of proposed violence which could neither be proven nor dispelled. The terror that this precipitated is that of the emergency, for which there was no protocol beyond the everyday incarceration of the psychiatric hospital. The fact that the patients were required by this protocol to wait, in helpless anticipation of death, forms part of the critique of ‘madness’ that tends to proliferate in studies of Artaud. In a now infamous interview with one of Artaud’s psychiatrists, Lotringer himself questions the right of a society in which the systemic extermination of millions of people was calmly and ‘logically’ enacted to accuse Artaud of insanity, drawing a connection between madness and mediatisation when suggesting that it is ‘perhaps literature’s job to imagine a world where men are like stones, and not just blurred images on a tiny screen’ (ibid., p. 78). As Artaud himself is supposed to have said to a doctor, ‘I am disgusted with living… because I see that we are in a world where nothing is stable’ –​in such a world, perhaps people are just blurred images on a tiny screen (ibid., p. 50). Thus, with Artaud, we are always returned to the physical over and above the representation. That is my point of departure with his statement about the sky falling, which is that if we do not recognise the distinction between the sky and its representation, then we risk becoming absorbed, and then lost, in the representation itself. What Artaud sought was in part a challenge to this, an art that ‘becomes one with certain real ways of

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being, of feeling and of thought. In a word, the only writer to survive will be the one who knows how to manage the rhetoric as if it were already thought, and not thought’s gesture’ (Scheer, 2004, p. 119). The great irony of the forms of representation with which I have been dealing here is that they trade on ever-​increasing qualities of violence and violation in order to further cement their own artificiality. The terror attack, the suicide, the mass-​drowning –​it is hard to imagine less ‘gestural’ acts, and yet that is precisely the way that they have been treated, and, thus, what they have been exposed as being. Artaud’s insistence upon a non-​representative language is defined by Julia Kristeva as an ‘exteriority of language’ that somehow resists the symbolic order within which language is otherwise organised, made sensible and made tame (ibid.). Part of the problem facing Artaud’s endeavours, of course, is that anything set down in communicable discourse is immediately prey to these processes –​something that Susan Sontag observes in her analysis of his work: Only a few situations in modern secular society seem sufficiently extreme and uncommunicative to have a chance of evading co-​optation. Madness is one. What surpasses the limit of suffering (like the Holocaust) is another. A third is, of course, silence. (2004, p. 95)

The trajectory of Artaud’s work can arguably be seen as a species of creative destruction –​with each genre or form upon which he embarked, he sought to wreck not only that form itself, but his own interactions with it. By the end of his life, once he had been discharged from his last asylum at Rodez, he lived in a clinic on the outskirts of Paris, in two rooms which contained amongst other things a ‘large block of wood which Artaud struck with a knife or hammer whilst screaming out his texts’ (Barber, 2008, p. 20). This image of the madman acting out violent destruction whilst screaming his texts seems as close to the evasion of ‘co-​optation’ (which I am reading as the assimilation of an entity into an alien form, such as I have observed occurring with images) as I am likely to encounter. But even if the items on Sontag’s list do maintain a chance of inviolability (although Artaud has been subject to a vast amount of co-​optations himself, including, of course, this one) it is almost impossible to find in today’s visual economy instances of suffering that elude co-​optation into exterior discourses. This was, after all, the horror and indignation that fuelled the argument in Chapter  2, which saw public empathy for a drowned child (iconic of so many others) overwritten by racist jingoism within a handful of months. The task in this book has never been to evade, but only to expose the mechanics of co-​optation in

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the hopes that those who co-​opt are prevented from gaining total control of their subject. Staying with this idea of the impenetrable, uncommunicable subject for a moment, I  want to finish by returning to the extremities of spectatorship, to those who confuse their relationship with the image to such a degree that they are absorbed into it. In this book, the clearest examples have been Katelyn Nicole Davis and Mevlut Mert Altintas. Both were suicides, and the suicide is ultimately a person unreachable, unreadable, un-​co-​optable. Their images may be manipulated and exploited (as happened in both cases) but by dint of its having overwritten a subject, there becomes something unobtainable in the image itself. If, as Simon Critchley points out, suicide stains the life of the subject, then a suicidal image remains stained with something that is beyond the reach of representation. It is a strange, horrific phenomenon, and it is one that I will try to unpick in the final performance analysis of this book –​Alice Birch’s adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ novella, La Maladie de la Mort (Birch, 2018).

