Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Studies in International Performance)

Studies in International Performance Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and culture as well as genres, identities and imaginations. Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces ‘Culture’ which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats ‘Performance’ as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations. Titles include: Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon (editors) VIOLENCE PERFORMED Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict Sonja Arsham Kuftinec THEATRE, FACILITATION AND NATION FORMATION IN THE BALKANS AND MIDDLE EAST Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case STAGING INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS Christopher Balme PACIFIC PERFORMANCES Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia Helen Grehan PERFORMANCE, ETHICS AND SPECTATORSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE Judith Hamera DANCING COMMUNITIES Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City Susan Leigh Foster WORLDING DANCE Alan Read THEATRE, INTIMACY & ENGAGEMENT The Last Human Venue

Joanne Tompkins UNSETTLING SPACE Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre S. E. Wilmer NATIONAL THEATRES IN A CHANGING EUROPE

Forthcoming titles: Adrian Kear THEATRE AND EVENT

Studies in International Performance Series Standing Order ISBN 978–1–4039–4456–6 (hardback) 978–1–4039–4457–3 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement The Last Human Venue Alan Read

© Alan Read 2008, 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in hardback 2008 by First published in paperback 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 13: 978–0–230–57261–4 ISBN 10: 0–230–57261–8 ISBN 13: 978–0–230–23524–3 ISBN 10: 0–230–23524–7

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Beryl Robinson & our daughters Florence and Hermione

The dramatic sense – He who lacks the four more refined senses of art seeks to understand everything with the coarsest, the fifth: this is the dramatic sense. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The task of interpreting works of art is to concentrate creaturely life in ideas. Walter Benjamin, Letter to Florens Christian Rang

Oh, who would think a boy and bear would be well accepted ev’ry where. It’s just amazing how fair people can be. Randy Newman, Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear

Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Author’s Preface

xi

Series Preface

xiii

Acknowledgements

xiv

Introduction Self-evident: intimacy and engagement The human laboratory: parable of a recent past Nature, theatre & politics: the present project A second naïveté: the future constitution

1 1 2 5 14

Part I

On The Social Life of Theatre: Towards a Science of Appearance

Introduction THE ENDS OF POLITICS A SINGULAR ART THE SOCIAL CONDITIONAL BEGIN AGAIN SUFFICIENT GOODS THE PRESENT IMPERFECT DISCIPLINE IN DISTRESS A LIFE IN THEATRE THEATRE RETURNS

Part II

15 25 30 40 44 46 53 58 68 70

On Performance as Such & On Human Performance in Particular

1 The Anthropological Machine

81

2 Nature Table Play ground Swimming pool Class room

102 105 111 113

3 Stage Play Acknowledging The imperative of performance In the infancy of theatre

120 123 124 126 vii

viii Contents

4 Ring-Side

132

5 Redeemed Night Fear Fauna Fur

145 146 149 152

6 Infant Enthusiasm Infant Infant animal Interval Infant, animal, automata Infant ‘inhuman’ Auschwitz

157 158 161 164 165 171

Part III

On The Part of Those Who Have No Part

7 The Distribution of the Sensible

175

8 Recalling the Collective

187

9 Forensic Display

207

10 Arrested Life

218

11 The Democracy Machine Memoir: Civil Service Memorial: Military Service Memory: Secret Service

229 231 238 244

Part IV

In the Event of Extinction: Natural History & Its Ends

Introduction DESTINATION NATURE NATURAL HISTORY IN THE EVENT OF EXTINCTION THE LAST HUMAN VENUE THE FRANCISCAN MODEL

249 252 263 268 271 274

Postscript The paradox of the actor The parallax of the performer The Lazarus affect

