Meaning in the Midst of Performance (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies) [1 ed.] 9780367142308, 9781032660967, 9780429030819, 0367142309

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Meaning in the Midst of Performance

Being an audience participant can be a confusing and contradictory experience. When a performance requires us to do things, we are put in the situation of being both actor and spectator, of being part of the work of art while also being the audience who receives it, and of being both perceiving subject and aesthetic object. This book examines these contradictions – and many others – as they appear by accident and by design in increasingly popular forms of interactive, immersive, and participatory performance in theatre and live art. Borrowing concepts from cognitive philosophy and bringing them into a conversation with critical theory, Gareth White sharply examines meaning as a process that happens to us as we are engaged in the problems and negotiations of a participatory performance. This study will be of great interest to scholars and students of theatre and performance, intermedial arts and games studies, and to practising artists. Gareth White is Reader in Theatre and Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

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Meaning in the Midst of Performance Contradictions of Participation

Gareth White

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Gareth White The right of Gareth White to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9780367142308 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032660967 (pbk) ISBN: 9780429030819 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

1

Watching, doing, meaning33

Contradiction 1: Watching

35



Contradiction 2: Action

49



Contradiction 3: Body

61

Other people/other things

77



Contradiction 4: Object

79



Contradiction 5: Affect

90



Contradiction 6: Play

2

101

3

Autonomy/Identity115

Contradiction 7: Authenticity

117



Contradiction 8: Mediation

126



Contradiction 9: Identity

139

vi Contents 4

Conclusion: Culture, crisis, aesthetics153

Contradiction 10: Culture

155



Contradiction 11: A Post Covid Coda

168

Index185

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Jo Machon and Adam Alston for encouragement, fellowship, and feedback, and to Tony Fisher and Sylvan Baker for nudging me towards clarity at different points on the journey. Thank you to PhD candidates past and present, for the insights shared along the way: Jo Ronan, Dave Calvert, and Philip Watkinson for showing the promise of dialectical thinking and Tuomas Laitinen, Hannah Rowlands, and Helen Evans for their provocative models of complex audiencing. Thank you to the organisers of the following events for generous invitations to speak and opportunities to air ideas that have found their way into this book: The Canadian Association of Theatre Research Annual Conference, University of Calgary, 2016; Commit Yourself! Strategies of Staging Spectators in Immersive Theater, Freie Universität Berlin, 2016; and The Critical Care Symposium, South Bank University, London, 2018. Thank you to the Playing with Intimacy and Intensity network, for our seriously playful workshops and conversations in 2019 and 2020, especially Bruce Barton; and to Persis-Jade Maravala and Jorge Lopez-Ramos, whose work finds its way into many of these pages. Thank you to colleagues and students on Contemporary Performance Practice and the Research Office at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, for giving me space. To Laura Hussey at Routledge for patience as the world asserted its disregard for the best-laid plans. Thank you to Dr. Richard Pearce and Tamsin Pearce, for cheering from the pavement as the book staggered the last mile or three.

Introduction

In the beginning… ‘I’m free!’ exclaims the woman standing in front of me. She is facing a naked man, who has just undressed himself and has been speaking to her, and to the rest of us, in a language I don’t understand or recognise, and I guess nor do most of us. She has her hands raised, echoing his gesture, as she may be translating or echoing what she understands or feels she understands of his words. She is smiling, beaming at him, he smiles back for a moment, holding her gaze before walking through the small crowd and out of the room. This is a moment from dreamthinkspeak’s In the Beginning Was the End.1 After wandering through many rooms under London’s Somerset House, rooms which appear as either chaotic and grubby laboratories or sparklingly new marketing suites, audience members might find themselves amidst a scene in a call centre. We might find a group of customer service agents in rebellion against their workplace. We would find ourselves able to move around the room, to read, on eight or nine outsize computer monitors, the text of comically impotent replies to customer complaints relating to products that had been demonstrated in other rooms earlier in our wanderings. We would be at liberty also to interact with the performers although they communicated in a baffling mix of languages – Greek, Russian, German, Italian, Japanese, and others, and perhaps hybrid and nonsensical languages too. We might stay long enough to discover that the scene is cyclic: with exchanges of increasingly angry dialogue from the workers at their desks, until one of them stands and removes her or his clothes and storms out, to return later with a manager, the rest of the workers one by one joining the protest, stripping off and storming out, so that the manager is left alone – with any audience present – ruefully but with some relief undressing and leaving, whereupon they all return to sheepishly dress themselves and go back to work. And the cycle would begin again. In my own experience of this event, at the climactic point of the scene and as I witnessed the cycle repeating, among the crowd of spectators was an older woman, easily the oldest person among the gathered audience and performers. As the workers rebelled, undressed and left, she found herself facing one of them as he removed his underpants and raised his arms into the DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-1

2 Introduction air with a beatific smile on his face and said some words in a language which was not English. ‘I’m free!’ she said. A tiny moment, but an interesting one: a moment when the meaning of the scene changed for the woman in question and for the rest of us with her. This book is interested in moments like this in performance participation, where a person is part of a performance while also remaining part of the audience. But this book is as much interested in how this moment meant, as what it meant. This book’s aim is to interrogate the processes of meaning-making as they are stretched, tested, and re-constituted in performance participation, and in the contradictions, confusions, and complications that ensue. What was going on for this woman, at this point? What was her dramaturgical role? What was her aesthetic situation? If her words and gestures become part of the play, what is her relationship to them, as aesthetic objects? Should we think of her body as an aesthetic object, given that other audience members (and at least theoretically she herself) are experiencing these words and gestures as part of a performance? And as the words and gestures don’t produce themselves, and nor does the work of art direct her to produce them (in this case, at least), what about the personality and subjectivity that does produce them? Are they now part of the work of art too? We could read this moment as an interjection into the play, an interpretation of an ambiguous action – that the call-centre manager becoming naked was a moment of liberation, and that speaking the words ‘I’m free’ aloud echoed this; or alternatively read it as engaging with the action ‘as if’ she was in the scene with the performer, joining in the moment of liberation, though stopping short of undressing. In either case, it is a response to the performance in the moment and to the experience of the performance up to this moment. We might assume, too, that it is a response informed by her life experiences, including but not restricted to her theatre-going experiences prior to this event. It is a choice that follows other choices that are required of audience members in a work like this, conscious choices about how long to stay in the room and where to stand, what to look at, along with matters of impulse, chance and the consequences of choices made earlier in the journey through the performance, such as when each spectator discovers the room, and how many others are there. My own experience of this scene was inflected by the moment when I arrived at the room, in the middle of the argument between boss and workers, to see a pile of clothes on the floor and as a woman exultantly added hers to the pile and berated a suited man in a language that might have been Greek. I made my choices: to read all of the customer e-mails on the computer screens, to stay to re-watch the scene from what I decided was its starting point, and to learn that the manager was played by a different actor each time, as was the first protesting worker. I wandered around the room when it was empty, and again when the workers returned. I loitered in a corner and watched other spectators come into and go from what might have seemed to them a nearly static installation. I tried to follow the dialogue from scraps of different languages, tried to discern who was speaking what, and I incorporated

Introduction  3 this into my conscious interpretation of the scenario (as … a global, market oriented organisation that had devoured an earlier economy of science and engineering exemplified in the grubby and chaotic laboratories found earlier in the journey...?) My choices shaped this scene, giving me creative input, but more than this, the things I did, and even the way I took my choices became part of the experience, part of the work of art, for me and at least peripherally for other audience members who are there with me. Loitering in a corner, or peering over shoulders looking at screens, I was part of the scene, for myself and others. In performance participation, we watch interactions, and we experience interactions as we take part in them. We witness our own actions, we experience ourselves taking action – or, indeed, ‘acting’ in a number of senses – we experience ourselves experiencing. We do all of these things just as we do in everyday, mundane experience – able to both experience what we do, and to observe it, to treat it as a thing apart from us. To be a subject is also always to be able to treat ourselves and our actions as objects. In this context, however, we are also doing and experiencing as part of a work of art: we are simultaneously creating a performance, becoming part of a performance, and being its audience; being at the same time the artist, the artist’s medium and the viewer. It is the complexity that can be very quickly found by extrapolating just some ways of describing this situation – this proliferation of contradictions – that I address in this book. The starting point is not that actor and spectator are essentially opposite states, or that bringing them together in performance is itself a contradiction, it is that contradictions emerge from the diverse ways that actor and spectator as roles and points of view shift and re-orient themselves in performance participation. As Jacques Rancière says We do not have to transform spectators into actors, and ignoramuses into scholars. We have to recognise the knowledge at work in the ignoramus and the activity peculiar to the spectator. Every spectator is already an actor in her story; every actor, every man of action, is the spectator of the same story.2 Spectatorship is an activity, and theatrical spectatorship is an activity that has its own historically situated expertise and understanding. It is now in a period of change, where many theatregoers understand their role differently or expect that they may be offered a role that requires more of them than ‘mere’ watching, while others are yet to catch up or catch on to the expectations for this new spectatorship. But just as new forms of spectatorship don’t transform audiences wholesale to create a new theatrical community all at once, nor does the knowledge of new ways of being a spectator abolish expectations and traces of previous spectatorship. The complexities of being a witness to one’s own everyday behaviour persist in the performance context, exacerbated by inherited roles and practices, and by the structuring of the division of roles as part of the performance itself. Contradictions, then, are, in

4 Introduction part, specific; they result from the dramaturgical manipulation of the hybrid role of the spectator-actor, to produce situations where, for example, I enact things that seem both mine and not mine, or find it impossible to perceive the boundaries between a work of art and my own experience of it. In the example above, the woman’s gesture can become part of the performance, without contradiction, adding an unexpected dimension to the scene, and yet in the roles allocated to her, there remains the contradiction of being both (suddenly) a performer, and (still) an audience member – part of a group that has assembled specifically not to be performers. This magnifies the contradiction pointed out by Stanley Cavell, for whom the actor always presents both a personal self and a character You can’t point to one without pointing to the other […] and you can’t point to both at the same time. Which is to say that pointing here has become an incoherent activity’.3 For Cavell, this incoherence becomes part of a critique of theatricality, but for me, it is the starting point for a celebration of incoherence, in moments of performance that are stronger because their failure to cohere is built in. Meaning as a question This book is about how meaning is made, between people, between bodies, between artworks and people participating in them, and in the encounters between people and themselves, as provoked in performance participation. It is not about how performances are made, neither about creative process nor about the artistic intensions of those that I have called, elsewhere, the ‘procedural authors’4 of moments of participation. It might be considered a work in the tradition of ‘reception studies’ though it is more precisely concerned with complicating the idea of reception itself. It investigates how performance participation becomes meaningful because we have a perspective upon ourselves doing it, as well as upon the other aspects of performance that are separate from ourselves. This book will theorise this experiencing of our own experience. As in the paragraphs above, it is the overlapping of diverse meaning producing interactions that creates the complexity of participating in performances, and it is this peculiar complexity that makes meaning an inviting question. A combination of theoretical perspectives is outlined later in this introduction, but prior to that there are some starting points for the enquiry to map out – not so much research questions, as assumptions from which to frame questions about performance participation, and assumptions to test through close analysis of moments of participation. These are 1 That meaning is a physical process as well as a cognitive and rational process – it happens to us, as embodied beings.

Introduction  5 2 That meaning is not only subjective, but intersubjective – it happens between people as well as happening to us. 3 And that these aspects of meaning are especially true of aesthetic meaning, and even more especially true of participatory art forms. This approach is intended to take the question of meaning in performance back to some fundamentals. There is a wealth of ideas to draw on about how understanding happens to conscious subjects, how meaning is a continual process, and how the mind itself emerges out of the continual synthesis of embodied experience. There are also many perspectives on the meaning of aesthetic experience, with different conceptions of the importance of a relationship between the experiencer, as aesthetic subject, and an aesthetic object. By excavating some versions of these basic levels of the event of meaning in performance, I aim to re-think performance participation from the roots upwards, rather than working down from questions concerning its potential to empower or transform a participant, or conversely about its tendency to coerce or bully, or to replicate existing power structures.5 The ideas that I will draw on come from a range of fields, not all of which are sympathetic to each other at first sight, or even after working with the tensions between their concepts, assumptions, or methods. This is a deliberate strategy. Taking inspiration from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,6 I seek out contradictions rather than avoiding or resolving them. Adorno has demonstrated how this is an essential tool for understanding the mutable and shifting nature of artworks, and I propose that this, too, is especially so for the art experiences of performance participation. Meaning as something that happens is a formulation borrowed from contemporary theories of enactive cognition – as proposed by writers such as Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, or Shaun Gallagher7 – where the production of meaning from the ‘coupling’ of organism and environment is key. Both minds and subjective experiences are taken to be products of this process of meaning-making, in this theory, rather than either as recipients or constructors of meaning, or collections of representations of a meaningful exterior reality, respectively. It is exciting to consider performance participation from this perspective, where a meaningful world appears because of active engagement rather than the representation in the mind of external phenomena presented to us. This might be deployed as an image of the situation when we participate, emphasising that we produce the world of performance along with performance makers, and that its meaning emerges because of our engagement. But I intend to show that a more thoroughgoing exploration of enactivism is more rewarding, that this radical and persuasive account of what mind, experience, and subjectivity consist of reveals new insights about how performance, and participatory performance in particular, works. To bring a further edge to thinking about meaning-making in this way, I turn to a collection of critical theorists, first among them Adorno, initially via his Aesthetic Theory, and then other works that adumbrate his complex and

6 Introduction challenging perspective on the nature of artworks, subjectivity, and thinking with contradiction. To some extent, the enquiry about participatory performance experience is a pretext to explore how the theories of embodied cognition and enactive mind can be synthesised with critical theory. Among others, Brian Massumi’s8 thinking about affective politics and the aesthetics of the ‘occurrent arts’ offers a more sympathetic and optimistic source than Adorno’s; Slavoj Žižek9 offers a more contemporary perspective on the politics of subjectivity. Yoking enactivism to Adorno’s astringent political scepticism is intended as a severe test of its potential but is also based on a conviction that the exploration of contradiction in Aesthetic Theory has the flexibility to work with contemporary philosophy of mind because it is a theory of the inherent mutability of the concept of the aesthetic. In the coming discussion, the cognitive emerges in conversation with the aesthetic, sometimes with the two appearing to collapse into each other, as in Mark Johnson’s aesthetics of continuity,10 and sometimes with their oppositions laid bare. This is a variation of the dichotomy of autonomy and heteronomy in philosophical aesthetics, where the cognitive tells us about the meaning of the body in mundane experience, in tension with an aesthetic frame which is marked off from the mundane. In performance participation, we are in the event as social and physical beings, as much as the works themselves are at play across our bodies and subjectivities as aesthetic objects, both belonging to us and autonomous of us. My intention is to put the enactivist approach to work, but supplementing it with questions about the personal, social, and aesthetic context of performance, and about the politically determining situation that human organisms are enactively coupled to. I intend to leave many of the tensions unresolved because those tensions can be productive, where, for example, the tension between the cognitive and the aesthetic should resist a totalising or reifying synthesis. Arts scholarship can and should acknowledge that knowledge is growing rapidly in the empirical understanding of conscious experience and that the philosophy of mind is responding with terms that address some core concerns for artists and arts researchers. This doesn’t entail an allencompassing scientifically led theory of art or a rejection of critical theory, but it demands to be taken into account, and rewards it too. In How Theatre Means, Ric Knowles warns that cognitivist approaches to meaning (of which enactivism would be a subset) carry: ‘…the risk of privileging the individual and psychological over the social and historical’. He sees the role of cognitivism as: […] reminding performance analysis that meaning is the multi-faceted product of thought, emotion, and physiological response working together’.11 His preference is for an updated semiotic analysis, with a focus on theatre’s ‘languages’, including gesture, design, and image, as well as the verbal, and

Introduction  7 its ways of encoding and decoding. It is my proposal that cognitivism’s role may be more radical and that a radical approach is needed when reconstructing the complexities of participation, but his warning should be born in mind. Emotion and physiological response don’t evade society, history and politics any more than does thought: they are the basis of and the instruments of each of these contexts. In an earlier book, Reading the Material Theatre, Knowles frames his analysis with the three poles of performance: conditions of production and conditions of reception, each intersecting in the specific material conditions out of which meaning arises.12 These are, indeed, vital elements of how theatre means, and inform the analysis in the following chapters, but there is a further material condition for meaning, beneath semiosis and beneath each of these three rather than alongside them, which I will frame as the body and its enactive coupling with an environment, and the emergence of a subjective point of view from the context of a cultured body actively maintaining itself. What all of these theories do have in common is that they are ways of thinking about subjectivity, experience, and meaning as braided processes, though they may not name them as such, and pursue these ideas from different starting points. The questions of subjectivity, experience, and meaning, and their objects, are formulated variously in each through ideas of uncertainty, emergence, contradiction, and instability. In this book, I will pursue the intuition that performance participation (and participatory performance) is particularly unsympathetic to being treated as a matter of ‘performance text’, analogous to static written texts, and amenable to the same techniques of analysis and interpretation, as if meaning is produced by a spectator of performance, in a relationship with a more or less stable performance given by others, at some kind of distance. If an artwork emerges from a participatory process, there is a good chance that the instability of the coupling of performance with participant has played an important part in the quality and content of this new aesthetic object. The moment described above is one where stability is undermined, and something new emerges: my fellow audience member made a decision, or followed an impulse, or found herself doing something unscripted. She became, briefly, creative artist, art object, and audience simultaneously. If this moment is integrated into her experience of the performance as a work of art, she experiences her own subjectivity as an aesthetic object. How do we conceptualise this? What does it mean to make the work, be the work and respond to it, simultaneously? How is this different to the meaning that arises out of awareness of our own mundane experience? If this book has anything to offer about the meaning of participation as such, it is through the answers that it offers to questions like this about the event of meaning-making. Meaning always comes to us in the midst: of circumstance, of context, of action, and of reflection. Performance that invites us into its midst magnifies this, in what I hope to show are complex and interesting ways.

8 Introduction Performance participation The moment above is an example of uninvited audience participation, to use terminology set out in my earlier book Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation.13 However, things are framed differently here. As I noted in the introduction to that book, all theatre, indeed, all performance, is participatory; it depends on the involvement of people in all sorts of roles, and it depends on the participation of audience members as well as that of performers and other skilled and prepared contributors, even when the role of the audience is to sit quietly and safely in the dark. There is much to be gained from considering the transformation of audience into performer separately, as I did in that book, but also – conversely – to think about the different kinds of participation in performance events together rather than separately. This book takes a small step towards that. Several of the performance experiences I will describe and use to springboard my discussion start with the assumption that those attending will participate to an extent that might obviate the framing of audience participation noted above. In short, they seem not to be premised upon the idea of an audience at all. For example, Ontroerend Goed’s £¥€$, fanSHEN’s Justice Syndicate, ZU:UK’s Binaural Dinner Date and Perfect Stranger, and Dismantle This Room at the Royal Court invite us in advance to play a game, simulate a jury, go on a date, meet a stranger online, and solve an escape room, respectively. However, in dreamthinkspeak’s In The Beginning Was The End, National Theatre Wales’ Tide Whisperer and STORM: 3, Coney Young Company’s The Droves, Access All Areas’ MADHOUSE re:exit, Mark and Marichka Marczyk’s Counting Sheep, and Jamal Harewood’s The Privileged, though an active audience is signalled in advance publicity or advice to audiences before attending, we are framed as an audience, rather than being given another, different role. These are not absolute distinctions, those attending the former events haven’t ceased to be theatre audiences, but we can conjecture that their expectations of what a theatre audience does can include such roles and hybrid forms. The cultural understanding of a theatre audience is altering such that audiences accept these invitations as intrinsic to a performance, and often adapt to them easily. To avoid either redefining or fudging the issue of audience participation and the invitations needed to make it happen, I have adopted the term ‘performance participation’ to frame an idea of the activity of performance that is inclusive without being too baggy to be of use. Performance participation, for my purposes, is audience participation in the most active sense associated with the term, both when this participation is invited during the performance, and where participation is the basis of the event and understood as such, invited in advance so to speak. It is a concept that could also accommodate longer-term participation, in projects and processes, by those invited by professionals to contribute in ways they wouldn’t normally contribute, and it’s also potentially the participation of those professionals

Introduction  9 themselves, along with the participation that is asked of us in more conventional, ‘non-participatory’ events. The participation of audiences, in general, can be looked at through the lens of performance participation, as can all sorts of related activity – rehearsing, auditioning, ticket purchase, socialising, journalism, dressing up or down, being a fan of or protesting about performance. This book doesn’t encompass all of these activities, but it considers a little more than what I have previously considered under the name of audience participation. The lens of performance participation focuses on two things and their interaction: first, being on show and, second, engaging ourselves. The first is obvious: if this is a performance situation, then things are on show, people are on show, in ways that are continuous with but also marked out from the performances that people and things give in everyday life. To think about performances extending ‘beyond the stage’ in diverse ways is not new: performance as a ‘border discipline’ was pioneered by Dwight Conquergood,14 for example, for its capacity to capture the cultural self-articulations of communities and individuals, along with its application as a method for uncovering non-theatrical performances and the performative implication of the ethnographic researcher. More recently, the essays in Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki’s Performing Antagonism excavate a specific political dynamic in a range of on- and off-stage performances, including Olympic wrestling, the occupy movement, and ‘political suicide’ after the Greek Euro crisis.15 Theatre appropriates non-theatrical performance at every level, re-contextualising gestures great and small and re-iterating them as its own material. Thinking of the process of joining a performance as ‘engaging’ turns around the concept of socially or politically engaged performance, where theatre makers ‘choose performance to respond to social controversies’, exploiting its ‘compelling expressive potential’16 so that it is the participant who engages with the performance, coupling themselves to it. To become engaged is to commit something to the performance, to surrender something of our everyday selves to it to be re-shaped and re-presented within its boundaries. These are two sides of the same thing, the transformation of ordinary matter (bodies, their gestures and voices, our performative appearance to each other as social beings, and so on) into performance, putting it on show in the moment of performance, and engaging something of the meaning that this ordinary matter has at other times and in other contexts.17 Performance participation puts ordinary bodies and their actions on show in formal performance, sometimes with the minimum of translation or delay. These bodies commit something to the participatory artwork, something more than is committed to ‘static’ art works, even though many of them may ask for substantial commitment. This recalls recurring questions of political participation, in performative events as well as in dogged constructive action. Does it ‘mean’ anything to make a show of our commitment? Undoubtedly, it must mean something to us as individuals. But the connection of this to something more broadly meaningful deserves exploration too: what thread joins that

10 Introduction which is meaningful to me and what it means to other people; what’s the thread from performance to change (all over again)? Every action will be inflected by our decision to commit to it, by how the invitation is made and how we measure our own response to it. Enactivism My framing of enactivism draws on a number of sources, beginning with Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch’s foundational The Embodied Mind,18 which proposes enactivism on the basis of a combination of continental phenomenology, biological systems theory and Buddhist meditation, and Evan Thompson’s encyclopaedic Mind in Life, which draws on a huge body of neuroscience to develop the enactive thesis. Others that direct their focus more narrowly include Shaun Gallagher, including in How the Body Shapes the Mind and Enactivist Interventions,19 where ideas about the embodied element of enactive cognition develop further. Alvo Noë’s enactivism in Action in Perception extends the concept of coupling to questions about perception, asserting that perception is principally ‘sensorimotor knowledge’, the application of skills which allow us to combine and collate sensory information from different modalities, perspectives and orientations. It is active know-how that raises organism-environment coupling above simple stimulus and response, towards orientation in space, comprehension of objects and their meaning, and coordinated engagement, rather than the interpretation of representational sensory data. In two less technical and tightly analytical books Varieties of Presence and Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature,20 these insights are extended to address broader themes: styles of engagement with objects (such as the world, pictures, ideologies), and aesthetic theory, respectively. Daniel Hutto and Erick Myin advocate for a programme of Radicalising Enactivism,21 particularly pushing to reinforce the rejection of the role of representation in cognition, while Ezequiel di Paolo (with several different collaborators) has begun the work of connecting enactivism to social interaction.22 Varela, Thompson, and Rosch summarise in several ways; for example, they say: In a nutshell, the enactive approach consists of two points: (1) perception consists in perceptually guided action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perpetually guided.23 It is the second point that is perhaps the most profound, as ‘cognitive structures’ cover so much in terms of what minds do and are, but are preceded by action and the sensorimotor patterning of interactions with an environment. Following the logic that minds emerge from what organisms do to sustain

Introduction  11 themselves in their environment, rather than having a life distinct from that active interrelation, leads them to propose that: Human cognition is not the grasping of an independent outside world by a separate mind or self, but instead the bringing forth or enacting of a dependent world of relevance in and through embodied action.24 The organism brings forth its world through its interaction with what is relevant to it, it is ‘coupled’25 to its environment and achieves much of what is necessary to it without representing that environment internally, or separately from its activity. Representations do occur in sophisticated minds like ours, but they are secondary to the grounding of sensorimotor activity that brings about our sense of a world around us. This view is inspired equally by continental phenomenology (for example, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) and American pragmatism (for example, John Dewey and Henry James), and takes mind as what emerges as meaning when the body and brain go about the business of sustaining themselves and engaging with their environment. Enactivism evolves from earlier forms of cognitivism, notably through the rejection of models based on symbol handling and computation. It is sometimes framed as part of a broader turn in cognitive philosophy, known as the 4Es framework,26 where the mind is thought of as embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive: four closely connected approaches that share a view of mind as a connected and active process rather than a phenomenon isolated within the brain. It is firmly anti-cartesian and tends to call out any theory that retains remnants of a mind-body split, or a ‘homunculus fallacy’27 where there is a mind within the brain, watching and interpreting the representations provided by the sense apparatus. The orientation to active coupling with the world tends to steer away from explanations that are purely neurological: it’s not the brain that does the thinking, but the whole animal28 I propose that this is a rich source of fresh ideas about what is going on when individuals interact, explore, interpret, and make choices, as we do in such concentrated instances in participatory performances. Participatory works engage us in processes of activity, they couple with us. As ever this is a subset of the processes of engagement deployed by all art works, and the activity that brings the work to life is on a spectrum with the cognitive, perceptual, and physical activity that activates any work of art. But the invitation to action, and the necessity of a response of some kind, initiating a partnership between acting spectator and artwork as process, is a kind of coupling. Like two partners in a dance who bring forth each other’s movements, organism and environment enact each other through their structural coupling.29

12 Introduction As well as drawing forth action, enactivism says that our coupling is what brings forth a world. For Josephine Machon, performance potentially ‘reorients in another place’30 imaginatively and scenographically; coupled to an imaginative environment, we bring forth an imaginary world. In Alva Noë’s theory of perception, our understanding of the world around us is an achievement, not a passive reception of sense-data. Again, the analogy with participatory art is inviting, and the language evocative: Our attitude to the world is not that of the voyeur. Nor is it primarily, or usually, intellectual, which is not to say that it is divorced from understanding, knowledge, or the intellect. We look at the world, yes, but the world looks back! We are always in the midst of making adjustments to the world around us. And we are always liable to be caught in the act.31 The preference for systems, networks, subnetworks, and interdependence, over representation, interpretation, and response to an independent world, strikingly evokes the involvement and interconnection invited and celebrated by interactive art. But borrowing enactivism for performance cannot stop at this, adopting cognitive philosophy as if – because supported by empirical science – it offers a fully formed theory of meaning in performance. Bringing these ideas into conversation with critical theory – from the Frankfurt school and more recent interventions – has the following advantages: embedded and extended meaning both gain a better sense of the social and political context into which mind extends or is embedded; embodied meaning becomes a contested site, both locus of oppression and self-assertion, as we pay attention to the differences between bodies and the socially determined dimensions of what and how they mean. And finally, enactive meaning, with its focus on the precarious situation out of which we achieve the feeling of being and having a unified self, becomes a question of the circumstances that realise and individuate us. Bringing critical theory into play complements cognitivism’s account of subjectivity. From different directions, both give us a picture of subjectivity (and along with it identity and positionality) as emergent from processes that carry on independently of it, in conflict with habits of self-perception as a unified and autonomous subject. This is an irresolvable contradiction, but a revealing one, drawing attention to the potential of participatory performance to work across and between these poles, magnifying our sense of autonomy at some points, or our interconnection or our irrationality at others. This adoption of enactivism joins a branch of the ‘cognitive humanities’ that exploits developments in cognitive science and philosophy without asserting a paradigm shift towards the kinds of scientific, explanatory models proposed in either neauroaesthetics or evolutionary cultural studies.32 But

Introduction  13 the traffic is not only one-way: the humanities are always situated and social, and social situation is fundamental to cognition. What humanities offer back to cognitive science and philosophy are empirical enquiries and thought experiments that test ideas in complex, nuanced, and subtle situations. If the propositions of the cognitive cannot adapt to complex social and cultural situations, they aren’t yet fit for purpose. Performance participation might be framed as a set of as experiments in human experience, as the creation of structured or semi-structured processes in which human embodied meaningmaking happens with intense reflexivity. It seems, too, that participatory art is interested in the way that meaning is made in the moment, through activity, even when the artists concerned aren’t explicitly or consciously aware of it in these terms. So, applying a theory of active and in-the-moment meaningmaking is an obvious starting point. A desire to follow through this impulse, and to interrogate it through critical aesthetics, drives the enquiry of this book, facilitated by the specific investigation of performance participation. Enactivism’s allies Two writers who are not self-defined enactivists, but who discuss and describe embodied minds coupled to their environments accessibly and compellingly, have been very useful to my own exposition of these ideas. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s widely read and influential books about the role of emotion in cognition, including Descartes’ Error, Self Comes to Mind, and The Strange Order of Things, are invaluable to the non-expert.33 Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body gave the initial inspiration for my enquiry into meaning as an embodied process in participatory performance. This is not just the idea that meaning is a process rather than a property, which has been familiar in theatre and performance studies for a very long time, following appropriations from reception studies, deconstruction, and semiotics; nor only that embodied meaning is an important part of the creating and spectating performance, which phenomenology, feminism, and queer approaches (just for example) have long established. It is the idea that meaning is the first thing happening, that it is what forms the basis for a first-person perspective and a subjectivity out of which to create and spectate art, as a more assertive application of the implications of embodied meaning, that is well expressed by Johnson. For example: [h]uman meaning concerns the character and significance of a person’s interactions with their environments. The meaning of a specific aspect or dimension of some ongoing experience is that aspect’s connections to other parts of past, present or future (possible) experiences.34 This is in contrast to a ‘conceptual-propositional’ view of meaning. A key aspect for Johnson is the qualitative grounding of experience, which leads him to propose that meaning is essentially aesthetic.

14 Introduction Brian Massumi and Erin Manning adopt enactivism as a component of their theory of affective politics, activism and art. Massumi’s wide-ranging work draws heavily on Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, (with their melange of post-Marxism and psychoanalysis) and Alfred North Whitehead (with his relational, process-based epistemology) to construct experience and social life as interconnected and emergent at every level. Manning is a dance scholar and, in collaboration with Massumi, explores movement as affective embodied meaning-making. Their writing is distinctively effusive and full of idiosyncratic portmanteau terms, for example: Language and movement meet in the thinking-feeling. In thinkingfeeling, both are notional in analogous fashion: at the immanent limit of their ownmost counterpoint, wholly and only in their own mode. Each is a thinking-feeling after its own fashion.35 But it is precise. These terms help show how concepts do not belong only to language, and neither does language operate only in a propositional register, for both concepts and affects work together, and they dance around each other as we engage with the meaning of our situation, mirror-like. Catherine Malabou brings neuroscience, including Damasio’s synthesis of what it means for our understanding of thought and feeling, into encounters with Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida.36 And when Slavoj Žižek addresses cognitive philosophy and neuroscience, he knits it into a LacanianMarxist re-evaluation of the state of the subject in contemporary life and thought. He is as likely to critique its assumptions as to adopt its conclusions but finds Damasio interesting enough to refer to in a number of books. Žižek also does sustained work with contradiction; in The Parallax View, he says: […] is not ‘parallax’ yet another name for a fundamental antinomy which can never be dialectically ‘mediated/sublated’ into a higher synthesis, since there is no common language, no shared ground between the two levels.37 Which makes him a rare ally in straddling these two theoretical territories. Where Johnson, Massumi, and Manning help me introduce the enactivist thesis; Malabou and Žižek help re-frame it in the later chapters. This book, then, also offers a new approach to adapting cognitive philosophy into performance studies, via critical theory – acknowledging the tension between these perspectives – as an aesthetic theory of the relationship of the human subject to itself. Contradiction theorised Allied to the theory of enactive meaning is a theory of contradiction. I begin with Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, where he demonstrates the value of working

Introduction  15 with contradictions, and of how this is vitally important in regard to works of art. He offers this image of the contradictions of the art object: The phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical for artworks, though because of its fleetingness and status as empty entertainment it has scarcely been acknowledged by theoretical consideration […] They appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artefactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes and indeed cannot be read for its meaning.38 Adorno is valuable to this enquiry not because he offers an easily adopted theory for participatory art, far from it, but because he offers a complex, reflexive, and (perhaps surprisingly) flexible critical aesthetics that insists on the autonomy of artworks, albeit an autonomy in the midst of their continuity with mundane life, both liberated from and burdened with being ‘mere things’. In the image above, that which appears as an artwork is a selfsabotaging object, a carrier of meaning that’s gone up in smoke before it can be interpreted, all of which is part of its liberation, not its downfall. Aesthetic Theory is an immensely challenging, posthumously published and incomplete magnum opus, which is written ‘paratactically’: ‘placing propositions one after the other without indicating relations of co-ordination or subordination between them’,39 with a web-like structure, woven together rather than ordered conventionally. It is packed with grand overstatement and unexplained references; extensive prior knowledge is assumed; propositions succeed each other without explanation; contradictions and aphorisms pile up relentlessly. There are many striking and highly quotable sentences, some of which are immediately insightful, some of which pithily sum up many pages of obscurity, and some of which are seductive but seem incomprehensible. Challenging though it is, it offers ideas expansive enough to draw in a range of other approaches to experiences and phenomena. Adorno offers aesthetics, as he does all philosophy, as a mesh of irresolvable problems rather than as a framework or methodology for solving them. It is as much for this refusal to settle on a solution that I turn to him, as for another approach and set of terms. I want to trouble the theoretical integration of enactivism and embodied cognitive aesthetics with participatory performance, even as I explore it. Adorno’s philosophical project can be seen in terms of ‘non-identity thinking’, and a rejection of ‘totalising’ philosophy which underpins his body of writing on society, politics, the nature of a critical theory, and art. Non-identity thinking does not trust or seek a complete and final fit between a proposition and its object; thought cannot be identical with that which it aims to understand, as Gillian Rose puts it: [i]dentity thinking makes unlike things alike. To believe that a concept really covers its object, when it does not, is to believe falsely that that object is the equal of its concept.40

16 Introduction Non-identity thinking is sceptical; not a repudiation of empirical thought, of the hard or soft sciences, but an insistence on a view from outside empirical and positivist methodologies and their strong claims for objective truth. The enactivism of Gallagher, Thompson, or Noë develops phenomenological and pragmatist philosophy of mind, applying them to or developing them in the light of discoveries in neuroscience: their methods are essentially positivist and assertively so, whether based on phenomenological reduction, analytical logic, or the synthesis and interpretation of empirical results of brain science. For example, Johnson’s embodied aesthetics, with its confident assertion of the fit between discoveries in cognitive neuroscience and Deweyan aesthetics, fits the profile of identity thinking and is, thus, ripe for a challenge of this sort. Massumi, though he refers to contemporary discoveries in the cognitive sciences, bases his ideas on the fluidity of process theory and, therefore, is less a proponent of identity thinking; drawing on Benjamin and Deleuze, his approach is more sympathetic to Adorno’s dynamic contradictions. But his bullish optimism also profits by being brought into conversation with something more reticent and sceptical. Performance participation, so multiplicitous in its forms and evanescent in its outcomes, demands non-identity thinking, or something of its kin. The difficulty of defining ‘immersive theatre’ is a case in point, and so might be the scenes of, for example, In the Beginning Was the End, in their mutability and instability. Adorno’s particular scepticism is attuned to exploring theory and philosophy’s ability to escape from power and from managed, alienated culture. Theory that attempts to finalise is, in fact, directed at totalising, and in doing that falls into the service of reification and ideology. So even his own thinking is incapable of reaching for a totality, which leads to his frustrating disavowal of clarity or self-evident organisation. All theorisation must be provisional. Where Aesthetic Theory refuses, as a text, to exhibit an organising principle or to guide the reader, it is because all constructive philosophical projects are doomed to incompletion, and in this, his final book, Adorno took his most radical efforts to evade this trap. Otherwise known as negative dialectics, this incompletion manifests as a strategy of thinking through the dynamic contradictions inherent in any situation, especially as they manifest in ideological formations. This is drawn from an idea of historical dialectics where thought moves forward by resolving the contradictions of an existing formulation, giving rise to a subsequent position, which is, in turn, examined for its own contradictions. What distinguishes Adorno’s project is that it is not teleological in this way, it does not aim to move forward by resolving contradictions, but to remain in a negative position: he refuses to settle and thereby to arrive at another position ripe for accommodation in the dominating system of ‘managed life’. For example, one of the strategies is the identification of antinomies, where two incompatible propositions coexist without resolution. In Aesthetic

Introduction  17 Theory, one of the most important of these resides in the potential for artworks to have truth content which transcends their objective form: [o]f all the paradoxes of art, no doubt the innermost one is that only through making, through the production of particular works specifically and completely formed in themselves, and never through any immediate vision, does art achieve what is not made, the truth. Artworks stand in the most extreme tension to their truth content. Although this truth content, conceptless, appears nowhere else than in what is made, it negates the made. Each artwork, as a structure, perishes in its truth content; through it the artwork sinks into irrelevance, something that is granted exclusively to the greatest artworks.41 The form and substance of the work, what it is made from and the work that has gone into it, does not determine its truth, and according to Adorno, the best examples seem entirely irrelevant to this truth. This dynamic tension is carried through in the account of art traditions and experiments and overt and implicit theorisations of art. All are incomplete, all are trapped in contradiction, aporia and self-negation. It is the dynamic potential of these contradictions that I find energising; in this view, artistic form seems to be tidal, or stormy, or always layered. If the authentic takes precedence at some point, it is only in tension with the fanciful; if art is in the service of magic or religion, it is only briefly holding back its rational side; if organisation is the principle, then chaos is on the way. In Aesthetic Theory, the antinomies are often on a grand scale, corresponding with historical movements and traditions, and what each tries to eliminate, or push forward as the essence of art. Sometimes, it is the thing-character of art that is effaced, sometimes, it is celebrated, but it is always to be found. Sometimes, it is the heteronomy of art that is prioritised, and at other times, it is refused and the purity and isolation of art is the thing. Again, both sides are always to be found, albeit through deep excavation: and the more they are disavowed, the more each element is vital to the dynamic of the work. The work’s austerity or its showbiz; its semblances or its abstractions. If there is an overarching theory in a book that strenuously avoids putting one forward, it is this pattern of immanent tensions, of art as a set of interoperating contradictions. Contradiction, dialectics, and performance Adorno is, nevertheless, an awkward fit when thinking about art that often unabashedly seeks accessibility, adapts popular forms, and in some cases is directly politically and socially engaged. He is famously scathing about popular and commercial art, instrumentalist art, and in his later work makes passing criticisms of ‘happenings’ and thus perhaps by implication participatory

18 Introduction performance. His thinking about the political potential of art lies in a different register. Among his key paradoxes is the co-existence of autonomy and heteronomy: art is both of society and apart from it, and being of society as it is currently formed art cannot help but reproduce forms of thought and social relations that govern society. Art is ideological. In this reading, instrumentalist art cannot be taken seriously because it belongs to the realm of the non-serious and is in any case governed by totalising impulses and complicit in reification, whatever its emancipatory ambitions. Adorno takes issue, for example, with Bertolt Brecht, whose ‘silly theatre did nothing to hurt the serious economic or political interests of those it sought to attack’.42 His well-known arguments against popular art as a manifestation of the ‘culture industry’ are another obstacle, at first glance at least, to a positive assessment under his terms of some other kinds of participatory art in its current formations in the ‘experience economy’. Art as commodity is irredeemably ideological, in this argument, and he favours challenging ‘high art’, epitomised by modernist music and Samuel Beckett’s drama. But, nevertheless, art of this kind also contains the germ of freedom from ideology, an implication of society ‘unchained’. Art is ‘both ideological and emancipatory’,43 and has the capacity to ‘give voice to what ideology hides’, but not through its direct heteronomous connection to the mundane world, carrying messages or stimulating political action: [a]rtworks exercise a practical effect, if they do so at all, not by haranguing but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness; in any case, agitative effects dissipate rapidly, presumably because even artworks of that type are perceived under the general category of irrationality: Their principle, of which they cannot rid themselves, stalls the immediate practical impulse.44 Adorno’s enthusiasm for contradiction is related to the formulation of negative dialectics, with its refusal to pursue resolutions, and dialectics as a mode of thought has a long history in thinking about theatre. Bertolt Brecht, for example, thought of his theatre as dialectical through and through, in its approach to ‘realism’ and to character, in its dramaturgy, in rehearsal process, and in conceptions. Obviously, for Brecht, this is a political position, an aspect of his heterogenous Marxism, which finds performance to be a microcosm of ideology, while also offering the possibility to unravel it. There is some dispute about how far Brecht’s dialectics amount to a method towards an outcome, in the simplistic view of dialectics attributed (though perhaps unfairly) to Hegel: a thesis, with its antithesis, in a movement towards a new synthesis. David Barnett opens the possibility that Brecht’s dialectics are process-oriented in a very strong sense – so that plays are ever-unfinished, revised in rehearsal and after the first night of performance, and everreassessed by audiences.45

Introduction  19 The various authors in both Adorno and Performance, and Žižek and Performance, and in the 2016 ‘On Dialectics’ edition of Performance Research, however, tend to focus on this dialectics that does not pursue a new synthesis but exploits the potential of the ‘negative’. Eleanor Massie and Philip Watkinson, introducing the journal edition, observe dialectics as a form of analysis, ‘that examines the world in terms of processes, contradictions and relations; a methodology that relentlessly thinks of all things in terms of other things’,46 and more provocatively, is inherent in performance itself. Among these dialectical analyses, there are accounts of playwrights such as Edward Bond and David Grieg, practices like verbatim, disability theatre, audio walks, and performance scholarship itself. Recalling the Brechtian ‘Great Method’ as an application of dialectics to artistic production and to ethical life, Joanna Ronan’s Dialectical Collaborative Theatre, applies dialectical thinking to the process/product contradiction.47 With Bloodwater Theatre, a group formed to experiment with processes that would radically share ownership of the creative process, and thus not be ‘her’ group, she looks for ‘troublesome contradictions’ at every stage of their process. These contradictions encompass the tensions determining and determined by the group’s creative roles, relationships, and places in the economy of theatrical production. To unpack and subvert these roles, the group adopt unusual strategies such as creating alternative characters to play at rehearsals and residencies that, in turn, devise and perform pieces together. By setting themselves contradictory tasks Bloodwater work towards transforming the contradictions that the capitalist context of their work imposes. More directly relevant to performance participation is Peter Boenisch’s observation of a dialectical spectatorship in contemporary theatre in his discussion of the work of Flemish director Guy Cassiers, which exposes spectators to ‘a disintegrating multiplicity’48 of modes of presentation, impossible to grasp all at once, provoking a radical self-awareness. The effect is that the spectator: ‘Finds her own spectating, as it were, “included” in the (staged) picture’,49 though not in the literal way celebrated by immersive theatre, and offered as the stimulating puzzle of this book: The change here is not one of the location of the spectator in reality, but consists entirely of the dialectical sublation of their viewing position: of a “parallax shift” – the very fact that despite sitting in the traditional auditorium, we are no longer able to ‘neutrally’ observe the performance as a coherent, objective totality’.50 Like many critics of immersive and participatory theatre, Boenisch objects to claims made on its behalf as much as to what it actually does – to the marketing that offers audiences an undivided and unproblematic experience of the inside of a theatrical event. What I aim to show is that this dialectic of spectatorship, of ‘watching myself watching’51 and becoming uncannily

20 Introduction aware of a relation to myself because of this simultaneity of watching and being the thing watched, can be enhanced by the problems offered in performance participation. Participation scholarship To look for contradiction in performance processes or the audience experience is not, then, an original endeavour, and nor is it a new approach to audience participation, where the presence of conflicting or competing pressures on participants is often observed. In my own previous work, I have examined the tensions between the performance maker’s control and the audience member’s agency, as two aspects of the ownership and authorship of the event, and between rational and irrational responses to invitation, both in my earlier book Audience Participation in Theatre.52 In shorter chapters and articles, I have considered the contradictions of immersion as a way of framing performance participation, where a feeling of being both inside and outside a performance situation – particularly a dramatic fiction – is a common experience53; of oscillating between being seen and being hidden54; and between self-awareness and self-forgetfulness, as aspects of the audience’s creation of their own meaning out of an experience.55 Interactive performance, audience participation, and immersive theatre are now familiar reference points within performance studies, with a body of work interrogating both the terms themselves and the work they seek to describe. Theoretical monographs by Josephine Machon,56 Adam Alston,57 and Rose Biggin58; collections edited by James Frieze,59 Anna Harpin and Helen Nicholson,60 and Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schutz, and Sophie Nikoleit 61 along with interventions of other kinds and other forms from Joanna Bucknall62 and Jason Warren63 offer a wealth of approaches, case studies, and provocations. Some of this – probably a majority – is concerned with ‘immersive theatre’, with what that term implies or encompasses, and what we should expect from performance that makes the claim to be ‘immersive’. As long as this is the current and common term, its analysis will be important. But the analysis of performance participation is possible without making a commitment either way to whether participants are immersed, or to what immersion can mean in different situations. The many possibilities of immersion in performance are fascinating, and some of them are real, I think, but other ways of describing what can happen during participation deserve some space. So, I respond to the wealth of thinking and writing around participation that has happened under the sign of immersive theatre, without – except at a few passing moments – engaging with the questions of the immersive per se. Machon has theorised meaning through the body and advocates for the body to be at the centre of our understanding of meaning making. For her, there is a ‘fusion of the felt and the understood’,64 so that we make sense through sensation, through bodily sense-making as well as cognitive rationalising. This is of a piece with the enactivist and phenomenological ideas I want to explore, where meaning occurs through embodied physical

Introduction  21 ‘worlding’, as the ground for anything conscious or conceptual. She also addresses the interaction of text with this kind of meaning: that text engenders felt and sensed meaning, as well as being informed by embodied meaning as we interpret it. She nominates various contemporary practices as exhibiting this strongly. Her writing in Immersive Theatres goes some way to integrating this with the capacity to take action but has the potential to be taken much further. She emphasises the audience-participant’s being situated within the work, more than their acting on it or within it, adapting terms from studies of digital games: absorption, transportation, and total participation. She writes about being ‘engrossed’, being ‘reoriented’, and working with ‘praesense’, as a fusing of liveness and ‘livedness’.65 Livedness implies consequences for the person whose life is (more than usually) being lived in the event of the performance, in a kind of engagement. Andy Lavender frames the engagement asked for by contemporary performance differently, describing a move towards what he calls mise en sensibilité for the arrangement of experience, ‘where the event takes place with us inside it’.66 This emerging aesthetic involves being ‘in play’ and ‘experiencing ourselves having an experience’,67 a formulation that is repeated in different forms throughout the following chapters. James Frieze identifies a dimension of immersive theatre that depends on investigation – where audiences have to literally find the work, often in large multi-room spaces, but elaborates this in relation to a new way of discovering truth, in a ‘cultural turn towards the construction of truth as a participatory game of evidence-gathering’.68 This hard-working, active audience, willing to become the investigator as well as to invest in other roles, is key to Adam Alston’s analysis of the imbrication of immersive theatre with the neoliberal economy. In his account, immersive theatre more fully embraces the experience economy, where consumers seek more personalised entertainment, more demonstrable intensity, and more potential for self-aggrandisement. It also means a theatre where the investment of the audience member seeks a return in a more tangible way: where audiences take risk and invest the capital of their time, prestige, and potential embarrassment for a greater return. It also means narcissism, a theatre that invites an attitude of ‘look at me’ as well as asking me to look at it, that makes me the centre of attention as well as making me attentive.69 Value, in this theatre, can be seen in terms of dividend, alongside (where we are lucky) the value of the experience of the performance (our performance) itself. But Alston also notes the potential for disruption when we are so deeply involved in the work, becoming a part of the ‘experience machine’70 so that it is a way of knowing, not only of re-knowing ourselves in this moment but also re-knowing the conditions that embed the work and what implicates us in those conditions. It is this way of knowing that I want to pay very close attention to in this book, to take a series of perspectives on what it is to come to knowledge, to understand, through aestheticised experience. A reflexive participation that makes the process of engagement into a problem, thus exposing the economic assumptions that it embeds and echoes.