A dead man is a strange fucking thing The set looks like an affluent and anonymous hotel room, with uncomfortable references to Sarah Kane’s Blasted –​ ‘so expensive it could be anywhere in the world’ (2001, p. 3). A man and a woman, well dressed and elegant. A  film crew dressed in black, with cameras and boom mics, orbiting the actors. A woman sitting in a sound booth front stage right with a script in her hand. A large screen over the stage, onto which live feed is blended with establishing shots of a hotel by the sea, a village, a young girl. The woman begins by starting to take off her clothes, and asking the man if this is what he wants. He says no. This introduces the audience to their power dynamic, in which it transpires that he has hired her to come to his room, night after night, to submit to his every command in his quest to experience ‘love’. She is a sex worker, with a child to support (the girl who appears in the videos) and the financial remuneration appears sufficient to consent to this arrangement. However, in one of their early encounters, as he films her whilst she sleeps, he takes a pillow to her face and begins to suffocate her. She resists and breaks free, declaring that he cannot do this, even whilst he protests that she should submit to his every desire. But she stays, and their encounters continue. Throughout this, uncomfortable close-​ups of torrid sexual encounters,

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body parts, and acts of violence are filmed on the stage and projected onto the screen above. She begins to notice upon him the ‘malady of death’, and as the play ends she leaves the hotel room, whilst he walks into the bathroom holding razor blades. According to Birch, Duras’ novella explores ‘the man’s psychology:  why he needs to go through this experience and why he needs to use the woman in this way’ (programme notes, 2018). Initially adopting the same perspective, Birch claims to have ‘recoiled’ in the early rehearsals because the experience of bodily manifesting the man’s perspective on stage, as opposed to interrogating it in a novella (where the woman conceals herself and intensifies his weakness) induced a sense of indifference –​she did not care why the man did what he did, but wanted to go through the experience with the woman. In fact, I  found that Birch’s play very much stayed with the perspective of the man, and that even though the voiceover spoke from the woman’s mind, the show as a whole seemed to interrogate his (and our) inhuman spectating, specifically the ways in which that mutates, inexorably, into suicide. As the show concluded, I found myself wanting to vomit all over the audience. It is rare that I have such an extreme reaction to theatre (I cannot remember ever feeling like this, in fact), and the reason seemed to be that I felt we had all missed a key component of the spectacle. The question that drove the piece seemed obvious, as it had to do with the product that is sold in prostitution –​namely that the client pays for a sensation which the sex worker creates artificially. There is no ‘love’ in the selling of sex; to confuse the two produced the apocalyptic destruction in How to Hold Your Breath, as discussed in Chapter 2. The man, however, was interested in the woman only as her artificial persona. At the junctures where she came ‘off script’, as it were, and taunted him with his inability to access the love that he claimed to desire, or spoke of her life beyond the hotel room, he became incapable of manifesting his desire. When he was most aroused, and when he was most violent, was when he was able to view her through the lens of his camera phone at her most vulnerable –​when she was sleeping, or when he was able to manipulate her body into poses of increasing humiliation. Towards the end of Chapter 1, I asked the following question. If the spectator could divorce themselves from an ethical responsibility to another body, would they become excited by its destruction? Throughout the book, I  have tracked the course of precisely that divorcing by the recasting of the body as an image, to the point at which the scapegoats, the sacrificial forms of our society, are now themselves manifested as images. This is how the Levinasian ‘face’ is eroded, and its rejoinder to our violent impulses, manifested for Levinas in the commandment ‘thou

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shalt not kill’, is overcome. The man accessed the woman as an image, and his desire, which in Bernard Stiegler’s terms would otherwise seek out the subjectivity of another in order to pursue concomitant ‘objects’ of desire, had instead been relegated to the drive of stupidity where what was desired was only an image. Mitchell’s show underscored this by having the camera operators focus on aspects of the on-​stage action which were then repackaged for us spectators on the screen above. At various junctures, these images included those seen through the man’s camera phone –​his drive comingling with our own, and showing us the relegation of our own desires to the statuses of drives. The mechanics of our interactions with the image were exposed. What felt particularly painful –​and I did experience the show as pain, which I will return to presently  –​was the woman’s thoughtful, cruel and accurate barb in a late-​stage conversation, as the man was disappearing into his suicidal turmoil: ‘A dead man is a strange fucking thing.’ The levels of this statement are prodigious. It takes at face value Judith Butler’s warning that evaluating the life of the other according to an impersonal set of metrics devalues the self. The man is no longer capable of engaging with the subjectivity of the other and considers them only as an image. Thus, he has lost the ability to rationalise himself as anything other than an image, which as Marie-​José Mondzain reminds us, is a thing. He is a thing; he is dead. The strangeness of his situation is compounded by its supposed eroticism, since the energy that has compelled his growing self-​realisation as a thing is a kind of sexual impulse. But, and this is the particularly queasy conclusion of this joke, it is not even the masturbatory sex which might be supposed from a sexual drive that is awakened by pornography, since the man has ceased to maintain his own subjectivity. It is a sexual drive that occurs between two things, in which no person is anywhere present. This is perhaps why I wanted to vomit on the audience; as well as angrily responding to the polite applause at a show that demonstrated the ways in which we were capable of destroying ourselves in our relationship with the image, to vomit might have been to reassert, in some bodily way, an idea of my own tangibility. Because the man seemed, to me, to be a kind of horrifying manifestation of the person absorbed into the image. It therefore made complete sense that he then went off and completed his suicide; this cemented his apotheosis. And by virtue of the fact that our own engagement with the figures on stage had been exposed as engagements with images, our position had been unveiled as one of extreme precarity. But, still, we applauded. True, this is the convention of an appreciative audience at the end of a play. I could not help feeling, however, that there