277 277 278 279

Notes

280

Select Bibliography

299

Index

308

Illustrations 1 Shunt, Tropicana, London Bridge Vaults, 2005. Courtesy of Lizzie Clachan / www.shunt.co.uk 2 St Michael Overcoming the Dragon. French, 1300–1500, walnut painted and gilded. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, Sculpture Department, London (526–1895) 3 Sepulchral Effigy – a knight of the De Lucy family. English, c. 1340–50, sandstone, from the Lady Chapel, Lesnes Abbey Kent, UK. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, Sculpture Department, London (A.10–1912) 4 Pieter Bruegel, Children’s Games, 1560, Oil Paint on Wood, H 118 cm, W 161 cm. Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien oder KHM, Wien 5 John Gielgud as Felix (the poet Butterfly) in The Insect Play by The Brothers Capek at the Regent Theatre, London, 1923. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London 6 Bettina Rheims, Mouton de face, from Animal, 1994. © Bettina Rheims. Courtesy of galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris 7 Bettina Rheims, ‘Nativity’ Avril 1997, Ville Evrard. © Bettina Rheims. Courtesy of galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris 8 Tipoo’s Tiger, c.1795, Mechanical organ, Painted wood, Mysore. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London 9 Edgar Degas, The Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera ‘Robert Le Diable’ (detail) 1876, Oil on Canvas. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London 10 William Hogarth, Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, Etching with engraving in black ink, 1762. © Trustees of the British Museum. Courtesy of British Museum Images, London (195326) 11 Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Genesi: From The Museum of Sleep, 1999, un bambino dell il parte: Auschwitz. Demetrio, Teodora e Agata Castellucci. Courtesy of Luca del Pia 12 Richard and Bomb before Showtime, New York, 1996, Richard Lowdon, Forced Entertainment. Courtesy of Hugo Glendenning 13 Robin in Horse Head before Pleasure, Sheffield, 1997, Robin Arthur, Forced Entertainment. Courtesy of Hugo Glendenning 14 Dijkstraat (tussen nrs. 6 en 12), 20 April, 1954. Courtesy of Beeldbank Stadsarchief Amsterdam ix

x Illustrations

15 Dijkstraat playground, Aldo Van Eyck, 12 July 1955. Courtesy of Beeldbank Stadsarchief Amsterdam 16 Goya, Men Fighting with Sticks, 1820–1823, Oil on Canvas, 123 × 266 cms. Courtesy of Museo del Prado, Madrid 17 Le Corbusier, Le Modulor, 6 January 1946. © DACS / Fondation Le Corbusier 18 CCTV Sequence, Damilola Taylor, Peckham Library, London, 27 November 2000, © Metropolitan Police Service. Courtesy of Directorate of Public Affairs 19 Graded Word Reading Test from E. J. Schonell, Psychology and Teaching of Reading, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Ltd, 1966 20 William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, 1819–1820, Tempera heightened with gold on mahogany, 21.4 cms × 16.2 cms. © Tate, London, 2007 21 Engineers building ERNIE I, 1956, Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill, UK, first used June 1957. Courtesy of HM National Savings and Investments 22 ERNIE I, National Savings and Investments, UK, 1957. Courtesy of HM National Savings and Investments 23 Krzysztof Wodiczko, images taken during and presented to author on completion of Civic Centre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance, 9–16 April, 2003, London, UK 24 ‘Mr Cody Met the Queen’, Buckingham Palace, November, 1960. Courtesy of Southend on Sea and County Pictorial, 4 November, 1960 25 Goat Island, The Sea and Poison. Photo courtesy of Nathan Mandell 26 La Résurrection de Lazare, Haut-Relief, Sixteenth Century, St Mammès Cathedral, Langres, Haute-Marne, France. Courtesy of St Mammès Cathedral and the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Directions régionales des Affaires culturelle