22 Introduction There is a body of texts emerging that either document or propagate techniques for immersive and participatory theatre making, as in, for example, Jason Warren’s Creating Worlds: How to make immersive theatre.71 Nandita Dinesh, in Memos from a Theatre Lab: Exploring what immersive theatre ‘does’,72 has recorded substantial experiments in using immersive approaches a war zone – specifically in Kashmir – and researched the experience of audience members with a qualitative methodology. Her explicit focus on the instrumentality of these practices makes the research very valuable though the work also benefits from her close-up understanding as a leader of the creative process. Her summary of areas for further exploration is evocative of how participatory performances are meaningful: that actors and spectators have different kinds of cognitive processing; that different shades of empathy are catalysed in this work; that ‘situational’ interest takes precedence over ‘topic-focused’ interest; and that immersive theatre increases audience investment. Dinesh has directly compared an immersive performance with one that dealt with the same subject matter in a more conventional form, comparing the experience and understanding of those involved as ‘audience’ and those who were ‘actors’, and, although many were drawn from the same community, participants in different ways. Her discoveries echo aspects of the work that I pursue here: how we think about the ‘shading’ of empathy and other affective responses, how a situational dimension of an experience is involved in this, the relevance and influence of ‘investment’, and so on. Royona Mitra has challenged two things in immersive theatre scholarship: its anglophone focus, and the binarization of active and passive audiences. Her proposal is that by looking to rasa aesthetics: […] the art reception theory as laid out in the Natyashastra (an ancient Indian dramaturgical treatise written in Sanskrit), immersion can also be theorised and experienced as an embodied, psycho-physical state that transpires interstitially between any audience, any artist and any art that is primarily premised on gestural dimensions of communication, and regardless of interactivity.73 Her concern is for the terms by which we can understand spectatorship of any kind as immersive, rather than only the problematics of interactivity and participation. However, citing an earlier article of my own, she uncovers in passing the kind of contradiction that I want to explore in depth here While scholars evoke the need for […] critical distance in immersive theatre spectatorship, one has to question to what extent full sensorium immersion allows audience members to retain their ability to effectively critique and remain ‘outside’ the event. Gareth White acknowledges

Introduction  23 this tension and states that ‘to be immersed is to be surrounded, enveloped and potentially annihilated, but it is also to be separate from that which immerses’ (2012: 228). But how can one be simultaneously annihilated by and remain separate from that which immerses?74 The entailments of the metaphor of ‘immersion’ can, indeed, be contradictory, and where Mitra resolves them in a model of immersive spectatorship that is both empathic and critical without contradiction, I suggest that embracing contradiction is how we find some of the critical potential in participatory performance. Sruti Bala, in The Gestures of Participatory Art, places artistic practice into its cultural context, where participation is expected and demanded by consensual politics, capitalism, and digital technology, and yet where dissensus finds its place too. The paradox, for her, is that [t]he demand for participation intensifies when participation is denied to us. Yet we ae inclined to refuse participation when it is demanded of us.75 Bala’s response is to document the gestures of participants that run against the grain of what is expected, ‘unsolicited, unruly and counter-intuitive’,76 and productive of meaning. In different ways, these theorists see meaning as a ‘becoming’. Participatory work seems to be easily allied to concepts of becoming. Even the most ‘culinary’ works are dependent upon deferred meaning, emergence, and incompleteness. That this is allied to an experience economy might demonstrate that these phenomena have been appropriated, but it doesn’t devalue them entirely. Other more ambitious work might be read as pursuing and realising (within appropriately circumscribed terms) these potentials. These authors’ focus on the work as process is a stimulus to the project of this book: thought and mind in the enactive account are emergent and becoming, and for Adorno, the artwork and the world itself is always unfinished, unstable, and beyond definition. Nicholas Ridout famously observes that the potential of theatre is in its capacity to break down: as theatre comes closest to failing to present another world, we get the greatest insight into how we construct this world. In Passionate Amateurs,77 he treats theatre as a peculiar exception to the usual schema of work and leisure, as a form of life where people are not-not working, labouring at something passionately, but a thing that produces nothing and is designed not to matter in the sense that most of our labour matters. Ridout’s analysis is another re-formulation of the heteronomy/autonomy problem: it is about how the mundane is brought into theatre, and how it is treated as not mundane. Of course, for Ridout, the best conditions for theatre are when we are unmolested by the ‘false excitements of joining in’,

24 Introduction but, nevertheless, there is something in his idea of theatre as a place where we can ‘sense ourselves sensing’78 that is reminiscent of what I am pursuing in participation. Conflicts, dynamics, and tensions To re-state, then, some of the contradictions that I posit are to be encountered in performance participation: to begin with, participants are part of the artwork and separate from it. So, when they bring a creative contribution to it, they are its author and its audience, its author and its protagonist, its author and its subject matter, its author and its victim. In these moments, they are the thing and its opposite. The participant is always in control and always controlled: performance makers who claim radical agency for their participants disavow the role they play in structuring that agency. When I do what I’m told – explicitly or implicitly – by an artist or practitioner who requires something from me, I do something that seems mine and theirs simultaneously. Artists work with compulsion, in their aspect as a designer of interactions or of games. But this compulsion has nuances that undermine a sense of personal autonomy. Games make demands on me and play out through my actions and my impulses. Games play me, and they question my autonomy. We do what feels right, what seems appropriate, when there is ambiguity. But this leaves questions. What was right about what I did? Other people’s interactions interface with my own. Other bodies and other subjectivities make their presence felt. But the presence of others also questions my autonomy, as what they do both limits and extends what I do. My actions are both mine and ours. I might find I’ve done something without thinking it through. Performance rarely gives the space to think-through and take fully informed action, and often it is more enjoyable because of that. But this brings our relationship to those actions into question. We might, even, feel that something is wrong while doing it. We can be aware of our actions as part of an artwork as they happen and as it happens, or might only become aware of that later. There may also be an awareness that even these reflections, and such self-awareness within the work itself might be part of what is provoked for me, that they might be part of the work. I can feel ownership I didn’t ask for, of actions I wouldn’t wish to do. I can feel misattributed. I can feel different in my body, and I can feel as if I am out of my body. I can feel more interconnected, or that I am losing track, or I can be hyperaware. I can feel more myself and less myself. I can be reminded of my relationship to my body, through the physical action of performance: of being my body while also having ownership over it

Introduction  25 as an object that belongs to me; of being contained by my body and of being extended by it. All of these contradictions can be in play – often – in performance participation. Antinomy, or immanent contradiction There are potential dichotomies explicitly or implicitly running throughout this: watching and doing, being and doing, participation and nonparticipation, immersive and distanced. Performer or spectator. Freedom and coercion. Resistant or complicit. But there is a flaw in analysis that seeks to finalise, to analytically fix a situation into one of two alternatives, which might become an attempt to reify it in the most blunt way, as a dichotomy that wants to say, ‘it is either this, or this’, perhaps valorising one position over the other, and sorting the world into good or bad. Things are rarely so simple, obviously. The more appropriate articulation is to look for contradictions as they appear in any given practice, to opposition, contradiction, and dichotomy into an analytical tool. But even to attempt to map and define the kinds of dynamic tension that are commonly found would stop some way short of a negative dialectical analysis. There’s a great complexity to Adorno’s approach, rather than a simple see-saw of alternatives or a continuum between contrasting poles. In his conception, a shift in balance leads to something unpredictable, a new formation, or allows something hidden within a situation to emerge; each thing contains its opposite in surprising forms, rather than simply negating it or being transformed by it. My discussion takes as a premise that these things are fundamental to performance participation, and they are explored where they are found in relation to a set of examples. The varieties of meaning that they entail are theorised, using the concepts of enactivism, in many cases, as keys to unlock meaning as something emergent from situated, embodied, contradictory experience. Contradictions are starting points from which to set out, heading towards conflicts hidden even within these contradictions themselves, and a subtler investigation, where the subject matter allows it, is to look for immanent contradictions: situations where there is a gap ‘between thought and thing’.79 The end point of each attempt is, in some cases, not merely distant from the starting point, but apparently the destination of another journey entirely, and in some cases, these can confidently be described as immanent contradictions, where one or some of the contrasting concepts or assumptions in play are both demonstrably correct, yet give rise to something opposite or incompatible. Chapters and contradictions The discussions that make up the book circle around each other rather than each establishing and completing a part of a systematic whole. In this

26 Introduction avoidance of system, I take my lead from Adorno rather than the enactivists, whose project is fundamentally systematic, though cognisant of how some of its propositions are counter-intuitive or entail a tension between what is understood as meaning in a propositional frame, and meaning at a preconscious level. My structure is, to some extent, ‘essayist’, in that each discussion makes an independent attempt at its subject matter, prioritising what emerges in that attempt, rather than their contribution to a coherent whole.80 Coherence arises from these repeated attempts, of course, as each informs the other so that the overall field of enquiry is elucidated. These ‘essays’ take their starting points from the pairing of an element of contradiction with an instance of practice where contradictions have manifested experientially in some way. Each has a numbered contradiction as its title, and a first-person account of practice within its first paragraphs (or, in one case, within a few of pages). This list of contradictions is not a taxonomy and is in no way comprehensive or summative. It is a guide to where the discussion goes, and may serve – in the spirit of the essayistic style – as a set of alternative entry points for readers so minded. The contradictions are grouped into Chapters, three in each. The chapter titles ‘Watching / Doing / Meaning’, ‘Other People / Other Things’ and ‘Autonomy / Identity’ articulate a broad movement from localised aspects of embodied meaning (and exposition of enactivist theory) outwards towards the body and the subject in its context (and more critical engagement with the body in context). My method applied to these instances of practice will be to write from personal experience, to help to refine concepts.81 The personal experience I refer to will be as an audience-participant rather than a theatre maker – though I do occasionally make participatory theatre myself and am deeply interested in the proliferating techniques, approaches and devices that are employed. But here close, critical attention to first-person experience is offered as the counterpart to conceptual exploration. I reconstruct these experiences in prose, and make no apology for it; the methodological implications of this reconstruction of experience through writing – the storytelling of the event – are left largely unexplored. I have made efforts to reconstruct experience honestly, though with no particular methodological devices to ensure that you, the reader, can be sure that I have done so accurately. Critical reflection on ephemeral, but non-participatory, performance also does this, it often superficially resembles writing about texts and artefacts which have some chance of being experienced in much the same form by readers, though what it treats as a ‘performance text’ is never to be repeated, or will only ever be shared by a relatively small number of people. In this sense, writing about performance has always resembled reportage: the performance academic or critic goes where others may not have been and where many will not be able to, and tells the tale. But in participatory performance, the ephemerality is intensified: in some cases, no-one else was there to share ‘the moment’ of a performance interaction as it passed by. Readers must take the writer’s word for it.

Introduction  27 I offer my first-person accounts of practice illustratively, rather than critically. I highlight moments or sequences that provoke thought about my questions, that encapsulate a certain kind of contradiction, or that offer in their own immanent particularity something that speaks to general questions. There will be a lot missing from what would make up a full critical discussion of each piece, therefore, and except where it serves the analysis of contradictory dynamics or immanent contradiction, I don’t assess the overall strengths or qualities of the work. The examples of practice, then, aren’t case studies. They don’t evidence my proposals, exemplify best practice, or describe an emerging canon. Some are well -known pieces by internationally reputed companies, some were devised and performed by amateurs, with very small numbers of participants. What they do is illustrate the complex situations that performance participation can create for us. In many of them, the complexity that I observe might be unintended, or tangential to the main thrust of the work as a whole, whereas in a few, it appears to be a deliberate strategy of the artists. As the thesis is not that the contradictions of participation are the core of a genre or style of performance, but rather that they may be an under explored and untapped potential in participation, this inconsistency contributes to the argument, as opposed to undermining it. That, in some cases the outcome of the contradiction that emerges from participation, seems ultimately to contradict the apparent intent of the performance, which is appropriate to the strategy that I am exploring: an immanent contradiction of what a performance might seem to have assumed of and for itself, not to its detriment or the discredit of the artists concerned, but in evidence of the depth of possibility concealed in performance participation. Notes 1 In The Beginning Was The End was staged at Somerset House on the Strand in London, from January to March 2013. 2 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), 17. 3 Stanley Cavell, quoted in Juliane Rebentisch Aesthetics of Installation Art (Frankfurt: Sternberg Press, 2012), 36. 4 See for example Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 5 In for example Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, Jams Frieze, ed. Reframing Participation: the Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 6 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997). 7 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Alva Noë, Action in Perception (London: MIT Press, 2006). 8 Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 9 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (London: MIT Press, 2009). 10 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

28 Introduction 11 Ric Knowles, How Theatre Means (London: Palgrave, 2014), 90. 12 Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 3. 13 White, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. 14 See for example: Dwight Conquergood and E. Patrick Johnson, Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013). 15 Tony Fisher and Eve Katsouraki, eds. Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy (London: Routledge, 2017). 16 Jan Cohen-Cruz, Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response (London: Routledge, 2010), 1. 17 In Chapter 2 of Audience Participation in Theatre, I theorise this ‘ordinary matter’ as ‘resources’ that have different values in different contexts, borrowing terms from both Erving Goffman and Pierre Bourdieu. 18 Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (London: MIT Press, 2016). 19 Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 20 Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015). 21 Daniel D. Hutto and Erick Myin, Radicalising Enactivism (London: MIT Press, 2017). 22 See for example Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions, 111–125, and Ezequiel di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher, Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); di Paolo et al have more to say about the enactivism and social life in their engagement with language – they also adopt a dialectical approach, different to that of this book. 23 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 173. 24 Thompson, in Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, xvii. 25 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 206. 26 As Gallagher notes, some now prefer that there are up to six E’s to take account of, including the Ecological and the Empathic, or four E’s and an A, for Affective. Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions, 28, 43. 27 Noë, Action in Perception, 44. 28 Ibid., 29. 29 Thompson, Mind in Life, 204. 30 Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (London: Palgrave, 2013), 63. 31 Noë, Varieties of Presence, 4. 32 See for example Peter Garratt, The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture (London: Palgrave, 2016). 33 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’s Error (London: Random House, 2006); Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (London: Random House, 2010); The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018). 34 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 10. 35 Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 42. 36 For example in Adrian Johnson and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience (Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2013). 37 Žižek, The Parallax View. 38 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 81.

Introduction  29 39 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: Verso, 2014), 17. 40 Ibid., 59. 41 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 131–132. 42 James Hellings, Adorno and Art: Aesthetics Theory Contra Critical Theory (London: Palgrave, 2014), 100. 43 Deborah Cook, Theodor Adorno, Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2008). 44 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 243. 45 David Barnett, ‘Dialectics and the Brechtian Tradition’, Performance Research: On Dialectics, 21:3 (June 2016) (6). 46 Eleanor Massie and Philip Watkinson, ‘On Dialectics’, Performance Research: On Dialectics, 21:3 (June 2016) (1). 47 Jo Ronan, ‘In Search of Truth: Performance a s Product, Process and Pedagogy’, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, 4:1 (August 2021). See also ‘Dialectical Collaborative Theatre: Practising Equality by Facilitating Nonmaterial Ideology in the Production Process’, Performing Ethos, 11:1 (November 2021), 39–54. 48 Peter Boenisch, ‘Who’s Watching? Me?’, in Žižek and Performance (London: Palgrave, 2014), 55. 49 Ibid., 56. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 50. 52 Audience Participation in Theatre, Chapters 1 and 3. 53 Gareth White, ‘On Immersive Theatre’, Theatre Research International, 37:3 (2012), 221–235. 54 Gareth White, ‘Odd Anonymised Needs: Punchdrunk’s Masked Spectator’, in Modes of Spectating, ed. Alison Oddey and Christine White (London: Intellect, 2009). 55 Gareth White, ‘Theatre in the Forest of Things and Signs’, Journal for Contemporary Drama in English, 4:1 (2016), 1–13. 56 Machon, Immersive Theatres. 57 Adam Alston, Beyond Immersive Theatre (London: Palgrave, 2016). 58 Rose Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience: Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk (London: Palgrave, 2017). 59 James Frieze, ed. Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance (London: Palgrave, 2016). 60 Anna Harpin and Helen Nicholson, eds. Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics (London: Palgrave, 2017). 61 Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schutz and Sophie Nikoleit, eds. Staging Spectators in Immersive Theatre: Commit Yourself! (London: Routledge, 2019). 62 Joanna Bucknall, Talking about Immersive Theatre: Conversations about Immersions and Interactivities in Performance (London: Methuen, 2023), see also her long-running podcast of the same name: 63 Jason Warren, Creating Worlds: How to Make Immersive Theatre (London: Nick Hern Books, 2017). 64 Machon in Frieze, Reframing Immersive Theatre, 33. See also (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (London: Palgrave, 2009). 65 Machon, Immersive Theatres, 58–63. She draws on Gordon Calleja, in particular. 66 Andy Lavender, Performance in the 21st Century: Theatres of Engagement (London: Routledge, 2016), 100. 67 Ibid., 30. 68 Frieze, Reframing Immersive Theatre, 25.

30 Introduction 69 See also Keren Zaiontz, ‘Narcissistic Spectatorship in Immersive and One-on-One Performance’, Theatre Journal, 66 (2014), 405–425. 70 Alston, Beyond Immersive Theatre, 218–219. 71 Warren, Creating Worlds. 72 Nandita Dinesh, Memos from a Theatre Lab: What Immersive Theatre Does (London: Routledge, 2016). 73 Royona Mitra, ‘Decolonising Immersion: Translation, Spectatorship, Rasa Theory and Contemporary British Dance’, Performance Research, 21:5 (2016), 89. 74 Ibid., 94. The text cited is White, ‘On Immersive Theatre’. 75 Sruti Bala, The Gestures of Participatory Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 7. 76 Ibid., 16. 77 Nicholas Ridout, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). 78 Ibid., 154. 79 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), 153. 80 Theodor Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, Volume One, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 81 Others, for example Kirsty Sedgman, have followed empirical, interview-based approaches to participatory audiences, as Dinesh has done but with greater distance from the creation of the performance. Kirsty Sedgman, Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), Caroline Heim, Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Audiences in the Twenty-First Century London: Routledge, 2016).

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 1997. Adorno, Theodor. ‘The Essay as Form’, in Notes to Literature, Volume One. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by Sherry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Alston, Adam. Beyond Immersive Theatre. London: Palgrave, 2016. Bala, Sruti. The Gestures of Participatory Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. Barnett, David. ‘Dialectics and the Brechtian Tradition’. Performance Research: On Dialectics 21, no. 3 (June 2016): 6–15. Biggin, Rose. Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience: Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk. London: Palgrave, 2017. Bucknall, Joanna. Talking about Immersive Theatre: Conversations About Immersions and Interactivities in Performance. London: Methuen, 2023. Chow, Broderick and Alex Mangold. Žižek and Performance. London: Palgrave, 2014. Cohen-Cruz, Jan. Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response. London: Routledge, 2010. Conquergood, Dwight and E. Patrick Johnson. Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013. Cook, Deborah. Theodor Adorno, Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2008. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’s Error. London: Random House, 2006. Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. London: Random House, 2010.

Introduction  31 Damasio, Antonio. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures. New York: Pantheon Books, 2018. Dinesh, Nandita. Memos from a Theatre Lab: What Immersive Theatre Does. London: Routledge, 2016. di Paolo, Ezequiel, Elena Clare Cuffari and Hanne De Jaegher. Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Fisher Tony and Eve Katsouraki, eds. Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy. London: Routledge, 2017. Frieze, James, ed. Reframing Participation: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2016. Gallagher, Shaun. Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Garratt, Peter. The Cognitive Humanities: Embodied Mind in Literature and Culture. London: Palgrave, 2016. Harpin, Anna and Helen Nicholson, eds. Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics. London: Palgrave, 2017. Heim, Caroline. Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Audiences in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, 2016. Hellings, James. Adorno and Art: Aesthetics Theory Contra Critical Theory. London: Palgrave, 2014. Hutto, Daniel and Erick Myin. Radicalising Enactivism. London: MIT Press, 2017. Johnson, Adrian and Catherine Malabou. Self and Emotional Life Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience. Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2013. Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Knowles, Ric. How Theatre Means. London: Palgrave, 2014. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Kolesch, Doris, Theresa Schutz and Sophie Nikoleit, eds. Staging Spectators in Immersive Theatre: Commit Yourself! London: Routledge, 2019. Lavender, Andy. Performance in the 21st Century: Theatres of Engagement. London: Routledge, 2016. Machon, Josephine. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. London: Palgrave, 2013. Machon, Josephine. (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. London: Palgrave, 2009. Manning, Erin and Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Massie, Eleanor and Philip Watkinson. ‘On Dialectics’. Performance Research: On Dialectics 21, no. 3 (June 2016): 11–15. Massumi, Brian. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Mitra, Royona. ‘Decolonising Immersion: Translation, Spectatorship, Rasa Theory and Contemporary British Dance’. Performance Research 21, no. 5 (2016): 89–100. Noë, Alva. Varieties of Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. London: MIT Press, 2006. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015. Oddey, Alison and Christine White. Modes of Spectating. London: Intellect, 2009.

32 Introduction Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliot. London: Verso, 2009. Rebentisch, Juliane. Aesthetics of Installation Art. Translated by Daniel Hendrickson and Gerrit Jackson. Frankfurt: Sternberg Press, 2012. Ridout, Nicholas. Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Ronan, Jo. ‘In Search of Truth: Performance as Product, Process and Pedagogy’. PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research 4, no. 1 (August 2021). Ronan, Jo. ‘Dialectical Collaborative Theatre: Practising Equality by Facilitating Non-material Ideology in the Production Process’. Performing Ethos 11, no. 1 (November 2021). Rose, Gillian. The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. London: Verso, 2014. Sedgman, Kirsty. Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales. London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. London: MIT Press, 2016. Warren, Jason. Creating Worlds: How to Make Immersive Theatre. London: Nick Hern Books, 2017. White, Gareth. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. White, Gareth. ‘On Immersive Theatre’. Theatre Research International 37, no. 3 (2012). White, Gareth. ‘Theatre in the Forest of Things and Signs’. Journal for Contemporary Drama in English 4, no. 1 (2016). Zaiontz, Keren. ‘Narcissistic Spectatorship in Immersive and One-on- Performance’. Theatre Journal 66 (2014). Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. London: MIT Press, 2009.

1

Watching, doing, meaning

Contradiction 1: Watching

Meaning is not just what is consciously entertained in acts of feeling and thought; instead, meaning reaches deep down into our corporeal encounter with our environment.1 Tide Whisperer National Theatre Wales’s Tide Whisperer was a headphone performance in and around Tenby in West Wales, a piece that situated the individual spectator and the audience as a group interestingly. The following account is based on recollection of my own experience of the piece on the 13th of September 2018. We receive our listening devices with what has come to be a familiar ritual in headphone experiences. Greeted with smiles and ticked off a list, we are given a little advice and guidance about what the performance expects of us: we will be required to be on our feet, to walk some distance, to be outside. And some of us will be on boats. We are asked if we would prefer not to take a boat, or if we would be unable to, as other options are available. I am delighted to be allocated a place on one of the boats. We walk in colour-coded groups to the beach, and by turn our groups board small tourist boats, of the kind normally used for tours around nearby Caldey Island, spotting seals and seabirds. Once away from the shore, the ambient music on our headphones fades out and we hear a woman’s voice. She tells us of a terrifying boat journey fleeing her home country with two small children. At the point where, in her narrative, the engines of her craft fail, the engine of our boat stops too, and we drift. If we look around, we can see rippling water, and hear it more clearly without recorded sound, slapping the sides of the boat. It’s atmospheric, and redolent of being at the mercy of the water. But we can also see the Welsh shoreline, not an empty South China Sea, and see each other in the boat with our headphones and our sensible clothes. We can see the safety equipment. We can recall the announcement given just after boarding, telling us where the lifejackets are and what to do ‘in the unlikely event of an emergency’. The tale we have heard is one in which DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-3

36  Watching, doing, meaning emergencies were highly likely, where people are far from the influence of health and safety regimes. When the narrating voice returns and tells us of her escape both from being becalmed and from pirates, and of how her group came near to land and sanctuary, she is noisily interrupted by the sound of a speedboat, and a voice on a loudhailer. And simultaneously, a speedboat begins to circle our little boat, and the words we hear, from a coastguard, seem to come from this boat. As it circles, waves from this boat set ours, still drifting without its engine, in motion. ‘Turn back, you may not land here, we will open fire’ is repeated, again and again. The boat’s engine starts and we turn around, heading back towards Tenby. The story, interrupted, is left incomplete. As we return a second, less aquatic, migrant’s story is told, of a forced and traumatic escape from an unnamed land-locked central Asian country. As we approach the shore, we can see that this picturesque seaside resort, from the sea, wears its history as part of the fortified, hostile border of the United Kingdom very prominently. There is the 19th-century fort, on an island projecting into the bay, and a much earlier castle on a promontory overlooking the harbour. After we land, we make our way via the castle to the harbour, joining other groups disembarking from other boats, or making their way from the adjacent beach. A local man tells of a vision of surreal invaders. A refugee plays football with children on the sand in the harbour. A lifelong resident of Wales tells of being put on a plane to be deported to the Caribbean, and of a noisy, foot-stamping protest in support of her by fellow passengers. ‘Look what the tide brings in’, a refrain heard at the start of the journey, is repeated again and again. A man on a makeshift raft arrives in the harbour and is rescued by this mismatched group while a ghostly chorus sing, a hundred meters beyond the scene, in murky light. This climax seems to enact a welcome as well as a rescue, with the audience encircling this corner of the harbour and absorbing the performers as they climb up from the small sandy beach beneath the wall. We have a small role to play, to allow them in, or back in, to the territory and the community of Wales. In this piece, at points, we are situated in physical analogies to what we hear has happened to the subjects of the stories we hear. At other points, we move with figures as they find their way through a town made strange to them. But at all times, we can see the evidence of our own privilege that we have not been cast adrift or refused access; our safety and our place in the world is assured, taken care of. This is a performance that works through being situated, where the meaning of being in the world in a quite specific (and not-typically theatrical) sense works with stories, perhaps underpinning them but also perhaps undermining them. Being on a boat means something, in social and narrative terms, but being on a boat also draws attention to how situation means, in a most fundamental sense. There is a difference – and perhaps a dissonance – between conscious propositional meaning and what goes on in the depths of bodily meaning-making, that is exploited in a performance of this kind. Meaning as the weighty, well thought out, messagebearing matter of works of art, that needs to be thought through carefully and

Watching  37 reflectively, is reinforced in the disembodied spectatorial gaze of traditional theatrical performance. Performances that situate the perceiving body in the middle of the work directly address the embodied mind, the mind that makes meaning in and from its situation. Exploring some ideas about the primacy of embodied meaning making provides a platform for unpacking productive contradictions between meaning at these different levels. The body thinks For Antonio Damasio, the Cartesian model of a division between mind and body has been discredited once and for all by discoveries about the mechanisms by which the body is fitted for its environment, coupled to it, and always already finding itself in the situation of having to respond to it and to maintain homeostasis – the organic conditions necessary for survival. It is this imperative for self-preservation that necessitates any organism’s baselevel understanding of its environment and its place in it, not a conscious understanding but a systemic one. An organism that can survive is one that is able to regulate itself by evolving what Damasio calls a response policy: ‘a set of extremely simple roles according to which it makes a “decision to move” when certain conditions are met’.2 This is made up of the mechanisms that differentiate environmental stimuli that lead to drives, motivations, and emotions.3 This is the basis of meaning at a biological level, an organism coupled to its environment, and responding to it, interpreting it, but without articulation in thought. While conscious awareness both grows out of and remains embedded in this systematic coupling, as I will explore below, much of the work done when the body interacts with the world continues beneath conceptual awareness. It is, as Shaun Gallagher argues, ‘pre-noetic’,4 that is it comes before ‘noesis’, in phenomenology the term for processes which brings bodily and cognitive activity into consciousness. Cognition and meaning, theorised in this way, are both unconscious and conscious. Conscious understanding only arises from a continual process of embodied meaning-making as organism-environment coupling, where experience is rendered from what is most relevant to the homeostatic balance of the organism. Sitting on a boat on a sunny day, in the company of strangers and surrounded by cold deep water, embeds my conscious thoughts in an affective attunement to, for example, the fine adjustments of balance needed to keep the body upright and the eyes and ears scanning for risks, both physical and social. This sense of an organism coupled to its environment is also the basis of enactive cognition; as Varela, Thompson, and Rosch put it, the body is a sense-making system,5 and the mind begins as ‘a self-producing and selfmaintaining system that brings forth relevance6’. Thus, meaning arises in an interaction between bodies and their situation, even the most simple bodies – for example, single-celled organisms, without their own nervous system that are capable of sensing concentrations of sucrose and moving in response – can be considered to be engaged in a meaning-making process, a process

38  Watching, doing, meaning that becomes a kind of seeking, though the organism is incapable of any conscious direction of its activity. Even in a very simple body such as a bacterium, the process of meaning making is chemically complex, but when the body in question is as complex as the human, the processes are, of course, layered and interrelated in fearsomely complex ways: […] each hormone in the bloodstream acts on the gland that secreted it, as well as on the pituitary, the hypothalamus and other brain sectors. In other words neural signals give rise to chemical signals, which give rise to other chemical signals, which can alter the function of many cells and tissues (including those in the brain), and alter the regulatory circuits that initiated the cycle itself. These many nested regulatory mechanisms manage the body conditions locally and globally so that the organism’s constituents, from molecules to organs, operate within the parameters required for survival.7 To state the obvious: this is happening as we participate in theatre events: first of all, our bodies are coupled to a situation. It is the body, moving, breathing, in space and always already responding to its qualitative milieu that is the primary mechanism for our understanding of what we undergo, what we see, and what we do. The moments of a performance happen to each of us, as a body in a situation. There is a meaning to them as basic situations that our sensorimotor system is coupled to, demanding responses and setting in train anticipations of how the situation might change. This is what eventually entrains a conscious perspective of having a place in this situation, as well as of other bodies as part of a situation. But consciousness only begins in the context of meaning that arises in the sensorimotor systems of the body on a moment-by-moment basis, building up to perceptually experienced understanding. This is the thesis of embodied cognition, that the body thinks, in that it actively creates meaning through its active systematic coupling with its environment, and what we perceive as conscious thought is dependent upon this bodily thinking. It is the body-mind that builds an experiential impression of what is right and wrong about a situation, leading to feelings about whether, for example, to flee or stay, to look or look away. This perspective on mind draws on empirical neuroscience to elaborate insights that have been suggested by phenomenology and pragmatist philosophy for many decades. The brain, it is now proposed, is continuously engaged with regulating the body, as well as with responding to what the body feeds back about its state and its environment. In fact, the intimate interlinking of brain and body is such that we can’t think of a brain that operates separately, or even of discrete brain regions that conduct what we might consider conscious thought separately. All parts of the brain are engaged in thinking, and all parts of the brain are directly linked to the body. Audience practices are ways of organising space and time so that the body-mind can be attentive, sometimes aiming to remove ‘distractions’, so that it seems that attention is almost entirely

Watching  39 through the eyes and ears, and sometimes, as in Tide Whisperer (and as in the examples throughout this book) so that distraction, interference, and attentional confusion take centre stage. In any case, however, the body coupled to the situation is hard at work, enacting meaning, amid the awareness of ‘being at a show’ appropriate to the form. Intentionality and consciousness The enactivist thesis moves on from this model of embodied, sensorimotor meaning to a perspective on conscious experience, by incorporating more complex questions of the philosophy of mind and experience and discoveries from neuroscience. Though enactivists are sceptical about a proper distinction between experiencing subject and experienced object (as will be explored in Chapter 2), experience seems to be continuously directed towards objects, in what phenomenology terms an intentional relationship.8 When conscious (and even in some states of unconsciousness, as in dreams), we are always conscious of something, whether a physical object that appears to our senses, or an idea. Enactivism takes this up from phenomenology but moves away from intentionality as a matter of a mind being directed towards an external object via a mental representation of it. Instead, the active process of being engaged with a situation brings objects into being in experience, actively constituting them through coupled interaction. Intentionality, then, is not a product of a consciousness continually directed towards things, it is the cause of consciousness. Meaning is happening even when we are not conscious, and a lot of the meaning that the body in its environmental coupling brings about never reaches consciousness – nor does it need to and nor could consciousness contain the wealth of meaning that the body-mind is made up of. What does not reach consciousness is not irrelevant noise, but fundamentally important to homeostasis; what is presented in consciousness is only that necessary to make the conscious mind relevant to the important business of homeostasis. The body’s sensorimotor coupling goes about the business of making meaning, and some of that meaning comes together into a stream of consciousness. It is what our body does without the need for consciousness that brings consciousness into being, along with action that is partly or substantially consciously directed. As Alva Noë puts it: For I am – we are – beings whose minds are shaped by a complicated hierarchy of practical skills. Our consciousness frequently does not extend to what is going on in our bodies; our consciousness is enacted by what we do with our bodies.9 This is counter-intuitive and can be troubling. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch critique the cognitivist theory that precedes enactivism for not being able to have the courage of its convictions in relation to this idea. If, as above, it is possible to demonstrate that cognition happens both within and without

40  Watching, doing, meaning consciousness, then the importance of conscious experience, the conscious experience of being in charge of what I think and what I do, is demoted. As the conscious mind is the medium within which our sense of self emerges, it can be hard to reconcile that the important stuff is happening elsewhere: Our pre theoretical, everyday conviction […] is that cognition and consciousness – especially self-consciousness – belong together in the same domain.10 So that while it is possible to grasp the theory of conscious cognition as a result rather than a cause of action, it is difficult to apply it to oneself. Body, situation, performance An experience means because of bodies in situations, or rather because of a body coupled to an environment as a situation.11 Performance, therefore, means (it enacts meaning) because of bodies coupled to environments, as situations, and this is where performance acquires both its rich dimensions of unconscious meaning and the basis of the conscious meanings that come to the minds of participants. Whatever performance makers intend by their choices about the combinations of bodies and situations, meaning is something going on in these bodies, through which the bodies come to life as minds. What can this have to do with being a theatre participant? Everything, and perhaps nothing. What we treat as spectatorship is generally what a performance brings to the conscious mind, what it makes us think, and what it makes us feel. When performance studies take account of non- or unconscious processes, it is often because of the way they impinge upon or influence those conscious impressions, perceptions, and reflections. For an enactive mind, however, there is more mind ‘beneath’ consciousness than in other models, and the relationship to the conscious mind is modelled differently. We are environmentally coupled first and always, and consciousness emerges from this. A body seated in its place at a theatre makes meaning from that situation through breathing, maintaining posture, organising hearing, smell, vision and proprioception, and scanning for threats and opportunities, layers of interoperating systems that have no need of consciousness. This ‘Escher spaghetti’12 of processes has the quantitative lead in meaningmaking, it is what makes a situation into a situation for a mind. The enactive view also emphasises that this is an active engagement. Sitting quietly in our seats, our sensory apparatus does not simply take in information ‘given’ to us by the environment, but takes hold of relevant kinds of contextual data, and enacts a world with them. A body sitting in a boat is coupled to a different situation, of course, and we might expect that physical situation to be paramount, in this version of the meaning of meaning. But it is possible to appreciate a work of art while in a situation like this, that distracts the conscious mind and threatens to overtake the embodied mind, with its homeostatic

Watching  41 preoccupation. It is possible to enjoy a work like this as such a situation, or such a situation as part of a work of art. Not representation, enactment of a world This argument for the primacy of embodiment in cognition and meaning is considerably more thoroughgoing than asserting the importance of sensual experience to an emotional substrate of cognition. It is part of a broad movement in cognitive philosophy away from an input-output, or computational, model of the mind. The older perspective, that the mind’s work is primarily in handling symbolic representations of external objects, allowed some significant insights that were often allied to progress in computing and artificial intelligence13 – an influential parallel field to philosophy of mind, in its attempts to assemble functional models of mind and meaning-making. It also corresponds in its basic outline to reception-based perspectives on performance: of an autonomous spectator interpreting concepts offered by a performance. The objections to representation-based models in relation to basic cognition come from two directions – empirically, in that that no satisfactory candidate for a physical counterpart to the representational symbol has been proposed so that it has not been possible to match neurological formations to representation; and in the fearsome complexity of manipulation and interpretation of symbols and their interrelation that seem to have reached the limits of what can be demonstrated either in conceptual models or in artificial intelligence. Computer scientists have moved on, to fuzzier logics and organic learning processes, rather than attempting to construct logical structures for machine minds to operate with. In this they are like the proponents of embodied and enactive cognition, who start with the structural coupling of sensorimotor systems with a situation, out of which comes experience. Enactive cognition: […] questions the centrality of the notion that cognition is fundamentally representation. Behind this notion stand three fundamental assumptions. The first is that we inhabit a world with particular properties, such as length, colour, movement, sound, etc. The second is that we pick up or recover these properties by internally representing them. The third is that there is a separate subjective ‘we’ who does these things. These three assumptions amount to a strong, often tacit and unquestioned, commitment to realism or objectivism/subjectivism about the way the world is, what we are, and how we come to know the world.14 Enactivism rejects this kind of realism, in what amounts to perhaps its most radical innovation. As far as the understanding of meaningful experience goes, enactivism tells us that the world we inhabit has properties because of our interaction with it, that are produced for us through our interaction, and that the subjective experience of being an independent self that has this

42  Watching, doing, meaning experience is also a product of that interaction. There are clearly further ramifications that come from this position, some of which I turn to in Chapter 3, but at this point, I want to re-stress this perspective on meaning: that meaning is always, first and before anything else, a matter of an organism coupled to its environment and its situation. As Evan Thompson puts it: Human cognition is not the grasping of an independent outside world by a separate mind or self, but instead the bringing forth or enacting of a dependent world of relevance in and through embodied action.15 The world we perceive, then, is not a faithful (or unfaithful) replica of something outside us, but an assemblage of what is relevant to us as an organism because we are coupled to it. The world and how it is enacted is ‘inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system.’16 Adding nuance, Alva Noë puts it this way: The perceptual world is not a subjective world. The perceptual world is not a world of effects produced in us – in our minds – by the actual world. But the perpetual world is the world for us.17 As I walk along a jetty towards a boat, crunching sand under my feet, feeling cold air on my face, hearing the boards creak, this world is not created for me as a composite of sense data, but it occurs in the situated coupling of my body and its physical environment: the world happens in me. A little cold, a little anxious, a little excited, I become aware of these fragments of world, as they come to my conscious mind and complement the tonality of the experience; but this world is being enacted more fully and more continuously beneath my awareness, as the basis of what occurs in the mind and as the mind. Contentless spectating Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin see the view that I have mapped out so far as Conservative Embodied (or Enactive) Cognition. They argue for a Radical Enactive Cognition that takes a stronger position on the role of action in cognition, and of the importance of action not just outside the brain, but outside the body, as a part of cognition rather than a result of it or adjunct to it, a thesis that […] uncompromisingly maintains that basic cognition is literally constituted by, and to be understood in terms of, concrete patterns of environmentally situated organismic activity, nothing more or less.18 Though minds can and do deal in representations, propositions, and concepts, these are very late developing abilities in the evolution of mind and do not even characterise most of the work of the minds that have the benefit of

Watching  43 them. For many philosophers of mind, they tell us a mind is something that processes and handles representations of the world or ideas of other kinds that has intentional directedness towards the world in this way so that phenomena appear to the mind as conscious experience. For Hutto and Myin, intentionality can happen (and often does happen) without phenomenality, that is, without experiential quality coming to the awareness of the organism. A helpful and intriguing way of interpreting what they propose is that it is in the announcement of objects to the conscious mind that the mind has content, and with the arrival of objects that appear separate from the mind, the subject appears too. Among the fruits of their approach, they say, is a more robust defence of the proposal for extended minds in more radical forms, as having existence in space beyond the brain and body rather than merely extended by our use of tools. Appealing, in a context of cultural critique, is their commitment to the […] Developmental-Explanatory Thesis, which holds that mentalityconstituting interactions are grounded in, shaped by, and explained by nothing more, or other, than the history of an organism’s previous interactions. Sentience and sapience emerge through repeated processes of organismic engagement with environmental offerings.19 This is further echoed in the sense of mind embedded in the environment it couples with and arises from: […] embodiment is not defined with reference to an intuitive, everyday understanding of bodies and their boundaries, but in terms of widereaching organismic sensorimotor interactions that are contextually embedded.20 Minds in their coupling are woven into environment, not simply drawing from it; the interactions are ‘loopy, not linear’.21 This model is a very basic level from which to address the meaning of performance, but it is instructive to re-appraise things from fundamentals. If performance that engages us with the environments we inhabit invites us to experience them anew, then it behoves us to re-think what experiencing an environment involves. For Noë: The environment is the physical world as it is inhabited by the animal. The perceptual world (the environment) is not a separate place or world; it is the world thought of from our standpoint (or from any animal’s standpoint). It is our world.22 So, in this view, the basic mind emerges in the body’s engagement and coupling with its environment, but the conscious mind is a product of that process rather than an observer of it. The ‘world’ of the mind is not its

44  Watching, doing, meaning exterior, but a rich mapping of that exterior, according to what is relevant to the processes of homeostasis, in Heideggerian terms a ‘worlding’.23 It is a subjective process in that it is the production of world for the subject but only produced by the subject in as much as the subject is produced by it too. The worlds of performance participation, and of course all performance, emerge in this way first of all. It is only from this basis that performance creates its own world in a collaboration between and among performers, objects, and spectators. This sense of experience as the outcome of an organism coupled to its environment in an ongoing process of mutual becoming is attractive when considering participatory artworks, which have the same structure: they come to life only when coupled to an experiencing subject. Come to life and come to mind are the same thing; in this sense, objects aren’t objects until they come to mind, objects are things as they are constituted by the mind. And reciprocally, the subject doesn’t come to life until it is engaged in the phenomenal representation of objects: basic mind brings the subject to life at the same time as the phenomenal world, and basic mind is engaged with a world before it brings it to consciousness. This happens when spectating, and it creates the background condition out of which the elements of the performance as such appear, out of which things appear to us recognisably as part of a work of art, as aesthetic objects. Often basic mind and non-representational experience are part of what is bracketed out by the socially conditioned habits through which we recognise art works. But experiential, participatory, and installation art situate the spectator explicitly and implicitly acknowledge the unconscious level at which the experiencing body is coupled to the constructed environment, and the part this plays in bringing the work to life. The background condition is, or becomes, the aesthetic object, or, as in Op Art, the process of coupling becomes part of the work. When a Bridget Riley painting seems to shimmer before our eyes, it is the failure of the coupling of optical organs and monochrome stripes to resolve into a static image and the production of an unstable object that is compelling.24 In Tide Whisperer my body on the boat is part of the deal, representationally, but also non-representationally. I hear the story of a refugee’s terrifying journey while on a boat, and will consciously or unconsciously make the bathetic comparison between the two experiences, conceptualising the situation, alongside and interweaved with the narrative. The point may seem banal, but fundamental: our experience of the performance happens while ‘being on a boat’ is happening first, with all its potential threats to homeostasis and demands on the nervous system. If meaning is always first the meaning of the environment the organism is coupled to, then my organism, at this point, is coupled to an environment of wood, metal, paint, life jacket, motor, waves, wind, ripples, and many metres of cold water. The artwork is me, and the boat, and the words I hear, and all the rest, and the process of coming together. So, as the experience of being a participant forms itself consciously, it takes the form of subject-object, the subject already in the midst of the object of