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should have been something in our experience of the drama that would drown such politeness and render appreciation impossible. Something that, in Sontag’s words, would resist co-​optation. But this was not the case. Perhaps, in the end, it was a consequence of the disposability of the image –​that is, of ourselves –​which had rendered such sensate incoherence impossible, and had returned us, smiling, to the auditorium. The subject that all of this must return to, finally, is pain. Pain emerged in the introduction to this book as a confirmation of both the singularity of performance and of the isolation of the spectator. Pain has haunted every analysis of the image in which I have engaged. Borrowing an argument from Giorgio Agamben, I have suggested that pain mirrors the lost essence at the heart of storytelling, something that we tell ourselves in a language that is alien to it. To a degree, this entire project has courted the attempt to receive and respond to pain, outwith manipulative processes that would seek to ‘co-​opt’ it into an exterior discourse. It seems relevant to state that, just as La Maladie de la Mort made me want to be physically sick, so the researching and writing of Precarious Spectatorship has proven, at many junctures and in many ways, to be painful. I also suspect that, for one reason or another, you will have found reading these pages to be a fairly painful experience. And if I am right, then the previous two sentences might be the most hopeful that I have written in the whole book.

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APPENDIX: A BRIEF HISTORY OF EMERGENCIES

The Oxford English Dictionary gives the modern meaning of ‘emergency’ as a ‘juncture that arises or “turns up”; esp a state of things unexpectedly arising, and urgently demanding immediate action’. The first use of this definition is attributed to the poet and preacher John Donne, who in 1625 proclaimed that ‘as manna tasted to every man that he liked best, so do the Psalms minister instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every emergency and occasion’ (1990, p. 171). Donne begins his sermon with a quote from Psalm 63, which reads: ‘Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I  rejoice.’ The context of this psalm is one of peril –​it was supposedly written by King David whilst he was alone and persecuted in the wilderness of Judah. In this line, David overcomes the wretchedness of his present by taking solace in a past in which he was helped by God, and a future in which he will rejoice in God’s shelter. Donne reasons that David is impervious to harm, since his concern is for a spiritual life to which he has constant access, and not the material life that is fraught with hazard. This new definition of the term, therefore, both identifies and remedies the risk constituted by emergencies. By looking to the past and future, and by prioritising those aspects of the present that transcend the material world, ‘emergencies’ in the here and now may be overcome. This establishes a precedent for Ben Anderson and Peter Adey’s model of an emergency, in which

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‘promissory and threatening futures achieve some form of presence in the here and now’, with one significant exception (2011, p. 1096). In Donne’s idea of emergency, the ‘ministration’ to which he directs his attention is located in David’s relationship to God. The psalm becomes testament to this relationship, a text offering perpetual remedy for ‘every man, in every emergency and occasion’. Thus, the corollary to ‘emergency’ is a body that stands apart from the affected situation, since it does not operate in the material world and can remain constant even, and particularly, in the face of distressing events. This is a common phenomenon in the discipline of political theology, one which Simon Critchley describes as the reliance of political organisation on ‘fiction’: government requires make-​believe, whether the belief is in the divine right of kings, the quasi-​divinity of the people that is somehow meant to find expression through the magic of representative government, the organ of the party, the radiant sun-​like will of the glorious leader, or whatever. (2014, p. 81)

In other words, any method of political organisation cannot endure without a dimension that exists purely as a belief. Now, the idea of ‘belief ’ does function in contemporary emergencies. As Adey et al. put it, ‘emergency is a term inseparable from faith in action: the promise that some form of action can make a difference to the emergent situation’ (2015, p. 3). But this is not the belief that Donne was describing, since his is a belief arbitrated by the subject for and by themselves. The belief that operates in the view described by Adey et  al. is in the capacity for an external body to remedy the emergent situation. It is a belief arbitrated by the subject to and for another. The question then arises –​where is the shift from the self-​actualised emergency that Donne describes, to the kind of emergencies which separate the spectator from the spectacle; the kind to which this book has been addressed? A useful place to begin tracing this shift is the philosopher Carl Schmitt, who in his book Political Theology (1922) linked the emergency to the figure of the Sovereign. This figure, the representative of the people charged both with identifying and responding to states of emergency, was initially compared to the divine: To the conception of God in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries belongs the idea of his transcendence vis-​à-​vis the world, just as to that period’s philosophy of the state belongs the notion of the transcendence of the sovereign vis-​à-​vis the state. (2005, p. 49)