Author’s Preface This book begins to imagine all those things performance could be getting on with if appeals to theatre’s political efficacy were temporarily suspended. An ethics of association, an understanding of the relationship between intimacy and engagement, a critical sense of how human-animal relations are primordial to performance, an expansion of the humanist collective to include the performances of objects, elements and architecture, an end to the amorphous tyranny of nature and society and the recollection of the matters of social concern those categories have concealed – all would be possible in the name of politics. Here I propose a politics of performance that is more modest and slower than the political theatre in whose courageous wake it retreats, a thinking through of theatre’s capacity to do some good in a world marked by widespread wrongs and the advances of the right. This book addresses the work of three theatre companies whose simultaneous practices have continued independently over the same quarter of a century: Societas Raffaello Sanzio from Cesena, Italy, Forced Entertainment from Sheffield, UK, and Goat Island from Chicago, USA. In choosing to approach these examples of performance the intention was not to do what others have done expertly, to write about them in their own rite, but rather to reconfigure them within, what Rebecca Schneider once called, ‘the flap flapping of personal narrative’.1 By embedding aesthetic works of public engagement within weak examples of intimate acts an unusual ecology of performance and politics emerges. Here ‘the scrappy tunes of this and that’ are not to be ignored, but are to be embraced and reflected upon for the difference they make. This book explores the writing of those philosophers and critical theorists who are least likely to be associated with ‘weak examples’ like mine, but nevertheless continuously return us to rethinking these kinds of tenuous objects. In putting such well-practiced thinkers into collision with those thought-through theatre practices, the street scene that ensues becomes the meeting place for another kind of small drama. One in which the protagonists of recent European debates concerning the politics of science and nature (Bruno Latour), the bare life of human and animal (Giorgio Agamben), the inoperative community (Jean-Luc Nancy), and the part of those who have no part (Jacques Rancière) are recited not for the currency of their names, but for the enthusiastic interruptions they effect in the melancholic narratives of the accident. The name I would like to give this meeting place of theatre, intimacy and engagement is the last human venue. Alan Read xi

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Series Preface In 2003, the current International Federation for Theatre Research President, Janelle Reinelt, pledged the organization to expand the outlets for scholarly publication available to the membership, and to make scholarly achievement one of the main goals and activities of the Federation under her leadership. In 2004, joined by Vice President for Research and Publications Brian Singleton, they signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new book series, ‘Studies in International Performance’. Since the inauguration of the series, it has become increasingly urgent for performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social and political borders. This is necessary not only in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency to limit performance paradigms to those familiar in our home countries, but also in order to be engaged in creating new performance scholarship that takes account of and embraces the complexities of transnational cultural production, the new media, and the economic and social consequences of increasingly international forms of artistic expression. Comparative studies can value both the specifically local and the broadly conceived global forms of performance practices, histories and social formations. Comparative aesthetics can challenge the limitations of perception and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of the Federation’s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship, we hope to contribute to an ever-changing project of knowledge creation.

International Federation for Theatre Research Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale

xiii

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Janelle Reinelt for her critical support of this project and to her co-editor Brian Singleton for giving this book a home in their series Studies in International Performance. An anonymous reader was as detailed in their criticism as they were generous in their enthusiasm. Paula Kennedy and Christabel Scaife at Palgrave Macmillan have been assiduous in their care as Commissioning editor and Assistant editor respectively. Penny Simmons combined precision and clarity in her copy editing. The Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, supported the production of the photographic plates and the involvement of the designer Simon Josebury in the project. I am indebted to Helen Levitt and her representatives at the Laurence Miller Gallery, New York, for granting permission for me to use her inimitable work on the cover and I am grateful to Krzysztof Wodiczko for permission to include images within the book that were a personal gift from him. Earlier versions of the chapters ‘Stage Play’ and ‘The Democracy Machine’ originally appeared in issues of Performance Research that I edited for Taylor & Francis. The chapter ‘Arrested Life’ was first published in a different form in A Performance Cosmology published by Routledge. ‘Nature Table’ formed part of a chapter for the collection Performing Nature published by Peter Lang. Full details of each publication are included in the bibliography. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to include these materials in this new setting. I am especially grateful to Randy Newman, James Grupenhoff, Lisa Thomas, Cathy Kerr and Erika Navarrete for securing me permission to quote lyrics from Randy Newman’s songbook (copyright Randy Newman / Alfred Publishing Co.). Almost every aspect of this work has arisen in dialogue with colleagues, students, artists and academics in a number of different public institutions and settings. I alone remain responsible for the limitations of the work that has grown from these encounters. Interest in the critical and philosophical terrain of the book was deepened by directing talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London between 1994 and 1997. Helena Reckitt, Sholto Ramsay, Ian Farr, Joanna Labon, Lois Keidan and Catherine Ugwu worked closely with me there, while Alphonso Lingis, Simon Critchley, David Pinder and Sonu Shamdasani offered insights and advice. I have enjoyed the stimulus of working with artists and others through the auspices of the London International Festival of Theatre, Arts Admin, Artangel, the Royal Society of Arts, the Public Art Development Trust, Performance Research and the Centre for Performance Research. At LIFT I was fortunate to work alongside the Directors Lucy Neal and Rose de Wend Fenton between 1993 and 2003; through Arts Admin I began to write about xiv