Watching  45 aesthetic reflection. This is part of how the fluid and protean interrelationship of subject and object in the nature of aesthetic experience can have a different dynamic in participatory performance. This dynamic might evolve to involve physical objects in the environment, with altered and interesting characteristics or orientations based on our participatory engagement with them, or so that personal experience explicitly becomes the object of our attention under the intense reflexiveness of performance. This can be personal experience of our own actions, our feelings, the objects of our attention, and our choices about what to attend to. By extension, these things might accumulate to a reflection on the self itself as an object of reflection. These are complex things, objects that aren’t straightforwardly objects, and whose meaning emerges in ways that are altered by their attribution as aesthetic objects, and where our understanding of the subject itself might refract according to how we conceive the object. But before these other dynamics unfold, there is an organism – a body – in an environment, creating meaning, and even as that meaning comes to consciousness it has already been wrapped into a work of art. Constitutive subjectivity A safety warning can be attached to the idea of the subject’s constitution of its world, however, and around the appropriation of the Heideggerian verbiage of ‘worlding’ in particular. The reciprocity of the constitution of the world in subjectivity does not mean that the subject is an equal partner in this endeavour. There can be no world, no object, in the sense used here without a subject for it to be disclosed to, but the world has material existence, and that material existence imposes itself upon us. As Thompson puts it: […] constitution does not mean fabrication or creation; the mind does not fabricate the world. ‘To constitute,’ in the technical phenomenological sense, means to bring to awareness, to present, or to disclose.25 The primacy of the world beyond the subject, the ‘ontic’ as opposed to ‘ontological’ world, in Heideggerian phenomenology, is implicit in the idea of homeostasis: it is the constant threat of a lurch or drift into a potentially unsurvivable milieu (such as the Bristol Channel, when in a boat off the South coast of Wales) that creates the whole imperative for homeostatic coupling. And the ontic is social as well as natural. Early in Negative Dialectics Adorno declares his aim to ‘use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’.26 He begins with a critique of the reasoning of idealism, and its conception of anything alien to the subject and anything beyond its control as being constituted by that subject, as if the mind creates a world that corresponds to itself. Evidently, expressed in this way idealism seems a nonsense, but in their attempts to theorise the subject’s capacity to have a relation to the world, idealist philosophers appear, to Adorno, to have argued themselves into this cul-de-sac. They have

46  Watching, doing, meaning a view of the world that is ‘anthropocentric’27 in that it sees other things shaped according to our ability to grasp them, not according to their own, solipsistic and inattentive, situation. The subject, in these accounts, being something transcendental, seems by implication a fixed entity, an unassailable position from which the world comes into being for us. It is vital to Adorno that subjectivity does not have this character, that it is at the mercy of practical circumstance, and in fact ‘the product of an empirical world’.28 This is where questions of existence become matters of politics, of the interdependence of people with and upon each other, and of the recognition of the imperfectness of the empirical world. This grounds his theories of the failure of enlightenment rationality and of the nefarious culture industry. However, it is in ‘the strength of the subject’ that Adorno looks to find a resilient core of potential, for autonomy, individual freedom, and for something different to the contemporary state of affairs. Some things, however, are shaped for our needs, or by our designs for them and for other people. This is exactly the dimension that Adorno is directing us to: that the world shaped for us is actually, in its apparently reciprocal relations, shaping us constantly. As Gillian Rose puts it, Adorno sees subjectivity ‘as the correlate of reification’,29 as becoming objective in its relationship with a social world that has a fixed undeviating place for it. Constitutive subjectivity, then, is a problem because of its neglect of the importance of a totalising system of objects and their role in constituting subjects, and therein returns its relevance to the theory of the enactive mind. Enactivism is not idealism, it doesn’t posit a transcendental mind that constitutes a world convenient for it, but an empirical environment that couples with an empirical organism as it fights for survival, producing an empirical mind that on occasion (in human beings, for example) develops subjectivity as a side effect; but in its literature up to now enactivism has only begun to engage with the material sociality constituting (for human beings, arguably) the majority of that environment. By critiquing the constitutive subject, Adorno re-asserts social process as mediating subjectivity30; in the absence of an enactivism of social process that is hinted at in its references to the history of an organism’s coupling, borrowing from a critical theory like Adorno’s, for example by allowing him to direct us to the constitution of the subject in the process of coupling to a social world that doesn’t bend to the will of the organism or the subject, fleshes out what enactivism offers to performance. Storm Storm 3: Together and Alone is another of National Theatre Wales’s recent works.31 Again, the audience are not given active parts, but the spectatorial arrangement still emphasises our participation in the event. It is a recitation of Simone de Beauvoir’s text Pour une Moralite de l’Ambiguite,32 in English, given by a group of six young performers. The text is meditative and expansive, rehearsing some questions about subjectivity that will continue to thread

Watching  47 through this book. The space – a sloping ramp that rakes counter-intuitively through the auditorium towards the screen in Newport’s Neon cinema – is scattered with plastic bags full of clothes, which the performers handle in different ways as they speak to us. One dresses and re-dresses, adding layers of hats and coats, then removing them as she walks about, listening to her colleagues, while others move them from one place to another, or ignore them. The bags look like furniture, and both performers and spectators sit on them. The fourth of the performers to speak to us unpacks and re-folds the clothes, as she speaks. At one point, she picks up a coat and folds it as she talks directly to a woman sitting at her feet. The woman has to make discrete gestures to say: ‘that’s my coat’ so that the performer, with the briefest of faltering in her recitation, hands it back. This is an irruption of the real into the performance world, as celebrated by Hans-Thies Lehmann.33 But in this case, the real irrupts precisely on and in the body of this audience participant. The homeostatic imperatives for her don’t just involve avoiding getting stepped on by other participants as we drift around the space, listening and watching, but also the social presence of all of these other human bodies. Embarrassment occurs at the conscious, conceptual level of mind, but also unavoidably for the pre-representational, basic mind. Momentarily and accidentally, the performance becomes ‘about’ a coat that was suddenly concretely someone’s coat rather than an iconic and ambiguous coat-that-could-be-anyone’s coat. The situation of being looked at, as part of someone else’s error, an interruption to the framing of the event, is fed back into the meaning of the situation that she is in the midst of. The passage being spoken at this point is lost in the evanescence of performance, but there is a good chance that shortly before, or soon after, something like this was spoken: Thus, every man has to do with other men. The world in which he engages himself is a human world in which each object is penetrated with human meanings. It is a speaking world from which solicitations and appeals rise up. This means that, through this world, each individual can give his freedom a concrete content. He must disclose the world with the purpose of further disclosure and by the same movement try to free men, by means of whom the world takes on meaning.34 It’s a shared (despite de Beauvoir’s persistence with the masculine pronoun), and human world that discloses itself, and what’s enacted is intersubjective, a speaking world, where what imposes on us are mistakes and misattributions as well as solicitations and appeals. As audience participants, we have submitted ourselves to the authority of the performance but may react or rebel. Sometimes, the reaction may be reluctant and unintended, as in a gesture that says ‘sorry, that’s my coat’. This is not an existentialist assertion of one’s freedom, but the awkwardness of a situation that won’t disclose itself as required. What might appear to be intended in these performances is that we are placed, as audience participants,

48  Watching, doing, meaning in the world of the performance. What’s as much in evidence is that the world, as enacted in the coupling of organism and environment, reasserts itself. This is another way of thinking about how the background situation, the ‘real world’ if you like, interpenetrates; of thinking about the heteronomy of the artwork. These small failures disrupt but don’t destroy the work, instead they flesh it out. By undermining, perhaps, they reveal the foundations in an interesting way without bringing the edifice down. Storm 3 takes de Beauvoir’s meditations on existence and puts them into the context of unlikely bodies – young voices speaking with impossible wisdom. The thoughts are given life and presence, with a measured and careful intimacy. There’s no space for participants to reply, but the situation does reply, in this accidental moment. Tide Whisperer invites the bathos of spotting our own privileged, safe bodies in the context of a story of peril. What Lehmann celebrates in the irruption of the real is the way performance can invite noise in its transmission, but also the brittleness of the theatrical, whose cracks reveal its uncertain relationship with what lies beneath it. In a variation of this invitation to failure, both these pieces quietly and patiently expose themselves to interference so that what emerges is a performance of the presence of the background situation in the foreground of the performance. In simple and familiar terms, it reminds us of our own presence, and of the artificiality of the work, but as well as that it colours the mundane situation with the shades of the work. The effect is mutual. Performance resonates with its situation – this is nothing new. But thinking about situation as the locus of meaning and the site where mind occurs in the coupling of organism and environment allows these cracks in the surface of performance to suggest the hidden substrates that it is built on. The contentless and enactive engagement with physical and social environment is what generates the world that performance comes to life in.

Contradiction 2: Action

Fight Night Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night is a performance of distorted democracy.35 Throughout the piece, audience participants are asked to vote, by pressing a button on a device that each of us has at our seat. We vote in response to what a group of performers say to us, but what they say bears little relation to plausible criteria for voting: we vote by instinct, or by whoever we like the look of, or by guesswork about what the outcome of the process is supposed to be. Five performers appear before us, one of them a ‘host’, the others are ‘candidates’. What they are candidates for is not said. Why we are voting for them is not set out for us. But nevertheless, we vote. First, we see the four, and vote for our favourite, without them saying anything to us. The loser gives us a speech, and the winner too, and then the host asks all the candidates to begin their campaign by answering a few questions and speaking directly to the audience. The piece seems to be a parody of contemporary democratic processes, at their most personality-driven and performative, but also of those who would like to keep a sceptical distance from democracy’s promises. There are repetitions and variations and the candidates are whittled down until we are placed in a double-bind situation. The apparently meaningless process culminates, after about an hour, when one of the remaining candidates makes an argument that ‘there are no real choices here’,36 and that we, the voters, should (first) press a button that does not correspond to a candidate, effectively spoiling our ballot papers, and in the round after that, hand back our voting devices to ‘break the system’.37 Those who reject it are invited to the stage, to occupy the space that has belonged to the candidates. At this point, there are only two candidates, one of them urging us to hand in our devices and not vote so that a unanimous vote is artificially created. This effectively empowers those who chose to cast a vote to take further decisions, including whether the non-voters should be permitted to stay in the room. If the vote goes this way, the non-voters are told to leave the room (Figure 1.1). This is what I do, on my first experience of the piece, I spoil my ballot, I give back my device, and I walk down to the stage. Reaching the stage, DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-4

50  Watching, doing, meaning

Figure 1.1 Aurélie Lannoy, Angelo Tijssens, & Charlotte de Bruyne in Fight Night. Photograph, Yvon Poncelet.

I and others who have done the same are instructed to leave. This is initiated by the winning candidate, but the rest of the audience are persuaded to support the demand, and so does the candidate who asked us to abstain – who then leaves with us. It seems that we have ejected ourselves from the performance and eliminated ourselves from the democratic process. This kind of double-bind is typical of Ontroerend Goed’s work, where, in Audience38 for example, there are presentations of intolerable manipulations or abuses of audience members, to object to which by walking of the show inevitably becomes part of the show. However, this may be one of a few moments where the structure of the piece allows a space for us to act against it, and to ‘express ourselves’. If the piece is about democratic space, and if the stage itself represents that space in that it is occupied by those who speak to and on behalf of the voters, then occupying that space is an intervention into this symbolic space. To refuse to participate in a broken electoral system, yet to insist on continuing to occupy democratic space, seems to me – as I stand on the stage, being asked to leave – to be a position worth taking. This was the position that I took, trying to encourage my fellow nonvoters to stay on the stage with me. But others left, and after a few moments, I left with them. The authored procedure of the piece, in this case a published text, seems to allow that some non-voters may refuse this instruction, and stay in the room, when the successful candidate is scripted to say: ‘Some of them are probably still here’. My point is not that mine was the ‘right’ response to the performance, or that I had solved its riddle, but that a moment

Action  51 like this can be an interesting example of the embodied experience of decision making, and of impulses to act or not act, and of witnessing myself as a performer of that experience. The moment when the non-voters make a choice about whether to do as they are instructed seems to me a moment of particularly embodied decision-making. We have been seated through most of the performance, expressing ourselves through button-pressing. Standing or sitting on the stage, and moving there after spending most of the performance expressing myself through button-pressing, seemed powerful, at the very least it felt comparatively energetic. When asked to leave, my own felt response was a quite powerful physical urge to stay, to hold my ground. It was – in a way that can’t be fully reconstructed, especially at some distance in time – connected to my perspective on the operation of electoral democracy. It was expressed in my body, appearing on this stage through structured participation, and it was also expressed in what my body wanted to do. As important for my thesis, however, is that the other decisions I made, other votes I cast, were also understood and expressed through my body. As the performance itself continually engaged me and engaged itself with me, it merely reproduced the structure of experience itself, always emerging from the coupling of organism and environment. Enaction and action The hydra, a very ancient and simple pond-dwelling animal made up of a tubular body and a tentacled mouth, has no brain, as such, but neurons that communicate very straightforward signals initiated by electrochemical changes either in the tentacles or the inside of the tube (its ‘stomach’). When a tentacle is touched, a chain of signals travels through it to the opening of the tube (its ‘mouth’) so that it closes on whatever is at hand: It is clear that the hydra does not experience internal representations of an external world that it could use as a basis for operating within its environment. A protozoan swims into the grasp of its tentacles and the neurons fire as they have been wired to do, stimulating adjacent muscle cells so that the tentacles curl about the food and bring it to a mouth that is simultaneously preparing to swallow.39 This is structural coupling and basic mind in action, and an illustration of how meaning and action are interconnected. The hydra cannot think, in conventional terms, it has nothing that we could recognise as a mental process, and yet because of its coupling to its environment an action occurs which is the occurrence of meaning arising from a situation. The enactive thesis is that meaning at the highest level has continuity with this, without a radical break at a point where sentient beings have minds that understand their world. This is, of course, counter-intuitive.

52  Watching, doing, meaning The description above is also a simple account of how action arises in a non-conscious way in living bodies in general. That the account of meaning and that of the origin of action are the same is no accident: meaning is seen as an active process, or rather as the process of action. So, working from these simple (and even simpler) organisms through to our own ‘instinctive’ routines and responses, there is a lot of entirely non-conscious action that is wrapped up in the making of meaning from the coupling of an organism with its environment. This line of thinking is how enactivism gives a biological prehistory to a central idea from phenomenology and pragmatism: that the impulse to act is often indivisible from the act itself so that goals and movements are intrinsic to each other. It is part of the rejection of the computational model of mind, of mind as a separate system that directs action, in favour of systemic action where thought happens as we act and interact, at some points involving conscious perceptions and choices, but often not. Physical action often happens without a conscious decision, through what human beings might recognise as impulse and habit. A scratch, a twitch, a dodge, pressing a button can all happen with or without recognisable conscious thought, or with varying degrees of awareness of choice, or awareness of not-choosing-not to act. Thoughts, too, come unbidden and sometimes resist conscious direction. We might re-order this to say that the body thinks in several ways – it responds independently of conscious thought, it conducts action with minimal direction from conscious thought, it gives the context to conscious thought and is, thus, an element of it, and it enables thought through action. In contrast to the representational process of the manipulation of symbols in other brands of cognitivism, enactive and embodied cognition see thought as consisting of a flow of action, one engagement leading to another and implying the next. Thought happens in context, and the previous actions, in relation to context, are part of the subsequent context. In this way, thought does not handle potential next actions as symbolic objects, but as part of a flow of actions upon which to reflect, and into which to interject, to some extent, so that there is a fluid relationship between thought and the flow of organismenvironment coupled action. Think of the experiences of running down a street, playing with a ball, or giving a performance, for example, and the levels of conscious semi- and unconscious management of action involved. Or think of these levels of experience in Fight Night when I accept the invitation to take the stage. My heightened self-consciousness at a moment like this means that I may have directed my physical actions more deliberately than usual, I might have paid attention to how I walked onto the stage, and how I stood, I might have adjusted my clothes and checked where I was standing in relation to others on stage. But such self-consciousness could not be all-encompassing, I could not take these actions while directing every movement: that would be paralysing. Or, far more likely than complete selfconsciousness, I could be absorbed in the action, finding my way out of my seat and onto the stage without giving a thought to the physical dimension of

Action  53 the action at all. In either case, or anywhere in between, a new set of balances between consciousness and self-consciousness appear, a new experience of the strata of awareness of bodily action. This, then is the first sense in which goals and actions are intrinsic to each other: that we are always-already directed towards action in the world, and always-already mid-goal, so that a new thought, a new goal, and a new impulse to action is a response to the current one. Attempts to achieve stillness, a lack of action – in meditation for example – are not futile, but they strive towards a lack of directedness that is only partly achievable, according to this way of understanding consciousness at least. Loopy This active coupling of organism and environment is what constitutes a world, not the passive reception of ‘sense data’, and the manipulation of representations of external objects. It also entails that what the body does is constituted in this way too and, thus, becomes part of the world as it appears in the mind. If the world is disclosed to us through our active engagement with it, the active body appears experientially through the same process. But the body and its activity are disclosed in particular ways, into an awareness of things that belong to the subjective self and to the body. Evan Thompson draws on a ‘neurodynamical model’ consisting of a set of ‘circular causal loops’ where ‘emotion, intention and consciousness emerge from and are embodied in the self-organising dynamics of these nested loops’.40 There is a ‘motor loop’ of the body’s action in its environment, feeding back from sensory engagement, and stimulating further arousal and response; and a proprioceptive loop consisting of pathways within the body, creating the sense of the whole body and its parts. Nested within these are loops within the brain itself, organising perceptions spatially and temporally, and with a sense of control, interconnection, and anticipation. These loops are neither inside nor outside of consciousness; rather consciousness is one of a number of products and facilitators of the looped structure, emerging along with action, emotion, and intention, contributing to feedforward and feedback structures. Feedforward in this context is the neuronal level activity that stimulates changes at a larger scale, and feedback comes from the parameters that constrain what can be activated at this neuronal level. This sketch of the loopy dynamic of the limbic system, then, imagines ‘local-to-global and global-to-local sides of emergence’.41 Enactivism doesn’t privilege consciousness, preferring that it plays a part in action (and so also experience, mind, meaning) but is also a product of it. Cognition is ‘embodied action’: By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first, that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these

54  Watching, doing, meaning individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context. By using the term action we mean to emphasise once again that sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition. Indeed the two are not merely contingently linked in individuals; they have also evolved together.42 Awareness doesn’t happen somewhere apart from these interconnected loops of brain, body, and environment, but is triggered by them, and feeds forward into them. There is no ‘homunculus’ or miniature self within the brain that observes and guides the actions of the biological self, but there is a consciousness that engages in and has physical consequences. It emerges amongst the enactive engagement of the organism and plays its part in feeding forward into subsequent active engagement. By implication, however, if consciousness merely informs this looping structure, a lot of action goes on without its intervention. This, contradictory to our sense of agency in everyday action, is frequently demonstrated in performance situations where we find ourselves doing things that we may not have chosen, or where spectating our own actions makes them seem strange to us. Performance participation often appears to address itself to the rational mind. It works with choices and perspectives, and depends on planning, exploration, or reflection, and other kinds of deliberate sense-making. But as I have tried to demonstrate in examples already, the ways that participatory performance makes use of involuntary action also vary greatly. My opening example (from In the Beginning Was the End) is of someone speaking out spontaneously in a performance situation where her participation was not invited. The first-hand character of this spontaneity is not known to me, and I can only speculate about how the woman I observed experienced this moment. But it seemed, to me, to arise out of the interaction in a way that surprised her, a half-voluntary echo of the action of the performer, and a filling in of the gaps in what had been said: ‘I’m free!’ as in ‘that’s what you mean isn’t it? You’ve taken off your clothes and given up your work. You’re free!’ But it might have been experienced very differently, perhaps as a conscious reply to someone speaking very directly – ‘you want me to join in? I’ll raise my arms with you. What are you saying? Is it “I’m free!”?’ I don’t know how self-conscious she felt at this moment, how aware of her companions, of how she was performing, or whether she spoke to and with other performers throughout In The Beginning Was The End. In my experience of the climax of Fight Night, voluntary and involuntary action compete: I resolve to stay, but the movement of others to leave the stage affects me, bodily. I move partly because other people move, despite a conscious desire to stay. The decision was conscious, I was aware of changing my mind, but part of that mind-change was a change in the body, under the influence of other bodies and the strange context of being on stage under lights, in a show I hadn’t rehearsed.

Action  55 Rationality The questions of agency that arise from a body that reacts without conscious thought, and that creates and asserts the context out of which conscious thought arises, must also be seen in relation to a body that is socially conditioned so that it is disposed towards certain kinds of response and towards certain kinds of grounding for conscious thought. But they must also be directed towards a less binary conception of thought and action. If thinking happens throughout the body, it should not be simplified as if the body and consciousness are separate. Consciousness is distributed – it has no home in the brain, as was once sought for and hypothesised. It arises across the organs of the mind – chiefly and most significantly in the operations of areas of the brain, but also by implication in the interactions between brain and body that add up to the generation of meaning and mind. Action is taken as meaning occurs and generates response from the mind distributed across the body, involving and not separating itself from the working of the mind that emerges as consciousness. Agency is the capacity to act in the world, which the conscious mind plays a part in. Thinking holistically about it, that which acts is the person, rather than the subject; the subject is the part of the person that can reflect on itself. In everyday language, in moral and ethical discussion, and in our legal frameworks for example, we take the conscious subject as responsible for choice and action. What I do belongs to me, and the me in question is a conscious, social subject. In aesthetic situations too, we ascribe agency to conscious subjects: artists too are credited with the power to have brought their works into being, to have acted deliberately through their creative processes. Audiences are credited with the choices they have made: to attend, to interpret, to make judgements. Cognitive philosophy is only one perspective that muddies this clear conception of the autonomous will of the subject. In Dialectic of Enlightenment,43 Adorno and Horkheimer portray modern subjectivity as a process of struggle to assert autonomy in a separation from nature through rationality. As I have suggested above, a thinking body is one way we might consider how action occurs under the force of nature, as instinct or impulse. Of course, the separation from nature is not a done deal for Adorno and Horkheimer, it is part of an antinomy where the autonomy achieved is only at the price of further domination. No longer dominated by nature, we are dominated by ‘administered life’ – social determination under capitalist systems – and alienated from reality. And yet the idea of a free will is essential to the sense of self-ownership: The dawning sense of freedom feeds upon the memory of the archaic impulse not yet steered by any solid I. The more the I curbs that impulse, the more chaotic and thus unquestionable will it find the pretemporal freedom.44

56  Watching, doing, meaning Autonomy from natural impulse, or at least faith in this kind of rational autonomy, depends upon the disavowal of a kind of freedom that trusts impulse and the quality of interconnection it might bring. Quality At this juncture, the question of action is not ethical – though of course a performance like Fight Night is an investigation of political ethics – but aesthetic, as it concerns what action in an aesthetic context means, and what meaning in an (inter)active aesthetic context is. Invitingly, when considering the aesthetics of action, for enactivism, it is sensorimotor quality in the looping structure of embodied action that is the driver. Mark Johnson stresses the qualitative basis of meaning Our world is a world of qualities – qualities of things, people, situations, and relationships. Before and beneath reflective thinking and inquiry, our world stands forth qualitatively. I know my world by the distinctive light, warmth, and fragrant breeze of a spring day, just as much as I know it by the driving rain, cold winds and pervading darkness of a stormy winter afternoon. I know you by the qualities of your distinctive eyes, your mouth, your voice, your smell, the character of your walk, and how you hold yourself. All of my thinking emerges within this qualitative world, to which it must return if it is to have any effect on my life.45 These qualities arise in the body’s coupling with its environment and the things in it, they are sensory and somatic. They become the conscious extension of the body’s involvement in its changing environment, the beginning of the conscious mind, but before that quality is happening at the non-conscious level, ‘before and beneath’ awareness, as above. Johnson’s repeated use of ‘know’ in this passage seems to direct us to consciousness, but what he describes directs us away from rationality. What I know first is a world of qualities, into which I am thrown and always responding to. This knowledge isn’t omnipresent or extra-sensory, it is based on our skilled sensorimotor investigation of environment. For Noë, perceptual content is ‘virtual all the way in’: There is no quality that is so simple that it is ever given to us all at once, completely and fully. However simple the object of our attention, the field of experience will outstrip what can be taken in at once.46 For Johnson, this leads to the perspective that experience is always aesthetic, always a matter of an engagement that projects qualities into the world, prior to logical appraisal. This is not a demotion of the conscious mind, but a re-balancing of what its primary activity consists of. Much like

Action  57 Damasio’s promotion of feeling as the basis of effective cognition and action, Johnson argues for the meaning of situations and events as founded upon continuous unconscious engagement. This is a theory of meaning as the basis of understanding rather than the highest outcome of it, he says: ‘[y] ou have meaning, or are caught up in meaning, before you actually experience meaning, reflectively’.47 He elaborates by drawing on the aesthetics of John Dewey, who is convinced that the artwork requires no autonomy, as there needs to be nothing radically different about the cognitive apparatus used to experience it, but which is ‘consummated’ in a way not available to mundane experience: Art uses the very same syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic resources that underlie all meaning, but in art those resources are exploited in remarkable ways that give us a sense of the meaning of things that is typically not available in our day-to-day affairs.48 Johnson goes further with this continuity between art experience and mundane life, proposing that all understanding is essentially aesthetic, because of its foundation in feeling and embodied response. This is a radical perspective on aesthetic heteronomy that puts the question of the participant’s status in the artwork into a certain perspective. After all, the participant doesn’t have to become an actor, to rehearse, prepare, or train to do this. Her resources are just what they were in the time just before the performance. She responds under the specific circumstances of the work, but these are an intensification rather than a transformation of what has gone on before. We can treat the moment described earlier in Fight Night as an example of this. When I find myself impelled to move (or to stay), and feel this as bodily impulse, I am especially aware of the complex of action and thought that emerges as the meaning of a situation. And we might read in it Johnson’s aesthetic, bodily meaning exemplified in an art process: though he asks us to treat all meaning as aesthetic, it might be that in an explicitly artistic context we can learn or re-learn this perspective. My analysis so far suggests that this particular moment (feeling impelled to both move and stay) and the whole work that it is part of can be treated as art objects, the one an important fragment of the other. As such each deserves consideration. The Art Object Johnson’s is an emphatic theory of aesthetic continuity, it says that all aspects of human understanding have an aesthetic basis. There are other theories of continuity, or heteronomy, and the prevailing conception of the place of art in society is one of heteronomy: the wide acceptance of the capacity of participation in art of all kinds as a maker or an audience to bring benefits; the interpenetration and cross-fertilisation of low- and high-art traditions;

58  Watching, doing, meaning the practices that place art works in everyday settings; and the use of ordinary, grotesque, and political experience as subject matter – these are all variations on the removal of art from a rarefied and privileged sphere. But there remain ways that we may hold on to the sense of art as something special, that needs to feel special or become so as part of a practice of making things special. Disavowing or disbelieving this specialness runs the risk of reducing the practice of art to a mere tool, or of undermining our ability to commit ourselves to its rigours. Thus, there is something else that needs attention. Performance participation does something with the action that it invites from us. It marks it off from other moments, frames it and names it as part of an artwork, and as such makes it into an object of a special kind. In Fight Night, my button-pressing and my stepping onto and off the stage become art objects. So do my indecisions and my impulses, and my sense that my impulses and any decisions I make have been anticipated and to all intents and purposes, scripted. In contrast to Johnson, for whom the subjective experience of meaning making in an artwork is paradigmatically subjective, for Adorno, an art object is especially objective. But he comes to this through the contradiction that art is a process that is simultaneously an object. Performance participation is inherently an art of processes, it consists of processes conceived by and initiated by artists and brought to fruition as an artwork only when participants accept and act on their invitation. Adornian aesthetics, however, insists on the processual dimension of object-based artworks and highly formalised performance traditions, in a way that is provocative in respect of processoriented work. The process in question isn’t the creative work of the artist, nor is it the process of subjective reception of a work by an individual in their personal and community context: That the experience of artworks is adequate only as living experience is more than a statement about the relation of the observer to the observed, more than a statement about psychological cathexis as a condition of aesthetic perception. Aesthetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that instant in which artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. […] Through contemplative immersion the immanent, processual quality of the work is set free. By speaking it becomes something that moves in itself. Whatever in the artefact may be called the unity of its meaning is not static but processual, the enactment of antagonisms that each work necessarily has in itself.49 The processual character is not the relationship between the work and its audience, but is immanent to the work, potential in it until animated by its encounter with a perceiving, experiencing subject. Two words in this passage stick out: gaze and immersion. Though Adorno is not being literal about the gaze of a spectator or viewer, he is using it as an image of attention to a phenomenon exterior to the self, engagement with an object,

Action  59 whether that be a piece of music, a painting, or a play. What the gaze falls on, figuratively, is not the painting, but the ‘crystalised process at a standstill’50 that is the work as it comes to life, speaks, and reveals the tensions and dynamics within it. As sketched in the previous section, Adorno is motivated by scepticism about the priority of subjectivity in the philosophy of his time, wherever it has taken a ‘constitutive’ role, as coming before all else. He insists that the situation of the subject vis-a-vis the object is not so powerful: we must allow that the objective world retains its power over us. In an art event, however, there is at least the potential that in our directedness towards objects we encounter a peculiar and paradoxical power. Among the characteristics he notes in aesthetic objects are a quality of remoteness, even in things that are close at hand, and of un-graspableness – of transience or ephemerality. And most strikingly, he finds art works to be particularly objective, as expressed straightforwardly in a lecture some years before he began Aesthetic Theory: I think what is also central for accessing a work of art, for experiencing a work of art as a work of art in the first place, is that one is met with an experience of […] meaning as something objective. I understand a work of art at the moment when […] I understand what it is saying as something it says to me, not as something I am projecting onto it, something that has come only from me.51 The art object, whether something physical and made, like a sculpture sitting before us, or something performed by many bodies and taking a long time, like a symphony, doesn’t just seem to hang together as a particularly intriguing collection of things for us to interpret. It speaks to us in a way that convinces us it has a depth of independent character, beyond what is apparent and explainable, and beyond what we can attribute to our own subjective response to it. This purported property of objectivity is interesting in itself, in relation to the ‘living experience’ of those engaging with art, but it is also one of the bases on which art experience must be seen as essentially and especially contradictory,52 as the subjective aspect is equally (if not more) undeniable. Thinking this way is an attempt to capture what makes art experiences distinctive, by casting them as the experience of particularly objective objects, objects that are more than usually independent not only from us as the subjects that encounter them, but also from other interests and influences. For Adorno, they ‘withdraw’ from the totality of nature and social life, while being undeniably embedded, in their material form, in both nature and social life. We have non-practical relationships to them, even those who make our living by making, performing or explaining them. The question in this context, however, is how we might come across this receding-but-objective quality in an artwork where the bodies that bring it forth are more than usually embedded, or are interpenetrated by the totality of nature and society in an immediate way, because they are the very bodies

60  Watching, doing, meaning from which the spectating subject also views the work. Adorno refers to contemplative immersion to describe what brings forth the processual quality of the work, its immanent antagonisms, and instability. He is not addressing the questions of immersion that we struggle with in relation to performance participation, but the practice of committing oneself to a work, as the only way in which the evanescent but still insistent object that is the work becomes animate. This allows the question of participation in an artwork to be reformulated as the question of whether an immersion of this kind can be found, as a contemplative engagement with an object. If: The artwork is both the result of the process and the process itself at a standstill. It is what at its apogee rationalist metaphysics proclaimed as the principle of the universe, a monad: at once a force field and a thing.53 What of a process that never comes to a standstill, or at least not until the event is over, and the force field of its interacting energies has dissipated? The evanescence of the artwork is as important as its insistent objectivity, they are volatile, they dissolve, and they splinter if we try to pin them down.54 In Adorno’s schema, this contradiction just about hangs together, as the work manifests fleetingly, objectifies before vanishing. But in the midst of a work as it makes demands for action, when we are unable to gaze on it, it is harder to conceive this ‘monad’ – a thing with no antecedents or influences – among conflicting imperatives, engagements, and influences when we are so tightly coupled to the real social situation of making the work happen. Standing on a stage, feeling the compulsion to both leave as instructed and to stay in protest, I was coupled to a constructed but compelling situation, I could argue for immersion in different ways. The image of a ‘force field’ suggests a kind of immersion, being surrounded by forces that are at work on me and through me, looping and feeding forward and back. But something like ‘contemplative immersion’ too, that lets the artwork manifest as an object, is at work here. As well as playing my part as a voter/non-voter and completing the jigsaw of action required by the piece, I play my part as an audience member, and I watch. I watch myself, and somehow out of the puzzle of my own and other people’s actions, I do the work of synthesising some kind of whole out of the parts. I let the conflicting elements come together, or at least exist together for me in their antagonism, and they ‘become something that moves in itself’. Adorno says of Beethoven that his work is ‘the full experience of external life returning inwardly’.55 What I am observing here is an opposite movement, where impulse, quality, and the loops of the embodied mind are the media of participation, passing outwardly into the greater whole of the work, before it slips away from us.

Contradiction 3: Body

Counting Sheep As I arrive at the makeshift box office for Counting Sheep,56 I am recognised by someone whom I have briefly taught as an MA student. He ‘upgrades’ my ticket from ‘Protestor’ to ‘Front Line Protestor’. As a Front Line Protestor, I take a place at a long table with perhaps 20% of the audience, others sit behind us on low benches, and more again at either end of the room (a railway arch under Waterloo Station, part of London’s Vault festival). These places of relative proximity to the performance normally correspond, of course, to ticket price. My antenna buzz for what is about to happen, and for who the people sitting at the table with me are. It’s an international crowd and I hear several European languages and accents, and some from further afield. I see Eastern Europeans noticing each other and having excited, bonding conversations. It’s a very white crowd. Across from me there’s another solo audience member, she doesn’t have anyone with her and looks a little nervous. She strikes up a conversation with a couple next to her before things start. I think she’s a plant or a performer, though I’m not able to reason exactly why. The show begins with a greeting from ‘Mark’, who does a non-standard version of the ‘please turn off your phones’ announcement: he asks us to keep them on and take pictures, but to put them on airplane mode. Bowls are passed down the table, then bread and dishes of beetroot soup, then glasses and a bottle of vodka. Those of us sitting at the table (the Front Line Protestors) cautiously indulge, then more eagerly. I have soup, bread, and several vodkas. The ‘protestors’ sitting behind us on either side of the table don’t get any and nor do the ‘observers’ sitting in rows further away. There is music, some in Ukrainian that I don’t know or understand, but which sounds great, and to which Mark seems to offer as a riposte Brendan Behan’s The Old Triangle. I join in lustily because I know the words and because the vodka is at work already. We hear about Mark’s arrival in Kiev, and at Instytutska Maidan, and how he is accidentally drawn into a demonstration against the overthrow of the government. Mark has Ukrainian heritage, but little of the language, but he meets a woman who speaks English and she tells him about the situation. DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-5

62  Watching, doing, meaning Her name is Mariska, he is fascinated by her; she is the woman who was across the table from me. As the story moves on, the table is broken up, and we lose our places. Protestors and Front Line Protestors mix from this point, though they both retain their privilege over the Observers seated at the bleachers at either end of the room. Mark’s story has moved on to his joining the protest in the Maidan, and we are to become the protestors alongside him. We are soon given props, costume (a military or construction helmet, or perhaps a blue and yellow flag), and things to do. We build barricades, passing car tyres from the corners of the room to the middle, where they pile up with our tables and benches. It’s heavy work: passing them along a line, with music pumping (a mix of electronic beats, accordion, and strings), singing and flag waving to encourage each other. There is a spontaneous, roughshod wedding on the barricades, the atmosphere of celebration builds, and so does the romance between Mark and Mariska. Later, we take the barrier apart and re-arrange it with more urgency as the story moves on to the sustained violent attacks on the protestors in the square. We take up riot shields and form a defensive circle. Performers pelt around the circle buffeting the shields. The beats get louder and mix with the bashing of plastic as bodies press against each other. We dance a desperate, sad waltz – in my case awkwardly with a stranger I exchange a few incoherent words with. We hear of deaths, and of Mark’s attempts to relay what’s happening to the Western media, of exhaustion, confusion, and loss. We build shelters for ourselves and pretend to sleep, as we watch and hear the uncertain end to Mark and Mariska’s story. It is a performance of affect and atmosphere, sweeping us into a simulacrum of the exhilaration of urgent collective action and its near failure. It requires us to be active, though not to make choices; we are there to play the supporting characters but also to feel something of the danger and thrill of putting our bodies on the line in support of something, without thinking hard about what we support. Body image, body schema Consciousness is most often consciousness of things, emerging from our engagement with things in the environment, or with things that we remember or imagine; in the terminology of phenomenology it is intentional. This applies to the body itself, which is experienced as an object or a collection of objects, as well as being the means of our experience of other objects: but we are conscious of the body when we are intentional towards it, not otherwise. For Shaun Gallagher,57 there’s a distinction to be made between a body image, which we are aware of, and a body schema which we are not. This way of thinking allows some nuance in distinctions between consciousness and unconsciousness and between conscious and unconscious action. The body schema is the body as we are unaware of it, as we direct ourselves towards other objects in acts of manipulation, locomotion, or perception. The body schema achieves a great deal of physical action, both those systemic activities

Body  63 that sustain homeostasis at basic levels, blood circulation, breathing, and digestion for example, and the monitoring of the ongoing situation (the milieu, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms) for changes that might require an adjustment or an impulsive response. It also achieves some things that appear to require precise judgement of physical space: Body schemas enable us to find our way in space; to walk without bumping into things; to run without tripping and falling; to locate targets; to perceive depth, distance and direction; to throw and catch a ball with accuracy.58 That we achieve many things without concentrating on them, and often cannot on closer examination know how we have gone about them, is a commonplace insight, but one that can still be startling and even unsettling. Breaking down these activities consciously, trying to explain them to ourselves or to re-learn or modify how we accomplish them reveals how much is done without the intervention of consciousness. However, the body schema does not usually undertake these matters of perception and motor skill entirely without reference to the conscious mind. The other bodily aspect, the body image, is what the conscious mind is aware of when it initiates and directs and provides the context for this kind of action, that it could not complete without a functional body schema. A striking thing in Gallagher’s account is how flexible what is captured by the body image can be: what is disclosed to the consciousness as a thing that the body is doing, rather than being disguised within the perception of the thing that we are involved in doing or investigating, is not by any means a consistent mapping of certain parts of the body, nor a simple binary of awareness or unawareness. When we are occupied in an activity, parts of the body irrelevant to that activity fade from awareness, only to reappear when something comes along that draws our attention to that part of the body schema and brings it into the foreground of the body image (a ‘limit-situation’ in Gallagher’s terms59). A pain or an itch will draw our attention, or a breeze across the skin, or an interruption to the progress of a habitual activity, and so a body part becomes the object of our awareness. We might consciously direct attention to a body part or try to attend to the body as a whole, exploring what can be experienced but which is normally half-hidden, what is included in our general awareness but occluded by our absorption in specific tasks. And if we think about how differently parts of the body reveal themselves to us, we see how differentially the body image maps itself: we are far more aware of our hands and feet and tongue, of what they are doing when they are actively at work, than we are of our eyes – even though what we see (for most people) is nearly always a focal point of consciousness – and we are even less aware of our ears.60 Some parts of the body can never become objects of phenomenal awareness: I can’t bring my spleen or my liver into focus, and it takes more concentration to become aware of my eardrum than my fingertip.

64  Watching, doing, meaning Being aware of my body in action is often indistinguishable from being aware of the action itself. As I type these words, I am aware of the keys under my fingertips, but only when my attention is drawn to them am I aware of fingers and fingertips as separate from the action of typing, and of the keys themselves. When focussed on the activity of typing, it’s a combination of fingers and keys that I am aware of – and to go further than this, we might say that the action of writing entails an awareness of the words on the screen with only a residual awareness of keys, and even less of fingers. My poor touch-typing often brings attention back to the location of keys, but even then I can find that the action of locating the backspace key and re-typing happens without conscious attention to the fingers themselves, and while I am consciously focussed on how to continue a sentence. This commonplace example, the one most ready-to-hand for me during the writing process, could stand for so many skilled and semi-skilled activities in which there is a ‘marginal awareness’61 of the body: it is under conscious direction, but goes about its work at a threshold of conscious awareness, available to the body schema but mostly blending into the background of the milieu of the situation. The degree and quality of this awareness certainly varies according to the task concerned, and according to approach or attitude to the task as well as to mood or state of mind and body; it may also vary from person to person, with some more inclined to ‘lose themselves’ in this way in physical activity, or habituated to it. But it is recognisably a shared facet of embodied experience, to the extent that exceptional cases – where for example illness has caused damage to the nervous system so that a person does not have a normal perception of their own body as their own body, despite being able to complete everyday tasks and sense pain for example62 – are of great interest to neuroscientists and experimental psychologists. Awareness of one’s own body is often called proprioception, and Gallagher takes the variations of treatment of this term and its phenomena in different disciplines as one of the cues for his enquiry. Neuroscientists will tend to treat proprioception as the ‘entirely sub personal, non-conscious’63 awareness in the nervous system of the position of the body, while psychologists and philosophers think of it as an element of consciousness. These perspectives on proprioceptive information and proprioceptive awareness, respectively, integrate to give a sense of where and how we are in relation to our unfolding physical situation, and thus are the basis of a fundamental aspect of our self-consciousness and personal identity. It is the relevance of these layers of proprioception to the process of this self-consciousness that Gallagher examines. Proprioceptive awareness is, thus, the perception of a special kind of object, of the body as my object, or of myself as an object. But often there is transparency, we perceive the world through the body, without perceiving the body itself64 we perceive the activity, perception or engagement, and have a sense of having a place in it. This offers an intriguing insight into the structure of consciousness, that in these facets of proprioception we have a

Body  65 continuum of embodied self-consciousness in the most literal sense, where the identity between the self and the body is a central but variable constituent. The body schema is the sensorimotor system integrated across the whole body and operating in relation to whole-body actions and projects. That the structure of consciousness is such that it is not identical with the body image that comes to conscious awareness shows one of the limits of the conscious mind – a limit to its involvement in action, and perhaps by implication to what it is capable of. To the conscious mind, transparency might feel like it is the exception, as the conscious mind is the realisation of a world of objects we are intentionally directed towards. And as we direct our attention to the body, it becomes opaque to us. From the perspective of basic, non-representing mind, however, we speculate that most meaning is generated as transparent engagement, for an organism coupled with an environment. For most minds (and most minds are non-human), there is neither need nor facility to get beyond this basic level. In Counting Sheep, when I am passing tyres along a line, or when I’m holding my place in the shield wall, I am fully occupied in these actions despite being self-conscious (in every sense) when beginning them. There is a quality of nervousness early in the event, but the contagious energy and commitment of the performers is intensified by physical proximity, shared food and drink, and then by having work to do as the piece reaches its climaxes. I am sporadically aware of my hands, arms, and shoulders when things become strenuous, and of the positions of my feet and my balance, but I’m mostly absorbed in the task – though not lost in it. My bodily awareness is transparent, the action discloses itself to me but not my limbs, skin, and organs. By contrast, I don’t recall that the waltz, danced with another audience participant, ever became transparent for me, I’m not good enough at it and was fully aware of trying to keep time and avoid stepping on toes. I was consciously present at Counting Sheep, of course, even in these moments of transparency, I wasn’t there as a ‘basic mind’ and nothing else. We might speculate about performance participation where consciousness fades and instinct takes the lead, but I don’t want to make those claims in this case, only that my body image gave a typically partial awareness of what my body was achieving on behalf of the performance, while other things became transparent to me – and more evident to others, in this case perhaps especially the Observers in the cheap seats. In retrospect, these transparencies have become very interesting objects, but for a while, they aren’t there for me, there was only the process of passing, or of building, or of holding my shape in the shield wall. I am dwelling on these short passages of the performance because they illustrate how basic mind can be more than the background to the dramaturgy of participatory performance. In becoming transparent to myself in even this

66  Watching, doing, meaning fairly minimal way, I begin to perceive the action with myself in it, without having to be imaginatively transported. I don’t have to be empathically involved with the characters, get swept away by their passions and perils, or be overwhelmed by spectacle (though all three of these techniques are in play in Counting Sheep as well) I can be in the action in a way that I perceive only the action, and – though perhaps fleetingly – not the incongruity of myself in the action. This is significant because, after all, this is a political play. In a 2014 article for The London Review of Books, James Meek reports on an interview with a young man who had been at the Maidan ‘Revolution’, writing of how he seemed to relate the events in the second person, ‘as if I and everyone reading this, could equally well have lived through his experience:’65 You’re a peaceful person but you understand the time has come. You start trying to take cobblestones out of the road. You’re surprised at how easily they come free. You join a human chain passing stones forward. You see the first Molotov cocktails being thrown. Snow falls and people use it to build huge ramparts. You break cobblestones in half to throw them more easily. You carry food. You carry snow. The first wounded begin to appear. You’re trapped in Instytutska with a rock in your hand. You see a young guy near you in a mask with a pistol. You go to him while he’s loading it and say ‘Please don’t.’ He swears at you and says: ‘They’re killing us.’ You become afraid because you see now their hands will be untied. The young man (Alexei Inosemtsev), in Meek’s retelling, echoes some of what I, as an audience participant, have experienced in simulation in Counting Sheep: human chains, barriers, the wounded, and the escalation of fear. But the cobble stones that feature in his account are absent from the show, as is the pistol and demonstrators priming themselves for violence. Also absent is the ‘Right Sector’, a collection of nationalist demonstrators, including football gangs and avowed Neo-nazis, who took to the Maidan alongside the pro-European and anti-corruption demonstrators. Counting Sheep is partisan, a campaigning piece of theatre. In its closing sequence, two of the musicians step forward and reveal that they are, in fact, the real Mark and Mariska, and that they created the show after joining up to defend Ukraine against invasion by Russian forces, and being persuaded that their talents were better suited to spreading the word internationally, of the conflict that continues there. But here too, there isn’t time or inclination for nuance. The complexities of that conflict aren’t hinted at, the extremists on both sides, the alleged interference of the Western powers, the views of some ethnic Russians. I don’t intend to find fault with this, there’s no pretence that this is anything other than a partisan piece, and I’m more sympathetic to their point of view than sceptical: but it’s worth recognising what kind of a show this

Body  67 is, and what this oscillation between bodily transparency and physical selfconsciousness plays a part in. Opacity Perhaps the defining feature of the body’s sensual presence is the way it resides (usually) in the background. If we are to hope to bring this pervasive feature of our lives, of ourselves, into focus, then we need actively to withdraw from our habitual engagement with the world around us. We need somehow to let the body itself crowd into the space of our attention and let itself be felt. And this is not easy to do.66 Does the subsumption of these physical activities in an art activity mean that we attend to them in this focused way? No, not if they are experienced as I have described them: it is only in reflection that I have dwelt on them, in the moments of the event I was engaged. In recollection, I make them into objects of reflection, which is quite different to the kind of close attention that Noë is getting at in the passage above. He is suggesting that it takes meditative or mindful practices to really make the body ‘opaque’, to give it something akin to a surface and texture to appreciate and attend to. That we move between perceiving ourselves and our bodies as objects, and perceiving the things and activities we engage with through them in an oscillating fashion – either between absorbed engagement and reflection on that engagement, or between momentary or longer mindful attention to experience and absorption – is itself a kind of dialectical movement. Any moment of experience, or flow of experience, in this embodied character, is elusive precisely because it has these two contradictory aspects that cannot be held in mind at the same time. If aesthetic experience is a style or modality of perceptual achievement, as Noë has it, it works as other modalities do, by skilful interrogation that brings the work into focus, allowing its elements and structures to come together. Critical thinking, and the acquisition of the critical concepts to apply to works of art, are essential to this, but not so that critical distance prevents engagement and embodied transparency. The skills learned include the understanding of how and when to engage, and how to integrate this variation of modality into the ‘whole’ of the work. Nor do we have to think too hard about these modalities, sociolinguistic practices are extensions of the skilful engagement of the body, and they are most often transparent too.67 This is only a variation on the styles of engagement we know well and apply to all art forms, as all have their manners and means of fully absorbed engagement. What feels fresh in this work is not that it asks for a mode of engaging with the work that becomes transparent through engagement (that it invites us to ‘get involved’), but that this process of getting involved becomes a thing in itself, an object of curiosity and uncertainty, and part of the work as a whole.