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The power of the Sovereign (the body who stands apart) finds its ultimate expression in a principal of suspension, where the law is legitimised insofar and because it can be suspended by that Sovereign. Schmitt calls this the ‘state of exception’, a term which has since become synonymous with many legal considerations of emergencies. And, significantly, when he discusses the state of exception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Schmitt does not see the Sovereign as instrumental to its operation any more, but rather that the state of exception has become a naturally occurring phenomenon within society (ibid., p. 48). If I have read Schmitt correctly, his view of the Sovereign originally mirrors a divinity whose transcendence relies upon personal spirituality. This chimes with the relationship between David and God that Donne saw as both the emergence and remedy of emergencies. The Sovereign, at this juncture, relies upon a similar engagement with the personal. In Schmitt’s view of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, this personal connection between subject and Sovereign is no longer required, because the latter’s power has become crystallised within the mechanics of society itself. Leonard C. Feldman reads this as Schmitt proposing the contemporary state of exception as an automatic corrective, the ‘eruption of real life into the machine of the modern state’, which ‘redeems a corrupt liberal constitutional political order that had grown “torpid by repetition” ’ (2010, p. 141). Tom Sorrell then points to this as an unsavoury bent in Schmitt’s thought, one that does not direct Sovereign power towards public safety, but rather to the ‘energizing of a popular will and, for example, enabling it to realise in history a certain sort of mythic self-​image in the face of enemies’ (2013, xii). In other words, Schmitt believes that the proper function of the Sovereign in declaring the state of exception is not to protect the people, but rather to energise their own will in tune with the will of the people. Thus, as Critchley reminds us, ‘Schmitt’s argument for the state of exception as exemplifying the operation of the political is also an argument for dictatorship’ (2014, p. 106). It is not without relevance that Schmitt was an active participant in the Third Reich. Nevertheless, his ‘state of exception’ has proven hugely influential, not least because of the seemingly intractable problems that it poses. On the one hand, it appears to invalidate the laws upon which the state otherwise builds its authority, and on the other it de-​exceptionalises the exception. These are Giorgio Agamben’s conclusions when he says that the law ‘is made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exceptio: it nourishes itself on this and is a dead letter without it’ (1998, p. 27). In a later work, Agamben clarifies this process through the symbol ‘law’, designating the law that claims legitimacy through its ability to erase itself (2005, p. 39).

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A high-​ profile and particularly ghoulish example of this process was the USA and Great Britain’s legitimation of torture, in so-​called ‘black site’ prisons in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, during the US occupations between 2003 and 2006 (Sheets, 12 October 2014). The programme, whose name ‘extraordinary rendition’ directly mirrored the state of exception, employed a classification of prisoner known as ‘unlawful combatant’. This was an existing term that Knut Dörmann, writing for the Red Cross, defined as ‘all persons taking a direct part in hostilities without being entitled to do so and who therefore cannot be classified as prisoners of war on falling into the power of the enemy’ (2003). Broadly speaking, any person not affiliated with military organisations of warring states but who actively engages in those states’ conflict falls under this classification. In 2002, President Bush released a military order entitled ‘Detention, Treatment and Trial of Certain Non-​ Citizens in the War Against Terrorism’ (2002), stating that ‘an extraordinary emergency exists for national defence purposes’. Within the order he proclaimed that members of Al-​Qaeda or those with any involvement in ‘international terrorism’ (which was never defined) would come under control of the Defence Secretary. Further, given the urgency of the terror threat, that it was ‘not practicable to apply […] the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognised in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts’. The groundwork was then set for his administration’s understanding of ‘unlawful combatant’; a person who falls outside of the Geneva Convention’s provision of rights such as limited detention without evidence, and fair trial. His order thus explicitly rejects the standard ‘principles of law’, as well as defining those to be excluded from these principles by including them within the realm of exclusion. Agamben described this category of person as homo sacer, a figure scrutinised in Chapter 3 of this book. In recent years, there have been several attempts to uncouple the ‘emergency’ from Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’. Nomi Clare Lazar, for instance, argues that ‘those who embrace the exception as a discrete category in the first place provide a carte blanche for politicians. If norms are suspended, anything goes’ (2009, p. 4). Her argument tries to reframe the emergency as a moral rather than a legal phenomenon, and takes inspiration from John Locke’s liberal philosophy which states that in emergencies the government may ‘act according to discretion, for the publick good, without the prescription of the Law, and sometimes even against it’ (1980, p. 160). It is a valiant attempt to counter Schmitt’s belief that liberalism cannot cope with emergencies, and Lazar’s conclusion –​that political and moral constraints upon government are as important as legal ones –​is valuable, even if the actions of political leaders in recent history

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offer little to support this (ibid., p.  159). Might President Bush have been prevented from the excesses of torture if his administration had been forced to provide ethical and political arguments to support their enhanced interrogation programmes? It certainly didn’t deter President Trump from a campaign promise to ‘bring torture back’ in his successful bid for the US presidency… (Weaver and Ackerman, 26 January 2017). Unfortunately, therefore, Lazar’s is a rather weak argument, in addition because ethical arguments for torture are available in western philosophy in the early twenty-​first century. Sam Harris (4 April 2013), for instance, uses the ‘ticking time bomb’ thought experiment to offer a utilitarian justification of torture. Harris points to what he sees as a hypocrisy between the celebration of dropping bombs that kill large numbers of people, against the revulsion of torturing one person in order to locate a hypothetical bomb, which, unless uncovered quickly, would also kill large numbers of people. His argument charts a bizarre course through Schmitt’s state of exception: Although I  think that torture should remain illegal, it is not clear that having a torture provision in our laws would create as slippery a slope as many people imagine. We have a capital punishment provision, but it has not led to our killing prisoners at random because we can’t control ourselves. While I  am strongly opposed to capital punishment, I  can readily concede that our executing about five people every month hasn’t led to total moral chaos. Perhaps a rule regarding torture could be applied with equal restraint. (ibid.)