Acknowledgements xv

the work of Graeme Miller; while James Lingwood and Michael Morris have always been supportive of my interest in their projects. I enjoyed my time as an arts advisor to the RSA and am grateful to Michaella Crimmin there, as I am to Sandra Percival and Vivienne Guinness, Director and Chair of the Public Art Development Trust for whom I acted as a board member between 2000 and 2003. As a consultant editor of Performance Research since its inception I have enjoyed collaboration with Ric Allsopp, Claire MacDonald, Richard Gough, Talia Rodgers, David Williams, Rachel Fensham, Clancy Pegg and Linden Elmhirst. The Centre for Performance Research has provided a model and legacy of work which has been deeply influential on me, particularly the commitment there of Richard Gough and Judie Christie. I owe a special debt to the three theatre companies whose work threads through this book and concentrated my thoughts and feelings during the period of its writing. I have always enjoyed working closely with Forced Entertainment, especially as a board member of the company in the 1990s. I am indebted to Tim Etchells, Terry O’Connor, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Deborah Chadbourn, and to Hugo Glendenning for granting me permission to include his photographs of their work. Following the encouragement of Adrian Heathfield, I was invited by Goat Island to participate in their summer school in Chicago in 2001 and I returned to participate again in 2002. I have gained enormously from this experience with the special support of Lin Hixson, Matthew Goulish and Carol Becker, as well as members of the company Bryan Saner, Mark Jeffery, Karen Christopher and CJ Mitchell. While working with Goat Island I benefited from the experience of Rebecca Groves, whose own work with Goat Island, Bill Forsythe and Ballet Frankfurt is a model of collective endeavour and generosity. Through the auspices of LIFT, I worked with Romeo Castellucci in 1999 and 2001 and enjoyed the hospitality of his company, Societas Raffaello Sanzio, and family from then on. I am especially grateful to Romeo himself for this engagement, but also to Chiara Guidi, Claudia Castellucci and Gilda Biasini. The pleasures and problems of theatre, performance, research and pedagogy were central to the work of a group of colleagues at Roehampton University between 1997 and 2006, where I especially valued a close and fruitful working relationship with Joe Kelleher and Adrian Kear. I also benefited from the wisdom of Peter Reynolds, Maggie Pittard, Peter Majer, Valerie Lucas, Susanne Greenhalgh, Fiona Wilkie, Sarah Gorman, Jen Harvie, Sophie Nield, Graham White, Sylvia Vickers, Lee White, Robert Shaughnessy, and latterly Iona Szeman, Josh Abrams and Jennifer Parker Starbuck. Beyond performance at Roehampton I was encouraged by Garry Marvin, Jonathan Rée, Stephanie Jordan, Jeremy Ridgman, Ann Mclarnon, Mike Witt, Neil Taylor and Lyndie Brimstone. During a five-year Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project on ‘Performance Architecture and Location’ while at Roehampton, I was supported throughout by Gianna Bouchard, as well as