68  Watching, doing, meaning Process as aesthetic object These elements of this piece (and others) aren’t immediately objectivated, they remain transparent until we reflect on them, but their oscillation between objects and means to engage with objects, is itself an element of the work as a whole, or of the work as it has the potential to become a whole. I want to make a connection between this as a technique in the context of a piece of political theatre, and the object character of works of art and their constituent parts. What is described above is a conception of the body as it appears to us as an object, and as it vanishes into activity. We might give that vanishing, transparent aspect the name ‘process’, and expand what it captures for us: artworks do not always appear to us as such, as artworks, and are ‘in process’ as we engage with them, towards the interaction of their parts and the realisation and release of their potential. That is, we can recognise something as belonging to the category of one form of art or another, and relate to it in mundane ways, but it takes the skilful engagement with it according to its form for it to disclose itself as an artwork, as a kind of object that depends on the interaction of disparate elements. In this sense, an artwork is the event of this interaction, rather than the physical or conceptual object that we perceive. But it is important that we do perceive artworks as things, that we experience the force of their presence, and the demands it makes on us, as a thing – often as if it is a property of a physical thing or assemblage of things. This objectivation of the artwork is always provisional, temporary, as Adorno says: If it is essential to artworks that they be things, it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things, and thus turn art against art. The totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress into an impotently subjective impulse and flounder in the empirical world.68 So once more there is an oscillation between process and object, resulting in an instability rather than lasting unity.69 This is not a weakness in the character of an artwork, but the source of its distinction: ‘[w]hat crackles in artworks is the sound of the friction of the antagonistic elements that the artwork seeks to unify’.70 In the case at hand, what is brought together is the very basic and contradictory elements of bodily experience, and our possession of them. This crackle of contradictory elements (if it occurs) is scripted for us in the invitation to enact with our bodies things that have been chosen by others, and that reproduce the actions of others: actions that will belong to us and not belong to us. Adorno continues with a comparison of artworks in general to scripts and written language that contain the seeds of meaning as a process: ‘its processual element is enciphered in its objectivation. The processual character of artworks is nothing other than their temporal nucleus71’. Artworks are

Body  69 temporally protean. What they become depends on the time of the event of their disclosure; time and place is everything to what we make of them. Participatory works are additionally protean in that the event of selfdisclosure – the objectification of the body in action – and its temporal oscillation from process to object, is itself absorbed into the whole of the work, just as it stands forth for us in experience. The body’s action begins as transparent and becomes opaque. The artwork begins as opaque, a thing apart, and becomes transparent before becoming opaque again, reifying again. Subject/object Adorno’s philosophical ambition was to redefine the subject and the object, and their relationship, without presupposing their identity, and to show that this can only be accomplished if the subject and the object are understood as social processes and not as the presuppositions of pure epistemology.72 Adorno’s interest in aesthetics was (like Emmanuel Kant’s), in part, about an alternative arena in which to think through the subject/object relationship, the appearance for consciousness of an external world. Again, he conceives it as an antinomy, in which there is no priority of subject or object, neither a naturalist standpoint that credits only external objects with full reality, nor a subjectivist view, where only what appears to us and how it appears can truly be known. These are irreconcilable but also necessary positions, not to be resolved but to be held in abeyance together. In this case, like Kant, he does offer something of a resolution in the aesthetic, where a subject, when experiencing an artwork, ‘recomposes’ it, while also becoming subject to it, overtaken by it. Thus, echoing phenomenology and pragmatism, subject and object themselves are processes that happen in relation with each other in experience. This is an implicit theory of experience and of art as experience, but not of deliberately experiential art. The critique of identity thinking and the proposition of non-identity thinking is a theory of subject-object interrelationship, especially in the creative process. For the artwork and thus for its theory, subject and object are its own proper elements and they are dialectical in such a fashion that whatever the work is composed of – material, expression and form – is always both. The materials are shaped by the hand from which the artwork receives them; expression, objectivated in the work and objective in itself, enters as a subjective impulse; form, if it is not to have a mechanical relationship to what is formed, must be produced subjectively according to the demands of the object. […] But the reciprocity of subject and object in the work, which cannot be that of identity, maintains a precarious balance.73

70  Watching, doing, meaning What are material, expression and form, in participatory performance? I have tried to show that we can think of participant bodies as material, as well as their actions and potentially the oscillation of awareness of those actions and the body’s involvement in them. But can they be ‘shaped by the hand’ in any but a figurative sense? Whose expression are we interested in – both the performance maker and the participant’s, of course, and what is form, in this context? Adorno is showing how the subjective and objective exchange places and hold their precarious balance; perhaps, we have to look for different place-swappings, and a different equilibrium. His respect for the objectivity of art works takes another form in his relative demotion of the conceptual response to art. Feeling is important, as well as thinking, in aesthetic response; but as well as this he recognises that art works will always say more than can be conceptualised, that they are more than the equivalent mental constructs that have inspired them or that they inspire. Art works, as things, have this aspect of autonomy. He discusses the materiality of art works, and the false binary of form and content, so that form as he sees it becomes content in itself, while also re-forming materials out of their pre-existent form. He doesn’t theorise experience or subjectivity as a material, (except in passing, as above where it is ‘recomposed’) but offers a theory of objectivity that admits a more complex, overlapping relationship with the subjective. The challenge is to work through how this theory of experience, and the experience of art, can accommodate an explicitly experiential or participatory art, along with how it can conceive such art as having a political potential. But like the enactivists, Adorno sees the appearance of things to consciousness – experience – as a process. His critique of ‘identity thinking’ is against the fixing of things to concepts, against reification. His aesthetics deals with encounters with precarious objects, and in performance participation experience itself becomes an object. Crackle There is something troubling in the apparent simplicity of Counting Sheep. On their website, the Marczyks write: ‘every time we imagine and stage a revolution with a new group of strangers, it restores our belief that the extent of our empathy is limitless, and anything is possible’.74 Which is a nice sentiment to sell a show with. But empathy is not limitless, nor always benign, and everything is not possible. To the extent that I appear conscripted to their cause I am troubled, despite being sympathetic to it, rather than its antagonists. How close is this to an aestheticisation of politics, rather than a political artwork? It is, after all, about re-staging and advocating for a particular revolution, not about the question of the transformation of the world as such, and art’s role in it. Doing my bit to keep alive the grounds for the age-old critique of political theatre, I don’t get involved in Ukrainian politics after taking part in this piece; I don’t even give them much more thought until beginning to writing

Body  71 this chapter. I have no evidence that others weren’t galvanised or radicalised, that connections weren’t made and minds changed, but there’s plenty in this piece that conforms to a sceptical view of ‘immersive theatre’: in the skilful use of sensation and affect, the scripted ‘narcissism’ of watching myself close to the centre of the action, and of course the purchase of privilege, even here, where we are supposed to be imagining and staging a revolution. The preceding threads of analysis pull in different directions, and I don’t intend to properly untangle them. I’m also wary of untangling threads to reveal only a perfectly ordinary piece of string. It would be possible to work through the relationship between the disclosure of the body in the mind with that of the work of art, to clarify their differences and resonances, and to show little very interesting about Counting Sheep or works like it. One thing I hope to draw from combining Adornian aesthetics with enactivist cognition is that observing the tangles – the contradictions – can be more fruitful than clarifying and explaining. The piece entangles me, it plays with what I am willing to contribute to it, and the ways that I can recognise myself in it. It seems to want me to recognise myself as like the protestors in the Maidan, as their ally, and I do. I recognise myself as someone who could commit to revolutionary action, and I recognise something of what this could feel like – in echoes of the much more tame and limited political protests I’ve involved myself in throughout most of my life. But I also recognise the tension between the things I simulate and the things I do. In the moments where I catch myself, or stop to consider what I’m up to, I feel slightly ridiculous, especially when wearing the flag of a troubled country about which I know little. But I enjoy building barricades, I enjoy defending against the police attacks, mostly in that transparent way, unaware of myself until these moments of self-consciousness. Much of the music is based on traditional Ukrainian polyphony, rich in dissonance, and I would say there are dissonances in the experiential structure of the work too. Perhaps the ‘observers’ in the cheap seats have retained some of the privilege of the traditional theatre spectator, able to observe from a distance with fewer distractions what is going on between participants and between participants and performers. They can see when we hang back, when we self-consciously simulate or wholeheartedly join in. Our involvement may be ‘transparent’ to them, providing another dissonance in the piece, where our divergence from the actions we undertake and represent is evident both in how unconvincing we appear and how unconvinced or conflicted (or the opposite) we seem. In Adornian aesthetics, the ‘shudder’ of uncomprehending realisation that a work can provoke is among the highest values.75 I don’t experience much of a shudder in relation to this piece despite my moments of embarrassment. But there is a ‘crackle’ of contradictory elements, in some ways in spite of what the piece seems – and claims – to offer us. Again, like the other pieces I have outlined, there is more going on than the ‘surface’ of the performance suggests, and some of its success is in spite of its own apparent impetus.

72  Watching, doing, meaning Doing and meaning As a rule, in performance, actors and spectators divide between them the roles that matter: those who watch and those who do. As an exception, in performance participation, these roles can be undivided, or more accurately: they can inhabit one body. The preceding sections of this chapter have begun to explore what it is to be watcher and doer simultaneously, to find oneself paying attention to the things done as part of an art event. This has entailed considering what it is to relate to our own actions as external to ourselves, to treat experiences as objects, as well as thinking about what it is to have experiences at all, what it is to have a consciousness which makes meaning out of what happens to us and out of what we make happen around us. It asks us to think and re-think what it is to experience art works, and how our encounter with an art object is different to other encounters. It suggests thinking about what an object is, as something that we can watch that is separate from ourselves, as well as something that we can create or be part of. It suggests thinking about how complex things like performances are objects, which we can be part of as we watch them. In each of the examples of this chapter, the performance has situated the audience participant in an intimate relationship to a political question, through acting out political action, making something resembling a political choice, or passively inhabiting a marginal space. In this, we might see a potential for participatory performance to animate troublesome questions, bringing these moments energy and a quality of surprise that is key to their impact, but also a capacity to put a spectator participant in the midst of a problem, rather than giving a perspective from which to observe it. In this way, some of the potential of participation to provoke deep and complex experience comes to light. But these examples are used because they evidence very clearly how it is possible to experience actions that we undertake as simultaneously our own and not our own. In this way, they can be used to explore the qualities of an inherent tension, and sometimes contradiction, between watching and doing, or between distance and intimacy with the action of a moment. Notes 1 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 25. 2 Damasio, Descartes’s Error, 50. 3 Ibid., 55. 4 Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 5. 5 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, xxvi. 6 Ibid., xxv. 7 Damasio, Descartes’s Error, 119. 8 Dan Zahavi, Phenomenology: The Basics (London: Routledge, 2018), 21. 9 Noë, Action in Perception, 31. 10 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 50. 11 See Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions, 55–56. 12 Andy Clark in Hutto and Myin, Radicalising Enactivism, 6.

Body  73 3 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 38. 1 14 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 9. 15 Thompson in Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, xvii. 16 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 140. 17 Noë, Action in Perception, 156. 18 Hutto and Myin, Radicalising Enactivism, 11. 19 Ibid., 8. 20 Ibid., 6. 21 Ibid. 22 Noë, Action in Perception, 155. 23 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2011). 24 See for example Riley’s Fall (1963). 25 Thompson, Mind in Life, 15. 26 Peter Gordon, Adorno and Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 38. In part this major theme in his later work is an engagement with a technical argument within German philosophy, where Kant is seen as founding accounts of experience on the subject’s capacity - or otherwise - to grasp the given that is external to it. But Adorno’s ambition to address this underpins his political and aesthetic concerns. 27 Stuart Walton, Neglected or Misunderstood: Introducing Theodor Adorno (Alresford: Zero Books, 2017), 274. 28 Ibid., 139. 29 Rose, The Melancholy Science, 162. 30 Ibid., 75. 31 Storm 3: Together and Alone, created by Mike Brookes, was at The Neon, Newport from 21st to 23rd March 2019. 32 Simone de Beauvoir (trans. Bernard Frechtman), Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Open Road Media, 2018). 33 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre (London: Routledge, 2006), 99–104. 34 de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 79. 35 Fight Night directed by Alexander Devriendt, text by Alexander Devriendt, Angelo Tijssens & the cast was at the Unicorn Theatre, London, in April 2015. 36 Ontroerend Goed, ‘Fight Night’, in All Work and No Plays (London: Oberon Books, 2015), 508. 37 Ibid., 513. 38 Ontroerend Goed, ‘Audience’, in All Work and No Plays, 391–454. 39 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 126. 40 Thompson, Mind in Life, 367. 41 Ibid., 369. 42 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 173. 43 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979). 44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 221. 45 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 68. 46 Noë, Action in Perception, 193. 47 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 79. 48 Ibid., 261. 49 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 176. 50 Ibid., 179. 51 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics 1958/59, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 25–26. 52 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1. 53 Ibid., 179. 54 Ibid., 101.

74  Watching, doing, meaning 55 Ibid., 116. 56 Counting Sheep, created by Mark and Marichka Marczyk was at the Vaults Festival, London, January to March 2019. 57 Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind. 58 Ibid., 141. 59 Ibid., 28. 60 Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 200–201. 61 Ibid., 28. 62 See Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 43–45. 63 Ibid, 6. 64 Ibid., 73. 65 Meek, ‘Putin’s Counter-Revolution’, London Review of Books, 36:2 (March 20th, 2014), accessed May 24th, 2020, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n06/ james-meek/putin-s-counter-revolution. 66 Noë, Varieties of Presence, 12. 67 Ibid., 37. 68 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 175. 69 ‘As soon as unity becomes stable, it is already lost.’ Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 187. 70 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 177. 71 Ibid., 177. 72 Rose, The Melancholy Science, 72. 73 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 166. 74 Counting Sheep, accessed October 22nd, 2019, http://countingsheeprevolution. com/theplay. 75 Adorno, Aesthetics, 46.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 1997. Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetics 1958/59. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’s Error. London: Random House, 2006. de Beauvoir Simone. Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Open Road Media, 2018. Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2011. Hutto, Daniel and Erick Myin. Radicalising Enactivism. London: MIT Press, 2017. Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge, 2006. Meek, James ‘Putin’s Counter-Revolution’ in London Review of Books 36, no. 2 (2014), accessed May 24th, 2020, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n06/james-meek/ putin-s-counter-revolution. Noë, Alva. Varieties of Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Rose, Gillian. The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno. London: Verso, 2014.

Body  75 Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. London: MIT Press, 2016. Walton, Stuart. Neglected or Misunderstood: Introducing Theodor Adorno. Alresford: Zero Books, 2017. Zahavi, Dan. Phenomenology: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2018.

2

Other people/other things

Contradiction 4: Object

… we get the feel of morality in our very skin – when we blush – and assimilate it to the subject, who looks on the gigantic moral law within himself as helplessly as the starry sky.1 MADHOUSE re:exit Access All Areas’ MADHOUSE re:exit is a guided tour, but with two kinds of guides giving two kinds of tour.2 One is made up of the staff of Paradise Fields, a ‘cutting edge, truly modern care facility’, who show us around as guests. They give us leaflets to read and games to play to relax us, but the mask slips at points when they forget whether they are referring to service users, patients, or inmates, and they get confused when equipment breaks down and they are interrupted by ‘patient 36’. This enigmatic figure is our other guide. He appears on screens – replacing the marketing video – and in holograms, and then in a variety of flesh-and-blood avatars that could be showing us a series of individuals and their experiences of social care through the 20th century and up to the present. But what these avatars show us is nothing literal, there is a man in a bird cage, dancing like a bird and ceremoniously handing out feathers to members of the audience before being restrained and put into a straightjacket. There is a woman dancing like a jaguar, in a forest setting, and alluding to Olmec cults that celebrated children with Down Syndrome as having supernatural powers. And, in a scene called ‘The Eater’, Dayo Koleosho presents himself as a version of Patient 36 within a sterile, hyper-modern space, separated from the audience by a screen. He sits in a white room, behind a white table, wearing a white overall and a transparent plastic mask. The audience are prompted to interact with him as in an arcade game, with tokens to put into a coin slot, and are invited to feed him peas, through armholes in the screen. When the game is activated – like a computer game – he moves like a coin-operated automaton, his mouth open grotesquely, and his features made inhuman by the plastic covering his face. For the first attempt at feeding him the coin machine dispenses spoons, but we are impossibly far from him, so that failure is inevitable, and red lights flash. In the second round, small syringes are provided, DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-7

80  Other people/other things filled with green pea juice instead of actual peas, and it’s clear that we have to squirt the juice towards Patient 36’s mouth. Again, failure is likely, and puzzlement might turn to discomfort. At round 3, the syringes are much bigger, and it’s possible to squirt the juice across the table and to hit him with it. The white room is covered in green liquid, as is his masked face (Figure 2.1). The game asks us to play at doing something that is wrong. We play the parts of old-fashioned, oppressive care workers. Koleosho’s costume is reminiscent of a straight-jacket, and his grimace, combined with the plastic mask, dehumanises him. He is being force-fed, and we are the force-feeders. We could refuse, but then would we be refusing Koleosho’s performance? What does he want us to do? Perhaps, we have to accept the complicity offered to us, play our part, and feel bad about it. This is an example of how affect and emotion are put to work as tools of the theatre maker and are facets of performance participation when we are in the midst of it. The piece has an explicit agenda, it demands a better caring response to the needs of people with learning disabilities, like those of the performers, who have also devised their work themselves. In ethical terms, it articulately asks for a conscious, rational approach to the care that is required by the people who have made it, and by the people they represent,

Figure 2.1  Dayo Koleosho in MADHOUSE. Photograph Helen Murray.

Object  81 in several ways. It deploys empathy, and even pity, in several ways, but the dominant tone is not pity for the maltreated; the show’s demands on us as audience, and on the government agencies it rhetorically speaks to, work in more complex ways. The final scene, for example, has Cian Binchy wearing a baby-grow, offered to us by Paradise Fields as an example of their service users’ dependency. But Binchy’s persona is laconically furious and ironic and leaves us in no doubt that the government is at fault for his continued infantilisation. An audience participant is asked to remove his supposedly soiled nappy, an uncomfortable moment that echoes the troubling complicity we might experience in Koleosho’s scene, but the mood here is satirical rather than surreal, and the structure allows us more distance. These are experiences of doing something uncomfortable, that feels alien to me, experiencing an action as an alien object that is still mine. But unlike in Counting Sheep, the fun to be had is – for me at least – undermined and conflicted as it happens, as the experience is happening. Strange affordances Consciousness – or perhaps in another vocabulary, subjectivity – arises from the interplay of the body and other objects, and the experience of the body itself as an object. An object in everyday life is an event of our interaction with it. Mark Johnson turns around the usual philosophical formulation of the independence of objects from our perception: We are not making our world of objects, but we are instead taking up these objects in experience. In other words, objects are not so much givens as they are takings.3 Things exist beyond our minds, but insofar as they become part of our world, they do so because of how we ‘take them up’, because of the use we make of them. To illustrate this, we might return to the body and its interactions with inanimate objects and with itself. Through proprioception, ‘a form of object perception that identifies one’s own body as its object’,4 especially through movement, tactility, and gravitational orientation, we are aware of our body in relation to spatiality, the environment itself, and other objects. We are very rarely not aware of what it is we are standing, sitting, or lying on, and are aware of these objects as things that afford standing, sitting, or lying, and as floors, chairs, beds, at the same time as we are aware of our posture and the attitude it affords to the immediate world around us. Other familiar objects offer themselves to us as things we can use, and as we take them up  – an apple, a phone – our hands or our mouths or other parts of our bodies are already taking action with them, solving problems, moving towards other actions, fulfilling the impulses of habit, often before we are aware of their presence as something separate from the action. Thus, the limits of the body, in perception, can be somewhat vague. Animate and inanimate objects can

82  Other people/other things become present to consciousness as if they extend the body beyond its corporeal boundaries. The contact of a chisel, a knife, or a brush with another surface can feel as real as that of a fingertip; a horse rider’s awareness of their animal’s movements becomes so synchronised that they anticipate and respond to terrain as one. In contrast, unfamiliar objects have to be appraised and tested before their character is clear, in their weight and texture, their temperature and solidity, and even their distance from the body. But most objects fall somewhere between these extremes, they appear to us as part of a known milieu, offering themselves for use or navigation, neither requiring close attention from the conscious mind nor vanishing immediately into the body schema. Human-made objects afford certain actions so that the body fits itself to them and into using them easily: chairs afford sitting, pens afford writing, steering wheels afford turning. Though the most obvious application of this concept is to the world of designed objects, where things have been shaped in order to afford ease, and our habits have been shaped, in turn, to include these things in our primary relationship to our environment, affordances can be found in the natural world too: tree branches afford climbing and water affords swimming, while some kinds of plant life afford eating without much intervention. Objects that afford action may not necessarily vanish from awareness, but their ease of use can make the detail and complexity of that use more transparent. To observe that we don’t have to think through every movement needed to pick up an everyday object like a cup is commonplace, but the proposal of Hutto and Myin’s Radically Enactive Cognition is that these everyday enactions of unthought understanding of the world make up the bulk of our cognitive work and that much of this basic mind happens outside the brain and some of it outside the body too. Coupled with the social psychological idea of affordance as the meaning of objects emerging relationally with their use, a rough picture of the extension of consciousness beyond the body into the environment emerges. So, as well as meaning arising from the body first and most fundamentally, this develops the perspective that meaning emerges from our situated interactions rather than our observation or reflection on them. In both of these propositions, we see a move away from meaning as the appraisal of objects which can be kept at a distance. The process is relational, as Johnson says: An object, therefore, should not be thought of as if it were a fixed entity with inherent properties existing entirely independent of creatures who interact with it. Objects, as we experience them, are actually stable affordances for us – stable patterns that our environment presents to creatures like us with our specific capacities for perception and bodily action.5 In this framing, it is the stability of objects that renders them object-like for us. Because they allow the same things to happen each time we take them

Object  83 up, they identify themselves to us in continued reciprocal interaction. The theory of affordance is concerned with objects that offer ‘action possibilities’ rather than just a reliable physical response, as Johnson’s use suggests. But, the question of stability opens up more potential in the concept itself. As play theorist Ian Bogost observes, it is the relative instability of an object’s affordance that makes it ‘playable’. Where design theorists tend to use affordance to articulate the seamless interaction of objects and users, where correct use offers itself up unthought, Bogost enjoys – and finds fun in – the capacity to use things incorrectly: … the sum of a thing’s affordances represents all of a thing’s possible interactions with all of the other things with which it might interact. All of its potential.6 And, this, in turn, affords ‘the pleasure of finding something new in a familiar situation’,7 and in re-invention of what seems otherwise to be stable. The objects that come to hand in MADHOUSE can map out some of these varieties of affordance. Some of them offer themselves for appropriate use – there are buttons to press, gloves to wear – while others offer mischievous and inappropriate use – spoons for throwing peas, syringes for squirting. Most importantly, they combine and offer themselves as an assemblage with a ‘social affordance’, generating interactions between the bodies that respond to them and through them. They become a game and ask us to play together, offering delight in the realisation that the room we have entered is playable in itself, with its flashing lights and dispensing portals, and in the simple joy of making a mess. They offer a further, subversive affordance: they lead us to be cruel to Koleosho. There’s fun in this too, in eventually being able to reach him with the pea juice, to cover him with it, followed by (or perhaps simultaneous with) a realisation of the implications of the way this playful action has been framed. In Audience Participation in Theatre, I articulated audience participation as the authorship of invitations of different kinds, citing affordance as part of the structure of some invitations.8 My reading of the concept here goes further and takes affordance as a fundamental aspect of experience, and of how meaning arises as we participate in life in general as well as in performance. Assemblage as object So, if the conflicted situations of MADHOUSE: re-exit are art objects that depend on these layers for the contribution they make to the larger artwork, what else is implied by the complex sense of them as objects, per se? Here, and in the three sections of Chapter 1, I have moved rapidly from intentionality towards physical objects, to the affordances of playable sets of objects and the feelings provoked by them. To follow through just two aspects of this: first, intentionality and affordance are not without feeling in themselves,

84  Other people/other things nor do the feelings they engender necessarily follow engagement sequentially. Affect is part of the architecture of basic mind, and feeling is what guides our engagement by giving it quality, as Mark Johnson says. Second, feelings become objects in themselves, as (following the distinction as it is made by Damasio) they are disclosed to us as emotions, and they are further objectified as we reflect on them. So, as I enjoy squirting pea juice, I become uneasy at the fact of who I am squirting it at, then alarmed at the memory of my enjoyment, and curious about the source of my alarm, followed by admiring the craft of the performance makers. All of this, from the initial engagement with buttons and syringes, is in some way inflected by the context it happens in: as part of a game, during a participatory performance. In phenomenology, objects include things that we imagine but we know do not exist, things that we anticipate, but have not yet encountered, physical things that are no longer available to us in sensory perception, and – importantly – abstract or ideal things that could never have a physical form.9 An object in this sense is anything that we can think of or be aware of. This is similar to the perspective of recent developments in object-oriented ontology (or as its advocates abbreviate it: OOO), where the need to recognise objects at any level of complexity is paramount. Graham Harman, for example, says that a theory of objects must be able to conceive of sub-atomic particles, tables, multi-national companies, and galaxies as objects if it is to avoid either undermining or ‘overmining’ viable and necessary categories of object-hood.10 Theories which undermine only recognise objects that cannot be easily broken down into further, smaller objects. Scientific theories tend towards this perspective, seeing as most meaningful those methodologies which tell us about the nature of and relationship between component parts. Overmining theories are interested in what objects mean in terms of their aggregation, in relation to the role they play and the meaning they derive from a total situation, as in political economy, or history. Artworks sit in the midrange of this ecology of things, as non-vast assemblages of smaller things, but it’s useful to appreciate the range of objects that meaningfully appear to us, and how OOO frames the question of what should be treated as being ‘an object’. To treat an art event as an object, and to treat single meaningful moments of the sort that I have been making use of, as objects to which the participant has the relationship of ‘spectator’ is a necessary perspective. As I have speculated, our own actions, our choices about where to stand and what and whether to participate, what we say and do, and how we do it, should be part of the list of potentially meaningful theatrical objects. In the example described in the Introduction: ‘I’m free!’, the words themselves in their tone and timbre, the gesture that went with them of raising arms in the air, the face and eyes open towards the naked performer, the smile – all of these were objects, and remain so in memory, but so is their aggregation as an invited piece of performance, so is the possibility of participation afforded by the preceding action, and so is the event as a whole, as perceived by the woman in question, by me and by others who were present, inflected and refracted and given new qualities as it is by this single moment.

Object  85 The term ‘assemblage’ has several lines of heritage, including in Allan Kaprow’s ‘assemblages and happenings’; and there is something to be gained from its use by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, though without adopting their overall epistemology. In this context, the assemblage is janus-faced, effectuating the coming together of both homogenous and heterogenous phenomena from different strata of existence into newly effective organisations. In their brutal example of choice: Must not the Amazons amputate a breast to adapt the organic stratum to a warlike technological stratum, as though at the behest of a fearsome woman-bow-steppe assemblage?11 But we might think of a more mundane leaf-china-electricity assemblage when making a cup of tea. Each element is wrenched from its home stratum, and transformed, becoming re-territorialised and newly at home, given form and function. What is offered by the theory of stratification is a way to navigate the antinomy of form and content without solving it: content that is formed at one level is form-giving at another. Leaves are plucked, dried, and oxygenated to become a mass of raw tea, but the individual leaf shapes itself from nitrogen and carbon drawn from the air and earth; clay is the archetypal formless substance, waiting to be shaped and fired into china, but clay itself is the bringing together of certain combinations of material under the right conditions of heat, pressure, and time; electricity, as we put it to work, seems to flow in the strictly regulated paths given to it but is itself a transformation of energy into differentiated patterns at the sub-atomic level. Neither form nor content is to be taken as paramount, one becomes the other, across and between and within strata. This makes it a little easier to articulate what is assembled in a work like MADHOUSE: Re-exit, allowing each part to have similar status. Following a chain of affordances across their strata, we see how the work as a whole invites: a discomforting reflection on disability and privilege; the immediate memory of having simulated an act of cruelty that inflects the rest of the event; a game that channels affects of joy, mischief, and cruelty; objects that afford play that transforms their use; and bodies that couple with a constructed environment to create action and meaning at a basic level. Self as object Alva Noë, in Strange Tools, his enactivist theory of art, discusses how affordance can be forceful, especially in some of the impulsive propensities that performance draws on: We get caught up in dancing the way, as infants, we get caught up in suckling. You don’t choose to suckle, just as, in a way, you don’t choose to read the sign on the wall. If you can read, you will read. The sign reads you, we might almost say.12

86  Other people/other things This is positively formulated, the getting caught up allows us to realise potentials, for example, in the emergence of dances as aesthetic objects: Dancing happens. Situations produce them. People dance. They decide to dance. But the ability to dance is precisely an ability to let go, to let oneself be danced (as we might say).13 The person, as an organism coupled to an environment, is impelled to engage in a process. And that process becomes a thing, made up of more than one of these couplings and the action they engender, a thing that, given other conditions and processes of recognition, becomes an object of appreciation and reflection. What should we think of finding ourselves to be the object of our own appreciation, and reflection, in the context of being this kind of object for others? It is implicit in what I have said above that in objectifying my actions and the way I feel about them, I objectify myself: I think about myself as a thing that acts, has feelings, and makes judgements. Theorists of embodied and enactive mind approach the problem of the sense of self, its identity with the body, and its relationship to consciousness that is directed to objects other than the body in various ways, including Thompson’s characterisation of it as the body-body problem: ‘the problem of how to relate one’s subjectively lived body to the organism or living body that one is’.14 Body image and body schema conceptualise some of this relation at the boundary of what comes to conscious mind, but actions attributed to one’s own body, whether originating in impulsive body schema or the consciously imagined body, become the assemblage we call self-image, and are once more continuously objectivated. But thus far enactivism has not engaged substantially with how self-image and self as such emerge from particular environments with histories, politics, and socialites. The subtitle of Adorno’s Minima Moralia is ‘Reflections on Damaged Life’.15 The damage he is concerned with is not individual trauma, or even the societal upheaval of his time (it was published in 1948, as Adorno returned to a devastated and divided Germany from exile in the United States), but the damage to human experience that occurs in contemporary, ‘reified’ life. The intimate influence of powerful forces on the potentials of human life seemed to Adorno to be relentlessly constricting, reductive of what we perceive and understand as well as of what we are able to choose and do. This was true, for Adorno, in the ‘free’ liberal democracies just as it was in the totalitarian regimes he evaded. The key theoretical term ‘reification’, which he (with Horkheimer) develops from Marx and Lukacs, posits that in capitalism we first transform our labour into a commodity, and subsequently treat other human capacities and relationships as properties, things independent of us and having governance over us. Ultimately, this means we become thing-like ourselves, behaving and responding first and predominantly according to the logic of the marketplace: reification in this reading is the falling into line of everything in our lives, the thoroughgoing expression of ideology. In Adorno, it’s about the identity of the object with its concept, a denial of the excess that the world itself must have beyond how we conceive it – to the effect that we

Object  87 fail to see that excess, and how it could manifest in the individual life of human beings, ourselves included. This negative sense of experience and the self rendered as an object throws into relief the schematising theory that precedes it in this section. The selves and bodies at play, and the things afforded to them by their situation, do not arise a-socially or innocently: they are ‘damaged’ to the extent that what is afforded by the contemporary world reduces the scope of meaningful experience, none more so than the figure presented to us by Dayo Koleosho. From the perspective of someone relatively privileged, surrounded by objects of convenience and enjoyment and the opportunity to spend time and money on my own fulfilment, this critique can feel far-fetched. Yet perhaps if this reification is an immanent aspect of contemporary life that is concealed within privilege, where subjectivity and experience are simultaneously summoned forth by the interwoven demands of work and consumption and abetted by a culture industry that offers relief disguised as insight, the resonances are undeniable. Adorno was an early observer of the ‘experience economy’. Concerning the appropriation of memory by the culture industry he writes: ‘In setting up his own archives, the subject seizes his own stock of experiences as property, so making it something wholly external to himself’,16 and he is prescient about other aspects of 21st-century capitalism from the blurring of boundaries between work and leisure17 to the marketisation of identity.18 At his most apoplectic: Only when sated with false pleasure, disgusted with the goods offered, dimly aware of the inadequacy of happiness even when it is that – to say nothing of cases where it is bought by abandoning allegedly morbid resistance to its positive opposite – can men gain an idea of what experience might be. The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he come home irritable from his office.19 The jeremiads of Minima Moralia still ring true. In his more optimistic formulations, this is what art works have the potential to sabotage. Their relentless ‘thingness’, ‘in-themselves-ness’, and refusal to be contained conceptually or to function through clear concepts means that they run free from reification. Because an artwork becomes something more objective, it fights against the sense that it has been constituted by subjectivity. But as well as that, it confronts and challenges, and in many works, it can render its material uncanny or sublime, and in participatory work, it renders the participating subject uncanny or sublime: Kant’s doctrine of the feeling of the sublime all the more describes an art that shudders inwardly by suspending itself in the name of an illusionless truth content, though without, as art, divesting itself of its semblance character.20

88  Other people/other things So, an artwork that works with resemblances to the actual, but whose truth hovers between what it is and what it seems to be, vibrating disturbingly, impossibly two things at once. The shudder is reproduced in the subject, as the uncomfortable feeling of encountering something that cannot be rationalised, but in this case, it is a shudder at something we do rather than witness. There is the shock of what we do to Koleosho, which tells us something in a rational way – that people were and are treated cruelly. But there is also a shock that comes from following a script, of being rendered objects of the performance in an echo of being objects of social process in toto. And if some performances manipulate us into performing actions that are then offered back to us as experiences of doing things we wouldn’t choose, this happens – according to this theory – in the context of a life where our actions are often offered to us, and reflected back to us, as objects of exchange (Figure 2.2). A piece like MADHOUSE:re-exit offers a partial response to Alston’s intuition that immersive theatre must move beyond the narcissistic.21 Performance participation can be about me, but that can be an uncomfortable experience. MADHOUSE offers a diversity of experiences to reflect on and consider, some are beautiful, some puzzling, some should provoke anger, but most allow us to watch from relative detachment, as we are guided from one space to another. But when interactions are offered, they throw the spotlight on us in ways that aren’t entirely comfortable; even early in the piece when we play games with other audience participants, we are asked to respond to questions about our daily lives that evidence our level of personal freedom – and privilege – relative to the artists who have made the work, and especially to the lives they commemorate in the performance. The short sequence I have dwelt on becomes a more radical version of what I have posited earlier that performance participation can implicate us in acts that are not our own. To

Figure 2.2  Dayo Koleosho in MADHOUSE. Photograph Helen Murray.

Object  89 the extent that these actions are things that we wouldn’t choose under normal circumstances and that performance participation is ‘set up’ in diverse ways to require actions from us, we are within our rights to disavow what we do, to say: it wasn’t me, it was what they wanted me to do. But there might remain a nagging doubt, that it was, nevertheless, me that did it. It remains mine, as an experience to reflect on, but also as something that could be drawn out of me, something which I afforded for the objects and assemblages of the performance as much as they afforded action for me. Koleosho is literally bound, wearing a straightjacket and mask during the scene, and we are bound by our contract with the performance, to do as it asks us. But a performance like this can ask how bound we are to the responses that it draws from us.

Contradiction 5: Affect

Myrtle takes us aside, away from the rest of the party, and asks our advice. Her marriage to Joe is dead in the water, and the rich Tom Buchanan has promised to take her out of the gravel pits, the dirty, poor, dead-end district she lives in. He’s been promising to buy her a dog, first of all, and has given her a dog leash as a sign that he will keep this and his other promises. What should she do? We talk to her, ‘Joe seems nice … he’s a good man’, but she tells us that nice isn’t enough, that she’s given too much of her life to Joe and Buchanan is her one chance to change things for herself, to live the way she wants to. I am aware that something bad is in store for Myrtle, as not-so-clear memories of the story (it’s The Great Gatsby with The Guild of Misrule22) swim into my consciousness. There’s something more to come than being let down by the evidently uncommitted Buchanan, and as I later remember that she is the one who will be run down by Daisy Buchanan, driving Jay Gatsby’s car, I can think of the clever lines I could have invented for myself in this scene: ‘Be careful, Myrtle, be careful of these rich men, and their big cars…’ But that’s not what I say: the dialogue is awkward, I don’t have any good lines, and I don’t quite know how to be with her, or who to be, with her. Her gambit is to ask us to care about her. She makes a demand on me, but it happens to be a weak one, with little in the way of space for me to fill with action that brings to life any of the care that I have come to feel. The Droves Another example, another show: some children have invited us into their underground community in the cellars under the carpet factory, with a vague mission to fulfil helping them replace the numbers they have lost, as children have grown up, and had to be sent out into the wider world. There are riddles to be solved and a red rope to follow through a subterranean forest. We find ourselves in the company of a child made of carpet, who asks if we are ‘the kind ones’. We learn that she is the product of the children’s attempts to create new children to re-build their population, but an unsuccessful result. Her request is chilling: ‘sew me to sleep’, she says. There is a flap of carpet DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-8

Affect  91

Figure 2.3  Bo in The Droves. Photograph Natalie Adams

hanging next to the hole through which the child performer’s face peeps out at us from her cone of blue rug; there is a needle attached to it so that we can pull it over and sew it shut. We are being asked to euthanise a badly made child, as an act of kindness (Figure 2.3). And we do. Giggling and looking wide-eyed at each other, we watch as one of our number follows instruction, and sews the child to sleep. And we leave the room with furrowed brows, wondering what’s just happened, and what kind of a show this is. It is The Droves, a piece made by Coney’s Young Company with 6- to 11-year olds, but for adult audiences. It takes place in the same building as The Great Gatsby, but is an altogether stranger proposition, a piece in which children’s imaginations have been allowed to follow their bizarre and morbid impulses. So: we give death to a child that asks for it as kindness. Is this kindness, or care? Of course, my ethical calculus says no, it’s not – the caring action would be to explore, and to insist on, a way to make her life liveable. It’s not easy to say why we don’t do that, there doesn’t seem to be space for it, the impetus of the scene seems to be to do as we were asked, though perhaps there is the potential for that space and my group and I just don’t think it through: but

92  Other people/other things this is beside the point, I think. We are given a small space in which to respond, and whatever we do becomes part of the show, part of our experience. I would be very unhappy if my complicity in this action were taken as a genuine ethical decision, but I am thoroughly impressed at its aesthetic impact. At this point in the show, I am quite shocked, quite troubled, taken aback, and put on a different footing for what else might come after it. There’s a particular kind of ethico-aesthetic effect at work here that rewards closer attention. We are asked to care for the children, in our role as adult guests in their world, but it’s a thin role, not thoroughly developed, and neither is this caring relationship. We’re likely to care, too, for the actual children who have made the piece and perform in it – we are likely to indulge them in the strange things they ask us to do. What appears ostensibly to be a piece made by children about children has removed its mask to reveal a piece about us as adults and our response to children in distress. Empathy and care Performance makers manipulate by making use of the interconnection of human bodies, and our inability to resist the affects (and effects) of that interconnection. They make us care. The complicity in this performance – and in MADHOUSE too – arises out of a complex way of working on our emotional responses to the characters of the piece, the performers, and our own actions. Just as in MADHOUSE we find in Koleosho a person who deserves our compassion, but we are given a task that requires us to treat him brutally, the carpet child inspires care, and yet the performance offers only a grossly inadequate way of realising it. Koleosho and the child performers seem to call on us to do something, and we might comply more readily because of our care for them as a real people. We are invited to treat the character of ‘the eater’ with contempt, but also potentially to feel that we treat Koleosho too with contempt, as it is he who embodies ‘the eater’. The child performers of The Droves ask us to play their game, but playing along seems to corral us into acts of cruelty and neglect. What happens in these moments, I think, is that we are provoked to care, but that care is confused, muddled up with other feelings and other thoughts, both contradictory and complementary. Works that lead us to these situations are ‘made’ by theatre practitioners, who, therefore, make us do the things we do, to the extent that they create situations that offer limited options. Their work is to make the spaces into which we step with our actions, but those notional spaces have definite qualities, which lead to more-or-less delimited action potentials, and also for delimited affects and relation potentials. Atmospheres are made, and options are weighted. To put it another way, we are manipulated: made to care. But what can this have to do with the important business of real care, the work of care, and the lack of care in the contemporary world? Theatre

Affect  93 artists like those of Access All Areas and Coney make work that investigates it, advocates for it, and tells us of its histories. The experiences offered are about a practiced experience of care, of working the muscles of care, in a fairly literal sense. They produce images of care, the lack of it, or misdirected care, in a theatrical frame. The performer-creators of both pieces are among those vulnerable people, differently able to give an account of themselves and to represent their own interests: they deserve care. But can this work make strong claims for effects, for provoking active care, as well as affects? I’m not sure, and at this point, I am not articulating a theoretical framework for that kind of question. There are other dimensions to this being ‘made’ to care. Caring is not just a voluntary thing, but it is a thing that happens to us and happens between us. Caring can be thought of as a function of empathy, and empathy (we are told in several different conceptual languages) is an embodied process. Care happens to my body, and yours, and between my body and yours. To care is to be affected by the situation of another, to be made to have a relationship with another. Caring, therefore, is intersubjectivity. We, as audience participants, are made to care. How successfully, and how consciously, I want to set aside for a moment to say a little about care in a very basic sense. It may be possible that theatre can tell us stories of the failure of care, or inspire us to find time to care, or to repair care-lacking situations. But performance also depends on empathy, on care, in the most fundamental way, and participatory performance sometimes exploits this dependency even more decisively. As Bruce McConachie says, in Engaging Audiences,23 we watch performance because we are interested in other minds, and we are drawn into stories because we feel a need to know what happens to people. In cognitive psychology, CARE is seen as one of six basic emotional states (alongside FEAR, RAGE, PANIC, PLAY, and SEEKING).24 McConachie says it is by addressing and engendering these basic emotional states that theatre engages us in the circumstances of a performance: theatre employs the same emotional architecture as everyday life. And why would this not be the case in performance participation? Performance depends on care in the form of empathy, in the most fundamental way. We watch performance because we are interested in other people, and we are drawn into stories because we feel a need to know what happens to people, what’s going on for people. McConachie treats empathy as synonymous with ‘mind reading’,25 the process by which we are involuntarily aware of other people’s mental states. A distinction is sometimes made in cognitive studies and neuroscience between mentalising processes and empathising processes: between our talent for imagining the content of other minds, and for feeling the state of other bodies, respectively.26 The enactivist position is that ‘mind reading’ is an unnecessarily representative model of what goes on in intersubjective understanding and that much of this work is done without the need for a ‘theory of mind’ in which we imagine other people’s thoughts.