The fact that Harris is able to say in apparent seriousness that torture should remain illegal whilst being expressed in a legal exception demonstrates both the influence and complexity of Schmitt’s thought. The law, which by virtue of its proper name should be immutable, is predicated upon the conditions of its own suspension in exceptional circumstances. This is how we have come to understand ‘emergencies’, and these are the stakes upon which our understanding is founded. In emergencies, apparently, anything is permitted. When Harris comes to the ethics of his argument, his focus is always towards the existing horrors of war, in much the same way as was demonstrated by Hilary Benn in his speech to parliament in December 2015 (see the Introduction to this book). But although Harris’ position may be challenged in a similar fashion –​instead of justifying further atrocity by pointing to existing atrocity, the focus should be on reducing the existing atrocity –​these arguments emerge with common frequency across the moral and legal philosophies of Oren Gross (2004) and Alan Dershowitz (2011), for example. Lazar’s Lockean position,

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although appealing as a refutation of Schmitt, contains severe problems in terms of its actual application. An alternative challenge to Schmitt is offered by Tom Sorrell, who takes issue with the former’s reading of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes believed that the state of nature was one of all-​out war, and that therefore unless ‘people submit in the right way to a sovereign with unlimited power, they face war with its greatest of all calamities’ (Sorrell, 2013, p.  30). In other words, the legitimacy of both the Sovereign and the state is derived from an underpinning threat of violence which would erupt in their absence. Where Hobbes differs from Schmitt is that the former believes the Sovereign is ‘supposed to embody public and impersonal judgement, and is supposed to be a means of reducing a plurality of conflicting security plans to a single co-​ordinated plan’ (1996, xiii). Not the energising of a collective identity which leads Schmitt to Hitler, in other words, but rather the manifestation of a collective will for the security and protection of that populace. At the epicentre of this collective will is the need to protect life, and a belief that the will of the individual (as an agent in the state of nature) is irrational or life-​threatening. Thus Hobbes: the use of Lawes […] is not to bind the People from all Voluntary actions; but to direct and keep them in such a motion, as not to hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashnesse, or indiscretion […] the good of the Sovraigne and People, cannot be separated. It is a weak Sovraign, that has weak subjects and a weak People, whose Sovraign wanteth Power to rule them at his will. (ibid., p. 240)

The key to creating laws which, in a Hobbesian sense, will provide the basis for a strong Sovereign and strong populace, is to prioritise the preservation of (human) life above any and every other consideration. Under this philosophy, it is necessary that this function falls to the Sovereign as the people are incapable of extracting themselves from ‘impetuous desires, rashnesse or indiscretion’. Sorrell modifies this thinking by demonstrating that people are capable of overcoming selfish desires, even in times of peril, but keeps the essential framework of Hobbes’ model intact. Thus, Sorrell envisages a collective view of what he calls a ‘security regime’ in which all have a democratic say in the construction of laws, and in which the preservation of life outstrips any other consideration: A neo-​ Hobbesian security regime could criminalize the wearing of national costume or singing of national songs, if rioting were regularly the result of singing the relevant songs or putting on the relevant costume.

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Precarious spectatorship In criminalizing these things and preventing the expression of identity, it would not be killing off the people involved, even if each preferred death to not being able to wear the clothes or to not be able to sing the songs. On the contrary, it would be proving in a way that wearing or not wearing a costume, singing or not singing certain songs, is not the end of the world. (2013, p. 52)

This is a rather alarming vision of an absolutely homogenised society, and its tenets are strangely credulous. Sorrell himself admits that there is no especial link between a ‘frightening state of nature and specifically civil emergency’ when he observes the lack of civic breakdown in Lower Manhattan in the days following 9/​11 (ibid., p. 45). The authority upon which his security regime criminalises cultural practices is thus inherently flawed, if not entirely suspect. Also, it is not clear which ‘costumes and songs’ would be favoured by those within the security regime, or by those who had voted for its members. Sorrell’s view offers no space for the asymmetry that places some people in minority positions for whom national self-​ identification becomes a frontier of resistance against oppression, nor does he bother to determine the cause, function and/​ or direction of his hypothetical ‘riots’. What he does do is demonstrate the difficulties of narrowing the gap between Schmitt’s Hobbesianism, with its dictatorial stripping of individual agency within the apparatus of the law, and Lazar’s Lokeanism, with its weak reliance upon non-​legal constraints in order to preserve the rule of law and prevent the worst excesses of politicians in times of ‘emergency’. Further complications are opened up by Feldman, who returns the Hobbes/​Locke debate to its temporal dimension. Locke, he observes, permits the activities of state in times of emergency ‘without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it’ because ‘law-​making power […] is usually too numerous, and so too slow, for the dispatch requisite to execution’ (2010, p. 148). This kind of power is referred to as ‘prerogative power’, an exclusive power available to the prince (Locke’s word for Sovereign) which is thus not exceptional but built into the fabric of the constitution from which the Sovereign exercises their power. The problem then becomes the incremental assumption of this prerogative power by successive princes, so that ‘a good prince may be followed by a “weak and ill prince” who claims extra-​legal prerogative as “prerogative belonging to him by right of his office” ’ (ibid., p. 149). It is difficult here not to think of the unprecedented (and previously unconstitutional) powers to make war that were bequeathed to President Donald Trump by virtue of orders and directives of his predecessors (Feldman, 11 April 2017). For Feldman, therefore, to focus on the moment of decision –​ as