xvi Acknowledgements

by Emma Velde and Emma de Lacey. During the AHRC project I worked with many artists and architects and particularly enjoyed collaborations with: Steve Tompkins and Andrew Todd, Ewan Forster and Christopher Heighes, Joe and Christine Molloy of Desperate Optimists, Simon Bayly and Theatre Pur, Platform, Scott deLahunta, Ernst Fischer, Ilana Ortar and Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro. Since moving to King’s College London I have enjoyed the critical collegiality of Catherine Boyle, Elizabeth Eger, Nicholas Harrison, Helene Hokland, Brian Hurwitz, Richard Kirkland, Zoe Laughlin, Clare Lees, Gordon McMullan, Mark Miodownik, Leonee Ormond, Dorothy Pearce, Clare Pettit, Max Saunders, Anna Snaith, John Stokes, Ann Thompson, Mark Turner and Sue Dunderdale at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Boston University has been generously supportive of my theatre-going habit throughout this work. Colleagues working beyond these institutional locations yet especially open to dialogue and collaboration have included: Phillip Auslander, Stephen Barber, Rustom Bharucha, Sarah Jane Bailes, Steve Bottoms, David Bradby, Marvin Carlson, Steve Connor, Anna Furse, Gabriella Ghiannachi, Adrian Heathfield, Paul Heritage, Ali Hodge, Peter Hulton, Shannon Jackson, Baz Kershaw, Michal Kobialka, Sonja Kuftinek, Bojana Kunst, Bonnie Marranca, Doreen Massey, Bruce McConachie, Jon McKenzie, Susan Melrose, Mike Pearson, Andrea Phillips, Andrew Quick, Dan Reballato, Kim Reynolds, Nick Ridout, Joseph Roach, Irit Rogoff, Freddie Rokem, Heike Roms, Rebecca Schneider, Richard Sennett, Peter Thomson, Mischa Twitchin, Lito Walkey and David Williams. I count many of those named above as friends and there are others to whom I owe a special debt of thanks. For their hospitality each year in the Drôme: Jane Worthington, Bernd, Jonas, Daniel and Tobias Hörning, Virginia Whiles, Hugh and Val Savage, Oliver and Debbie Maurice. In London the friendship of Vicky Creevey, Rachel Clare, Simon Parker, Alice and Abraham, Kate Tyndall, Steve Tompkins, Danny and Joey, Jenny Pollitt, Andy Ward, Hannah and Oscar, Nigel Pollitt, Tony Humphries and Mary Dodwell, Oriana Baddeley and Ramsay Cameron, Ciaran McIntyre, Patricia Lousada, Christine Hall, Grant Forsyth, Antek Malinowski, and further afield Mike Ford in Dublin, Nienke Meeter in Amsterdam, Coleen Reedy-Simons and Kornel Simons in Chicago, and John and Sarah Lutterbie in Stonybrook. I continue to enjoy the support and friendship of my sister Teresa Critcher, Mark Critcher and my nieces Jenny and Claire. My grandparents, Bernard Rose Cody and Florence Cody are in these pages for the intimacy and examples of engagement that they offered to me and to others. The chapter, Stage Play, was written before the death of my mother, Veronica Read, in 2001. I was particularly encouraged by her critical response to that writing especially as she had committed her life to teaching children of the age I was trying to write about in performance. My deepest and enduring gratitude is offered here to my partner, the painter Beryl Robinson, and our two daughters Florence and Hermione. This book would not have been possible without them and it is to them that the work is dedicated.

Introduction

One established laws by accepting natural incidents with astonishment, … one can only understand their evidence by ceasing to treat them as ‘self-evident’. Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues

Self-evident: intimacy and engagement The nature of theatre is determined by three self-evident facts. Humans experience an extended childhood. Humans are unique in their ability to sustain a controlled unbroken outward breath. Humans are able to do less than they can. The implications of these facts for performance are less simple and provide the excuse for this book. They are not the only distinguishing marks of the human’s distinction from other animals. The right to make a promise, the use of the thumb to hitch-hike, and the ability to make images of other animals and then laugh at them, are all worthy of some attention. But the imperative to consider the nature of childhood intimacy, the opportunity to use exhalation to engage with others by speaking more than a few short words, and the freedom aesthetically to disappoint, are peculiarly apt places to ascertain the significance of performance in the twenty-first century. The last human venue is the place of performance where such distinctions between humans and other animals are played out – a venue for the coming together of a repertory of self-evident facts where there is no knowing how the self will survive, and abundant evidence that it will not. How a self becomes evident is a fact of theatre that requires an understanding of the dynamics of intimacy (the proximity of relations) and engagement (the conduct of associations). These matters of fact may therefore also be matters of concern, apparently aesthetic niceties give way in this venue to questions of ethics and politics that might have some relevance for us all. Intimate acts of theatre in childhood mark the first appearance of 1

2 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement

becoming other than oneself and thus provide evidence of our earliest engagements. These acts afford us the commonest sense of being alive and determine our social engagements as sentient participants in the processes of politics. To say that performance, the most immaterial of acts, is essential to the survival of a species would be a dramatic twist worthy of the last human venue.