94  Other people/other things Assuming that we do, to some extent, consider the thought processes of others, we might see the two in intermixing layers: one is the ever present and involuntary base-level perceptions, our enactive intersubjectivity. This means feeling that there are other people around, and projecting their relevance to us, most fundamentally in terms of homeostasis, of the maintenance of survivable conditions, but also in terms of our social thriving. Along with and intermixed with this, is the empathic process, our awareness of another’s feelings, their comfort or distress, and our affective taking on of some of that discomfort, and caring because we feel some of what another feels, without having to stop to think about it. These needs and interests are instinctive, according to contemporary cognitive science, and unavoidable. Empathy is seen as an embodied process, and an enactive one, and part of the homeostatically driven basic mind. In this sense, feeling-states like CARE don’t necessarily reach the conscious mind. Sometimes, we are affected by another’s situation without consciously caring, let alone making a choice to care or to act on that care. This is in the territory of intersubjectivity and of extended mind, of the proposition that mind, awareness, and experience, happen between people as well as within the neural circuitry of the brain. Sometimes, we are affected by another’s situation without consciously caring, let alone making a choice to care or to act on that care. This is affect – to take up Massumi’s fairly extravagant interpretation of it – as a gravitational field between bodies rather than a response that belongs to one individual body.27 We are made to care by our encounter with another and by the shared generation of feeling between our bodies. Donating my body to performance Another moment from The Droves might illustrate this, as well as providing a metonym for it. In the climactic moments of this short piece, one of the riddles set for us early on becomes important: we have been told that our ‘spit and bits’ will help the children to solve their population problem. It turns out that to make a new child – without sewing them together badly from bits of carpet – they must be conjured magically from a pile of refuse with the addition of samples of hair, fingernails, and spit from visiting adults. This is a slightly fraught process for us, the visiting adults, to facilitate. Who has fingernails and hair they don’t mind cutting? Who isn’t squeamish about spitting into a sample pot? Our commitment to the truth of the moment is wafer thin, there is hilarity and alarm at the gall of these children (the real child performers and performance makers, not the fictional feral imps). But, we care enough about the show they have made to play along. We have joined in, and we will continue. The child that magically appears from under the rubbish pile immediately dashes into the middle of our group, grabbing hold of the tallest man among us. He seems to have been adopted as a parent, and the child seems to want protection from all of us. We’re told that if we want to leave the underground labyrinth we must leave the child behind, but we refuse this. A

Affect  95 physical struggle ensues as we try to force the door to the outside world, and we fail. We lose our child in the confusion, and then submit to the demands of the others, and file out of the building with veils over our heads, chanting. It’s a puzzling and troubling experience. A piece devised with and by children that portrays cruelty to children in a surreal but also quite direct way, and with no easy route, or no route at all, to a satisfying strategy to help them. The suffering children of this fiction are magical, but they are still children, played by children, close up. But that makes it a rewarding and challenging experience too. I don’t just spectate the trouble, it happens to me – I play a part in choosing whether to ‘sew to sleep’ the carpet child, and I feel bad about it. I give a bit of my fingernail, donating a tiny part of my body to the performance; but more importantly, the whole of my body is right there throughout, feeling the shocks and dilemmas: the performance happens on and in my body. Theatre can tell us stories of the failure of care, or inspire us to find time to care, or even contribute to the repair of care-less situations. The Droves might be thought of as a show about the failure of care. Paul Bloom, in Against Empathy,28 says that empathy is like a spotlight, a narrow beam that works precisely to exclude the bigger picture, illuminating only individuals and small groups that we focus on. And worse, it tends to illuminate only those that we are inclined to identify with, those that we care about. So, have I and my fellow audience members failed because our empathic spotlight fails to shine on the carpet-child, or failed to bring her or the other children sufficiently into focus? Mind reading Kinaesthetic empathy is a theory of bodies that communicate with each other,29 feel each other’s movement, and echo it within themselves. It has been anchored by the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’30 which have garnered a lot of attention beyond neuroscience, as an evidential basis for empathy between sentient minds – the activation of elements within the brain that are associated with kinds of movement when that movement is observed in other bodies. Mirror neurons in themselves don’t appear to have led to all that they may seem to have promised, but still there is other evidence for bodies that feel the movement of other bodies.31 In a connected theory that emerges across evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of mind, our instinctive appraisal of other people’s mental states, portrayed variously as mind reading, folk psychology or theory of mind, proposes that we project mental states onto other bodies. This begins at a relatively primitive level in our bodily response to other moving objects as if they have intentions. This begins as an unconscious impulse, which creates a basis for the conscious interpretation of other people’s actions and inactions as evidence of their state of mind, and especially the state of their intentions towards oneself. Daniel Dennett calls this an ‘idealised, abstract, instrumentalist calculus of prediction’,32 that calculates in terms of a normative system, producing a simplified

96  Other people/other things impression of the beliefs and desires of another subject. This is a kind of mutual transparency – I feel and behave as if others are transparent to me and others feel and behave as if they know and experience what I feel too. It’s not necessary to believe that we can literally perceive another’s interior life, but as a folk psychology it creates a shared trust in our instinctual appraisal of the evidence that we find in another person’s appearance and actions, in what they seem to perform for us. When we become aware of others in our presence, we become aware of them as subjects with beliefs and desires, simultaneously. It is very hard to subtract from our impression of a person (first or subsequent) a sense of how they relate to us. It takes a conscious effort to remind ourselves that another’s internal mental and emotional state is really a mystery. Works of art that depict or consist of human bodies work with these effects, and works that locate themselves upon and within the bodies of participants make use of them in different ways. Some cognitive humanities scholars have drawn a lot from these developments, for example, Lisa Zunshine’s work with mind reading and storytelling,33 along with McConachie’s appropriation of them for performance studies,34 but their implication for participatory performance is different. As well as echoing the movement of other bodies that we watch, or imagining other minds as we watch other bodies, we move with and react to these bodies and minds so that they react to us – and we do so more intimately, expressively and directly than could happen when the relationship between our bodies is that between a performer and a spectator. There is a whole set of minds to read in performance participation, the performers, their characters, characters implied but not seen, other participants, and the performance makers who don’t appear, who we ascribe plans and intentions to. In my reading of The Droves, it is my involuntary mind reading that makes the carpet child so impactful, while I also process the confusion of my fellow participants, generating flows of contradictory affect in my body. These varieties of transparency trouble the sense of performers and spectators as distinct subjectivities, they remind us again that subjectivity itself is a problem, now not because the body might be a mere automaton, with the rational subject only ’along for the ride’, but because a subject that overlaps with other subjects implies a subject that is not in control of itself, or is not actually separate from other subjects. If another body moves my body, it both suggests that I am not in full control of my body, and that I (as the subject contiguous with my body) am moved by others, and therefore not fully subjectively independent. Wonder and consternation Affective intersubjectivity is also a part of how the self comes to mind (as Damasio puts it). The sense of being someone comes about because of other people, because of self-other relationships. And, it is part of my thesis that the experience of participatory performance is an aesthetic encounter with the self, and potentially an encounter with the self as a thing in process, as a

Affect  97 becoming. To experience ourselves caring, then, may be a strong example of this, or a fulfilment of one of the structural pillars of this becoming. Catharine Malabou in Self and Emotional Life writes about how philosophy can respond to the discoveries of contemporary neuroscience, and makes comparisons between Damasio and philosophers like Derrida and Deleuze, through their respective treatments of Descartes and Spinoza as the original thinkers of affect. Damasio sees Descartes as having made fundamental errors, and Spinoza as having made discoveries ahead of his time, and through both he argues for the importance of affect (or feeling/emotion) in thinking of all kinds, conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational. Malabou’s tracing of affect through Deleuze brings about a re-connection of the word to its other more everyday meaning: Generally speaking, an affect is a modification. Being affected means to be modified – that is, altered, changed, – by the impact of an encounter, be it with another subject or an object. But, what exactly, is modified by this encounter, and why does this modification create an emotional, and not immediately cognitive, phenomenon? This is because the encounter does not trigger any faculty or sense or logical structure; it touches – and thus reveals – the very feeling of existence.35 So affect is what makes a change in the feeling of existence, and furthermore, this is how the subject becomes conscious of itself, how the transcendental logical form of the grammatical ‘I’ is able to refer to a changeable, empirical, ‘I’ that feels: ‘[t]he self has access to itself through its own otherness or alterity’.36 As far as subjectivity is concerned, affect results in an auto-affection, in the awareness of oneself as a thing, a thing having feelings. This is a crux in the understanding of subjectivity – the question of where, and how, the self becomes aware of itself. Famously for Descartes this happened through the soul’s presence in the pineal gland, where it makes contact with the embodied self. For Derrida, auto-affection is infected with hetero-affection so that one meets oneself as something other, as ‘an unknown me in me’.37 This echoes what Malabou calls ‘the deconstructive aspects of the neurobiological redefinition of the subject’,38 in which subjectivity is a changeable, plastic structure, with no centre, but emergent out of a collection of dynamic, interrelating processes. For Damasio, it is the maintenance of homeostasis that drives the emergence of consciousness, as the affective milieu of the body’s situation constructs the feeling of what’s going on. Again, it is the response to something outside itself that brings consciousness into being. Damasio’s most famous conclusion is that it is the feeling quality of this affective basis of consciousness that allows us to make decisions, that feeling isn’t a distraction from rationality, but fundamental to it. I think this is useful to any consideration of the meaning of participatory performance, not just because it re-frames how meaning emerges in any situation, but because for experiential art in particular it is the situation itself that is constructed

98  Other people/other things around our own active spectating bodies, addressing meaning of this kind directly rather than at a distance. To be clear, any performance works with the affective interrelationship between people, but in participatory performance, this is intensified, sometimes to the extent that the affects generated across the performer-audience divide, between active participants and performers, need to be recognised as essential parts of the work. When accepting the invitation to participate, we loan our bodies to the performance and accept the consequences. This confusion at discovering one’s own capacity re-frames the rest of the performance of The Droves, in terms of our objectivation of the other performers, the personas they present, or the situations they portray in fantastical terms. It might also affect our objectivation of ourselves, giving a slight jolt to reified subjectivity. We don’t only re-think what the piece is about, but re-feel it, re-world it. In terms sketched out by Slavoj Žižek, the modification in this affect is an event: ‘…event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change in the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it39’. And among these re-framed things is the artwork, becoming more assertively itself; again Žižek: ‘…a thing is the result of the process (event) of its own becoming’.40 The Derridean perspective also draws attention to another particular of participation: that we are audiences to ourselves, as well as partners in the creation of moments of performance. When I take part in this negotiation about what to do with the carpet-child (or in MADHOUSE, how to feed the robot-inmate), I am aware of my own actions, and that these actions (and inactions) are part of something else as well as the interaction itself as an ordinary social exchange. As well as ‘what do they want me to do?’, I’m presented with ‘what should I do in this show?’, ‘how do I look when I do this?’, and ‘is what I did part of the show?’. In the current example, this leads to ‘did I just euthanise a child!?’ The point of interest at this stage is how uncomfortable moments like this don’t just stage a problem, but they stage a problem with me in it, and they stage my reaction to being in that problem. Sometimes, the image of ourselves that we encounter through this will seem a stranger. Someone who’s done something unexpected and perhaps unattractive, unethical. The Derridean insight that we are always strangers to ourselves is writ large at these points. And I think that perhaps this is an argument for the manipulations that performance makers indulge in, in this work, when they (we, you) are cruel. It depends on surprise, and also on the uninformed consent that we, as audiences give to be mucked about with like this, it adds that inflection to the inherent narcissism that Alston has directed us towards in immersive theatre.41 These moments are especially ‘all about me’, but they don’t show me in a good light. What can we do with this idea? In the sense that in participatory performance we are especially aware of ourselves, we might be coming across a magnification of this basic intuition, and the basic difficulty in recognising what it is to be a conscious subject. But is there more to it when we consider

Affect  99 what it is to care, to be in a relation of empathy, with someone or with someone in a situation? For Malabou (and she tells us, for Spinoza and Descartes), the first affect is wonder, followed in order by ‘joy, sorrow, love, hatred and desire’.42 Wonder is an expression of surprise, of the newness of the encounter: ‘[w]ithout the capacity to be surprised by objects, the subject wouldn’t be able to have a feeling of itself’.43 But not all new encounters are pleasant, so Malabou names its opposite, consternation. So we might call the affects felt when undergoing uncomfortable, unexpected experiences in participatory theatre, varieties of consternation. Malabou also sees affect in the way that Brian Massumi does, as taking place at ‘an entirely ontological level’,44 prior to and not requiring the mediation of subjectivity. Affect happens without our awareness of it, without necessarily even becoming emotion. For Massumi, this is an energetic process, of flows between bodies, not a matter of the experience of a conscious subject, but preceding it. Affect is its own driver, its own end process, and the experience of subjectivity only a side effect or passenger. In these terms, the empathising process, the cognitive empathy through which we find ourselves aware of other people’s mental states is a level up from the primary affective tonality of a situation. Other bodies are present to our bodies, their faces to our faces. The tonality that arises is more than the background to how we make meaning out of a situation, it gives the key within which we achieve understanding of a situation. It is the premise which our body understands, and from which we as conscious subjects have the luxury of elaborating something more explicit but not necessarily more articulate. So: I am in a small room in a cellar. I’m with a group of strangers, but I have already travelled a little way with them, laughed with them. I’m aware I could bump my head or trip, I could bump into someone or get in the way. I could say something stupid or try too hard to show that I’m some kind of expert in immersive theatre. I’m aware that these others with me are nervous like me, but that they also sense the essential safety of the situation. This strangeness doesn’t amount to existential danger. The mix of half-conscious threats lurk in my mind but are already at work in my body: according to this theory, my body is assessing the threat, and the opportunity, making baselevel judgements about homeostasis, about keeping itself within a tolerable range for survival, both physical and social. It’s from within this milieu that my body appraises the new situation of the child wrapped up in blue carpet. A child that seems unhappy, one that calls on an impulse to care, that calls on the cognitive empathic process by which I am aware of her distress. But I can cope with this, I can frame it as a fiction, even if it is a strange one. It is when I find myself as one of the causes of that child’s ‘death’ that something more powerful takes place, when I become aware of a negative wonder, or a consternation. This happens to my body, surfacing sporadically in my conscious mind. But as an addendum to this situation – there were two quite small boys in the audience group with me at the start of this performance, within the same

100  Other people/other things age range as the children who had created and performed it. After the episode with the carpet-child, they were very upset. ‘I want to go now! Now! Now!’, I heard the older of the two say to his father, as we left them behind, moving on the next strange encounter. Their affect was quite different, they couldn’t read the doubleness of the carpet-child or manage the playful conceptual blending of threatening atmospheres and absurd stories that the adults could. The affect was overwhelming to them and it wasn’t their fault. The performance didn’t take care of them, either. We care for the audience by giving them challenging things to experience, of course. By respecting that they want to be tested, and in participatory work to be tested personally and up close. Sometime that means being cruel. As Alfred Jarry put it: It is because the public are an inert and obtuse and passive mass that they need to be shaken up from time to time so that we can tell from their bear-like grunts where they are – and where they stand.45 Getting shaken up by these performances isn’t about letting Jarry and the artists hear my bear-like grunts and see where I stand, but about letting me see for myself where I am, and how I stand.

Contradiction 6: Play

£!€$ (LIES) At London’s Almeida Theatre, August 6th, 2018.46 Sitting at a half-circular, casino-like table, I’m struggling to count the piles of chips in front of me, while my fellow players look on, not very patiently. Their piles of chips are smaller than mine, and some of them have dwindled almost to nothing. I have made some advantageous choices, and as we roll the dice, I simply can’t lose. At every round, I either double or triple my stake, or on a bad roll my stake simply returns to me. My initial £5 cash stake, which was exchanged for 5 million worth of chips, has by the end of the game become 78 million. Each play is a roll of dice. To begin with, a 3, 4, 5, or 6 returns the amount invested – a 1:1 profit. This is the commodities market. Later, the stake can be raised to 2, and the return will be 5 (2:5), but it risks more failure on 1, 2, or 3. This is the services market. The riskiest is the financial products market, where a 5 or 6 roll brings a 5:15 profit. But, I have out-bid my fellow players for the right to ‘short’ any trade, to make a parallel bet against any bet in each round, and learnt to use it to short my own trades – hence never losing my stake. I have paid fees to open up the markets in services as well as goods, and in financial products – I have invested in bonds in my own market and in other markets, and I have leant to and borrowed from other players. Each new strategy has either increased my potential return or protected me from losses, and once I gain an initial edge over my fellow players by buying the ‘short’, I can outbid for every other opportunity that comes along. Wealth piles upon wealth. In the early rounds of trading, I had felt an urgent desire to increase my small stake. Other players had put more real money in than I had – £10 or £20 – and started with bigger piles of chips. Though it’s not completely clear, despite assurances that the money is safe, whether this is an actual gamble or not, it’s a piece by Ontroerend Goed, so anything is possible. The odds are very good, there’s little doubt my money will grow, but with such a small pile of chips only a couple of bad dice rolls had begun to make my reserves look very thin. I had needed every roll to come up in my favour. The desire had felt physical, in my hands as I cast the die, in my flinch when it landed on 2 and I lost the chips I’d gambled (Figure 2.4). DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-9

102  Other people/other things

Figure 2.4  £!€$. Photograph Michel Devejver

But once I buy the option to ‘short’ a trade, the tone and feel of the game changes. I remain nervous, briefly, about whether the strategy of shorting my own trades will work, or whether I may have misjudged something. But, it works and my stake grows steadily as I either win (and win bigger) or simply break even on each trade. Now, I begin to feel and think differently. I relish my growing pile of chips, but I start to think of the bigger picture, the potential for losses that must remain, or might be about to trap me. After all, this is a performance about financial markets, at some point there has to be a crash, doesn’t there? What has been built into the game to engineer it? As the performance time passes, and as between each round announcers tell us how much time has passed, as well as about the rising temperature in the room, and about the winners and losers in different markets on different tables, I become more aware of this. I am also pleased when I begin to detect where the crash will come from – one of the other tables where the national market as a whole hasn’t grown as much as ours has – and even more pleased when I work out a strategy to defend my capital ready for when the crash comes down. Having received bonds related to other markets in the returns on my gambles, I try to shift this debt onwards, so that I hold more cash. But then, I realise that in my position of wealth, I need to hold on to some of this risk, hopefully – as the logic of the whole system becomes hazier – helping to stabilise the now deeply interconnected markets. Each table is hosted by a croupier, elegantly dressed and stylishly managing the progress of the game for a group of six players. Twelve tables are arranged around the outside of the Almeida’s main stage space, which has

Play  103 become a single circular room, with other croupiers operating a display in its centre, updating information about the markets at each table. The atmosphere, with low lighting, dark colours, and discrete quiet, reflects a casino rather than a trading floor, but the performativity of both arenas is suggested. This scenographic atmosphere is important, but it is the process of getting drawn into the game that makes this a compelling performance. Semblance and game The first two sections of this chapter have explored some facets of how practitioners make use of affect and intersubjectivity to manipulate participants. My exploration now moves on to how playful structures and playful instincts might be thought of as doing this kind of work, further exploiting the effects of being together with other people, with a focus on how a game can become a thing in itself, independent of those who made it as well as those who play it, while incorporating both in positive ways. There is playfulness in most participatory performance, in, for example, explicit invitations to play according to rules offered to participants, in mischief in regard to the rules of theatre, and in spontaneous inventiveness between performers and participants. The non-seriousness of both play and theatre, in the sense that within their spaces and times what happens doesn’t count, doesn’t have ordinary consequences, is what allows them to do their work, in its many forms. But play is a serious business, just like art: it is compelling, it demands engagement and involvement from players, and spectators as well as players can become preoccupied and emotionally excited. This contradiction is at the root of why experimental forms criss-cross between games and art, and why game-as-art is a key territory in participatory performance. Playing a game offers ways of doing that are not only not-serious, but also potentially not-real. To be at play can be a short-cut to pretending and imagining, to taking on a role without the difficult and risky labour of acting. Play can be a route to ways of being not-me, sometimes in the challenging senses that I have been exploring in the preceding chapters. And, therefore, it can be a route to being both me and not-me, to encountering a fractured and refracted self, to watching oneself in action while neither being committed to what one acts, nor ever convinced that it emerges from somewhere other than an essential self. Play is, conventionally, divided between rule based and spontaneous play (‘ludus’ and ‘paidia’, in Roger Caillois famous formulation47), though, of course, the two have always overlapped. Rules create space to be safely spontaneous, while spontaneity always kicks back against the frames that hold it. All of the performance work in the discussion so far could be re-thought in terms of play, but £!€$ is a performance that takes the form of a game, and of a game that takes the step into the spotlight to become a performance. Game performances can stimulate both intimate interactions between players, and moments of intense involvement that belie the supposed triviality of game play.

104  Other people/other things In a 1958 lecture, Adorno said this about the contradictory presence of nature and the real in art works: I will attempt to present this dialectic – that is to say this unity of opposites or this identity in non-identity – theoretically as vividly as possible. Art, at least in the way we have experienced the concept historically, initially stands in contrast to nature, in so far as it is taken out of the natural world and occupies an area that does not coincide directly with the real world; indeed, we consider it a failing in works of art if this line of demarcation from empirical reality is not drawn. For example, it was interpreted […] as a symptom of incipient barbarism in the days of the Roman Empire that the classical Attic tragedies were staged in some sort of Latinized versions, but that those heroes who were destined to die were played by slaves who were then genuinely killed on such occasions, as painfully as possible, resulting in a form of synthesis between gladiatorial games and tragedy.48 The spectator participants are drawn into the action of The Droves and MADHOUSE echo, in a less deadly way, the position of these poor slaves. What is represented as an artwork – part of it at least – coincides with what is happening to their bodies. The production of the affect in the moment approaches identity with the affect it is representing: a need to protect a vulnerable child, or a cruel pleasure in abusing someone helpless, manifest in the participant’s body, as these things do in life beyond the performance. Adorno continues: But one can generally say, I think, that art sets itself apart from nature by constituting a special area characterised by two poles: on one side the game aspect I just underlined, where the activities developed in art are not viewed as directly real but placed in parentheses, as it were, taking place in a separate realm; but on the other side the aspect of semblance – that is to say, the aspect that the work of art as a whole, to the extent that we understand it as art in the true sense, has an intention, that it means something, that something appears in it which is more than mere appearance itself.49 This is not the pithy, aphoristic Adorno of Minima Moralia or Aesthetic Theory, but it is instructive to read words transcribed from speech, hedging around the subtlety of this idea of semblance. Semblance is not resemblance, but the attempt to construct out of the resources of everyday life a meaning that transcends it. The murdered slave, obviously, is a barbarically literal attempt to produce a semblance of the death of a mythical figure. Along these lines, the generation of real affects within the participant’s body, that are a whisker away from the affects that move bodies like our own, in the situations which we play our part in representing, are barbaric too. The slave who

Play  105 appears as Orestes, really dies as Orestes dies; and care and cruelty really do run through the bodies that act within the rules implicit in the performance. The Droves and MADHOUSE flirt with barbaric reproduction, and yet they are self-evidently playful. And if I play as if a banker, I do not become a banker, no matter how involved I get in accumulating surplus symbols of capital at the expense of other players and of the system as a whole. In the game the thing is itself, but disconnected; I have real chips that count within the game, but they are not money, I have real feelings about winning and losing, but they are not identical to the affects that drive derivative banking. However, games as autonomous structures engage us in activity intensely, they compel involvement by offering rewards within their own world, that are real at the level of affect, and, thus, double back towards semblance. Game performance can, contradictorily, be less ‘game’ and more barbaric than other performances, because play makes experience more real. The opposite pole in art, however, is not the barbaric reproduction, but the pole of semblance, where it has an intention and seeks to mean something. Meaning something is not the same as making meaning in the enactive sense, to mean something is to matter, to have a truth content of its own that is not trivial. This is how, for Adorno, art reconnects with the world, not by imitation but by semblance. Enacting play Play is an extension of engaged coupling between organism and environment. It is the bringing forth of meaning from engagement, but the bringing forth of different meanings – or in the senses explored above, the creation of different objects, because of different kinds of engagement. Ian Bogost’s sense of the playability of objects as the exploration of their possibilities (as noted in Chapter 1) is, at root, this. The objects in question for Bogost are in the main those things physically exterior to us, in the environment, potential toys to be played with; but though he doesn’t adopt the phenemological language of intentional direction towards things, he is interested the becomingness of objects. He disagrees with play theorists who conceive of a set of special play objects that confer the transformation of the order of things: To think that toys reconfigure the world around us presumes that that world is somehow already fixed and settled, for one part, and unworthy of our attention, for another. While it might seem like a moral high ground to lament using roads for automobiles rather than bicycles and lawns for decoration rather than Frisbee, and malls for improvised dancing rather than commerce, reality proves harder to pin down. Just as Walmart proves that the nobility of things might be found in our willingness to commune with them rather than in their intrinsic properties, so toys and art and other supposed disruptions show us an approach to identifying and embracing the worldful attitude more frequently and with greater delight.50

106  Other people/other things The sense of objects having a surplus of meaning beyond the concepts we apply to them brings Bogost momentarily into step with Adorno’s campaign against identity thinking, impossible though it is to imagine Adorno finding in the aisles of a multi-national, exploitative and homogenising supermarket chain (in Bogost’s phrase ‘the megachurch of cut-rate consumerism’51), a site where objects can playfully come into their own autonomy. The Walmart reference here is to a game Bogost played with himself, to explore the enormous iteration of the chain near his home to look for neglected things he could ‘feel admiration for’, the resultant list including: Cheeseburger-flavored Pringles Disney Wreck-It Ralph Taffyta Muttonfudge action figure Chicken Dinners Magazine52 As well as a play theorist, Bogost is a proponent of object oriented ontology. The feeling that a fresh eye for consumer objects offers a quick and easy route out of their, and our, reification could undermine the value of that endeavour. But the objects being played with in £!€$ are of a different order: the dice, chips, and cards are playable and played with, but it is the system of their interaction that is the compelling object. Jukka Vahlo53 adopts enactivism as a theoretical framework for computer games, in a way that can be adapted to articulate some of this quality in games of an analogue kind. Autonomy in enactivism is a quality attributed to minds, in common with other living systems, of the way they are coupled with their environments. The mind is a ‘self-regulating’ system that arises from organism-environment coupling. A computer game, however, is a heteronymous, externally regulated system that is interacted with by the player, and what results is a coupled system in itself. He writes about player-game coupling, and to follow the implications of this suggests a new thing emerging from this coupling, an assemblage of player and game. When the game involves multiple human players, and thus multiple autonomous systems, it becomes a matter of enactive social play, but still entailing an emergent autonomous assemblage. This, perhaps, is the autonomy of emergent phenomena in gameplay. So in £!€$ I willingly become part of a new thing, even though (once again) what it performs through me is something that I disavow. I contribute to the event that I experience, working wholeheartedly, without a script in a literal sense, but with anticipation that what will emerge from the game is planned. Like any artwork it has the capacity to emerge afresh each time it is played, and as a game taking new forms in response to what is put in by the players. Play, considered in this context, has its own way of making action into an object, and of the self as an active agent becoming an object that becomes present through action. Games – at the rule-bound end of the spectrum – are redolent with desire. Competitive desire, in the need to win despite the pointlessness of the activity, tension in the deal of the cards or the

Play  107 role of the dice, and resentment at another’s luck or apparent good strategy. There’s an aspect of self on display in this: of the self as a desire machine, of a need to achieve needless success, which can, of course, be embarrassing. Self-consciousness is rarely far away, I play myself and my relationship to the game as it emerges, as well as playing the moves of the game. Can the rich think? Aditya Chakrabortty, a Guardian columnist who habitually writes about economics, disagreed with his colleague Michael Billington’s positive review of £!€$: Trouble is, it’s a lot of effort for such a small ambition, a massive huff to go a tiny distance. I mean, really: the banking system as a giant casino? Financial speculation as gambling? How did they think of that? The message theatregoers are meant to take away is that banks use jargon to obscure their private powers to create credit, which they often extend to invest in useless things that, uncannily, make them a lot more money. You could have made that argument before the banking crash, but also before any number of other financial crises. Precisely because it is an eternal truth, it doesn’t explain the 2008 crash – just as asserting that politicians fib doesn’t really cover Brexit.54 If this is, indeed, the message of £!€$, he is right. The banking system as a casino is a commonplace and trivial notion and there is no need for a play – or game – that merely re-states it. But a message-transmission conception of performance is simplistic, in most cases, and especially inappropriate to a piece like this. If it does assert and argue this point, it also does a lot more by playing out the argument through the audience’s involvement, and in the affects that occur in and between our bodies. Traditional economics has been modelled on the behaviour of ‘rational economic man’, supposedly concerned to maximise personal benefit above all else, as Kate Raworth puts it ‘standing alone, money in hand, calculator in head, and ego in heart’.55 But it has been made increasingly clear by research in behavioural economics that in the economic sphere as elsewhere, human choices are riven with cognitive biases that ensure considered evaluation is only ever a part of a decision-making process. Daniel Kahneman, in a chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow called ‘The Engine of Capitalism’56 lays the blame for the financial crisis on over-optimism rather than a gambler’s compulsion. It’s the socially and institutionally reinforced feeling of being in control, and that one’s previous judgements are what have led to consistent rewards rather than luck, that make powerful people insufficiently attentive to risk. Or to put it another way, the things that make powerful people powerful include confidence in one’s ability and the willingness to take credit for success.

108  Other people/other things Kahneman satirises over-investment in the rational actor model, contrasting these abstracted subjects, as ‘econs’, with the ‘human’ subjects observed by psychology.57 The point is that even at the large scale, of markets and other economic dynamics, at which the rational actor model is applied, account must be taken of irrational behaviour and a greater variety of other less self-interested motivations. In an article in the London Review of Books entitled ‘Can the Poor Think?’,58 Malcolm Bull laments how this kind of ‘human’ unpredictability is attributed to electorates, or less educated portions of them that have made unexpected decisions. Applied upwards, to the leaders of capitalism as well as customers, workers, and disobedient voters, we find ‘humans’ too. Perhaps, this is the question (rather than message) of £!€$, that we might just as well ask, can the rich think? Occurrent arts The game of £!€$ functions partly as a simulation of the market, a set of rules that models the interaction of a set of dynamic factors at a level of abstraction. Though the abstraction is quite extreme, and the modelling not aimed at a nuanced account of the phenomena at hand, it still has a relationship of isomorphism59: what varies in small scale in an effective model is proposed to correspond to variations at full scale. Brian Massumi suggests the term ‘occurrent art’, for any technique that ‘takes as its object process itself’,60 and performance participation seems a good candidate to be the occurrent art par excellence. Massumi tells us that these are techniques of existence that are ontogenic, capable of producing new forms of dynamic subjectivity, and of ‘composing potentials of existence’.61 I have, elsewhere, characterised the work of the practitioner of participation as ‘shaping’ aspects of experience,62 as if they are artistic material in the hands of a sculptor: directing the conscious perception of mind, or moulding the unconscious affects of bodies. Alternatively, the theatre maker as composer of experience63 might offer more purchase on the dynamic aspects of participation as an event, on the rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint of the affective and the cognitive. The capacity of occurrent arts for ‘diagramming living relation’,64 bears a resemblance to the proposals of Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, with its ‘subject matter in the totality of human relations’65; Massumi acknowledges this but makes a distinction from Bourriaud. The distinction is relevant in the context of performances that manifest as playable objects, with participating subjects as active components, and worth following through. The metaphors I suggest above, echoed in Massumi’s use of ‘composing’, are put to work to capture the agency of the artist; what Massumi intends, however, is not the subjective agency of a creator, but the capability in the emergent relation itself to re-compose the events of subjectivity and object encounters.66 The diagram, like the simulation, appears to have a relationship of representation to a real world, but it is an event of its own, with its own outcomes. This

Play  109 is another dimension of the autonomy of the work, but also of its emergence as its own thing, regardless of its relationship of resemblance when considered from another perspective. Immediacy suggests that any diagrammatic relationship is directed outwards towards the larger scale rather than inwards, in the usual expectation of the game as a microcosm of the world. Massumi does not see a direct line from the occurrent artist as agent to a desired outcome. He puts some (uncharacteristically) cautious distance between his theory and a too-easy valorisation of the potential of the artistfacilitator – though the tone of his writing is often breathlessly positive about what process thinking reveals in the capacity of working together to do affective politics. The artwork becomes something of its own in the process of occurrence, as it does for Adorno: Artworks become like language in the development of the bindingness of their elements, a wordless syntax even in linguistic works. What these words say is not what their words say. […] In music an event or situation is able retroactively to shape a preceding development into something awesome even when it was not that in the first place.67 Works are more than the sum of their parts; they take shape autonomously before our eyes and ears, discovering their syntax as they go along. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno characterises the work of dialectical cognition as ‘to pursue the inadequacy of thought and thing, to experience it in the thing’.68 The immanent contradiction that he seeks is found by paying close attention to ‘the thing’, to discover what in it is not covered adequately by its concept, and most productively to find incompatibilities that are not simply repaired by a revision of the concept: ‘The aporetical concepts of philosophy are marks of what is objectively, not just cogitatively, unresolved’69; aporias are to be revealed, not resolved. £!€$ appears to be covered by the concept of a societal system (in this case banking) which can be simulated and offered to experience in this form. There is a contradiction in this, and in simulation itself: simulation can produce its iterative representations of a system, but ultimately what it tests is only its own model. In this case, the model that is exercised is the participant’s coupling with the game, productive as it is of processes and affects specific to this single iteration and all those present in it. A game like this is itself as an occurrent art, while still being a simulative representation of a systemic structure: it addresses itself to the matter at the systemic level only by being something else at the occurrent level. Rose Biggin suggests a ludological perspective on immersive performance when she observes: Games‘ potential for immersion is concerned with cognitive/psychological immersion in the gaming mechanics and the present moment of play, not sensory immersion in detailed art design, or emotional engagement in the arrangement of narrative events.70

110  Other people/other things Immersion happens through play and the coupling of player and game, generative of their own process and their own relations. It is the occurrent character of performance participation that provokes this immersion, its hereand-nowness. An occurrent art plays us in multiple ways: setting its orchestra of interacting elements in motion, playing participants as instruments; it also plays us through engaging us in its game, coming to life through our structured but unscripted action. Notes 1 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 181. 2 MADHOUSE re:exit was performed at Shoreditch Town Hall, London from March 13th to 28th, 2018. 3 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 75. 4 Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 6. 5 Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 47. 6 Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom and the Secret of Games (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 164. 7 Ibid., 165. 8 White, Audience Participation in Theatre, 40–47. 9 See for example Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 23–27. 10 Graham Harman, Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2018). 11 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 71. 12 Noë, Strange Tools, 12. 13 Ibid., 13. 14 Thompson, Mind in Life, 408. 15 Adorno, Minima Moralia. 16 Ibid., 166. 17 Ibid., 166. 18 Ibid., 230. 19 Ibid., 62–62. 20 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 196. 21 Alston, Beyond Immersive Theatre, 51–58. 22 The Great Gatsby, directed and adapted by Alexander Wright, first performed at The Fleeting Arms in York, in 2015, this revival at the COLAB Factory in London in 2017. 23 Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave, 2008). 24 Ibid., 93–94. 25 Ibid., 27, 75. 26 Christine Hooker, Sarah Verosky, Laura Germine, Robert Knight and Mark D’Esposito, ‘Mentalizing about Emotion and its Relationship to Empathy’, Social Cognition and Affective Neuroscience, 3:1 (September 2018), 204–217. 27 Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 17. 28 Paul Bloom, Against Empathy (London: Vintage, 2018). 29 See Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, Kinaesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 18–20. 30 Thompson, Mind in Life, 394.

Play  111 31 See for example Hayes and Tipper in Reason and Reynolds, 69–84; and Stanton Garner, Kinaesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement (London: Palgrave, 2018), 153–161. 32 Daniel Dennett, quoted by Smith in James Garvey, ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Mind (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 120. 33 Lisa Zunshine, Getting Inside Your Head (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 34 McConachie, Engaging Audiences. 35 Johnson and Malabou, Self and Emotional Life, 5. 36 Malabou, Self and Emotional Life, 6. 37 Ibid., 20. 38 Ibid., 26. 39 Slavoj Žižek, Event (London: Penguin, 2014), 10. 40 Ibid., 114. 41 Alston, Beyond Immersive Theatre, 51–57. 42 Malabou, Self and Emotional Life, 9. 43 Ibid., 9. 44 Ibid., 15. 45 Alfred Jarry in Neil Blackadder, Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience (London: Praeger, 2003), 60. 46 £!€$ directed by Alexander Devriendt, script by  Joeri Smet, Angelo Tijssens, Karolien De Bleser, Alexander Devriendt, was at London’s Almeida Theatre from August 1st to 18th, 2018. 47 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (New York: The Free Press, 1961). 48 Adorno, Aesthetics, 43. 49 Ibid., 44–45. 50 Bogost, Play Anything, 107. 51 Bogost, Play Anything, 29. For Adorno: He who accepts the world of wares as the in-itself, which it pretends to be, is deceived by the mechanisms which Marx analysed in the chapter on fetishes. He who neglects this in-itself, the value of exchange, as mere illusion, gives in to the ideology of universal humanity. (Trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will) The Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge, 1973) 52 Bogost, Play Anything. 53 Jukka Vahlo, ‘An Enactive Approach to the Autonomy of Videogame Gameplay’, Game Studies, 17:1 (July 2017), accessed May 24th, 2020, http://gamestudies. org/1701/articles/vahlo. 54 Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘Gambling in a Theatre Casino Won’t Help Us Understand the Banking Crisis’, The Guardian, August 10th, 2018, https://www.­theguardian. com/stage/2018/aug/10/lies-financial-crash-drama-economic-crisis-almeidatheatre. 55 Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (London: Random House Business Books, 2017), 96. 56 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Penguin, 2011), 255–265. 57 Kahnemann, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 269–272; Kahnemann takes the terminology from Richard Thaler. 58 Malcolm Bull, ‘Can the Poor Think’, London Review of Books, 41:13 (July 4th, 2019), accessed May 24th, 2020, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/ malcolm-bull/can-the-poor-think. 59 Noë, Strange Tools, 155. 60 Massumi, Semblance and Event, 14. 61 Ibid., 73.

112  Other people/other things 62 White, Audience Participation in Theatre. 63 This idea is not unrelated to the idea of ‘conducting’ audience participation in Astrid Breel’s PhD thesis: Conducting Creative Agency: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Participatory Performance (Canterbury: University of Kent, 2017). 64 Massumi, Semblance and Event, 76. 65 Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: La Presse Du Reel, 1998). 66 Massumi, Semblance and Event, 73. 67 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 184. 68 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 153. 69 Ibid. 70 Biggin, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience, 159.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974. Adorno, Theodor. The Jargon of Authenticity. Translated by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will. London: Routledge, 1973. Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetics 1958/59. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. Alston, Adam. Beyond Immersive Theatre. London: Palgrave, 2016. Blackadder, Neil. Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience. London: Praeger, 2003. Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy. London: Vintage, 2018. Bogost, Ian. Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom and the Secret of Games. New York: Basic Books, 2016. Bourriaud, Nicholas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: La Presse Du Reel, 1998. Breel, Astrid. ‘Conducting Creative Agency: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Participatory Performance’. PhD thesis, University of Kent, Canterbury, 2017. Bull, Malcolm. ‘Can the Poor Think’. London Review of Books 41, no. 13 (July 4th, 2019), accessed May 24th, 2020, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/malcolm-bull/ can-the-poor-think. Caillois Roger. Man, Play and Games. New York: The Free Press, 1961. Chakrabortty, Aditya. ‘Gambling in a Theatre Casino Won’t Help Us Understand the Banking Crisis.’ The Guardian, August 10th, 2018. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1987. Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Garner, Stanton Kinaesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement. London: Palgrave, 2018. Garvey, James, ed. The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Mind. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Harman, Graham. Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2018. Hooker, Christine Sarah Verosky, Laura Germine, Robert Knight and Mark D’Esposito. ‘Mentalizing about Emotion and its Relationship to Empathy’. Social Cognition and Affective Neuroscience 3, no. 1 (September 2018).