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Hobbes and Schmitt do –​is a mistake, since it presumes the operation of Sovereign power in what he calls a ‘normless void’. Following Foucault, Feldman sees the operation of sovereign power as ‘shaped by the logics and practices of governmentality as well as the pressures of resistant practices’ (2010, p.  152). Thus, far from being called into being at the point of urgency, prerogative power is ‘the emergence of governance as a particular set of practices, knowledge and values’ (ibid.). Feldman’s optimism is hardly borne out, however, when considering an actual case study of emergencies being used as an instrument of governance, which occurred within the project of British colonialism. Stephen Morton uses the contradictions of Schmitt’s state of exception to illustrate systems of oppression within contemporary governance, specifically those that derive from colonialism. His rationale is straightforward; whilst he does not claim the British colonies as the zones par excellence of the state of exception, still: contemporary states of emergency owe much to colonial forms of sovereignty, not only because many colonial states permitted practices such as detention without trial, torture, execution and other forms of violent state repression, but also because the practice of colonial governmentality complicated the distinction between norm and exception that underpins the rhetoric of emergency. (2013, p. 3)

It is telling, of course, how often zones outside of the domestic spaces of targeted audiences cropped up, over the course of this book, as stages for the production of emergencies. In terms of Morton’s point about ‘complicating the distinction between norm and exception’, this appears to arise as a disjuncture between the colonial subject and the rule of law. After the seventeenth century, Nasser Hussain points to a post-​civil war emphasis on the ‘rule of law’ (as opposed to the rule of the Sovereign) being the key arbiter for British self-​fashioning. It was also a driving justification for the projects of colonialism; the British depicted their ‘uncivilised’ subjects as having previously lived under despotism, and colonialists were therefore ‘overcoming the sovereign excess of despotism in favour of a rule-​bound, bureaucratic form of government’ (2003, p. 38). Parallel to these declarations, ‘states of emergency’ were commonplace under colonial rule, and a key legacy in India and Pakistan, for example, is that the courts have frequently suspended constitutional rights under the aegis of ‘emergency’ ever since. Stephen Jacobson points out that this doctrine ‘boomeranged back to the British Isles in the form of the Northern Ireland Emergency Provisions Act (1973)’ which allowed terror suspects to be tried by a

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judge without a jury (2006, p.  179). In other words, the emphasis on rule of law combined with racist ideologies that saw colonised subjects as incapable of self-​regulation under that law, enabled perpetual suspension of law to maintain the status quo. Hussain quotes an early nineteenth-​century English judge, who, presiding on a case of habeas corpus in India, complained that ‘there is always wanting that similarity of circumstance which pervades all English cases, arising from race, history, religion and constitution, and which form the unnoticed but not the less well recognized substratum of every English decision’ (2003, p.  87). The double bind was that English law was supposedly brought in to ‘civilise’ the asymmetrical despotism of ‘primitive’ Indian sovereignty, but the people of India were deemed too ‘uncivilised’ to abide by its doctrines. States of emergency  –​frequently actioned in colonialism through martial law –​were employed ostensibly as instruments of remedy. Thus, Jacobson observes, the framing of martial law within the logic of the common law: permitted publicists and apologists to continue to claim  –​genuinely or disingenuinely –​that granting rule of law to the colonies was, and remains, one of the everlasting legacies of the British empire. Reality was that the frequent use of emergency power made normalcy an increasingly precarious situation. (2006, p. 180, emphases added)

There is no small irony in the thought that the emergencies that have become commonplace apparatuses for the assumption of extraordinary power within twenty-​first-​century liberal democracies may have first been trialled as means of colonial subjugation. No small irony, but little comfort. David Scott points out that in tandem with considerations of the ‘rule of law’, the other main strategy of postcolonial study has been to ‘demonstrate how colonialist textuality works at the level of the image and language to produce a distorted representation of the colonized’ (1999, p. 22). This strategy, heavily influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism, is focussed on cultural activities of ‘writing back’, with formerly colonised subjects negotiating and tackling the practices through which they had been ‘authored’ in and by colonialism. Morton reminds us, of course, that these practices of subjugation through authorship continue more or less unabated to this day: The framing of Muslims in the dominant discourse of terrorism has also provided the justification for political techniques such as the suspension of human rights for Muslims in the diaspora, the ‘rendition’ of Muslims

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suspected of terrorism to locations beyond the jurisdictions that guarantee the rights of such prisoners and the indefinite detention of so-​called ‘enemy combatants’ at global-​war prisons. (2013, p. 212)

He provides scathing reviews of some post-​9/​11 British novels that depict Muslims in such light, and says of Martin Amis for one that his ‘framing of Muslims and of Islam as a threat to western liberal values aids and abets the argument for emergency legislation that empowers western liberal states to discipline and punish individuals it deems to be dangerous’ (ibid., p. 216). Legally, the emergency is a nebulous and imprecise entity, and this discussion of its usage under colonialism is intended to show how it became a ‘normal’ executive instrument  –​in the process, as Jacobson puts it, rendering ‘normalcy’ an increasingly precarious situation. But in colonialism, and thus in the work of post-​colonialism, it must be remembered that there is a co-​dependency of legal and cultural practices. It is significant in the example above that Morton engages with dispersed practices of control rather than the nominative topic of emergency itself. States of emergency do still exist as discrete entities within law, of course, and are used to wield executive control –​as I evidence in this book through the examples of torture under President Bush and the reprisals to the Paris attacks in 2015. But it is no longer (if indeed it ever was) sufficient to only focus on these officially declared emergencies, since state apparatuses are fully capable of legitimising their actions by appealing to an emergency without having to officially declare one. Our current understanding of emergency, as I  have endeavoured to demonstrate in this brief account, has a complex and unsavoury history. What began as an attempt to historicise (and thus provide strategies of redress) for a crisis within a current situation has variously been used to justify dictatorship, colonialism and multiple other forms of violence. In the process, emergencies have been employed to grant unprecedented powers to heads of state, and have been denuded of their historicising function. To declare an emergency, in the twenty-​first century, is both to reaffirm the hegemony of the present, and to destabilise ourselves within it.

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INDEX

2Magpies Last Resort 14, 119–​120, 121, 122, 126 ‘9/​11’ 21, 40–​41, 43, 77, 160 Adey, Peter 2–​5, 8, 112, 154 Adorno, Theodor 120–​121 Agamben, Giorgio 11, 61–​62, 82–​83, 102, 114, 131–​134, 137, 153, 156–​157 Ahmed, Sara 73–​74 al-​Kasasbeh, Moaz  42, 54 al-​Khateeb, Hamza  39 Altintas, Mevlut Mert 93–​97, 98, 100, 102, 132, 150 Alvarez, Al 79, 98, 100–​101 Anderson, Ben 2–​5, 8, 112, 154 apocalypse 41, 68–​69, 71, 101, 138, 140 Aristotle Poetics 79 Artaud, Antonin 14, 143, 146–​149

Badiou, Alain 20 Bagshaw, Rachel The Shape of the Pain 10–​12 Baldwin, Alec 117 Barker, Howard 37–​38 Barthes, Roland 37 Baudrillard, Jean 92 Benjamin, Walter 57–​58, 60–​62, 77, 130 Benn, Hilary 2–​3, 5, 61, 133, 141, 158 Bharucha, Rustom 96, 147–​148 Bigley, Kenneth 23–​24, 31, 83–​84 bin Laden, Osama 23, 25, 40–​41, 53 Birch, Alice Anatomy of a Suicide 14, 103–​105 La Maladie de la Mort 14, 150–​152 Blair, Tony 41, 76 Brecht, Bertolt 57, 127 ‘Brexit’ 145 Brooker, Charlie Black Mirror 97–​98 Brown, Michael 39

173

173

Index Bush, George W. 41, 49, 76, 157–​158, 163 Butler, Judith 7, 9, 17, 49, 52–​53, 65, 85, 113, 121, 134, 138, 152 Cameron, David 19–​21, 42, 42, 50, 87, 133, 143–​144 Camus, Albert 82, 98 Charlie Hebdo attacks 18 Christianity 40, 72, 82, 84, 146 Coren Mitchell, Victoria 22 Critchley, Simon 90, 104, 105, 150, 155 Darkfield Flight 14, 140 Davis, Katelyn Nicole 89, 97, 98, 100, 102, 132, 150 death execution 22–​25, 28–​29, 31–​34 limits of the visual 36, 40–​46, 56, 144–​145 repetition 116, 121 storytelling 61–​62, 127 see also suicide, IS Delacroix, Eugene 54, 58 Deleuze, Gilles 73, 116, 121 Derrida, Jacques 21, 50, 63, 77, 100, 133 Donne, John 15, 154–​155 Duffy, Andy Crash 14, 125, 127–​130, 131 Eagleton, Terry 81–​82, 85, 106 emergencies 2–​5, 47, 71, 74–​75, 81, 83, 97, 106, 108, 112–​113, 147–​148 colonialism 161–​163 French state of emergency 16–​17 legal framing 17–​18 155–​157, 159–​161 narratives of 50–​51, 72, 100, 133, 141 performance of 3–​4, 8, 65–​66 phenomenology of 75–​78