Play  113 Johnson, Adrian and Catherine Malabou. Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience. Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2013. Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin, 2011. Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity, 2015. Massumi, Brian. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. London: MIT Press, 2011. McConachie, Bruce. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave, 2008. Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015. Raworth, Kate. Doughnut Economics. London: Random House Business Books, 2017. Reynolds, Dee and Matthew Reason. Kinaesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices. Bristol: Intellect, 2012. Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Vahlo, Jukka. ‘An Enactive Approach to the Autonomy of Videogame Gameplay’. Game Studies 17, no. 1 (July 2017). White, Gareth. Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Zahavi, Dan. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Žižek, Slavoj. Event. London: Penguin, 2014. Zunshine, Lisa. Getting Inside Your Head. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

3

Autonomy/Identity

Contradiction 7: Authenticity

In a passage of Aesthetic Theory,1 the subject that manifests in an artwork is treated quite literally, in a linguistic sense, as the ‘I’ that speaks in the work. This ‘I’ manifests in several different ways. There is a lyrical ‘I’, a grammatical ‘I’, an empirical ‘I’, a latent ‘I’, among others. The subject of the work in this sense is the I that appears to speak through the work, for example in lyric poetry, where the poet seems to speak in person through the words of the poem – a n illusion in most cases, of course, as the lyrical mode is a convention, a mask put on by the poet who adopts the convention to address an audience as if from a certain position, as a spurned lover for example. But counterintuitively, it is not this reversal – where a subject appears in a poem to stand in front of the real subject who has created the poem – that is the significant relationship. Adorno’s view is that there is a subject in the poem that is independent of the person who wrote it, while appearing to refer to or speak for that person, or for a fictional ego of some kind. When a work, as in a lyrical poem, has a grammatical or empirical I in its language, it is brought into being by the spiritual I that is latent in the work. The work itself has a perspective from which to speak, rather than just being a reflection or representation of a speaking human being. Adorno speculates that the character of this latent I may change according to the genre and materials of a work, as few forms have a lyrical I as their norm. In performance, we can see that the quality (perhaps the quantity too) of the subjective I can take several forms. The I of live art can often be very radically ‘empirical’ in the sense Adorno suggests: pieces are often personal or confessional, and the presence of the artist is often foregrounded, to insist that the artist speaking here and now really is the subject that addresses us, here and now. The I of socially engaged or applied performance can be similarly direct – as when people perform their own experiences or present their own arguments for change. Verbatim or testimonial theatre derives its authenticity by reference to a real I, who has shared words to be spoken (usually) by others. But according to this proposition, each of these cases the work itself is the subject that speaks, not the individuals that it appears to be a vehicle for. In this schema, the various grammatical I’s of conventional dramaturgy – the characters that speak as if for themselves, and who sometimes appear to DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-11

118 Autonomy/Identity speak on behalf of an author (in direct address, perhaps) actually have more in common with the subjects presented in live art or testimonial forms, with the apparently real subjects that present themselves through performance, than might be first apparent: both are fictional constructs that mask a latent subjectivity that runs through the work itself. This begs questions about the latent I or spiritual I of a participatory work. If we try to accept that a work of art has a subjectivity of its own, it adds an inflection to the sense that our actions as audience participants are not entirely our own. If we accept that what we do in a performance has become part of something larger and other, of an event or a work, or that what we do has been led or shaped by others, then we accept that we do not entirely speak for ourselves. But to say that the work has its own form of subjectivity offers something else: it takes literally the way we frame works of art as having agency, of moving us (and thus having motive force), of speaking to us (and having thoughts to communicate), or of wanting things from us (and having desires). A work of art is a thing, but if it is a subject with these attributes, there are implications for our own subjectivity, as audience participants. Other kinds of works of art often appear through performance, and through performers, but there are differences when the performer is also an unrehearsed audience member. There are extreme cases where performers – musicians particularly – might not feel that they are in conscious control of their performance, even appearing to lose phenomenal consciousness or to forget the time spent performing, manifesting a kind of possession of the performer’s body by the art work, a ghostly or demonic subjectivity. When a performance harnesses the instinctive capacities of the body so that action seems to be beyond what can be delivered under conscious control, the ghostly dimension is magnified. But though a musician’s subjectivity might be subsumed into their playing in the sense that they ‘lose themselves’ that is not necessarily the same as being subsumed into another subjectivity in quite the same way as an audience participant might be. For the musician ‘possessed’ by their playing, what they do is not different to what they have chosen to do: the intended piece is played, though it can seem to come from elsewhere, so that the sense of ownership or agency of the musician is inflected differently. An audience participant does not need to forget themselves or lose conscious control of their agency to feel that what they do does not belong to them, by simply following a script one can give life to actions that are originated elsewhere. Justice Syndicate Fast Familiar’s Justice Syndicate2 is a piece that asks us to ‘speak’ in three ways: by reading pieces of text, by engaging in discussion, and by voting. It casts a group of around a dozen participants as members of a jury, with a case to consider. There are no performers, apart from a few recorded speeches supplemented by ourselves as participants with tablet devices on which various

Authenticity  119

Figure 3.1  Justice Syndicate. Photography Danilo Moroni.

kinds of evidence appears to us simultaneously, so that the performance often consists of the group sitting reading from the screens while exchanging glances with each other, checking and becoming aware that we see the same material. The different kinds of expression that the piece depends upon from the audience are, first, some scripted performances for us to give as witness statements to read aloud to the rest of the jurors. Second, we are given short windows of time in which to discuss the case, activity that is ordered, though not scripted. Third, we are asked to render our verdict via our tablets. Unusually for a jury process (as far as I’m aware), we are required to give indicative judgements of how we perceive the accused’s guilt at two points earlier the process. In these indicative judgements, as well as in the final verdict, the choice offered is a simple click: guilty or not guilty. Even more unusually, we are given the chance twice to vote in another way, to remove someone from the jury, nominating a member of the group who will be asked to leave the room to allow us to fulfil our jury duties more easily. No one was nominated at either point during the performance I attended. It seems that these two additional game-like elements intensify the narrative, so that how we perceive our own judgement, changing with the evidence presented and discussed, is highlighted at these points, giving the verdict we render at the end some background (Figure 3.1). The case we are asked to consider is a serious sexual assault, allegedly committed by a successful and well-known surgeon upon the mother of a young patient. The facts of the case as presented (or its fictions, as it is not based on specific documentary cases) seem measured to make neither a guilty or a not-guilty verdict a foregone conclusion: there are character witnesses and character assassinations about both sides, and while there are some very suggestive pieces of circumstantial evidence, the testimony given by both sides seems to be what the case has to be decided on. There is a sub-plot to the trial in the defence’s petition that we consider the cost to society at large of the conviction of a person with apparently unique life-saving gifts, a request quickly disregarded by the jury I was part of; it seemed to us to be a mischievous red herring. It appears that we have been invited to a very rational process – it asks us to deliberate between ourselves, as if we are a jury, and to decide on the application of justice and the fate of a man accused. It is about

120 Autonomy/Identity the juridical process, which depends upon an ideal of the rational judgement of autonomous subjects as it can be aggregated amongst a group of randomly selected members of the community, a cornerstone of the prevailing ideology of many liberal democracies. But there is a contradictory thread to the piece, that makes us wrestle with cognitive biases, during the process itself and afterwards as we re-evaluate or compare notes on the experience. The piece involves performing to each other, and the potential to notice how and when we influence each other. The strange demand that we indicate which way we are inclined to vote, with the anonymised totals in either direction shared with the whole jury, points up changes in our inclination, but we may notice other moments where our minds change, perhaps based on evidence but also perhaps based on the influence of others in the jury. Though Fast Familiar seem to have been very careful not to lead towards one verdict, they have also been careful to ensure some debate and some difficulty in resolving the case. Through the ‘red herring’ of the accused’s value to society, perhaps they have also ensured there is a cue to feel and to notice impulses to value one person over another, or to find it difficult not to conflate unrelated issues. As a work, it raises questions about the exercise of justice in cases where it is known to be generally unfairly served, and about individual and collective reasoning. It is a piece that can reveal (or conceal) things about the process of autonomous, and authentic judgements and actions. The jargon of immersive theatre Like Fight Night, MADHOUSE, and £¥€$, the structure of Justice Syndicate is such that anything said or done by participants can feel as if it has probably been anticipated in advance, and so is built-in to the range of possibilities that the work can comfortably contain. This is a subtle kind of manipulation, inviting us to engage in interactions that allow nuanced and individual utterances, but where these utterances seem to be anticipated, so that what the piece consists of seems to speak through me rather than it allowing me to speak. The sense that something else speaks through me might offer an alibi, a constructive, reassuring sense of what’s going on when I do things I don’t like. What’s happening is that the ‘play’ is doing this thing, instead of – or at least as well as – me. But this troubles what is often advertised for immersive or participatory theatre: that it allows us to make choices, express ourselves, be at the centre of things, and therefore to experience something more authentic. If we come to Justice Syndicate expecting an immersive theatre experience that allows us this sort of free-roaming confirmation of our autonomous will, we might be disappointed.3 It is more likely, I think, that a participant will reflect on choices and how they came to be made, and on what prejudices or unconscious biases they might expose. There is a potential for this to be a performance of the difference from one’s conception of one’s self, and of one’s inconsistency. It is, perhaps, a performance that is

Authenticity  121 concerned with inauthenticity and tests the limits of what is expected of ‘immersive’ performance. Immersive theatre’s claims to offer freedom or unmediated engagement might be seen as a contemporary manifestation of the ‘jargon of authenticity’ critiqued by Adorno. As Peter Gordon puts it As a functional analogue to commercial music and fascist propaganda, the jargon […] served to degrade the human being even while making the deeply felt longing for authenticity the very cornerstone of its appeal. Just as commercial jazz promoted itself as a vehicle for spontaneous human expression while reinforcing the mere stereotype of this expression, so too jargon served as a ready-made lexicon of magical terms for genuine existence, even while the repetition of those terms became standardised and hopelessly unreflective. This was the logic behind Adorno’s truly wicked remark that the jargon was ‘the Wurlitzer organ of the spirit.’4 Adorno traces this collection of faulty concepts from Heideggerian phenomenology and Sartrean existentialism to advertising and the culture industry. The crux is the self-identity of subjectivity, the idea that subjectivity has the potential to be ‘a small divinity’,5 effectively in possession of itself and its actions, and each of us can be securely ourselves. For Adorno’s critique, that a concept of the self can be found and expressed with the right effort, is in itself false, and both intellectual and popular culture that repeats and reinforces this falsehood further intensifies reification and obscures the real mutilation done to authentic life, as if it takes only an effort of will to undo: That the subject itself is formed, and deformed, by the objective configurations of institutions is forgotten, and thus reified, in the jargon’s pathos of archaic primalness.6 Absorption Enactivism makes its own assaults on the authority of the authentic subject, by unpacking the embodied, embedded, and extended origin of meaning that gives rise to the experience of self, and by asserting other means of exploring and articulating the emergent character of the self, in contrast to its substantiality. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind looks to Buddhist philosophy to add what the authors call a ‘pragmatic dimension’ to phenomenological reflection.7 They are sceptical of the capacity for the phenomenology that is their philosophical scaffold in the Western tradition to fully develop its theoretical insights into either practically applicable knowledge or a genuine tool for investigation of first-person experience.8 Buddhism offers this tool through mindfulness meditation, a way of observing the constant activity of the mind while striving for ‘presence’, by

122 Autonomy/Identity attending as completely as possible to an object, such as the breath. They find in mindfulness meditation a resonance with, and experiential evidence for, ideas from both phenomenology and from cognitive science that, validating the ‘groundlessness’ of mind, for example. As they note, mindfulness has achieved a huge cultural reach since the first publication of their book in 1992 and is now a therapeutic and wellness touchstone for many. In its popular form, this is self-ownership, or authenticity, in another guise, and it stops short of a troubling encounter with the groundlessness of the self. But describing the barriers to a mindful attitude, they outline how the normal state of absorption results in a mind that is: […] cushioned by a cloud of fragmented perceptions, attentions, intentions, fantasies, thoughts, efforts, feelings and memories.9 Absorption in this sense is entanglement in the ontic or empirical world of objects as they compose themselves for and intertwine themselves in subjectivity. Our attention, intention, fantasy, and feeling are populated by the institutions, products, and pre-formulated desires that Adorno laments in The Jargon of Authenticity. Absorption is a profoundly historical and material situation. Participatory performance does not, for the most part, invite a very mindful state and is more likely to provoke intense absorption of this kind. The profusion of stimuli, the confusion of frames, and the demand for appropriate action in an unfamiliar setting entangle the embodied mind not just in the activity of the work itself but enact the work’s entanglement in its own social, empirical world. If a participatory work draws activity from its subjects that demonstrates a general bias or unexamined prejudice, this scripting is facilitated by the everyday, absorbed mental attitude. In Justice Syndicate, when participants accept the invitation to give indicative judgements, or estimates of how they feel about the substance of the case prior to hearing all the evidence, their cognitive biases are in play, informing their apparently rational decisions. Absorbed in the activity that is the basis of the event, the effort of resolving the case presented draws on feelings towards the others present, and on memories, fantasies, and biases. The idea of unconscious bias meshes with the absorption of enactive cognition fairly seamlessly. In Kahneman’s account, ‘heuristic’ strategies10 allow us to make fast, unconsidered judgements that are efficient and effective in many scenarios, but treacherous in some. Damasio’s account of the role of feeling and emotion in decision-making in the pre-noetic sustaining of homeostasis, and enactivism’s organism coupled to an environment, both offer a grounding for a partly rational mind that is inclined to direct us down well-worn paths. Much of the time people are absorbed in activity, and thrive precisely because they don’t step back to question their snap judgements.

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Figure 3.2  Justice Syndicate. Photography Danilo Moroni.

Performance that anticipates and structures our action and makes use of absorption – as a kind subsumption of the participant into the rhetoric of the work and how it appears to speak – suggests a more radical conception of artworks having a kind of subjectivity of their own. An artwork does not arise from a homeostatic imperative of its own, except that it is parasitic upon the epiphenomena of the human bodies that it puts to work. Human homeostasis entails demanding social affordances and affective needs, so that we must play, we must sing, just as we must feel what other people feel. When an artwork sets these needs in train, it is human homeostasis that drives both bodily and cognitive empathy, both impulses to act and to interpret action; it is the fundamental and most vital element of the architecture of whatever the artwork comes to be. Homeostasis is about the material coupling of organism to environment, the reciprocity of viscera and bones and nervous systems with the objects they collectively encounter and which constitute their needs and their threats. The subjectivities of performing artists are what they are, independently arising through a physical body, though intersubjectively entwined. An artwork will never have this kind of integrity or independence, though it might endure much longer than the human bodies that create and enjoy it, and integrate multiple bodies and other complex objects when it is performed; and yet an art work can absorb human subjectivities into itself and put them to work. In Justice Syndicate, the artwork that speaks through the participants, in explicitly scripted readings and in the more subtly scripted exchanges between them when sharing views of the ongoing case as it is presented, is not a trick to draw participants into saying what they do not mean. All sides of the discussion are what the work has to say. It is by saying what they mean, in a state of absorption in the problem of coming to a judgement, that participants also give voice to the subjective I of the work (Figure 3.2). No subject, no object This counterintuitive becoming, where personal subjectivity seems subsumed into a system of objects that give rise to another subject in the artwork, might be cast in a different light by a mode of thought where subject and object

124 Autonomy/Identity lose their primacy. Brian Massumi’s ‘activist philosophy’ inspired principally by Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as enactivist theory of mind, aims to ‘disable the traditional dichotomies haunting Western Philosophy’.11 Objects and subjects as fundamental poles of existence are set aside in favour of the event of their mutual becoming. His debt to the ideas sketched out in the previous Chapter can be seen in this thought about the potential for change in affective encounters but with a positive spin. In the heat of an encounter, we are immersed in eventful working-out of affective capacities. We have no luxury of a distance from the event from which we can observe and reflect upon it. But in that immediacy of feeling absorbed in the encounter, we already understand, in the very fibre of our being, what is at stake, and where things might be tending. The feeling of the transitional encounter is not ‘raw’ feeling. It is imbued with an immediate understanding of what is under way, what might be coming – and what we are becoming. This is enactive understanding: it is one with the action. It is what I call a thinking-feeling.12 Massumi pursues the logic of enactive understanding into social critique, in the importance of thinking-feeling to social change and social stasis. The biopolitics of power rests upon the thinking-feeling of populations, not directed by state apparatuses but ‘self-modulating, self-amplifying’13 in the flow of affect; but at the same time, affect contains the seed of resistant encounter. The immediacy of thinking-feeling is because of its embodied character because it happens in and through bodies as a collective rather than minds that form concepts in response to events. His language is evocative: events have ‘heat’, they are ‘workings out’, ‘something doing’,14 affect is an ‘energy’, a ‘gravitational field’,15 it has a ‘centrifugal hurtle’.16 That thinking-feeling is something that happens between bodies makes it a pre-individual process, not a sub- or unconscious interiority, but an intersubjective happening. If the work has become a subject, subsuming the subjectivity of the participant within it, what of the work as an object? Massumi’s thinking opens up possibilities: Subject and object are given operative definitions by pragmatism. They are not placed in any kind of metaphysical contradiction or opposition. They are defined additively, according to their multiple takings-up in events, in a continuing movement of integration and decoupling, phasing and dephasing, whose dynamic takes precedence over their always provisional identities.17 The difference between being an object and a subject is conceived through another set of key ideas for Massumi, as ‘virtual’ or a ‘semblance’. Each of

Authenticity  125 these words denotes something counter to what it may be used for in other discourses: the virtual is the super-immediate affective character of objects, that renders them more concrete than their ‘actual’ character ever could18; semblance here is the identity that we abstract from the general flow of affect and the perceptual information stream. It is the work of the homeostasisseeking body-mind that continually transforms the ‘actual’ into formations of objects, such that objects are in themselves events of this thinking-feeling process.19 Both subjectivity and objectivity oscillate between virtual and actual, in an ‘experiential Doppler effect’,20 which re-configures the question of the problematic of participatory performance as I have been interrogating it. We may flick back and forth between perceiving ourselves as active or aesthetic objects and subjects, or we may be able to hold the two concepts in tandem, but we are also engaged in a deeper oscillation between the formed and unformed of thinking-feeling and experiential life. Just as we might think of the performative strategy of MADHOUSE re:exit as channelling aggression towards disabled people, drawing participants into its enactment rather than accusing individuals or possessing these politics or attitudes, nor representing the idea of prejudice (or its manifestation in privilege) as a social ‘thing’ in itself, but allowing them to come into being as an event, we might anticipate that this intersubjective becoming is going on in lower-key interactions like those of Justice Syndicate, where we sit quietly around a table and deliberate. For an event to have ‘heat’, it doesn’t have to become superficially heated. Neither potential nor activity is object-like. They are more energetic than object-like […] For the basic category they suggest is just that: occurrence. Neither object nor subject: event.21 The energies channelled are more subtle, but still the performance exploits the porosity between the cultural flows that occur as the actions, gestures, and attitudes of subjects, and the identity of the subject with its potential and activity. It is altogether easier to think of the subjectivity of a work of art as an event, insubstantial and fleeting, but a work that destabilises the personal subject in this way might also flirt with the groundlessness of mind as the manifestation of an authentic subject.

Contradiction 8: Mediation

Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art misperceived. Only when art’s other is sensed as a primary layer in the experience of art does it become possible to sublimate this layer, to dissolve the thematic bonds, without the autonomy of the artwork becoming a matter of indifference. Art is autonomous and it is not; without what is heteronomous to it, its autonomy eludes it.22 Binaural Dinner Date ZU-UK’s Binaural Dinner Date23 is a peculiarly heteronomous work of art; not necessarily more heteronomous than most, but in a peculiar way. We sit opposite each other, two participants in a piece of interactive art, and/or two people on a date. We wear headphones but have an intimate one-to-one encounter. We may have come with someone, or we may be having a blind date with another lone audience member. The performance takes place in a cafe, but set out with only small, two person tables. A waiter moves between the tables and takes our ‘order’, from a menu of activities, he is urbane, deferential, smooth. We converse with each other and with him and hear a quiet voice that gives us further prompts for things to say to each other, or fleshes out the games that we choose from the menu, each of which presents variations on themes of terrible blind dates and our prospective future relationship. The games take us through an absurd version of what might be in store for us, depending on our preferences, as we’re asked questions that could be drawn from (twisted) online or magazine quizzes about sex and love lives. The table has objects on it, miniature figures that represent the characters we hear in short sketches of disastrous dates (Figure 3.3). I am aware of my partner’s eyes, when she looks at me, aware of her movements when she takes up the small objects that are on the table. This is what is in my conscious awareness, but how is meaning developing beneath that consciousness? What is my body ‘aware’ of in this situation that gives it meaning? Though our movement is very restricted, it’s still a physical DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-12

Mediation  127

Figure 3.3  Binaural Dinner Date. Photograph: Ludovic des Cognets.

experience. I sit opposite my partner, looking at her face and into her eyes as I consider and answer satirical, yet still meaningful questions about how we might live our lives together. The fact that this is my partner, and what lies ahead for us is still – and always will be – resolving itself, makes this a performance of something real, despite its comic mode. We laugh it off, but that doesn’t make it insignificant. The body constructs this situation out of what is offered to it. It takes up the situation and makes meaning of it. What does the body take as relevant? What does the body require me to pay attention to? How does the performance exploit what’s going on in the depths below conscious understanding? The other couples surrounding us at other tables never leave my conscious awareness, each doing the same thing, but in their own way. Later our waiter heads outside, he has to sort out his own love life. We hear his words through our headphones though he is outside, all of our attention is directed outwards to this scene, not towards each other. He recruits a passer-by to play the part of his lover, inviting her to sit with him at a table like ours, just beyond the window of our restaurant. He makes declarations of love to her, but she is not receptive. His melancholy situation is a counterpoint to our comic one, he remains stoically – unrealistically – optimistic and we are told to hold on to optimism about love. Our conversations have been heard too, as we wear microphones. A snippet of our conversation comes back to us. The voice in our ears makes reference to things we have said earlier. Our presence and what we have contributed is reflected for us, in a selective and distorting mirror.

128 Autonomy/Identity Channelling performance Headphones offer a strange interface with the present world, whenever we wear them, they offer ambient sound – fake ambient sound – that seems to come from our environment but is interposed in it. In this case, it is used to offer narrative and commentary as well as to ask questions – but it also connects us to the other participants. We know that they are hearing much the same as us, and we know that they hear (probably) what we are hearing, know the voices that we hear in our heads. Disembodied voices guide and inflect an embodied experience. ZU-UK work with this technology in a particular way in this piece. They don’t only give us things to listen to, they listen to us as we participate. There is a microphone in the table setting, through which they listen in on the conversations that emerge between the participants, and re-shape events as they happen. The piece is nuanced for each audience – and, to some extent, for each couple – not substantially in the interaction between the couples and the waiter as he moves around, though that no doubt takes place, but remotely. Timings are tweaked, running orders might be changed. There’s an initial awkwardness to sitting with someone, on a ‘date’ or a performance of a date, wearing earphones. It is bad manners, for a start, to have a conversation while listening to something else, to someone else. It is also a more recent understanding of bad manners, to continue to interact with one’s personal media while ostensibly spending time with another, as if on a date we were each continuing to swipe at our phones, to be more interested in the world of social media. Of course during the performance, we can soon forget what first manifests as a barrier, as it takes on its role as facilitator, and as the greater oddness of the interaction set up in this way begins to fascinate. It is, in a way, a reminder of how technology becomes transparent. That mediation by machines is not only something that we adapt to quickly, but which we have become fundamentally adapted to, that mediation is our reality, that as John Durham Peters puts it ‘[…] apparatus is the precondition, not the corruption, of the world’.24 The Binaural Dinner Date is an exercise in mediated intimacy. It guides us into an awkwardly close encounter, a conversation with one other person, while a third person speaks into our ears. Earphones, so often a barrier to the invasive aural world, are instead here a kind of bridge. The instructions we hear invite us to play games, to talk to and to look at the person we sit with. This piece uses technological media, in a sophisticated way, to facilitate responsive experiences for a set of paired participants. The critical framework of media studies tells us that ‘media’ are the technologies and techniques that sit between communicating subjects, but also the materials that are used to create objects of meaning. We can take this as a cue to think about how participants themselves become media, in the sense of the material used in the work, and how this affects how we think of the artwork, particularly, in terms of its autonomy.

Mediation  129 Media aren’t just the apparatus of communication, but basic ways of being in the world, as Zizek puts it, ‘technology is the way reality discloses itself to us in contemporary times’,25 though for Durham Peters, thinking in terms of media works for non-technological life forms and pre-contemporary human societies too. Durham Peters fundamentalises media theory, going beyond first principles to ‘a philosophy of elemental media’ where water, fire, and air are the first media we live by, make meaning in and live through: Media are not just pipes or channels. Media theory has something both ecological and existential to say. Media are more than the audiovisual and print institutions that strive to fill our empty seconds with programming and advertising stimulus; they are our condition, our fate, and our challenge. Without means, there is no life. We are mediated by our bodies; by our dependence on oxygen; by the ancient history of life written into each of our cells; by upright posture, sexual pair bonding, and the domestication of fire; by language, writing, and metalsmithing, by farming and the domestication of plants and animals; by calendar making and astronomy; by the printing press, the green revolution, and the Internet.26 The mediation of the elements is revealed in comparison to cetaceans: dolphins and whales who don’t just spend their lives in water, but whose complex social lives are facilitated by water. Their calls and songs, in the case of sperm whales famously capable of travelling around half the globe, cross distances because of water. But not only this, cetacean space and time are waterspecific, he says, disclosed in a world that has different rhythms and logics to ours. For human beings, land bound but capable of object manipulation of a subtlety and variety beyond the aquatic dreams of cetaceans, the mastery of fire is a foundational and transformative step, leading to the mastery of electricity and thence to modern media. In the terminology of enactivism, media are the environment with which the organism is coupled, and in which it enacts a world. Body and environment together produce meaning, and when the environment changes radically, so does the process of meaning that emerges with it. Our bodies are the media of our own understanding, intermixed as they are with other things and other people. Inside or outside If the Binaural Dinner Date uses technological media to facilitate a performance that uses the body of the participant as its medium, it also uses the familiarity of those bodies with the rituals and obligations of a date, though the performance describes the situation in its script, scenography, and action, it relies on our embodied familiarity – to whatever extent we have it – with situations like this for a substantial part of the performance to happen. It is via the channels carved into our embodied soma by social practice (including

130 Autonomy/Identity social media) that this performance flows so that the performance happens in us. And at the same time, we are in the performance: […] either one is inside a work of art and aligned with it in a living sense, in which case the question of understanding the work or of the meaning of the work does not really arise; or, on the other hand, through reflection or development – possibly through something like disgust or an excess of artistic experience – one is now outside the sphere of influence of art and casts one’s gaze on the work; and then – this is what I have experienced and still experience very often, and I would not be surprised if many of you had also encountered it at some point – then one suddenly asks oneself abruptly: so what’s it all about, what is all this? The moment one is no longer inside it, where one is no longer aligned with it, art begins to withdraw in a certain sense, to close up, and assumes what I earlier called its riddle character.27 This is a very suggestive passage in relation to participatory work, as although Adorno is not concerned with ‘active’ audiences, he both alludes to artworks having an ‘inside’ within which to become immersed, to changing relationships to the work and to oneself in the work, and to the temporality of relationships with art works. But he is also unequivocal, here, about a fully absorbed art experience: all or nothing, in or out. There is plenty of scope for abruptly asking oneself ‘what is all this...?’ during a piece like Dinner Date, but largely not for the reasons above: sudden, inadvertent, or welcome romantic possibilities are not what Adorno has in mind. The immersion described is quite apart from any call on a participant to make active contributions and deserves attention quite apart from the consideration of how this kind of involvement is compatible with interaction. If, in this passage, questions of understanding or meaning don’t arise when one is aligned with a work of art, it is because the rational mind is not at work, and the ‘natural’ is dominant. Stepping outside the sphere of the work of art makes rational reflection possible but also renders it riddle-like. It is contradictory, of course: cannot be articulated when we are involved, and when we are not involved we can articulate but not fully grasp what we have experienced. Adorno considers critical reflection on art as essential, and the critical interpreter as performing a key role, not in translating or authenticating artistic experience, but allowing it to move forward. As he says in Aesthetic Theory: […] if finished works only become what they are because their being is a process of becoming, they are in turn dependent on forms in which their process crystallises: interpretation, commentary, and critique.28 He does not advocate a thoughtless attitude, but he does suggest that the ambiguity and fruitfulness of a work is a product of an objectivity inaccessible to the rational subject. If alignment with a work renders questions of reflective

Mediation  131 meaning irrelevant, it seems in the two passages above that is because meaning is not happening, deferred until the moment of reflection. This seems to be a disjuncture with the approach set out in the first two chapters here, where meaning is ‘in the midst’, a thing that happens through the body before it emerges in the conscious mind. There is a terminological difference to note: for Adorno words like ‘cognition’, ‘thought’, and ‘mind’ tend to refer explicitly to conscious, rational articulations. The thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment is partly about the long rise of rational thought, and its domination over natural involvement – leading to its place in capitalism’s system of domination, wherein subjectivity is the struggle to assert this rational ego and its individual perspective and judgement. The propositions I have adopted from enactivism, that cognition is deeper, distributed, and largely unconscious, is not antithetical to this, however, as they represent another engagement with how meaning occurs within a ‘natural’ register, rather than in the ‘ratio’.29 Riddle ‘Art is not synthesis, as convention holds; rather it shreds synthesis by the same force that affects synthesis’,30 says Adorno’s gnomic, aphoristic summary of the antinomy at work in art’s employment of meaning and coherence. Again, it needs to be seen in the context of his understanding of the ‘ratio’ of subjective, enlightened thought, where nature as a counter-force is always at work to resist or escape domination. Working through its immanent contradictions, art gives its own shape and form to nature, but in re-shaping it offers the potential for un-shaping, for resistance to the violence of rationality by offering irrational concepts, or emancipated ideas. Art has a direct relationship to the world even as it repudiates it, offering concepts that refer to the world while not claiming a nominalist relationship to that to which they refer. It does not bring things together, even when it appears to; it depends upon rationality to create the forms that give it definition, even when rationality cannot expect to articulate what it offers. Art works are structures, that have their own laws, but they are laws that are designed to break down, to mutate unpredictably in any given iteration or encounter. Whereas rationality, reason, appears to aspire to the identity of concept to object, to reification, art depends upon the instability of concept and object, and the fluid relationship of each to the other. As earlier chapters have shown, participatory art is suited to this kind of instability. In works of participation, there are always mismatches: between knowledge brought to the event, between capability, between responses to invitations. These works are inherently unpredictable, and so do not offer stable sets of concepts. The relationship between instability and form as Adorno presents it in Aesthetic Theory is an aspect of subject-object interplay: form is the objective appearance of a work, but when a subject submits to the work, that form is revealed as provisional and processual, and a deeper monad-like objective character presents itself. When we fully engage with a work, we find something in it that is greater than the concept carried by its form.

132 Autonomy/Identity Rational thinking should allow rational individuals to come to the same conclusion in any given situation, and it should allow an identical synthesis of form and subjective experience. In art, this kind of synthesis cannot be expected. Rational reflection will not lead to aesthetic judgement. The greater range of active outcomes rhizomatically possible in performance participation exaggerate this. But participatory works are far from formless. They give a new form to social life, transfiguring it,31 giving new relationships and making new divisions. When Adorno says that the form-giving aspect of art ‘makes incisions in the living in order to help it to language and thus mutilates it’,32 it is more than usually true in respect of participatory art because its matter is the living bodies of participants. Not incising living flesh itself, as in some forms of performance art, but arranging and colliding living bodies as they relate to each other, as with performance in general but with the important further step that we bear witness to these interventions from within the living matter itself rather than within an encounter with a foreign object as an artwork. The form-giving aspect of art is like the name-giving aspect of language, it mutilates because it reifies, pinning things to their concept and restricting their protean instability; but successful art unpins again, allowing its objects to stand forth in new guises, along with the subjects tangled up with them. In Binaural Dinner Date, the social form of a date holds firm. The instability comes in the things that playing the game of a date has disturbed: intimacy, sexuality, commitment, identity, and a specific relationship between two embodied minds. At points, participants are pushed to make snap decisions, in the context of having taken an attitude to the performance – for me, this included deciding that I was going to answer the questions sincerely as far as that was feasible, and that I was expecting my partner sitting opposite me to respond in a similar way, that I wouldn’t think too hard about the games we were to play because they were games and not part of a real date. And, of course, it was, in a sense, a real date, and I didn’t want to make a bad impression. Taking an attitude is also a physical thing, a bodily attitude: in this case sitting in a chair, facing another person, with three or four other couples in my eye-line doing similar things, and the same behind me in my partner’s eye-line. A bodily attitude calls up behaviours, and social attitudes. Sitting facing someone, I am called upon to be polite, to engage appropriately. Body and conscious mind collaborate in the appraisal of the situation – is this person opposite me a stranger? No. Is this the relative intimacy of the arrangement a source of difficulty? No. I don’t feel a need to lessen the distance, on the contrary I feel a need to acknowledge and engage with the proximity. The specificity of the body opposite me is relevant. What would it be like to take part in this with a stranger sitting opposite? I had two different experiences of Dinner Date, which were quite distinct because of their different heteronomies. I attended once with my partner,

Mediation  133 and once alone so that I was introduced to a stranger. In the first instance, the piece was a ‘date’, in the sense of a night out together. In the second, it was unclear how much of a real date it became. I went quite naively, wanting to experience the piece again, as a piece of theatre, forgetting how much ZU-UK had also framed it as a way to meet new people, and how they allocated unattached participants on that basis, as match-makers. I was uncomfortably uncertain about whether my ‘date’ had signed up for the event in the same way, and conscious throughout of the deception that I had inadvertently set out upon. Not wanting, at the outset, to undermine the premise of our theatrical encounter by saying, ‘actually I’ve done this before, with my girlfriend’, I found myself more and more giving a performance of someone on a date with a stranger, and – within the scripted action of the piece – replaying the non-committal friendliness that I recall from other unsuccessful (real) dates in the past. The awkwardness of this situation might be summed up in Adorno’s pithy aphorism: ‘[i]n the utopia of its form, art bends under the burdensome weight of the empirical world from which, as art, it steps away’.33 The utopia in question here is merely the idea that I might play out a date with a stranger, and it remain merely play. Peculiarly burdened with being two things at once, the experience bends one way then the other, during the event and on reflection, buckling but not breaking. Risk Risk is an important element of the aesthetics of participation. If we seek to remove risk, we may remove the potential for positive effects such as surprise, challenge, unpredictability, danger, discomfort, and more. We may demote the benefits of these things as both or either real elements of a process, and as feelings experienced by participants. Practitioners know that when they discuss taking care of participants that they are concerned with the potential for real harm, but it is less often said that to take care of people we need to provoke and destabilise them, need to ask them, and lead them to take risks. It is ethical to be tough with people, or to tease them or to deceive them, even to be cruel to them, within certain frameworks or for certain ends. To theorise this is to recognise the process as an artwork, that when we want to experience it, we must give ourselves to it, trusting that we are able to handle what it asks of us. Mature readers, spectators, art lovers, and so on are willing to be tested like this, they know how to read the codes of an art form for where it may take them. Occasionally, we argue over whether boundaries have been broken, things taken too far, but this is evidence of awareness of a boundary within which difficult content is appropriate and to be desired. Boundaries are pushed because ambitions for the potential of art grows. Is the phenomenon in participation the same, but with its own dynamics, or is it different? There is still the risk of being exposed to disturbing or offensive content, but one also gets involved physically and socially: both one’s body

134 Autonomy/Identity and one’s social being are in play. There is a risk of real physical harm or discomfort, and the risk of embarrassment or exposure. Reframing it as an ethic of care can be productive, where because we ask people to trust us, we must care for them; but we can say that it is possible to care for someone by asking more of them, by respecting their potential, by making demands while offering the tools to meet those demands.34 We have power over people, which can be something people have asked for. When people give you their trust, they want you to do something with it; when you take responsibility for a situation, people expect something to come of it. The disavowal of this power may only represent a style of handling the power, a technique, an aesthetic choice that has implications for matters of informed consent. Remainder Risk reveals how performance participation is heteronomous, but there is a risk inherent in having an encounter with an artwork as such, not just in its potential to be ‘leaky’. To really have an art experience, we need to be open to its radical difference. As James Hellings puts it: Only by being open to new, unexpected and potentially unsettling experiences, by reaching out and submitting oneself to the discipline of the work, by relinquishing one’s subjective agency, choice and decision making, and by entering into a generative relation with that which is entirely and objectively other, does one come by genuine experience, according to Adorno.35 The ‘discipline’ of participatory work is something else; however, it’s not just the rigour of close attention and willingness to be tested beyond the limits of entertainment, but it is submission to rules guiding behaviour within the work’s active demands, and to offering oneself as the media and the means of the work. The unpredictability of what that opens up is a correlate of the uncertainty that is the beating heart of a successful work: Negative capability comes from Keats who defined it, in correspondence, as, ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ This capacity for being in uncertainties, this acceptance of pathlessness (aporia), without subjecting these riddles and enigmas (the non-identical = art) to identificatory, classificatory, and dominative thought (fact & reason) is a fitting description for Adorno’s aesthetic theory and negative dialectic.36 In other respects, participatory art may both have this potential in the way that other works do, and be susceptible to Adorno’s critique of engaged art. But, it is necessary to consider how the formulation is re-shaped in the particular conditions of participation. To make a thing or an idea strange is a

Mediation  135 fairly commonplace way of thinking of the effect of art – and this is, in part, a way of pushing further into that idea. It is also a way of re-focusing aesthetic autonomy, where the thing that becomes aesthetic (as well as a thing among other things) is a different kind of thing to start with: it is human subjectivity in its engagement. If domination consists of the reification of human being, then the potential to release – however fleetingly – subjectivity from its definitive constraints is political. In the potential of participation, we see an especially focussed manifestation of the politics of ‘administered life’. Antinomies of continuity Binaural Dinner Date is a peculiar demonstration of an art experience walking both sides of the dividing line between art and life. Can a work maintain a double aspect in this way, can it be something as purposeful as a date? Or should we expect the experience of artworks to be decisively one way: […] Art’s autonomy remains irrevocable. All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function – of which art is itself uncertain and by which it expresses its own uncertainty – are doomed.37 Autonomy manifests in performance participation in, for example, our recognition that behaviour is not consequential in the usual way; that some behaviour is licensed and encouraged; that there are appropriate ways to interpret experiences within this frame. The value of aesthetic autonomy could end with this kind of recognition of art as a social process, but Adornian aesthetics urges that autonomy is essential to a model of how an artwork becomes a thing in itself, something radically other that is paradoxically made from the stuff of everyday life. There’s a way to look at this antinomy that’s more specific to participation, seeing a hybrid of the game and semblance dialectic (introduced in Chapter 2) with the contradiction of being both spectator and performer. As I have already observed, the spectator who performs never truly stops being also an audience to their own performance. Spectatorial distance is part of the apparatus of artistic autonomy but is undermined when the artistic object is almost completely immediate. Adorno subscribes to art’s autonomy while insisting on its simultaneous heteronomy. He berates artworks that reject semblance by becoming things that are identical with themselves – making something that is nothing but itself – for their fruitless attempt to eliminate that which is necessarily immanent and in tension with its opposite, the work’s objectivity: As soon as the artwork fears for its purity so fanatically that it loses faith in its possibility and begins to display outwardly what cannot become art – canvas and pure tones – it becomes its own enemy, the directed and false continuation of purposeful rationality. This tendency culminates in the happening.38

136 Autonomy/Identity But he was not witness to developments in performance art which embrace theatricality (albeit often ironically) and play with presence and absence, fiction, and reality. Participation often puts people under these conditions in performance, of being themselves and not themselves, referencing their presence while asking them to play the game of semblance. If Adorno directs us to the interplay of heteronomy and autonomy in the artwork, we can take this as an invitation to consider both the work as that which excludes itself from the everyday, and as that which remains everyday. Everything that is part of the art event is part of the artwork; my action is part of the artwork; my experience of my action is part of the artwork; my experience is not just an experience of the artwork, but an element of the material of the artwork. In Adornian thinking, each item, thus, listed can be discussed either and both as a mundane phenomenon and as a thing transformed aesthetically. What Adorno offers is a way to discuss these aspects of the event experience in their mundane aspect and another to reassert their aesthetic aspect in dynamic tension with it. As Hellings suggests, this extends to the situation of the spectator, reader, or listener: One must become both a part of art (breathe its aura) and apart from art (exhale its aura), both absorbed and alienated, both near and distant, both inside and outside, both interested and disinterested, both co-producer and spectator-like if one is to fulfil the work in its own terms and experience this freedom of art, which for Adorno, hurts; the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.39 The capacity for art to overpower is dependent on our capacities as participants in its combined heteronomies and autonomies. It is because art is constituted by the disengagement of objects and practices, otherwise continuous and mundane things, because it does not participate in everyday exchange, that it can be something so radically other, and show the potential for other forms of life. In order to think of participation per se as aesthetic, we have to think of the participating subject becoming an object to itself. This is both tautological, as we are always already objects to ourselves, and another necessary repetition of the antinomy of subject and object. It is in the aesthetic that Adorno (following, while critiquing, Kant) tries to accommodate the great difficulty of the distance between subject and object. Subject and object, in art, are wrapped in an antinomy, each surrendering to and recomposing each other to the other, such that on the closest examination they are inseparable. Does this render the participatory encounter merely identical to any other art encounter? No, as it is bringing something from outside into this intimate relationship that has aesthetic power, while the participatory renders something of our own – something already intimate – into something other, before it is once again reincorporated into personal experience. If the potential of the aesthetic is in this radical kind of appearance, then it is necessary to look for how this appearance can have a different character.

Mediation  137 ‘I’m free’: an outburst, continuous with affective involvement between a performance and a performer. But as well as being intensified by taking place within an art context, it is also mediated by it. This spectator seems to have breathed the aura of the work, in its immersive, participatory form, and become absorbed, but there is more to be gained for her if there is something left over from this absorption. This everyday gesture is subsumed into a larger work, both peculiarly her own experience and something authored by the performance makers. Arms aloft, her own arms, and arms that might become strange to her. Temporality is one means by which this distancing happens, looking back on the event not only as a memory among others, but viewing it under ‘the general category of irrationality’,40 as something that happened inside the frame of a work of art both excused and enhanced by it, and mystified by it perhaps. Squirting pea-juice at a performer restrained in a straightjacket is a product of the affective moment, of the flows of affective energy, but in mediation with a wilful structuring by an artist, the awareness of which does not go away, and with a willingness to go along with this game. It is in mediation with becoming someone who followed the logic of the game and made a scripted assault on a person with a disability. The violence is an art-violence as well as a game-violence and an intensified moment of the mundane. And it is because this art-violence – despite that we have paid for a ticket and encountered it as an experience among experiences (a thing among things) in the experience economy – can be more than just another social thing, it has the potential to offer more. It is the excess of the object, that which cannot be contained by a concept or an exchange value, that gives them potential. Art is related to its other as is a magnet to a field of iron filings. Not only art’s elements, but their constellation as well, that which is specifically aesthetic and to which its spirit is usually chalked up, refer to its other.41 If participating bodies and subjects are among art’s elements, their constellation is what, exactly? As well as the visible and audible actions that are invited and drawn out, the elements that constellate include the subject positions and dispositions of the person that acts. Things that we do become a part of something else, but also things that we are, or at least are inclined to think and feel that we are. What they constellate into, and the process of their constellation wraps back around to activate, as if possessed of magnetic force, all these normally mundane things and processes. Artists are familiar with their bodies and actions becoming something other than their own. The singer’s lungs, larynx, and mouth remain flesh and blood, even while the autonomous thing lives in them. This only confirms the chimerical character of aesthetic autonomy in the performing arts: things seem transformed but then become themselves again. Sitting at a table in Gerry’s Bar & Kitchen in Stratford Circus, the Dinner Date is reminiscent of our own first date, as the personal resonances pile up

138 Autonomy/Identity in layers, and constellate delightfully. The mischief of the words whispered in our ears (‘Look your partner now and try to imagine what the craziest thing about this person is. Would you like to fuck this person?’) is also occasionally awkward, as the intimacy of a relationship is re-cast and satirised. A few miles away and a year later in the bar at Rich Mix, at the same show but also accidentally and inappropriately on an actual date, things constellate differently and more intensely. The intimacy of the encounter is fascinatingly uncomfortable, entirely specific to the two bodies facing each other across the table, while belonging generically to a tightly scripted performance, identical to that experienced by couples on either side of us. Semblance and game intersect riddlingly in bodies that have become media for an artwork and yet still merely bodies meeting, uncomfortably, the real looming massively behind the mask of the aesthetic.

Contradiction 9: Identity

The professor’s privilege Eric Oberle, in Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity, cites a notorious incident near the end of Adorno’s life as an emblem of Adorno’s confrontation with identity politics. Early in 1969, one of Adorno’s lectures on ‘The Introduction to the Dialectic’ was interrupted by a group of students, who called on him to surrender his authority in favour of a collective and dialogical event, and to let the lecture be a ‘teach in’. Demanding that he recognise and critique the university’s authoritarianism and his place in it, three semi-naked protestors ‘showered him with rose petals and kisses’.42 This was to be Adorno’s final lecture before his death a few months later. This curious confrontation between generations of radical politics, between action and theoretical reflection, and between performative gesture and high modernism’s most austere advocate also (for Oberle) illustrates the entry of identity into politics in the form that we are perhaps most familiar with it now. The student movements of that time, famously evident in protests around the world the previous summer, had in common an aim to transform the world through self-realisation and authentic action, with the premise that an inauthentic and alienated society could be overthrown through a pursuit of utopia in the immediate present. As well as being radically performative in themselves, these movements had their cadres within radical theatre, among them experiments in authenticity through eradicating boundaries between audiences and performance. The Living Theatre’s Paradise Now, famously, pursued both community and communion through ritual and participation, and not coincidentally, like Adorno’s students, nudity.43 This utopian impulse seems to see identity between the self and the world, or subject and object, as something achievable.44 Meaningful life is in reach if we are true to ourselves, and if we combine the personal and the political. Identity politics as we are now more familiar with them emerge from this period as the diversified and fractured pursuit of the more complicated business of realising selves that are obstructed or alienated by patriarchal, ableist, racist, homophobic, and heteronormative society. Its root in this sense is not that which attracts so much ire from both left and right – the supposedly divisive need to declare each of DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-13

140 Autonomy/Identity these interest groups as more important than that of the collective – but the sense that identity itself is the aim. Identity, as I have discussed it up to now, is correspondence between a concept and its referent, or between theory and material existence. But identity is also a correspondence between a self and a self-image, or a self and a place in the world. For Adorno, negative thinking had to extend into his thinking about personal identity, and the resistance to ‘identity thinking’ that refused a dogmatic philosophy must also refuse a simplification of the pursuit of selfrealisation. Self-creation is potentially a positive aim, but it is inspired by and motivated by the fractures and gaps that are the basis of all selves (the wounds of Minima Moralia’s ‘wounded life’). The self as ‘unalienated subjectivity’45 is a myth, though sometimes a reassuring one. Just as no theory is adequate to what it describes, no concept of the self, either of the subject per se or individual sense of one’s self, is adequate to the complexity, heterodoxy, and evanescence of what the self is. And more than this, the proclamation of ‘identity’ as the principle of subjectivity is in itself misleading: identity (taken literally) is sameness, but subjectivity, in its instability and insubstantiality, is especially unlike that which it appears to be. As we have seen in various forms, it is the very appearance of a subject identical to itself as such that misleads. As Oberle puts it: ‘To think about non-identity is to think against the subject’s myth of self-creation and to consider the subject in a forcefield of negations, borrowings and displacements’.46 Adorno’s negative identity thinking, as Oberle argues it is found in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, as well as in his empirical research in The Authoritarian Personality and Studies in Prejudice, acknowledges the positive impulse to have identity, to know oneself and to feel that one has a place, but stresses the importance of negativity in the formation of that self. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Odysseus is a model of the emergence of rational subjectivity and ‘a soundable self – a self simultaneously empowered by and diminished by the myth of his own self-sufficiency’.47 There is trauma in the alienation of contemporary life, and in becoming self-conscious, and there are negative forms of identity expressed in and produced by ‘racism, prejudice, ontological conflict, and victim blaming in a world of mass-mediated subjectivities’.48 More recently and in tune with this, Slavoj Zizek frames subjectivity itself as the wound. What is ‘Spirit’ at its most elementary? The ‘wound’ of nature: the spirit of human subjectivity is the power of differentiating, of ‘abstracting’, or tearing apart and treating as free-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity.49 The Privileged In Jamal Harewood’s The Privileged,50 audience members may find themselves wrestling with a naked man for control of a bucket of fried chicken.

Identity  141 They do this to stop him eating the whole bucket, and making himself sick. A spectacle of determined, excessive eating and the prospect of a person continuing to eat far too much stimulate strong responses and seem to compel spectator participants to become physically involved. Harewood’s method has been to cast the audience as zookeepers, taking care of a polar bear called Cuddles, who needs supervision and entertainment because caged living has rendered him helpless and incapable of moderating his appetite. Harewood himself plays Cuddles in a threadbare costume, and as the tasks he has set for the audience progress, the furry suit is removed piece by piece until this climactic moment where he is both naked and in need of discipline. The work exploits a conjunction of grease, sweat, frustration, and morbid anticipation (Figure 3.4). It is not only Cuddles that demands discipline in this moment, it is also Harewood, who has committed himself to an action with a disgusting conclusion. Harewood does not speak to us, he continues to portray an animal, all grunts and flashing eyes, but this is only a remnant of his comic polar bear persona. What participants are confronted with at this point is a recalcitrant performance artist, drawing them duplicitously into something unpleasant. Our role in the game of zookeepers has been refracted, distorted so that we have to choose between letting him harm himself, and intervening physically to prevent him. In these circumstances, the choice to intervene is not entirely a rational one, I believe, it is driven by the atmosphere in the room and by the affect that it generated in the bodies of the participants.

Figure 3.4  The Privileged. Photograph: Guido Mencari.

142 Autonomy/Identity In addition to this, the active participant is likely to have some awareness that Harewood has staged something else: he has staged his own black skin, naked, and dominated – often, but not always, actively dominated by lighter skinned people preventing his wilful, undisciplined consumption. It’s the complexity of this overlap, of powerful affect and the actions that are energised by that affect, along with but not in sync with an acute thematic agenda, that makes this a spectacularly interesting piece of work. Harewood’s conceit makes things happen in the bodies of the participants, things that are both real and not real. Privilege & authenticity The very ease and familiarity in the world of the dominant group, the lack of discontinuities in its experience, means that it lives in ideology in a way that the subordinate group never can.51 Under the assumptions of the enlightenment and liberal democracy, to become a subject is to have autonomy: to make our own choices on a practical day-to-day basis and in regard to matters of conscience. Historically, this has been denied to women, slaves and serfs, and is denied to some still in ways that we might take for granted: infants are not recognised, and the trappings of full subjectivity are shared with children in a piecemeal and gradual way; prisoners and those with mental illness or incapacity are denied some of the freedoms that constitute the subject. So, arguably even within the bounds of the law and social convention in contemporary democratic and enlightened societies, subjectivity in a form that allows full participation is denied to some; nor has slavery been eradicated, and still less poverty. This is not to say that people who live their lives in these subordinate situations do not experience the world from a subjective point of view, that they don’t exist as subjects, but that the basis on which conventional thinking has constructed the concept of the subject depends on a kind of individual autonomy that has made sense to propertied white men. If this model of subjectivity doesn’t recognise that independent self-realisation is not available to all, then it does not recognise all as subjects. What Harewood presents in an animalised black body is a bleak image of this lack of recognition. The privilege that his work confronts is the privilege of being recognised as a subject. He makes himself recognisable first as an animal, then as an animal in human shape. But he casts audience participants as ‘zookeepers’ who recognise themselves as human subjects with the agency to impose choices upon him. As in some of my other examples, the piece traps us in an unflattering performance, with only false choices, forcefully producing this performance of privilege through the bodies of the audience, in a productive contradiction troubling the perspective of audience members as being wholly autonomous, implying that perhaps the privileged, too, have a fractured, negatively structured self. If there is a reflection

Identity  143 of social determination in this, it echoes the apathy or retreat of elites that James Heartfield identifies in late capitalism,52 where the privilege of social subjectivity is not accompanied by confidence in the authenticity of one’s autonomy. Harewood’s performance, in common with work discussed in earlier chapters, operates on affective intersubjectivities as much as it is about the responsibility of individuals, but it also processes a set of stark images of subjectivity in collapse, either in a situation of subjection or in an exercise of power. These are not subject positions elegantly disavowed, but deliberately defaced, in a recapitulation of the negativity that might be at the core of our relations with ourselves and with each other. When the piece works as I understand it, some participants are compelled to solve the problem of Cuddles/Harewood’s self-destructive course of action. Or like me they sit paralysed and fascinated, drawn into the tight logic of Harewood’s game and recognising that even inaction entails responsibility for what is occurring, and that it has been authored deliberately by the artist who is present with us. Identity politics in its contemporary manifestation seeks equal recognition for all subjectivities, including those subordinated, misrecognised, or damaged by the order of things. But as Heartfield expresses it, this theory is trapped in a contradiction, as the force of their critique leaves little room for the positive transformation they seek: Over and again we find the paradox of identity theory replayed: it conjures up a feisty spirit of taking on the world, but at the same time it revels in its chains. Identity theorists having based their claims upon determinate being are constantly looking around for the undetermined moment that is contained within identity theory.53 Negative identity thinking at least gives us a language for recognising subjectivities damaged by racism, and intersubjectivities interrupted by it. Harewood plunges us back into the determinate. His nakedness has none of the defiant declaration of autonomy of the counterculture, nor of contemporary body positivity. It’s a willing humiliation, an entirely negative, layered engagement of the intersubjective. It revels in negative identity. It plays with the insight that what makes us who we are is the damage done to us, and the damage we do to others. Selflessness Enactive cognition encourages us to think in terms of negatives: of the absence of the homuncular subject, for example, or of the Buddhist void. This gives some common ground with the project of negative identity, in the refusal to allow that the constitution of a world in the engagement of organism and environment leads to or is in the service of a whole and authentic subject. Cognitivists seem uninterested in alienation or trauma, but they offer the

144 Autonomy/Identity seeds of a cognitive basis for social determinacy. So far, however, they purse the negative into the positive potential for a truer understanding of the nature of mind from a personal as well as a scientific perspective. Self-consciousness is an important factor to makers of performance participation: it is the barrier to joining in, for many people, or the barrier to joining in with spontaneity or enjoyment. In everyday terms, it is the mild anxiety derived from monitoring our appearance to others during social interaction, and in enactive terms, we can recognise in it a process of embodied feed-forward and feed-back of intersubjectively anticipating risk in a social situation. But it may also refer to the coming to awareness of having a ‘self’ or conceptualising what that self might consist of. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch make a (self-consciously) bold assertion: ‘all of the reflective traditions in human history – philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, religion, meditation – have challenged the naive sense of self’54 as a singular, coherent, consistent, and substantial centre of human experience. The singular self may be at the centre of how we feel things to be; but repeatedly and through very different methods, things have been shown to be different. Self-consciousness might also become a realisation of the fragility and contradiction of this self. In the first instance, the question can seem absurd: how can I question whether I exist? The very fact that I ask the question serves as its own answer: ‘I am here, asking the question, and this is my evidence that there is such a thing as “I”; describing what this ‘I’ consists of may be elusive, but the “I” is not less real because of that’. This is what we might call the experiential self, the pervasive sense of being the centre of experience, of having a point of view (literally), of having continuity with past experiences, and of inhabiting and being intimately connected with a body. But closer reflection and inspection see difficulties mount up. Conceptually, can I be the same self as I was five minutes or five years ago, can my self be the same as my body? What is it that I would call my self when I try to pay attention to it: is it something apart from the act of paying attention? And if so, what does this mean about self? Experimentally, where would I find my self, physically? It appears to be inside my head, but where, in what part of the brain? If it is inside the brain, what kind of material is it made of? And what about the evidence that the self can be inconsistent, broken, multiple, during what we think of as mental illness or ecstatic experiences. There is a vital contradiction between the most fundamental personal experience, and the results of reflection and experimentation: what feels most real, most of the time, seems impossible to describe precisely and can be perhaps most effectively understood as a confabulation. According to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, the best way to investigate this self is through techniques of meditation drawn from specific Buddhist traditions that focus on mindfulness. Mindfulness, in this sense, is the close attention to what thought contains, trying to maintain focus on an object, while monitoring what comes into mind, moment by moment, unbidden,

Identity  145 and beyond control. Practiced meditators, it is said, are able to discern much more accurately the essential substancelessness of the self that appears to be the centre of the mind. This discovery, available to all through a technique they attribute the same status as any scientific method, is the root of the ‘egolessness’ that is associated with Buddhist teaching, but for these writers not as religious doctrine or spiritual goal, but as the finding of rigorous enquiry. This enquiry reveals what consciousness consists of: an indivisible awareness of the body, feelings and sensations, things that give us our relationship to the world, (‘dispositions, volitions, motivations’55), and thought processes. This amounts to experience, but not an experiencer. Just as the physical examination of the brain, alive or dead, cannot find the substance or location of the self (or the soul), methodical introspection cannot find the substance or the location of the self as experiencer, only a discontinuous flow of experience. For Galen Strawson, the term ‘stream of consciousness’ is misleading, particularly about the consistency of the sense of self. Awareness: […] keeps slipping from mere consciousness into self-consciousness and out again (one can sit through a whole film without emerging into Ithinking self-consciousness). It is always shooting off, fuzzing, shorting out, spurting and stalling.56 If we give credit to this perspective, it tells us that there is no self to be conscious of, that the mind contains an unsteady stream of references to a self that is in itself confabulated by these references – by the directedness of attention towards things that are of relevance to the self, in the physical and social world. This directedness towards things corresponds to the phenomenological idea of intentionality, as the object-awareness of consciousness: self is unable to be aware of itself without being directed towards another object. We cannot be conscious of the self, at its root, and yet we are almost continually conscious of the self through our focus on other objects and their meaning for us as a self. What can this mean for performance? We do not attend to performance as practitioners of meditation – and I don’t propose that we should. It is interesting that Strawson chooses film-watching as an example of an activity where our absorption can be complete and continuous, but in this situation, we are neither absorbed in the sense of being centre and agent of experience nor in mindful self-examination. Theatre spectatorship could have served as his example, but when in performance participation, we are more likely to be absorbed in immediate action and anticipation, I-consciousness prevented by the situation’s demands for response. As outlined in the previous section, the subject generally goes about in a state of absorption, that gives him (sic): ‘the sense of who he is and what he is about, but do[es] not make him fully present57’, and this is likely to be the case when participating in performances. But not always. Performance participation, as I say, has to overcome or work with self-consciousness in the everyday sense, but at times

146 Autonomy/Identity performance participation itself can cast light on the self and the problems of self. When a person tries to: […] stop and look at his experience, the shadow of an ever present but slippery separate observer already present in the cloud comes to the fore, another kind of fragmented duality that makes it difficult to look. There is no first person here and only a ghostly sense of any second or third person.58 Such introspection might occur during a performance – though probably fleetingly – that has led one into doing unexpected things when there is cause to consider one’s role in doing the very things one is doing. For example, as one wrestles with a naked man for control of a bucket of fried chicken. Buddhist practice offers a language for an articulation of domination – societal domination of the self is part of the worldliness that seeks to evade. This is a positive aspect of negative identity: the profit to be had from deep reflection on the incoherence of the self, but this tends to be effaced by appropriations for the purpose of self-care and spiritual growth. This kind of self-reflection takes time and social capital, to access the books, the classes, or the networks; in other words, it requires privilege. And perhaps just as importantly, it requires confidence: there is irony in the need for a relatively secure sense of yourself in order to disavow the self. If your experience of your place in the world is embattled and undermined, it is difficult to see the gains to be had from surrendering what others seem to have and enjoy. It also takes social capital to go to performances and to have the confidence to embrace their challenges. Harwood’s The Privileged can be a very upsetting experience, in provoking and performing violence and cruelty, it leads us to do uncomfortable things, to take actions that others consider wrong or that we know are wrong as we do them. The wrongness it channels, nakedly and without disguise in its final sequences, is the brutal taming of black, male bodies because of the animalism and irresponsibility attributed to them. It enacts racism, at an affective level, within the bodies of the participants in their interactions with each other and with Harewood. We find ourselves becoming the oppressor, involuntarily. If I can be manipulated in this way, where is my agency? If I can find myself performing these acts in this context, what else am I capable of, that I would disavow? If my body can be a channel for racism, where is my sense of myself as an anti-racist? As Helen Ngo has it, racism itself is a matter of habit, embodied and unconscious, it reflects ‘a comportment or mode of responding that has “sedimented” in and been taken up by the body, supported by deeply embedded discourses and histories of racist praxis’.59 The performance happens through the actions of the participants and the affective energies that motivate those actions. Instead of introspecting to discern the insubstantiality of the self, we discover, in action, that we are divided from the self we protect and project and imagine to be consistent and whole.

Identity  147 This is not just a portrayal of the negative identity of an oppressed, subaltern subject, but a conjuring of a negative experience of what I can be, in my position of privilege, a non-meditative evidence of the insubstantiality of the self. Homeostasis and identity For Antonio Damasio, subjectivity is rooted in homeostasis, fundamentally premised on having a point of view, he says, on being able to realise oneself as having a self. It is the phenomenon of having a perspective on images, some of which are the images of internal states that are experienced as feelings. In relation to the embodiedness of subjectivity, he says: Subjectivity requires a perspective stance on the making of images and the pervasive feelingness that accompanies image processing, both of which come straight from the body proper. They result from the incessant tendency of nervous systems to sense and make maps of objects and events not only around the organism, but also inside it.60 So, when thinking about the role of affect, in everyday life as well as in art events, we are reminded of its basic and constitutive function. Affect is what occurs to an organism as its situation in relation to homeostasis. In relatively more sophisticated creatures, this is represented to consciousness in images of this internal state, as feelings, good or bad, as pertains to the potential to threaten or enhance homeostasis; enhancement not as a neutral or balanced state – despite the apparent etymology, it is not stasis that is sought – but a drive towards more advantageous situations. Without the drive to homeostasis, we might fall into the peril of stasis; it is at the root of all our drives, and without it, we might stand still and perish. Subjectivity is, once again here, a form of self-witnessing. This reinforces the assertion of other cognitive philosophers that the self and subjectivity is a process and a construct, rather than an essence or anything more stable. Damasio, though, roots this in affect in an intriguing way. It seems that my subjectivity emerges from having feelings, and the manifestation of a place for those feelings and an entity that can be oriented to and take a perspective on those feelings. Self is perspective, point of view, and first of all a point of view on things happening affectively. Once again, the phrase ‘find myself’ has a different resonance. In any situation, I find myself doing things and thinking things, but the first finding is that I am having feelings, that I seem to be in possession of a body that has feelings. If we want to consider the matter of the self as an illusion, perhaps this is another place to see what it is that is illusory: that it is the self that has a body, rather than the other way around. It seems, rather, that the body has a self. That the body has its homeostatic work to do and has conjured up a phantom to assist in coordinating some of the decision-making of this work, though the body does most of the routine work of deciding how to maximise its

148 Autonomy/Identity benefit without the self’s help, of course. What kind of identity crisis is this? Giving some thought to this kind of conceptualisation of the mind and body relationship should give us pause. There are plenty of objections to raise: can we conceive of an affectively motivated set of autonomic systems making decisions about differential calculus, dismantling structural racism, or the structure of a poem? This raises many questions, but it is more than a reminder of the importance of the body to the mind, or of their interconnectedness, or another nail in the coffin of an essential self. It suggests another kind of self, in a constantly active and engaged body, that has accrued drives before it accrues personhood or a personality. In a holistic mood, it might suggest something in common with all other living things – that underneath what makes us ourselves (or appears to) is a need that pre-exists any awareness, and that belongs to bacteria, slugs, and spider plants just as it does to me. For an art of interaction, this is evocative of something organic. It establishes the interconnection between people at a deep, physical level, where participants in art events respond at a bodily level, and the homeostatic engagement of their bodies becomes an engagement with each other. This is an intersubjective basis for feeling together, for a sharing of qualitative meaning. Experiencing art together is an acknowledgement of this unmanned communion, and of how the conscious mind, when it comes along for the ride, also has this aesthetic basis. A performance like The Privileged, by exposing involuntary affects and impulses, can reveal a lack of autonomy, even amongst those who are (or play the part of) the privileged. Even as it enacts privilege, it evidences that those who possess it don’t entirely possess the autonomy to decide their actions. We too are subject to the administered world. Harewood himself presents a subject collapsed between two positions. He adopts the part of the radically subaltern and is subjected to the symbolic and actual violence of his own game, but he is also in charge, he has initiated and crafted this situation. But there is also a hybrid subject, of the work as subject, appearing to us as if it is the latent ‘I’ of Harewood’s will, guiding our actions and shaping our experience. As the creator of the game, he is also performed: in the instructions read aloud by the audience, and in our imagination of his creative agency in conceiving and constructing the work. The character of Jamal Harewood is the supposed empirical ‘I’ of the performance, and the most powerfully autonomous subject that appears in the piece, even though he is apparently absent. Notes 1 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 167. 2 Justice Syndicate, directed by Dan Barnard and Rachel Briscoe was at London’s Battersea Arts Centre from February 11th to 23rd 2019. At this time the company were called fanSHEN, changing their name shortly afterwards. 3 Fast Familiar themselves call the piece ‘playable theatre’, though this has not stopped reviewers from dubbing it ‘immersive’, (as here: https://fastfamiliar.

Identity  149 com/artwork/the-justice-syndicate/ accessed March 22nd, 2023), nor venues promoting the piece (as here with Goldsmiths’ College: https://www.gold.ac.uk/ calendar/?id=12818, accessed October 20th, 2019). 4 Gordon, Adorno and Existence, 97–98. 5 Theodor Adorno, Jargon of Authenticity (London: Routledge, 2003), 132. 6 Trent Schroyer, in Adorno, Jargon of Authenticity, xiii. 7 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 19. 8 They do, however, acknowledge in the introduction to the 2016 edition that their judgement was harsh, and that phenomenology has a more thorough engagement with practical investigation than they were aware of when writing the first edition of the text. 9 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, xi. 10 Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. 11 Massumi, Semblance and Event, 5. 12 Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 94. 13 Massumi, Politics of Affect, 109. 14 Massumi, Semblance and Event, 3. 15 Massumi, Politics of Affect, 17. 16 Massumi, Semblance and Event, 32. 17 Ibid., 31. 18 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (London: Duke University Press, 2002), 30. 19 Massumi, Semblance and Event, 43. 20 Ibid., 33. 21 Ibid., 5–6. 22 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 6. 23 Binaural Dinner Date, written and directed by Persis Jadé Maravala, was at Theatre Royal Stratford East from 16th November to 3rd December 2017. 24 John Durham Peters, The Marvellous Clouds: Towards a Theory of Elemental Media (London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 114. 25 Zizek, Event, 31. 26 Durham Peters, The Marvellous Clouds, 52. 27 Adorno, Aesthetics, 17–18. 28 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 194. 29 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 67, 87. 30 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 139. 31 Ibid., 143. 32 Ibid., 144. 33 Ibid., 105. 34 See Alice O’Grady, Risk, Participation and Performance Practice (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), ix. 35 James Hellings, Adorno and Art, 109. 36 Ibid., 147. 37 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1. 38 Ibid., 103. 39 Hellings, Adorno and Art, 103. 40 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 243. 41 Ibid., 7. 42 Eric Oberle, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 2. 43 1968 in Avignon, in Europe again in 69 with other plays, including Ber lin. Beck and Malina in Paris in May 68. See Thomas Walker ‘History’, Living Theatre, accessed May 24th, 2020, https://www.livingtheatre.org/detailedhistory

150 Autonomy/Identity 44 To call into question / who we are to each other in the social environment of the theatre, / to undo the knots that lead to misery, / to spread ourselves / across the public’s table / like platters at a banquet, / to set / ourselves in motion / like a vortex that pulls the / spectator into action, / to fire the body’s secret engines, / to pass through the prism / and come out a rainbow, / to insist that what happens in the jails matters, / to cry “Not in my name!” / at the hour of execution, / to move from the theater to the street and from the street to the theater. / This is what The Living Theatre does today. / It is what it has always done. Julian Beck, ‘Mission’, Living Theatre, accessed May 24th, 2020, https://www.livingtheatre.org/about. 45 Oberle, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity, 124. 46 Ibid., 4. 47 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 123. 48 Oberle, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity, 5. 49 Zizek, Event, 46. 50 The Privileged was at Camden People’s Theatre from 12th to 16th of April 2015. I have written about The Privileged in ‘The Promise of Participation Revisited: Affective Strategies of Participation’, in Staging Strategies of Immersive Performance: Commit Yourself! ed. Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz, and Sophie Nikoleit (London: Routledge, 2019). It is such a compelling and problematic piece that it rewards further examination: my earlier analysis of it stimulated many of the reflections that run through this book. 51 Mark Fisher, ‘Deprivatising Anxiety’, in The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Vol. 3, ed. Warren Neiditch (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014). 52 James Heartfield, The Death of the Subject Explained (North Charleston, SC: Createspace Independent Publishers, 2006), 207–224. 53 Heartfield, The Death of the Subject Explained, 91. 54 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 59. 55 Ibid., 79. 56 Galen Strawson in Models of The Self, eds. Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 1999), 17. 57 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, xl. 58 Ibid. 59 Helen Ngo, ‘Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 42:9 (2016), 859. 60 Damasio, The Strange Order of Things, 153.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 1997. Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetics 1958/59. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. Adorno, Theodor. Jargon of Authenticity. London: Routledge, 2003. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1997. Damasio, Antonio. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures. New York: Pantheon Books, 2018. Durham Peters, John. The Marvellous Clouds: Towards a Theory of Elemental Media. London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Gallagher, Shaun and Jonathan Shear, eds. Models of The Self. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 1999.

Identity  151 Gordon, Peter. Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Heartfield, James. The Death of the Subject Explained. North Charleston, SC: Createspace Independent Publishers, 2006. Hellings, James. Adorno and Art: Aesthetic Theory Contra Critical Theory. London: Palgrave, 2014. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin, 2012. Kolesch, Doris, Theresa Schütz and Sophie Nikoleit. Staging Strategies of Immersive Performance: Commit Yourself! London: Routledge, 2019. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. London: Duke University Press, 2002. Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Massumi, Brian. Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Neiditch, Warren, ed. The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Vol. 3. Berlin: Archive Books, 2014. Ngo, Helen. ‘Racist Habits: A Phenomenological Analysis of Racism and the Habitual Body’. Philosophy and Social Criticism 42, no. 9 (2016). Oberle, Eric. Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. O’Grady, Alice. Risk, Participation and Performance Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. London: MIT Press, 2016. Walker, Thomas. ‘History’, Living Theatre, accessed May 24th, 2020, https://www. livingtheatre.org/detailed-history Zizek, Slavoj. Event. London: Penguin, 2014.

4

Conclusion Culture, crisis, aesthetics

Contradiction 10: Culture

Dismantle this room We are brought into the auditorium of the Royal Court Theatre, a small group of around 16, and asked to sit in the back of the stalls. Above and in front of us, the physical structure of the building is exposed, the bolts and rivets of the underside of the dress circle visible. Two jobs are delegated to members of the audience – to hold the microphone and the iPad with which our facilitators will communicate with us. The facilitators introduce themselves to us: Ingrid and Milli. Once the performance begins, we can get help via these media, but we are to work together. When buying our tickets to Dismantle This Room,1 we have had four price options: £1, £5, £12, or £18, to choose from according to our own assessment of our level of privilege. Milli and Ingrid invite us, at this point, to say what ticket we have chosen, raising our hands as they announce the ticket prices one by one. It’s not compulsory to make this declaration, but more people raise their hands at some point than don’t, and there’s a distribution of the different prices amongst us: given the chance to identify and then to perform our level of privilege, we seem to be a mixed group, though also differently willing to identify in public. We are asked to consider others as we work together, those of us ‘used to having our voices heard’ should give space for others to speak. The group is probably all younger than me, with more women than men, and a number of younger people of colour. After this briefing, I’m more self-conscious than I would normally be, and aware of that self-consciousness too. Though some of the piece is structured much like a conventional escape room, it begins more theatrically. Our briefing finishes with an instruction to move to the front of the auditorium. There is a sign across the front of the stage that says (approximately) ‘Please stay in your seats, do not touch any specialist equipment, do not attempt to change …’ but within seconds a flashing light directs us to a lever on the stage right proscenium arch. Eagerly supported by the group, someone runs up to pull the lever. Our disobedience has begun. Two doors are revealed onstage: labelled ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ the system. We have to make a choice, as a group, and given how we’ve been DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-15

156 Conclusion briefed, we have to do so in a way that somehow gives space for everyone to speak. As a theatre educator, I have plenty of experience in trying to facilitate space for an equal sharing of ideas, but it’s as little my role to do that now as it is to lead the group in solving the task. So, I just listen (Figure 4.1). Someone says we should ‘get inside and fuck shit up’, and this motivates a group decision to take the ‘Inside’ door. It seems unanimous. As our journey continues, it is full of decision-making moments like this that are a bit awkward. As a group, we’re self-conscious too. People try to check that everyone’s being heard, but some people don’t offer anything. The fact that we’re supposed to be creating this space for shared decision-making is explicit, but under the surface is an awareness of who is speaking and who not. It seems to me, as we proceed, that one of the young black women is the one who is least inclined to make her voice heard. But what do I know about whether she wants to say anything anyway? ‘Inside’ is an office space, and we learn, from a written briefing, that we now collectively take the role of an intern at a theatre. Collectively exploring the clues in the room, we uncover a conspiracy of White Male Directors to preserve their closed shop dominance of the UK’s important theatres. Our task is to choose what to do about this discovery. As with the initial choice to play inside or outside the system, at a crucial moment, we are offered a binary: accept a contract and stay silent, or blow the lid. We debate, and choose to stay true to our mission to ‘fuck shit up’, and tear up the contract. We move to another room, ‘Outside’ and after solving more puzzles, we are

Figure 4.1  Dismantle This Room. Photograph Jemima Jong.

Culture  157 asked to write our manifesto for dismantling privilege in the theatre business – a tricky task, not a binary yes/no, in/out choice. And after this, we are free. There is a short post-show activity where we are asked to close our eyes and answer three questions, individually: do we stand by our collective decisions; did we pay attention to our privilege during the game; do we think that the members of the group were able to make themselves heard equally? It’s during this that there is an even more heightened feeling of self-consciousness, for me, even though ostensibly the rest of the group have their eyes closed. I find the questions ambiguous and want to hedge my answers instead of simply agreeing or not. But I’m also aware that the final question feels like a trap: someone like me would feel that the space is equal, wouldn’t I? I raise my hand, because on balance, given the parameters of the game, it’s been pretty open. But then, I take it down again because there were people who didn’t say much and others whose voices dominated. But I think my vote has already been counted. Ingrid and Milli have been watching and tell us that less than a quarter agreed that the space had allowed everyone to be heard, and I feel that my older, white, male, hand among them tells a tale on me. I am one of those who, in contexts like this, is used to having my voice heard and used to people doing as I say. Several of those in the group with me are of a similar age to most of my students; I have had to consciously not facilitate the discussion about how to ‘fuck shit up’, and about what the game expects of us. Even though I restrict what I say to a few supportive inputs, perhaps I still assume and express and rely on my privilege. This experience isn’t carefully facilitated to try to create that safe space to talk on equal terms, to really expose the structures of privilege among theatre goers and theatre makers. A choice has been made to provocatively underfacilitate, to hint at the inequalities and conflicts within a group randomly brought together. As in other cases, the tensions and contradictions make this work a richer experience. They add to the interest and the fun, and they are cause for deeper thought and feeling. There is a deliberately evoked tension between people that is promoted and provoked by the minimal facilitation strategy at the start and the end of the performance. For me, there is a physical tension in restraining my instinct to solve problems between people and to facilitate the group myself. And there is a dichotomy constructed between being privileged or not – drawn attention to at points within the fictional frame of the game, but also lingering by implication between us as collaborators working together to solve problems. Groups always contain conflicts, possessing them, but also holding them under control, effacing them, sometimes for the benefit of those who have a privileged position in the group. This piece deploys a proxy for privilege in the self-selection of ticket price and whether to declare it, but the attention drawn to our likely relative power, influence, wealth, and confidence in other ways pervades the way we interact with each other. It becomes a subtext of all the activity that follows. And this is the most interesting contradiction, for me: of being a group and being divided. The seeds of division are deliberately

158 Conclusion sown, and while the piece doesn’t force a confrontation, the difference between participants remains a subtext as we try to work together as a group. There is, for me for example, unexpectedly and briefly, and against the usual order of things, the contradiction of my privilege restricting my experience, as I am asked to voluntarily restrain myself, making for an interestingly uncomfortable experience. Culture industry Adorno says that the culture industry’s tools include the staging of ‘false conflicts’; Dismantle This Room adapts a form that stages false emergencies. The escape room, as a form of recreation, has seen a rapid rise over the last decade and has an enthusiastic world-wide following. Though arguably they inhabit the same spectrum of experience economy active entertainments as immersive theatre, as a rule escape rooms don’t have artistic ambitions beyond thematically dressing up their environments of puzzles. Escaping from a speakeasy or a spaceship can have some bearing on the atmosphere of the experience, and might dictate the technologies that the tasks of the room are made with, but more often it provides the colour palette of the environment or the materials that very similar puzzles are made from. The escape experience is an against-the-clock team task, its affective strategy is to set the pulse racing by promoting a desire to succeed with and for others, and to frustrate this desire by setting challenges that are just within the reach of the group, and that offer surprises as well as successes. There is a craft to it, and connoisseurs seek out and travel to enjoyable and testing rooms, hoping for surprise and innovation, as well as aiming to post good times. It provides a work-out of problem-solving skills individually and for groups and can build relationships easily; but other than this, the escape room is purposeless distraction par excellence. Among Adorno’s more famous – or notorious – theoretical commitments is his relentless critique of the ‘culture industry’. Commercialised art has become a ‘system almost without a gap’,2 which renders cultural objects as commodities. Where once the commodity character of an artwork had been a part that might recede or come to the fore, by the time Adorno was giving it sustained attention in the mid-20th century, this tendency had colonised the majority of the field of cultural production and dominated each work to the extent that very few, in his view, even warranted the name art. If the phenomenon persists into our time – and it does – the culture industry is dedicated to producing the need for its own continued consumption and for reproducing its customers as such, and plays its part in the general capitalist economy by reproducing workers and consumers, ready to play their part once again. This is partly because of the way these forms are produced and circulated – because they are mass forms, conceived in order to reach and encourage a mass market – and partly because of the way this dictates the aesthetic forms they take. Historically, this begins with the novel as a mass form when

Culture  159 technological production affords the opportunity for capitalist exploitation as never before; its logic infiltrates cultural forms that are not mass produced so that escape becomes as difficult for live forms as for those technologically produced, mediated, and distributed. These need not be mass cultures in the sense of those produced by or belonging to the masses, therefore, but those manufactured according to the logic and needs of capitalist production. Nor is it about the difference between high art and mass culture as such – both are susceptible to capture by the culture industry – though examples of genuine art for Adorno are all drawn from high culture, often the most austere modernism. The culture industry nurtures sentimentality, it encourages conformity and order, by reproducing structures of feeling that instruct us that the way of life offered to us is sufficient. It engages us with ‘false conflicts’3 in place of those of our own situation. Mass culture trains us, it reconciles us, and we give ourselves up to it because we feel that it will help us to adapt, to learn how to live within this totalised system. The idea that it re-shapes us is not metaphorical, it reshapes our desires and our sympathies, our attitudes and our assumptions so that as human subjects we become what we need to be to consume and produce. This is a powerful argument that continues to be proved right – examples of cultural products with severely limited scope and manipulative formal tactics, driven by marketing strategies, are very easy to cite, from the cinema and pop music that Adorno despised, to reality TV, computer games, and social media memes. And yet the lack of nuance or compromise in his perspective undermines it: his account defies any sense of the sceptical consumer, able to enjoy things at arm’s length or with irony; or of the producer who subverts or reanimates forms so that they offer double meanings; or of the evolution of forms facilitating new depth and reach; or even that people (especially ordinary working people) deserve enjoyment, and can differentiate activities that offer fleeting distraction from those that enrich – even where the latter are few and far between. He only cautiously recognises that there is a ‘deep unconscious mistrust’4 on the part of the people for the culture industry and its products. My own sympathies are instinctively with those who take popular forms seriously. Though the argument about what the culture industry is capable of is convincing, it is personally difficult to reconcile with the enjoyment, and more, that I derive from work that is distributed in mass forms and that adapts itself to the interstices that the culture industry affords. Adorno’s absolutism denies us the capacity to make more from manufactured art, either as makers or creative consumers. We are now a few generations down the line from Adorno: does this mean we are more irretrievably entranced by the culture industry, or have we grown up with tactics at our disposal for escaping capture, or making more of what it offers, amongst a culture of artists who take for granted that this is possible? We can’t excuse Adorno (or our orientation towards his thinking) entirely because he didn’t live to

160 Conclusion see the evolution of subversive operations within the culture industry. He may not have heard Radiohead or Kae Tempest but his scathing judgements on jazz persisted despite plenty of opportunity to pay attention to Charles Mingus or Nina Simone and to have witnessed the resistant potential in jazz. His absolute judgement on the culture industry seems to be, against his own principles, totalising; but he is resolute in it and there’s no sense that Adorno intended to leave room for compromise in his theory of the culture industry. Adorno is right about the character of the culture industry, but wrong about its ubiquity and its totality. Participatory theatre is not obliged to answer all of Adorno’s objections, but if we wish to take it seriously, we should articulate how it does more than just distract, console, and refresh, and how, amongst its experience economy tricks of interpellation and complicity, the most ambitious work offers challenges on terms like those he advocates, or defies his critique on other terms. And we may wish to note how or when work that only seeks to entertain can sometimes do more, even inadvertently. Although we might disagree with him, it is worth the exercise to consider how and where participatory theatre commits its sins, and where, in these terms, it might achieve something more. The culture industry that is our context has new mechanisms of production and consumption. Among its perennial techniques is the creation of moments of superficial effect, for example, the way music in film manufactures mood, cueing emotion from fear to astonishment. The techniques of participatory performance abound in superficial effects, from jump scares to pitch darkness, from nudity to choral singing. It works with thinking-feeling – or (syn)aesthetics5 – coupling with the embodied mind, to affectively exaggerate mood and intensify perception. Sometimes, the application of a combination of these techniques leads to something more than superficial, even if more often it leads to a good night out. But there are structural as well as technical mechanisms at work too. For Adam Alston, immersive theatre is premised upon the productive participation of audiences, as we are conscripted into playing our part in the creation of the event, as well as making the most of our experience of it. This replicates a key logic of neoliberal capitalism, in which the individual is obliged to operate in the same way as a small business: constantly attentive to investments of time and effort to maximise our productivity and our personal worth becoming our own capitalist, an ‘entrepreneur-of-the-self’ who decides how much to invest in our own future education, health, and so on.6 This is not just to be a productive worker, nor even just a good consumer, it is the extension of these impulses into investment in a worthwhile life. A good subject gets back what she puts in. It’s not hard to see how this maps across participatory cultural forms that depend on creative involvement and that celebrate the value that active contributors bring. Alston cites Jean Baudrillard to establish a supporting theme, that capitalism romanticises productivity: […] it is no longer a question of ‘being’ oneself but of ‘producing’ oneself, from conscious productions to the primitive ‘productions’ of

Culture  161 desire. Everywhere man has learned to reflect on himself, to assume himself, to posit himself according to this scheme of production which is assigned to him as the ultimate dimension of value and meaning.7 We posit and recognise ourselves through what we produce, and we do this now (even more now than when Baudrillard wrote prophetically in 1973) in the production of the culture that we also consume. The confusion of production and consumption so often noted in late-capitalism, and magnified in the experience economy, retains this feature of recognition. We know who we are because of what we produce and what we consume, and the enjoinder to produce experiences for ourselves, to enhance our selves, only magnifies this. If this is a romanticism – as well as a romanticising – of production, it implies an inward looking, individualistic and anti-rational subjectivisation of experience, a positing of the self as self-imagined through production and consumption. The displacement of self-identity onto material products bought or consumed has shifted to self-identity in experiences produced, consumed, and performed. We may be convinced that we look within to find our authentic self, but the tools we use – that we purchase and work at – to develop this intuition, our music, reading, mindfulness, travel, and our immersive theatre, are equally performances of that investment. For those with the disposable income and time, there is the luxury of a varied experiential palette, but the selves we portray with it tend to follow conventional and familiar forms, not so much at our disposal as we imagine. Producing more and more as a producing consumer, within and beyond immersive theatre, is not of itself a better or more empowering form of productivity; it might be valued as such, but it is not necessarily better and may end up being disempowering.8 If we recognise ourselves through production, do we recognise more of ourselves, or recognise ourselves more, when we produce more? As Alston suggests, quantity might be the opposite of quality in this arena. As a politics of art and culture, the culture industry critique is not concerned with reactionary art that represents dominant politics, but the interpenetration of forms of culture into forms of life so that subjective experience itself is more fully reified. Reading the experience economy as an evolution of this, we see the forms of participatory performance as playing their part in the reification of experience in this way. Crackles, shudders, and contradiction Dismantle this Room re-purposes a popular form to critique the theatre as a sexist and racist institution. Its brevity means that, as an account of institutional structure or as a process of collaborative analysis – as might appear to be the aim when we are invited to draft our manifesto – it is superficial. But viewed as a pretext to provoke contradictory reflections or affects that relate to our place within the institution, however, it looks more successful. Echoing works in the fine art tradition of institutional critique,9 the piece works only partially by representing the object of its enquiry, but more effectively

162 Conclusion by enacting a relationship to the institution, and operating both within and outside it, exposing and undermining its structures while benefiting from them, even if provisionally. It gave me cause for thought, and cause for feeling – the two could never be untangled, after all – even if only a frisson, a moment’s uncertainty arising in the incident I described, when raising my hand to be counted had a surprising outcome for me. It was soon conceptualised, interpreted, accounted for. The memory of that frisson remains, and it serves what I understand to be the aims of the performance makers: to give me pause for thought about my relative position of within the theatre and arts community. It very briefly and partially uncouples me from my sense of self, and from my sense of privilege, and asks me to look at it as something foreign to me. It gave, in language used earlier, a crackle rather than a shudder. Such crackling contradictions are, I propose, signs of success in performance participation, experiences of small changes of mind or attitude, uncertain realisations, not immediately articulable, but constitutive of something more than being entertained or informed. The majority of the works I have drawn on so far give rise to an experience like this, and my brief accounts of them elucidate these crackles, these minor contractions. The contradiction major, the Adornian shudder, the sense of encountering an artwork that was (not-entirely explainably) more than the sum of its parts, I can cautiously ascribe to only two of these pieces, Harewood’s The Privileged, a shocking, bold, and transgressive work, that runs the risk of dangerously exceeding itself each time it is performed; and The Droves, a flight of fancy devised by children under ten. There is, however, more to offer in respect of how meaning can arise from these moments, beyond the immediate, basic mind meaning of the organism and the situation and beneath the irresolvable contradiction, in rational, conceptual interpretation of these pieces as works that address themselves to us as intelligent theatre goers. Ideas about spectatorship return, again and again, to the importance of critical distance to the capacity for performance to create sophisticated meaning in a responsible way, without seducing, tricking, or browbeating their audience, and where the spectator emerges with ideas and perspectives exercised or challenged. In an art of experience, distance can also be temporal, we can surrender ourselves to an experience uncritically and reflect on it later, in full possession of our critical faculties. But there is more to think through in relation to how the tension between involvement and distance is at work in performance participation, while we are engaged, involved, even potentially immersed; more to consider in how criticality is not necessarily absent in these states; and more to say about how this kind of contradiction is a fundamental dynamic of experiential art. Enactivism’s position on reflection as an aspect of both embodied and abstract thought is revealing. Concepts are not divorced from embodied coupling but originate from and depend upon it. As Gallagher argues, a lot of rationality belongs in the hands: they grasp, they appraise, they adjust to

Culture  163 affordances, they sort from the environment the things that can be interacted with in familiar and manageable ways.10 Many concepts arise from affordances that reveal themselves to the hands (as well as the feet, the legs, the ears, and so on), they are there first, before we attach words to them. The thinking of the hand mediates its way into language through gesture, which is not an irrelevant surplus to spoken language, but an important contributor to the assembly of sequences of concepts, offering a continuity between the rationality of doing, and that of communicating and thinking in abstractions. Reflective thinking does not depend on abstraction from situatedness, but upon skill in a particular situated engagement. Gallagher’s example of reflection-in-action is how: [r]eflection in the downhill skier is not disconnected from the skier’s performance, but is part of it – a dimension of the flow rather than something different from it. The expert skier should know when to reflect and when not to: and what to reflect about – such reflection is a skill, and a way of coping with her environment. Neither the knowing when, and when not, to reflect, nor the reflection itself is discontinuous with action in a way that would disrupt the flow of action.11 Why should a skilled theatre goer not have a similar intuition for when to reflect and when to commit to the moment? Theatre goers who sit quietly in the dark give up the rationality of their hands, along with that of their legs, pelvis, spine, and much of that which belongs to the neck, head, and eyes. Not for them the skilled bodily investigations of space, objects, people, and their affordances; or rather it is the echoes and inheritances of the concepts that these body systems know, in empathic brain activity and the interplay of words, images, and other signs that we devote our attention to, having trained our bodies to accept this peculiar environmental coupling. The involved spectator has not become disembodied. Critical distance might be imagined as the mind wresting itself from involvement, from engagement; but it depends upon layers of coupling with an environment that we are skilled with. Still, how the use of that skill is afforded in a piece of performance is a vital matter for consideration. Claire Bishop, in a seminal essay on participatory art, critiques works that produce ‘microtopias’,12 miniature communities of unproblematic interaction. Instead, she looks for works that engender antagonism, as a corollary of a democratic potential where competing forces make space to express themselves, and where ‘relations of conflict are sustained, rather than erased’.13 The preference for antagonism is also a preference for the encounter between people as between incomplete, de-centred, and emergent subjectivities. The encounter with another is what reveals the self as ‘something questionable’. The moments of contradiction I have outlined here are evidently not microtopias, and in some cases, they provoke antagonism between people. The Droves, devised by children, is for adult audiences:

164 Conclusion where it produces uncomfortable affects and effects, they are addressed to people of greater power and privilege. Appearing to offer an invitation to a frivolous adventure, the children draw us into an experience where, complying with what seems to be needed from us, we fail to exercise the informed, ethical, adult agency we might expect of ourselves and do something wrong. And where MADHOUSE seems to assume a non-disabled audience, The Privileged feels like it assumes a white audience – though this is very likely a product of privilege in itself, of an interpretive impulse to assume that I am the addressee of the work. In each case, however, there is antagonism between the constructed subjectivity of the work and at least some of its participants. But what I have tried to draw out – in these and other examples – is that they also create antagonism within the subject. This is, I propose, one of the ways that participation makes bold demands of its participants, assuming of them not a homogenous group of similarly privileged individuals, in pursuit of innocent pleasure, but divided and decentred subjects apt to be confused and confronted. Reading antagonism in this way gives us a very Adornian relationship for performance participation to take to society: profoundly critical, uncertain, and unstable. But Bishop’s position also privileges critical distance, in the way a spectator orients to a work to create meaning in an informed way. This is less Adornian. Subjective involvement in a work is complex for Adorno, particularly where he advocates for entanglement within the work, or surrender to it. There is something ineffable and mysterious in the works that we briefly join ourselves to because when that joint is broken, what is powerful about these works is no longer available. This non-conceptual aspect of the artwork offers less to appraisal or response at a critical distance. Critique – central as it is to the Adornian political world view – is incomplete in relation to the artwork, because it happens at a removal from the thing itself, and because like all conceptualisations of things themselves, it must beware of claiming an identity between what can be conceptualised and what is actualised in experience. Critique, too, must not deceive itself that it can exhaust the object. Critical distance for the performance participant, as well as for the professional critic or academic, doesn’t have a persuasive claim to primacy over immediate experience. The works that I have discussed in these chapters don’t need to achieve the depth or sublimity that Adorno found in Beckett, Kafka, or Mahler to be able to orchestrate experiences that are caught in similarly entangled contradictions. The skilled audience commits to engaging in the work, immersing in the work, because that is the best way to grasp its concepts. Royona Mitra’s intervention in the debate about what is thought of as ‘immersive’ in performance can be read as another assertion of the importance of critical distance, against the collapsing of distance in participatory performance. But her argument is not ultimately about performance participation, as its claims for immersion or its ways of engaging spectators are

Culture  165 concerned with the scope of embodied spectatorship per se, and with how it manifests an apparently contradictory form of critical distance. Her essay’s ocular-­centric preference for the audience as a collection of viewers betrays a hint of a familiar prejudice against physical and affective involvement in performance. She argues for an embodied spectatorship based on a parity of qualitative and conceptual understanding. Rasa aesthetics, as she deploys them, offer a resolution of the dialectic of distance and involvement. The discourse of rasa has wrestled with this and other dichotomies for a millennium and a half – the influence and accumulated exegesis around Mitra’s source text, the Natyashastra (or Treatise on Theatre) of Bharata is comparable to that of Aristotle’s Poetics, and its legacy is similarly contested. Perspectives on whether the distinctive qualitative experiences of art arise in the performer or the words of the poet or in the spectator shift over these centuries, while the specific set of rasas14 (the erotic, comic, tragic, violent, heroic, fearful, macabre, fantastic, and later the peaceful) remain relatively consistent, along with the sense that expertise in the spectator is essential to the accessibility of the rasas. In Mitra’s interpretation, ‘[t]he Natyashastra emphasizes that rasa simultaneously generates empathy and critical distance in the spectator’.15 For my purposes, it is the simultaneity that is interesting. If rasa has this capacity for a spectator distant from the stage, can other kinds of affective involvement co-exist with critical reflection, and can they exist for participants as well as for spectators? In a later text, the ‘New’ Dramatic Art,16 Abhinavagupta describes how both actor and character, because of their simultaneous appearance to us, are detached from their specificity in time and space, so that, with the rasa of the erotic as an exemplar: [t]he sight of the physical reactions in the actor, the horripilation17 and so on, that serve to produce the convincing apprehension of desire when we observe them in the real world, give us to understand the presence of desire in a way that is, as a result of the foregoing, unrestricted by time and space, and in which the viewer himself comes to participate thanks to his own predispositions toward desire.18 Which seems to presage our contemporary understanding of empathy, including the familiar mirror neurons, as a partial participation in the experience of others as we witness it. Abhinavagupta continues: The understanding we have of such desires cannot, therefore, be one of indifference. Moreover, since we do not understand the desire as being brought about by a cause specific to oneself – a particular woman, say – there is no possibility of our wanting to possess her, embrace her, or the like; and since we do not understand it as exclusively concerning someone else, there is no possibility of hatred arising toward that person, or sorrow or any other emotion. The desire is thus ‘commonised’ and,

166 Conclusion when brought within our own consciousness (whether consciousness is conceived of as a sequence of moments or as a unity), is the erotic rasa.19 The affect in question neither belongs to me, nor in the usual way to another; I am both interested and disinterested, and the feelings that arise are not emotions that make immediate demands upon me. This ‘commonising’ seems to be a peculiar kind of intersubjectivity, a sharing of affect unlike ordinary empathy because of our awareness of our own circumstances in relation to the performer and their emotions. And as formulated here, it is this being both involved and not involved that constitutes rasa, a commonised sharing of the quality of experience, evacuated of the demands of being situated. The antinomy of feelings that are both mine and not mine has been resolved in the quality of a feeling, without its needs. But participation of the kind I have been exploring is performance where time and space are differently ordered, not unrestricted (to borrow Abhinavagupta’s word) but restricted and apportioned to the bodies that do the work. These are the bodies that fulfil the potential of the performance, they complete the artwork; they also do the work of generating affects and producing intersubjective couplings among themselves. These bodies enact the work. Feelings generated in this way are particularised as well as commonised, as I do understand that there has been a cause specific to myself, while also understanding it as a cause that is probably common to others who find themselves in the same situation in the performance. These feelings are not exclusively mine nor someone else’s because they are persuasively both. Thus, the antinomies of the ownership of feeling in performance participation, find different balances and oscillations, and different kinds of reflection-in-action. But still a skilled critical distance is not just possible but inevitable. Enactivism rejects representation in the basic functions of mind. Performance participation is a theatre where representation is muddled up with enaction, while distance is muddled up with proximity. I am asked to pretend, while real things happen to me; I am asked to do and also asked to watch. Just as performance is not all repetition or re-production at a remove, meaning and thought are not all representation of a world in the mind. There is an analogy between performance and mind understood in this way: in different ways, each can be clarified, conceptually, when representation does not hog centre stage. But beyond analogy, there is a direct relationship, in that performance, like the mind, is an enactive interaction between bodies in a situation. This is old news. But the works discussed here, because they operate at the level of occurrence between and within each body-mind, mesh the enaction of the event of performance with its enaction as meaning. When the thing that happens between organism and situation, that which is enacted, offers a surprise or a moment of discomfort at my own action or interaction, it makes a bridge between the enaction at the basic, pre-conscious level and the enacting of performance. What is happening in our own bodies, revealing itself to

Culture  167 us as the meaning of a situation, is also what is happening in the show. And after this, it manifests as a contradiction: what I am doing is not mine or is not me, an incompatibility that cannot be resolved either in the awareness that a performance maker gave me this thing to do, or the awareness that my body and my self are both identical and not.