protocol 2, 76, 87, 118, 148 spirituality 154–​155 storytelling 57–​58, 61–​63, 114, 127, 139 Emmot, Stephen Ten Billion 8–​9 Emwazi, Mohammed 20–​21, 31 Facebook 24, 42, 89–​90, 93 Farage, Nigel 51 Featherstone, Vicky 66, 71 Feldman, Leonard C. 156, 160–​161 Fey, Tina 116 Foley, James 19, 23, 32, 35–​36, 42 Forced Entertainment Real Magic 14, 115, 117, 121, 126 Foucault, Michel  3, 161 Freud, Signmund 72, 121 Girard, René 81 Goto, Kenji 19, 23, 42 Haines, David 19, 23, 42 Harris, Sam 72, 158 Harris, Zinnie How to Hold Your Breath 13, 66–​71, 72, 73, 128, 139 Heidegger, Martin 73 Henning, Alan 19, 23, 42 Hobbes, Thomas 15, 159–​160 Hollande, François 16 Horkheimer, Max 120–​121 Hughes, Jenny 23–​24, 31, 36, 83, 116, 127, 132–​133, 147 Hurley, Kieran Heads Up 1, 3, 14, 138–​140, 141–​142 Islamic State (IS) 1–​4, 12–​13, 25–​29 execution videos 1, 23, 25, 30–​34, 39, 47, 62, 91, 143–​144 ‘Paris attacks’ 1, 3, 16 see also ‘Jihadi John’

174

174 Jameson, Frederic 139–​140 ‘Jihadi John’ 19–​22, 24, 26, 32, 50, 61, 76 see also Islamic State (IS) Kassig, Peter 19, 23 Kristeva, Julia 56, 72, 149 Kurdi, Alan 50 Lazar, Nomi K. 2–​3, 157–​158 Lehmann, Hans-​Thies  107 Levinas, Emmanuel 7, 13, 50, 52–​53, 72–​73, 134 ‘Levinasian face’ 57, 62, 85, 100, 152 Locke, John 15, 157 London Bridge attacks, June 2017 109–​110 Miller, Arthur 80 Mirzoeff, Nichols 49–​50, 52, 65 Mitchell, Katie 8, 103, 152 Mondzain, Marie-​José 16, 40, 45, 47, 58, 84, 146, 152 Nitschke, Philip 101 Obama, Barack 41 Ontrorend Goed £¥€$ (Lies) 14, 124–​126 Audience 123–​124 Fight Night  117 Internal 124 pain 10–​12, 55, 56, 145, 152, 153 Palin, Sarah 116 Paul, Logan 90–​91, 94, 98 pornography 31, 42–​44, 45, 58, 98, 123, 152 Rancière, Jacques 6–​8, 10, 97 intolerable image 8, 92–​3, 99, 141 refugee crisis 48–​49, 51–​52 Robson, Mark 99–​100

Index Said, Edward 162 Sartre, Jean Paul 58, 62 Schmitt, Carl 15, 85–​86, 87, 155–​156, 158, 161 Sontag, Susan 38, 99, 149, 153 Sophocles Antigone 107 Sorrell, Tom 156, 159 Sotloff, Steven 19, 23, 42 Stiegler, Bernard Antigone Complex 107 desire 12, 118, 121, 152 future 70–​71, 77, 113–​114, 132 re-​enchantment  131 reproducibility 137–​138 spirit/​spiritual misery 13, 63–​65, 67, 69, 102, 119, 129 suicidal society 88, 106 storytelling 11–​12, 57–​63, 114, 127–​128, 130–​134, 140–​142, 153 suicide 13–​14, 53, 62, 104, 111, 149, 151–​152 Anatomy of a Suicide see Birch, Alice autoimmunitary 21 Bridgend teenage suicides 101 sacrifice 107, 110 suicidal image 89–​97, 113, 150 suicidal spectatorship 97–​103 suicide bombers 30, 96, 99 terrorism 5, 19–​20, 29–​32, 45, 86–​87, 102, 110, 157, 162–​163 Thatcher, Margaret 125 Theatre Conspiracy Foreign Radical 14, 122–​123, 124, 126 Thomas, Mark The Red Shed 14, 134–​137 Thorpe, Chris Shape of the Pain, The 10–​12 torture 28, 39, 41, 72, 87, 91, 113, 120–​122, 157–​158, 161, 163

175

175

Index tragedy 79–​82, 102, 106–​108, 110–​111 Trump, Donald 14, 86–​89, 117, 133, 145, 158, 160 Trump Jr., Donald 51–​52 Twitter 24, 42, 88 Vanishing Point Destroyed Room, The 13, 54–​57, 58–​60, 62–​63, 65–​66, 93, 98, 113, 127 Ventriloquism 34–​35, 45–​46, 56–​57, 97

Virilio, Paul 28, 45–​46, 60, 83, 101, 143–​145 Wall, Jeff 54, 58 Williams, Raymond 81 YouTube 24, 25, 42, 90 Yukawa, Haruna 19, 23, 42 al-​Zarqawi, Abu Musab 23, 25–​26, 31, 41 Zephanaiah, Benjamin 48, 71 Žižek, Slavoj 42, 72–​73, 75–​76, 114