Contradiction 11: A Post Covid Coda

The new factories of cognitive capitalism An early draft of this final chapter was written in Kathmandu, and reflected on the privileges that can allow a professional academic to decamp to picturesque locations from time to time, and still be ‘at work’. But that was in 2019, and subsequent events have amply demonstrated how such privileges have their double edges. As ‘[t]he workspace is no longer the factory, but is now everywhere and all the time’,20 those of us able to do our work ‘remotely’ spent much of 2020 and 2021 working not just close to home, but at home. That the global pandemic coincided with the burgeoning of low-cost and convenient video calling, cloud computing, and broadband networking is a striking coincidence, but it also revealed contradictions in the world of contemporary work, and in our understanding of theatrical performance and what we want from it. To carry one’s workplace everywhere is one of the convenient inconveniences of the new formation of ‘cognitive capitalism’, as described by Warren Neidich: […] in which the brain and mind are the new factories of the 21st century and the labouring body in industrial capitalism has been subsumed by the labouring brain/mind in cybernetic capitalism.21 Contemporary communication media don’t only allow official work to colonise more of what might have once been leisure time, they also turn leisure into productivity, taking Baudrillard’s thesis of the romanticised producerconsumer to a counter-intuitive new level. Even when ostensibly at leisure, we are productive on behalf of globalised capital, as the apparently free activities of digital and handheld media occupy us more and more. We play more than ever, both in games as such and in the playful back-and forth of memes, tags, and trolling; but these games are productivity in disguise, and each minute stimulation that they provide is designed to bind us more closely to them. These: ‘[…] are integrally engineered media, focussing on the network conditions of society and the brain it is coupled with’.22 DOI: 10.4324/9780429030819-16

A Post Covid Coda  169 In the various stages of pandemic restrictions through 2020 and 2021, we were bound to our homes, or barred from public spaces such as theatres; we were, in an unprecedentedly collective way, decoupled from opportunities to share space and from social and cultural activities of many kinds. This contradictory mass experience of being all together in being unable to share space, also became a period of enforced exploration for performance makers, who either had to accept an indefinite hiatus, or devise ways to make performances happen while unable to gather audiences in the same physical space. To look at this in a positive frame, we were forced into an extended period of experimentation, with much to learn, or re-learn, about where performance can happen, how we gather for it and travel to it, what excites us about sharing it, and how elastic its forms and aesthetics can be (Figure 4.2). ZU-UK’s Project Perfect Stranger was an experiment in inviting participants to, as the company described it, ‘a series of games, challenges and encounters to match head-on the times we find ourselves in’.23 In the performance, each participant is put in touch with a ‘stranger’ through WhatsApp, and over five days, a set of tasks are given to both, that become oblique ways of becoming intimate with each other. We are instructed to remove ID photos and other personal info from our WhatsApp accounts, and as our first task, to ask each other questions through text only – what is stressing you, what did your mum last tell you off for? What talents would you like to have? What has comforted you during the pandemic? What are you doing with your life? While making a new acquaintance through these questions, there is

Figure 4.2  Project Perfect Stranger. Photograph: Gareth White.

170 Conclusion nothing beyond the words from which to build an impression of the other – no indication of age or gender, no photograph. But the questions bring out some fairly intimate exchanges straight away – sharing thoughts about, well, what we are doing with our lives. The second day’s tasks are to share photos of hidden places in our homes – inside cupboards, fridges, dark corners. The third asks us to exchange voice messages about ‘how does it feel to be me…’ intensifying a sense of performance, along with the beginning of a manifest physical presence, bringing in the voice, with its grain and tone, and of course its sense of gender, age, class, and mood. The fourth is a drawing task: to look into a mirror, draw one’s own face, and post a video of the hand doing the drawing. This is a clever mediation of physicality and appearance – presenting the face to the other, but via the hand and via the screen. The fifth day asks for an exchange of images of a walk, starting from home at the same time, and concluding these concurrent walks simultaneously, to have an actual conversation (Figure 4.3). In my participation in this piece, the cumulative effect was strange – the journey from being a stranger to ‘an intimate’, someone to be vulnerable with, to share uncomfortable feelings with, and to confess to, was strikingly rapid. In a sense, we skipped ahead a few steps in the usual process of permitting ourselves to open up. The premise and structure of the piece is that one could (in the company’s words again) ‘invest in a connection to another human being who knows nothing about you, and who has no judgements, no prior knowledge, no historical or emotional baggage with you and vice-versa’.24 We are in ‘postnormal times’, as Ziauddin Sardar calls them: ‘Normal, no matter how it is defined, is evaporating’,25 or alternatively, as Christopher Burr Jones says, we are going through a ‘global weirding’.26 Prior to covid, we may have been concerned with the climate emergency, political populism, financial crisis, post-truth politics, and artificial intelligence: all independently capable of transforming human society, or our planet itself. Sardar and his collaborators observe four factors in the dynamics of postnormal change: speed, scope, scale, and simultaneity. The current pandemic has had its own way of confirming the utility of this heuristic, in the speed with which it came to dominate everything, its global scope, its impact down to the smallest scale of our lives, and its essential simultaneity – despite differences in response and trajectory, the pandemic has hit virtually everywhere, and everyone, in some way during the same time frame. Covid times may have meant something different in Nepal, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, but there is a pervading sense that the time frame from roughly the start of 2020 until … who knows? is a very particular historical moment at a global level, but also transformative at the smaller scale, in the minutiae of everyday domestic life. The scale and simultaneity of the pandemic, together, have at times transformed what performance can be and what it can mean, during this time frame, as the adaptations, responses, and experiments of performance makers using the technology of the moment investigate this moment, and the experience of being not-normal.

A Post Covid Coda  171

Figure 4.3  Project Perfect Stranger. Photograph: Gareth White.

Lockdown prevented us from gathering for performances, and from being present with each other, but many performances were made, and shared. Many of them used technology to bring performance and audience together, in some cases to transmit performance, essentially televisually, but, in other cases, to attempt a kind of shared presence, and to explore what kind of shared presence contemporary communications technology affords. A presence effect in performance, according to Josette Feral, can be a mediated body, or the image of a body, which produces the feeling of physical presence; presence effects are ‘experiences that give the impression that someone is there, when in truth, no one is there’.27 This is an important theme in performance that explores the use and place of media in our lives: it experiments

172 Conclusion with presence, sometimes through evoking contradictions, in the ways that media can really make us present to each other when we are not able to be ‘there’ with each other in physical space. Performances that exploit the technologies that allow us to be with each other from a distance include Coney’s Telephone, and Univited Guests’ Love Letters At Home. In Telephone, Tassos Stevens hosts a zoom call with around 25 participants, which becomes (he tells us) ‘a mostly true history of telecommunications, both personal and universal’. It’s full of nostalgia, for those participants old enough, for what telephones used to look like, how they worked, and how we used them (for British participants, memories of bakelite phones, with circular dials, in cold halls…). Coney are specialists in game-based performance, and this piece has a game structure, where participants take turns to place calls to a list of pseudo telephone numbers, which connect (with Stevens playing the telephone operator, connecting the calls) to items of personal and historical reflection, and odd facts, which Stevens relates for us, sometimes with additional bits of performance for the participants to contribute. The tone is casual, playful, with magic tricks and the opening up the workings of the magic, and of the performance game itself. Chance resonances between stories and histories develop, and the piece becomes something unique to its random iteration shared by this group of people. Stevens tells us ‘zoom is a room’, and wherever it is hosted, technically, it is still a place of some kind where this unique group of people have gathered. Mainly, though, this feels like time spent with Tassos: he shares personal stories and he makes us welcome. Love Letters has a somewhat similar structure, where two performers play songs requested by audience members, and reflect on the importance of song to people, and to our relationships. And they dance for us. Both of these pieces use the format of the Zoom call to stage their presence and their interactions – asking us to switch between speaker view and gallery view, for example, to put the focus on individuals or on the congregated audience participants. In both, the performers emphasise our presence. It’s in moments performed by Jessica Hoffman of Uninvited Guests that I notice a particular zoom performance technique – she seems to look into my eyes as she dances. I remember that in a zoom call, when I look at another caller’s eyes, my eye line lands somewhere around their chin. She is deliberately looking into the camera above her computer screen, artificially producing the effect of exchanging glances, for everyone on the call, not just for me. Perhaps this is a presence technique, producing not Feral’s presence effect as an impression of being with me, but a presence affect, a technique to produce an affect of intimacy. In this moment, Hoffman and I do interact, even though she is interacting with a number of other people simultaneously. She can (presumably) see me on her computer screen, and I can feel her looking at me, physically, even though she’s probably looking at a dot at the top of her computer. We are in a shared space, sort of, intimate, kind of. Tassos Stevens doesn’t use this technique, as far as I can tell, in Telephone, his eyes are lower, engaging naturally with the faces of the people in the shared zoom room. All their eyes are down too.

A Post Covid Coda  173 Sharing time online is sharing time with people, sharing digital space is sharing space. Our bodies feel the presence of other bodies. But it is different, compromised. After so much sustained zooming, in the time after this performance, I think I feel different about online eye contact. I think I’ve got used to people’s eyes landing just below my chin so that a look in the eye – from someone who chooses to look into their camera – is the thing that stands out. In fact, it may be the look into my eyes that jars? Is this a perceptual adjustment, rather than just a forgetting or a habit – it might be similar to the process of getting used to the sound on a TV being out of sync with the pictures, where after consistent use we simply no longer perceive a gap – our brains eliminate it, so that we perceive sound and image as in sync, in a version of a cognitive process called ‘temporal renormalisation’. Do I now perceive an eye line just below my nose as looking into my eyes? Not quite, I think, but I do perceive it as normal, perhaps indicating an adaptation within my perceptual system to the habits of living online. In any case, I am used to feeling people’s presence, feeling that I am with people, when their faces appear before me, in Zoom’s over-familiar grid, in a strange togetherness. Sherry Turkle has observed that mediatised life has given us ways of being ‘alone together’ – engaged with each other, but on terms that protect us from the demands that other people make. We send texts rather than call; we play games with people who are distant from us, or with AI. In the Zoom age, this has become twisted: we are together as well as solitary. We work to make ourselves present to others, and to feel their presence, but we get less somatic reward for it. When I meet people on an online call, I can’t size them up; I can’t feel their handshake; see their shoes; smell them; I can’t quickly form an impression of their wants and needs. And they can’t do this to me: I am protected from some of other people’s surveillance of me, but instead, it takes more work to project myself, to have presence, and to feel the presence of others. The famous Zoom fatigue comes partly from the effort of attending to the screen-versions of people, and partly from the effort of being one of these screen people. Performances on Zoom play with these materials. Zoom – and zoom sociality – is the subject matter, as well as the medium. Marshall McLuhan is all over this. Global weirding and post-normal tech bubbles There has been a change in our normal relationship with technology. Tech has long been – in the kind of image favoured by media philosopher John Durham Peters – much like the air we breathe, or the water we swim in. We have long been dependent upon it to live our lives as we do, or to inhabit the world as we do. But the kind of intensified dependence that many of us experienced from March 2020 until late 2021, will be seen as an inflection point, perhaps an acceleration point, unless bigger and nastier emergencies rain down upon us to overshadow the first stages of the covid pandemic. For Durham Peters, media are ‘our condition, our fate, and our challenge’,28 and all of the material conditions of our lives should be treated as media, from the internet, to the printing press, to the domestication of animals, to language

174 Conclusion and the mastery of fire. But he is attentive to the impact of modernity’s technical mediations, and their transformation of our life-world; he says: It is now possible to be absolutely aloof to the environment and dwell in a constant sensory microclimate of houses and headphones. What the city did in its long history, and slaves have done for their masters, digital media […] have done in the short span: they buffer us to many and expose us to a few things that are.29 This is from a chapter in his book The Marvellous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media, called ‘The Fire Sermon’, in which he proceeds from the domestication of fire and animals to the domestication of people. We are domesticated by our own tech, and dependent not just upon it, but also upon what it depends upon. He calls domesticated energy ‘vestal’, after Vesta the god of the hearth.30 There is vestal fire in all our tech: tiny, imprisoned motes of energy derived from fires that are hidden safely away from us. Even this safe containment and harnessing of fire is impoverishing, however, as it alienates us from the means of our own maintenance, and encourages us to look only inward. As well as a kind of imprisonment, lockdown was a kind of enforced introspection. To look outwards has taken effort. And when we have looked beyond our domestic limits, we have had to use tech, to bring the outside in and reproduce it, to render the outside safe. Images of my colleagues and students can affect me, but they can’t infect me, just as the fire that powers the device that shows them to me can’t burn me. I am buffered. If what felt like normal was a state of affairs where I chose my buffers, managed my media with what felt like agency, lockdown was an assault on this agency. I gave up my capacity to choose when to be buffered from the world. Now, still in the process of emerging, I am still susceptible to, or attentive to, appreciative of, what was missing. But what else may have changed? Am I more in tune with some tech? More, or differently, dependent? Am I more appreciative while also less trusting? What’s happened to my buffers and barriers? The presence of each other on the Zoom call – which I have exemplified in both the strange effects of the eye line, and the effort of perceiving and projecting – reflects a kind of contemporary intimacy. Perhaps, it is an emblem of a compromised version of intimacy. In the first part of his three-volume Spheres project, Bubbles31 (the other two parts are Foams and Globes), Peter Sloterdijk performs what he calls an ‘archaeology of the intimate’, a ravenous genealogy of subjectivity, with paired relationships ever-present, whether foregrounded or disavowed. To think with the bubble as an image of sociality about this time is very inviting – as we were asked to restrict ourselves to smaller, tighter social spheres, and in the United Kingdom at least, these were labelled ‘support bubbles’ or ‘childcare bubbles’. The bubble, as defined by our Covid 19 restrictions, is the group that we are allowed to spend time with, without observing legal restrictions on sharing space and sharing touch.

A Post Covid Coda  175 Sloterdijk’s Bubbles is partly a series of sketches of how humanity has imagined intimacy and intersubjectivity: from cultic images of birth and gestation, to the 19th century fascination with animal magnetism. The more-than-close interconnection between mother and child during gestation and early infancy, which he calls ‘the biune’,32 is an inevitable and primal loss, not just to each subject as it leaves infancy, but also to human society as it increasingly celebrates individuality. But the biune remains as the hidden potential, an undercurrent in our relationships. To allow ourselves to not be singular, to be opened up to intersubjective involvement, is usually just out of reach. Beyond this original biune bubble, human societies construct their shared interiors, their excluding/including socialities, as ways of belonging as well as physical and institutional encirclements. Immune structures can form interiors – it is the things that keep us safe that give us a way of being safe together, and a place to be together, an interior. There’s a kind of social space that is safe, but because it’s exclusive. During the pandemic, every nation on the planet looked to its borders in different ways, and many closed them (or, of course, further closed those that were already closed to many). For Sloterdijk, society is ‘the power to belong together’ – but during the pandemic, it hasn’t necessarily given us the power to be together, except in compromised ways. The mediated convocation of online interaction becomes a new kind of bubble. Performance that has gone online has constructed new bubbles for itself and for us, investigating the experiences of restricted social spheres through its form, as well as its subject matter, as part of a species-wide re-awakening to vulnerability – not just of our bodies, healthcare systems, and economies, but of our ways of being together (or together alone), and being ourselves. In the zoom performances I have sketched, the bubble – the sense of being with and connected to someone – is temporal and depends on the feeling of contact upon the modified face-to-face connection, giving rise to a kind of tension, in the effort to sustain this connection. Perfect Stranger, my first example, has a different, layered reciprocality. It too needs effort, but effort spread out, with a slow rhythm and time for the pressure to offer things to the stranger to dissipate between each encounter, and for a model of the stranger to emerge, cognitively and affectively. But when the final exercise of Perfect Stranger allowed more conventional communication, the exchanges steered back towards politeness. There was a touch of embarrassment, and also some reluctance to allowing this to become the new friendship that it had appeared to be. It felt like something had escaped from the containment of the game of the performance, from (in a different sense) its sphere or bubble. Except at the most superficial level (of being on or offline, for example), the digital is not experienced in binaries – it is experienced as analogue. I don’t process your appearance to me on the phone or on a screen as a set of zeros and ones, or as clear signal or useless noise: I experience you as a voice and a body. There are differences, of course, between this analogue experience and a conventional co-presence, but exactly what those differences are

176 Conclusion is not as self-evident as we might expect. Each Zoom is a shared space. Each Zoom brings you into my attentional sphere. If thus, I enter your attentional sphere, and your domestic sphere, I don’t become part of it. I am present to it but not of it, when I appear on your screen. I haven’t – either in biosecurity terms or in phenomenological terms – become part of your domestic bubble. But we have coupled, or formed around ourselves a sphere of a kind. By virtue of being two-way interactions, in video calls, we are present to each other in ways we aren’t with older, one-way screen media. One thing discovered during this great experiment of mass house arrest is the complexity of the experience of interactive video calling. Amongst other things, we have discovered how live video calling really is. It seems to me that precisely because we have been engaging in performance while not being physically together, that we need to look very closely at these performances in terms of being together, and in physical terms, with models of performance meaning that are affective rather than semiotic. To treat things semiotically might be productive because on the surface some performance has become more akin to broadcast, a transmission event rather than a shared experience. But even where theatre has been broadcast, we need to consider how it can remain theatrical. The uses of contradiction ZU-UK’s Plague-Round is, in a way, the second part of Perfect Stranger. It has two audiences, or a set of audience participants selected via Perfect Stranger, which will have taken place a week before, who join a Zoom call as contestants in a game show, and a second set who watch the show on YouTube, and can participate via YouTube’s live chat. Ostensibly, the object of the game is to identify the partner one has begun to get to know via Perfect Stranger, from among the disguised faces arrayed on the screen, Zoom-style, and through party games. But really, it serves as a pretext for Persis-Jade Maravala and Jorge Lopes Ramos to pose questions about what we want a return to normal to feel like and be like. It has an entirely different tone to Telephone and Love Letters, as well as to Perfect Stranger. Maravala, Lopez-Ramos, and the other performers project themselves across these boxes, to transform the zoom call into a party. It’s not entirely successful, on those terms, and I think they’re aware of that. It’s parodic. We can be together in online space, but we can’t transpose all kinds of sociality. My own experience of this piece is compromised – or perhaps I compromise it, I don’t give it a fair hearing, in a way that I think tells us something else about online performances in domestic spaces. It is scheduled on a Saturday afternoon during the second UK lockdown. I have been out for a run and come back in time to join in. But when Jade and Jorge ask me to join in a warm up, I am not inclined to comply. I have just done my daily exercise. And when the invitation is made to interact with the performance and with other participants on YouTube chat, I am not well disposed to do that either: I have spent

A Post Covid Coda  177 the working week online, and have little patience left for digital interaction. I am a distracted, distanced observer to the piece rather than a true participant, even a little resentful of its intrusion into my domestic space and routine. In a similar way to what Adam Alston has observed about the capacity for immersive theatre to create ‘errant’ spectators,33 I don’t comply. But this disobedience does not lead into new and interesting explorations in the way that Alston suggests can happen. The immunological sphere keeps things out and keeps us safe. For Sloterdijk, this is largely a metaphor for the creation of shared sociality, but it has now become strikingly topical. But while keeping us safe bubbles exclude others and impoverish those of us inside. Perhaps the theatre that would be most interesting over this period would be that which tries to, and perhaps succeeds at, making us unsafe, by pricking our bubble. That’s what I think both Perfect Stranger and Plague Round try to do, with different degrees of success, for me. In our pandemic vocabulary, the bubble is both license and limit: it is the restricted set of physical intimacies permitted to us during lockdown, beyond which we might stray guiltily or defiantly. Technology has allowed us to survive this crisis, experiencing compromised intimacy without breaking the rules. But the tech solutions become fresh problems in their own right, causing stress and fatigue. Perfect Stranger is some way short of anyone’s idea of ‘the biune’, the unity of two in one, but it is a set of patient and spacious tactics to allow two to form a surprisingly spacious bubble, in the sense of what intimacies it can contain, together over short period of time. If the bubble is the intimate sphere of encounter with the self and the other, it is something performance has always played with, in the creation of evanescent spheres of sociality, sometimes more and sometimes less intimate. Taking intersubjectivity as a feature of the event of performance, and how this continues to be feasible in encounters happening telematically, performing from within bubbles has been a response to crisis, but also a research programme, into life and art, re-imagining what it means to be in company and what it means to be isolated, to be alone and to be together. Sara Ahmed, in What’s the Use?,34 thinks about how objects are affected by the varieties of use to which they are put. Repeated use creates patterns and reinforcements; it is part of how things come to be what they are, to us as people, and how we as people come to be what we are to ourselves. The kind of perceptual adjustments I have referred to – the change in how I find myself registering eye contact with people online for example – is an effect of use. Not just use of Zoom and my webcam, but also use of my eyes, and my use of time with other people in this form. It may be a demonstration of the receptivity to change of this kind of nexus of perceptual apparatus – their plasticity. Among many permutations, Ahmed considers those queer uses that arise when things are used for purposes for which they were not conceived and the normative pressure that usefulness creates when things are designed to be useful only to typical bodies; she extends this thought to

178 Conclusion the usefulness of people – how some are misused, rendered useless, made to misfit. She explores what it takes to recover the potentials stolen in this way. My perspective on the pandemic has been based in a very non-queer positionality: a straight, white, male, comfortably-housed-and-salaried perspective. More precarious situations would lead to different reflections. So, I won’t go so far (at this point) as to say that the estrangements of my domestic spheres amount to a queering of my own bubble, but returning to a phrase I quoted earlier, I can say that this has been a weirding of domestic space and time. And the communication tech that has captured the centre of the domestic sphere may not itself have become queer, or even obviously unfamiliar, in what I have described, but it has played an instrumental role in the repurposing of domestic space. It has enabled (or magnified, intensified, multiplied) the use of domestic space as work space. And it has enabled the use of domestic space as performance space. Applying an old formulation, these performances defamiliarise the domestic sphere by interjecting themselves into it. But it is a complex kind of defamiliarisation, as the domestic sphere has already been rendered strange by our confinement to it, and our changed uses of it. Performance becomes a reminder of that estrangement, and sometimes an unwelcome one. The tech itself is sometimes transparent, as the media of the work, but sometimes comes into the focus, a jarring reminder of the time we spend with it, the uses we make of it and that it makes of us. Ahmed writes about the interweaving threads of affect and instrumentality that the concept of use draws attention to. Our networked devices have become intensely interwoven objects. Used for work, play, social and family life, domestic practicalities, and to take part in performances, they occupy our attention not just because they are addictive, but also because they are so bloody useful. Time spent at a computer, or at a phone screen, can have so many different qualities, and be threaded through with so many aspects of life, and yet be so physically homogeneous. Adding our performance going/audiencing to this repertoire draws on the affective complexity of these objects and their uses but has the compensation of informing on it, adding an oblique perspective on it. Critics such as neuroscientist Susan Greenfield fear the changes this may provoke in the brain because of the role of dopamine in cyclic processes where screens call us back again and again to their stimulation, potentially (and harmfully) suppressing activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with planning and risk-calculation.35 Gaming, in particular, offers a ‘paradoxical combination of safety and excitement’, which might also be ascribed to social media though with the risks of social harm deferred or disguised rather than obviated entirely.36 Brains and minds and their coupling with culture, capital and context, are changing, in ways that we as a society are accidentally implicated in. As Catherine Malabou puts it: ‘[t]he brain is a work, and we do not know it. We are its subjects – authors and products at once, and we do not know it’.37 There is no reason to assume that it is an accident that the networked forms that

A Post Covid Coda  179 make this coupling explicit are emerging so strongly at the same time as participatory performance becomes popular. What is not clear is whether and when we are repeating, reflecting, or satirising in performance what is happening at a neuronal level. This view of neuroplasticity is a strong theory of how cultural activity can lead to change in the substance of human subjectivity. It is also a disconcerting context to imagine. Zizek puts it in more individual terms: Our brain is a historical product, it develops in interaction with the environment, through human praxis. […] Our mind does not only reflect the world, it is part of a transformative exchange with the world, it ‘reflects’ the possibilities of transformation, it sees the world through possible ‘projects,’ and this transformation is also self-transformation, this exchange also modifies the brain as the biological ‘site’ of the mind.38 So personal and social change are also biological change, and there’s a continuity between these strata. The organism is no more fixed than its environment, and the environment is no more immutable than the organism. Participatory performance can’t flatter itself that it has a major role in this, but if it engages with reified subjectivity, these are the subjects concerned. To look for how a cultural encounter can ‘reorganise the self’ we can track back to Varela, Thompson and Rosch, who say that their enactivism is: […] a view of cognitive capacities as inextricably linked to histories that are lived, much like paths they exist only as they are laid down in walking. […] cognition in its most encompassing sense consists in the enactment or bringing forth of a world by a viable history of structural coupling.39 So, what the mind can do depends on what it has done, repeatedly and formatively, in a way that recalls the well-known forging and strengthening of neural pathways within the brain by repeated use. As neither the brain nor the mind is a static structure, they change in response to experience even after reaching maturity. In the extreme, these changes are a response to trauma40: a shock that damages the physical brain can result in re-structuring how its functions are organised so that tasks become re-assigned, and new paths forged in alternative structures. While the usual ‘laying down a path’ of experiential learning might be how the mind gradually re-shapes itself, the usual manner of learning, we might expect a traumatic experience to re-shape the pathways of the mind more radically, with habitual dispositions rendered unviable. Alva Noë says that art is a re-organisation of the self,41 in a playful, experimental mode of remaking not a traumatic one. We wouldn’t conflate an aesthetic encounter with a genuinely traumatic experience, but the ‘shudder’, as a disturbance, seems to have the shape of trauma if not the damage. If physical trauma re-shapes the body (brain included) and psychic trauma re-shapes the ability to experience, or the ability to return to any experience

180 Conclusion that recalls or re-enacts the trauma, an aesthetic trauma re-shapes an experience of the subjective self, in an encounter with something radically other. The point is not to inaugurate a concept of aesthetic trauma, but to explore the analogy between neuroplasticity’s reorganising and what is posited to happen in such theories of art. Adopting the language of immanent critique, art’s capacity to reorganise the self becomes a reorganisation on the basis of an exposed gap between thought and thing, between one’s sense of oneself and the self – produced or coupled at any moment, a jarring and fleeting re-organisation of the self. Or following Zizek, it is an encounter with something that so radically fails to fit the story of the self, that its incomprehensibility evokes a sublime encounter with the instability and insubstantiality of the self, as a trauma. Because the formation of the self is, itself, a trauma: The properly dialectical tension between the singular Self and narrative is crucial here: the singular Self stands for the moment of explosive, destructive, self-referential negativity, of a withdrawal from immediate reality, and thus a violent rupture of organic homeostasis; while ‘autobiography’ designates the formation of a new culturally created homeostasis which imposes itself as our ‘second nature’.42 The Lacanian flavour of the constitutive rupture from organic, unmediated life is typical Zizek. This is a rupture between two kinds of homeostasis, the organic and the cultural, that is rarely acknowledged in neurologically inspired accounts like Damasio’s, nor in enactivism, where the continuity from the biological to the cultural is unproblematic. But it is also the rupture in the sense of the self as what is one’s own, and what is other: circumstances, histories, or environments that we are coupled to and that lay claim to us and our actions. In the preceding chapters, I have circled around various kinds of contradictory recognition (and misrecognition), which might amount to frustrations of the logic of the culture industry. As Alston asserts, participation is unable to entirely evade it, but can jeopardise it, for the chance of subverting its complicity or opening up some engagement with others.43 The integration of tensions and contradictions within the work, as I have described it, has some resonance with the deployment of annoyance or strangeness as strategies,44 as key to preserving the possibility for a differently productive experience in the experience economy. Joanna Bucknall, in Talking About Immersive Theatre, converses with a number of practitioners about the importance of care and connection, including with ZU-UK, about ‘radicalising’ human connection when working with audiences. For this to manifest, the invitation to participate must be attentively managed and generous,45 a sharing of experience to promote being with other people in a radical and revelatory way. The experiences I have dwelt on have tended towards different moods, of competition, conflict, and, of course, shared and personal experiences of contradiction: a set of testing

A Post Covid Coda  181 experiences rather than comfortable ones. The creation of these negative atmospheres can take as much care as creating a space of overt trust and connection, this is not the easygoing darkness or ghost train atmosphere of some immersive environments: Jamal Harewood makes very dark things happen, usually under strip lights. As well as arguing for the genuinely dark in participatory practice, as a complement to this kind of generous, open-ended work, this enquiry leads to these thoughts about what happens within the subjective self. We might see this as enacting a world in which disagreement is still possible, though manifesting as conflict internal to the subject, provoking selfrecognition as something incomplete and inconsistent, self-contradictory, and problematic. In order to take people to these darker places, we need sometimes to be unkind. Not crassly, as in bad ‘theatre of cruelty’, but by inviting people into a dissonant atmosphere. It is in the production of negative feelings – though they may appear amongst positive experiences – that something more than superficial can manifest. Art might make direct interventions for the good: it can inform, express, change minds, and it can entertain, but Adorno sees its true (and rare) fruition only when it is not useful or kind: Kant covertly considered art to be a servant. Art becomes human in the instant in which it terminates this service. Its humanity is incompatible with any ideology of service to humankind. It is loyal to humanity only through inhumanity toward it.46 As contradictory as ever, this is the art of discomfort and puzzlement. It is the ‘shudder’, as the token of this discomfort, that signifies a work that has become inhuman in this way. Exploring this discomfort, and its basis in the relationship of embodied meaning making to conscious understanding and aesthetic experience, unpacks how at moments of puzzlement and incoherence in performance participation, often disguised within works that promise the superficial pleasures of the experience economy, there lurks something vital. Perhaps, an art of contradiction is increasingly vital in the midst of multiplying crises when grasping the meaning of everyday life becomes more difficult, when the return of the normal hasn’t lived up to its billing, and when the world we are coupled with seems to lose coherence. Notes 1 Dismantle this Room, created by Milli Bhatia, Ingrid Marvin and Nina Segal was at the Royal Court Theatre, London from 6th to 26th of April 2019. 2 Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991), 98. 3 Ibid., 104. 4 Ibid., 105. 5 Machon, (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance, 13–33. 6 Zizek, The Parallax View, 181. 7 Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production (St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1975),  19. 8 Alston, Beyond Immersive Theatre, 224.

182 Conclusion 9 See for example Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Politics (London: Routledge, 2011), 104–143. 10 Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions, 201. 11 Ibid., 201–202. 12 Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110 (2004), 54. 13 Ibid., 66. 14 Sheldon Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2016), 48. 15 Mitra, ‘Decolonising Immersion’, 94. 16 Dated to around 1000 CE. 17 Horripilation: goose pimples 18 Pollock, A Rasa Reader, 203. 19 Ibid., 203–204. 20 Warren Neidich, ‘Introduction’, in Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, ed. Warren Neiditch (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014), 17. 21 Ibid., 24. 22 Scott Lash and Anthony Fung, ‘Cognitive Capitalism and Creative Economy’, in The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, 95. 23 Project Perfect Stranger’s first performances were in Autumn 2020, and I took part in a second iteration in early 2021. The words here are from email briefings for the performance. 24 ZU-UK, Project Perfect Stranger briefing, ibid. 25 Ziauddin Sardar, ed. The Postnormal Times Reader (London: Centre for Postnormal Policy & Futures Studies, 2017), 4. 26 Christopher Burr Jones, ‘When Things Fall Apart: Global Weirding Postnormal Times and Complexity Limits’, in Building Sustainability Through Environmental Education, ed. Lynn Wilson and Carolyn Stevenson (Hershey Pennsylvania, PA: IGI Global, 2019). 27 Josette Feral, ‘How to Define Presence Effects: The Work of Janet Cardiff’, in Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being, ed. Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks (London: Routledge, 2012), 30. 28 John Durham Peters, The Marvellous Clouds, 52. 29 Ibid., 162. 30 Ibid., 124. 31 Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres Volume 1 – Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2011). 32 Ibid., 60. 33 Adam Alston, ‘Making Mistakes in Immersive Theatre: Spectatorship and Errant Immersion’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 4:1 (2016). 34 Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? (London: Duke University Press, 2019). 35 Susan Greenfield, You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity (Honiton: Notting Hill Editions, 2011), 130. 36 Ibid., 126. 37 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 1. 38 Zizek, The Parallax View, 209. 39 Varela, Thompson and Rosch, The Embodied Mind, 205. 40 Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? 41 Noë, Strange Tools, 199. 42 Zizek, The Parallax View, 210. 43 Alston, Beyond Immersive Theatre, 226. 44 Ibid., 179.

A Post Covid Coda  183 45 Joanna Bucknall, Talking about Immersive Theatre, Ch.7; or the podcast Talking About Immersive Theatre, 2016, podcast, no. 5 [Ruth Cross], https://soundcloud. com/dr-joanna-bucknall. 46 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 196.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum, 1997. Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1991. Ahmed Sara. What’s the Use? London: Duke University Press, 2019. Alston, Adam. Beyond Immersive Theatre. London: Palgrave, 2016. Alston, Adam. ‘Making Mistakes in Immersive Theatre: Spectatorship and Errant Immersion’. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 4, no. 1 (2016): 61–73. Baudrillard, Jean. The Mirror of Production. St Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1975. Bishop, Claire. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’. October 110 (2004): 51–80. Bucknall, Joanna. Talking about Immersive Theatre: Conversations on Immersions and Interactivities in Performance. London: Methuen, 2023. Durham Peters, John. The Marvellous Clouds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Gallagher, Shaun. Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Giannachi, Gabriella, Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks, eds. Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance and the Persistence of Being. London: Routledge, 2012. Greenfield, Susan. You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity. Honiton: Notting Hill Editions, 2011. Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Politics. London: Routledge, 2011. Machon, Josephine. (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance. London: Palgrave 2009. Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do With Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Mitra, Royona. ‘Decolonising Immersion: Translation, Spectatorship, Rasa Theory and Contemporary British Dance’. Performance Research 21, no. 5 (2016): 81–100. Neiditch, Warren, ed. The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Vol. 3. Berlin: Archive Books, 2014. Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill and Wang, 2015. Pollock, Sheldon. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2016. Sardar, Ziauddin, ed. The Postnormal Times Reader. London: Centre for Postnormal Policy & Futures Studies, 2017. Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles: Spheres Volume 1 – Microspherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2011. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. London: MIT Press, 2016. Wilson, Lynn and Carolyn Stevenson, eds. Building Sustainability through Environmental Education. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2019. Zizek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. London: MIT Press, 2009.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to end notes. Abhinavagupta 165–166 action 49; aesthetics of 56–57; and affordance 82–83; as artwork 136; audience participant’s 10, 24, 54, 60; awareness of 64–66; embodied 10–11, 42, 51–54; and enaction 39, 51–55; on impulse 123; as object 106; political 18, 71–72, 139; and reflection 163, 166 activist philosophy 124 administered life 16, 55, 135, 148 Adorno. T.: Aesthetic Theory 5, 15–18, 58–60, 68, 87, 109, 117, 130, 135, 181; Aesthetics 59, 104, 130; The Culture Industry 158– 160; Dialectic of Enlightenment 55, 131; The Jargon of Authenticity 122; Minima Moralia 86, 140; Negative Dialectics 45–46 aesthetic experience 5, 45, 58, 67 aesthetic meaning 5, 56 affect 96–99; and basic mind 84; as event 98; as gravitational field 94; and intersubjectivity 103; as tool of theatre maker 71, 80 affordance 82–83, 85, 163; social 123 agency 24, 54, 118; and rationality 55, 146 Ahmed, S. 177–178 alienation 55, 140 Alston, A. 21, 98, 160–161, 177, 180 antagonism 164–165 antinomy 17, 25, 69, 135–136 art object 7, 15, 17, 57–59, 72, 84, 86; as process 50–52 assemblage 83–85; of player and game 106

attention 58, 63–64, 67, 144 Audience (Ontroerend Goed) 50 aura 136–137 authenticity/inauthenticity 120–122, 139, 142–143 autonomous system 106 autonomy: aesthetic 15, 17–18, 57–58, 70, 135; and game play 106; personal 12, 24, 126, 148; of the subject 55–56, 142–143 awareness 24, 37, 43, 53, 73; and consciousness 145; and intersubjectivity 94; selfawareness 24, 52, 56, 63–65, 97 Bala, S. 23 Barnett, D. 18 Baudrillard, J. 161–162 Beckett, Samuel 18 Biggin, R. 109 Bishop, C. 163 Binaural Dinner Date (ZU-UK) 126– 133, 135, 137–138 the biune 175 Bloom, P. 95 body image/body schema 62–63, 65, 86 body-mind 38–39, 125 Bogost, I. 83, 105–106 Bourriaud, N. 108 brain: and body 11, 38, 43, 54–55, 95; and plasticity 178–179; and society 168 Brecht, Bertholt 18 Breel, A. 112n63 bubbles 173–176 Bucknall, J. 180 Bull, M. 108

186 Index Caillois, R. 103 care: as basic emotional state 93–94, 99, 134; and empathy 92–94; care work 79–80; as performance strategy 90–95, 100 Chakrabortty, A. 107 choice 2–3, 51, 62, 107, 120, 134, 142, 156 Chow, B. 19 cognitive bias 107, 122 cognitive humanities 12–13, 96 cognitivism (see cognitive philosophy?) 6–7, 11 Cohen Cruz, J. 9 commonising 165–166 Conquergood, D. 9 consciousness 37–40, 53–57, 62–65, 145; and affect 97; and affordance 81–82; conscious mind 40; stream of 145; see also awareness; self-consciousness consent 98, 134 constellation 137–138 contemplative immersion/engagement 60 contentless spectating 42–43, 48 contradiction 14–20, 22–27, 35–72, 79–110, 117–148, 155–181 Cook, D. 18 Counting Sheep 61–62, 65–66, 70–71 coupling: with art work 7, 9, 42, 44, 160; and culture 178–179; enactive organism-environment 5, 7, 10–12, 51–52; and homeostasis 123; sensorimotor 37–39, 42; with social world 46; and play 105–106, 119–110; and qualitative meaning 56; and reflection/critical distance 164 crackle 68, 70–71 critical distance 22, 162, 163–166 cruelty 85, 100 culture industry 87, 158–161 Damasio, A.: Descartes’ Error 13, 38, 96; Self Comes to Mind 13, 96; The Strange Order of Things 13, 147 de Beauvoir, S. 46–48 decision making see choice Deleuze, G. 85 democracy 49; see also voting di Paolo, E. 10, 28n22 dialectics: and Brecht 19; and creative process 19; negative 16, 109 digital space 172–173

Dinesh, N. 22, 30n81 Dismantle This Room (Royal Court) 155–158, 161 domestic space 177–178 domestication 129, 174–175 The Droves (Coney Young Company) 90–92, 94–96, 98, 104–105, 162–163 Durham Peters, J. 128–129, 173 embarrassment 47, 71 Embodied 37 embodiment 4–5, 10; see also embodied action; embodied selfconsciousness; 4-Es framework; embodied meaning-making; embodied transparency; embodied spectatorship empathy 22, 70; and care 92–94; kinaesthetic 95; limits of 95; in rasa aesthetics 165–166; as strategy 81; and wonder 99 enactivism 10–13, 16, 39–40; and computer games 106–107; and embodied action 53–54; and plasticity 179–180; and representation 41–42; and social process 46 environment see coupling, organism-environment event 98, 124–125; art event as object 84, 109; of meaning 5, 7, 81 experience economy 18, 21, 87, 158–161 Fight Night 49–50, 52, 54–58 financial crash 102 financial markets 101–102 first-person perspective 26–27 Fisher, M. 142 Fisher, T. 9 folk psychology 95–96 force field 60 form 131–132; and content 70, 85 4 Es framework 11 Frieze, J. 20–21 Gallagher, S. 10, 37, 62, 64, 162 game 24, 103–104, 106–107, 132; gaming 178 Garner, S. 111n31 Garratt, P. 28n32 gaze 58–59

Index  187 Gordon, P. 73n26, 121 Greenfield, S. 178 group dynamics 157–158 Guattari, F. 85 habit 52; racism as 146 Harman, G. 84 Harpin, A. 20 headphones 126–128; headphone performance 35 Heartfield, J. 143 Hellings, J. 134, 136 heteronomy see autonomy homeostasis 37–39, 44–45, 94, 147; and consciousness 97; cultural 180; and identity 147; and social affordance 123 Hooker C. et al 110n26 Horkheimer, M. 55, 131 Hutto, D. 42–43, 82 I (of a work of art) 117–118, 123 identity 139–140, 161; identity politics 143; and homeostasis 147; see also non-identity thinking immanent contradiction 25–27, 109 immersion 60, 109–110, 130; contemplative 58–60 immersive theatre 71, 120–121 impulse 52–53, 55–56; in art works 18, 68 In The Beginning Was the End (dreamthinkspeak) 1, 16, 54 in the midst 7, 44–45, 72, 131 institutional critique 161–162 instrumentalist art 17–18, 178–179 intentionality 39, 62 intersubjectivity 5, 93–94, 96–97, 124, 148, 175 intimacy 126, 132, 174–175 invitation 8, 58, 180; in advance 8 Jackson, S. 182n9 Jarry, A. 100 Johnson, M. 13–14, 56–58, 81–82, 84 Jury trial 118–119 Justice Syndicate (fanSHEN/Fast Familiar) 118–120, 122–123, 125 Kahneman, D. 107–108 Katsouraki, E. 9 Knowles, R. 6–7 Kolesch, D. 20

Lavender, A. 21 Lehmann, H. 47–48 £¥€$ (LIES, Ontroerend Goed) 101– 103, 106–109 live art 117–118, 135–136 loops, neurodynamic 53–54 Love Letters (...) 172, 176 Machon, J. 20, 160 MADHOUSE re:exit (Access All Areas) 79–81, 83, 85, 88, 92, 98, 104– 105, 125, 164 Malabou, C. 97, 99, 178 managed life see administered life Mangold, A. 19 manipulation 91, 120, 162 Manning, E. 14 mass art 158–159 Massie, E. 19 Massumi, B. 14, 16, 99, 108–109, 124 McConachie, B. 93 meaning 4–7, 12, 105, 162, 181; and affect 99; embodied meaningmaking 13–15, 21, 37–39, 126, 181; meaning-making 38–40; and media 129–131; and representation 166; and semblance 105 media theory 129–129, 173–174 meditation 53 Meek, J. 66 mind 5, 166; embodied 37; enactive 10–12; mind reading 93, 95; philosophy of 6, 16, 39; see also body-mind; consciousness mindfulness 122 Mitra, R. 23, 164–165 Myin, E. 42–43, 82 narcissism 21, 71, 98 National Theatre Wales 35 Natyashastra 22, 165–166 negative dialectics see dialectics Neiditch, W. 20 Ngo, H. 146 Nicholson, H. 20 Nikoleit, S. 20 Noe, A. 5, 12, 39, 42, 85–86, 179 non-identity thinking 15–16, 69–70, 104 Oberle, E. 139–140 object: and attention 56; inanimate 81–82; objectivation 24–25,

188 Index 62–64, 67, 81, 85; object oriented ontology 84, 106; play object 105–106; see also art object; object oriented ontology; subject-object occurrent art 108–110 opacity see transparency pandemic 168–169 Perfect Stranger (ZU-UK) 169–171 performance participation 8–10, 13 Plague Round (ZU-UK) 176–177 plasticity 177–179 play 83, 93, 101–103, 105–106, 110; playing along 91, 94 politics 70–71 possession 118 postnormality 170 presence effect 171 privilege 87–88, 139, 155, 157–158 The Privileged (Jamal Harewood) 140–143, 148 process 58–59, 68; artwork as 11, 58– 60, 68–69, 108–109, 130; and event 98–99; meaning as 4–5, 37; subjectivity as 147 productive participation 160 proprioception 64, 81 quality 56, 166 racism 141–142, 155–156 Ranciere, J. 3 rasa 22, 165–166 rationality 130–131; rational economic man 107 reflection see critical distance reification 46, 86–87, 98, 121 representation (realism) 41, 65, 108–109, 166 Ridout, N. 23 risk 133–134 romanticism 160–161 Ronan, J. 19 Rosch, E. 10, 37, 39, 121, 144, 179 Rose, G. 15, 46 rules 103 Sardar, Z. 170 Schutz, T. 20 Sedgman, K. 30n81

self consciousness 52, 65, 144 self-creation 140 semblance 103–105, 124–125 sensorimotor: capacities 53–54; patterns 10; system 38–39, 65; see also sensorimotor coupling shudder 71, 87–88, 181 spectatorship 19, 40; embodied 165 Storm 3 (National Theatre Wales) 46 subject-object 39, 44–45, 69, 123–125, 136 subjectivity 6–7, 44, 55, 97–99, 108; of artwork 118, 124; and authenticity 121–123, 140; constitutive subjectivity 45–46; and homeostasis 147; and privilege 142–143; see also consciousness; self; subject-object sublime 87 (syn)aesthetics 160 Telephone (Coney) 172, 176 temporal renormalisation 173 temporality 68–69, 162 The Great Gatsby (The Guild of Misrule) 90 theatricality 4, 136 Thompson, E. 10, 16, 37, 39, 42, 45, 53, 121, 144, 179 Tide Whisperer (National Theatre Wales) 35–37, 44, 48 Transparency, embodied 64–67, 82, 96, 128 truth content 17, 87–88, 105 Ukraine 61–62, 66 Vahlo, J. 106 Varela, F. 10, 37, 39, 121, 144, 179 Vault festival 61 voting 49, 119 Warren, J. 22 Watkinson, P. 19 White, G. 8, 20, 22 witness 3, 51 Zaiontz, K. 30n69 Zizek, S. 98, 129, 140, 179–180 Zoom 172