The human laboratory: parable of a recent past One manifestation of the theatre, the architectural venue that emerged after the expulsion of animals from pre-Attic performance and survived remarkably intact in cities for 3000 years, provided a peculiarly hospitable model for such human attempts at self-definition. In the late-human age just before a mammal with ideas took it upon itself to morph into a state described by Michel Houellebecq as the ‘neohuman’, it was the theatre that was the laboratory where the most exhilarating experiments had taken place.1 This laboratory was not a place apart from the world but was a means of communicating descriptions of a field. Laboratory, a word first used in England as Shakespeare was finishing The Tempest, had, after all, long described the labour of making things speak: labour, the work, of oratory, the eloquence of speech. From Aphra Behn’s translations of Aesop’s Fables in the seventeenth century, through the sciences of the ‘player’s passion’ in the eighteenth and the demands of verisimilitude of Naturalism in the nineteenth, to the laboratories of theatre experiment in the avantgardes of the twentieth century, there had always been a relationship between experimenting with ‘natures’ of the human and performance. But it was only at the cusp of ‘the human’ wrought by genomics, embryo cybrids, cloning, bio-active glass scaffold and face-transplantation that this final venue for the assertion of human being assumed its true significance. It was already clear that there was to be no ‘post-human’, humans in their diversity were too canny and cussed for that, but rather a more prosaic evolutionary adaptation to circumstance: to the gradual increase in the appetite for affect in the screen-world of virtuality, the nostalgia for agency and the consequent retooling for action over reaction, the rediscovery of the potential for pleasure and increased states of excitation that blurred the boundary between suffering and satisfaction. It was performance in general and theatre in particular that had, largely unnoticed, provided the playful mechanism of the measure of human value and a convivial venue through which, and within which, such exploration could be more or less safely carried out.2 Some tickets had also been sold. If the theatre of the late twentieth, and early twenty-first century (the calendar of the late-human) was the human laboratory, what were its objects and methods and who were its subjects? The character of the human laboratory was such that these qualities were not so easily defined,

Introduction 3

nor distinguishable, as they had been. Nature, once thought to be that exterior to human action, was discovered to be socialised at every turn; things, once thought to be inert until activated by humans, appeared to have a life of their own. And material, once presumed to be mute, had begun to talk back to its manipulators in a variety of languages. Thus, true to their word, subjects were as likely to be subjected ‘to’ things, as objects could be discovered objecting ‘against’ other things. It was this state of epistemological expansion, of generous relativism, of paradigm proliferation that generated the conditions necessary for performance to play its part in what would otherwise have been an inviolate territory defended by the rules of a latter-day rationalism. Consequent upon this mongrel-materialism, methods of measurement common to the laboratory, of calibration and calculation, had long been significant for their exposure of embarrassing contradictions and inconsistencies. When the artist Gordon Matta-Clark announced in the late twentieth century ‘You are the measure’, turning the classical assumption that man was the measure on its head, he began to cleave houses in two and reassemble them in lop-sided asymmetry that sculpturally realised the incompatibility of house and home. The poet Friedrich Hölderlin had asked at the beginning of this scepticism more than a century before: ‘Is there a right measure?’ and had had to answer: ‘There is none’.3 The writer Maurice Blanchot thought writing to be the act of opening oneself to ‘measurelessness’, and the philosopher Martin Heidegger believed the reduction of measure to calculation to be the fateful economic commodification of modernity. But this scepticism regarding ‘right measure’ did not for a moment infect the human laboratory with its doubt. And that was for a simple but telling reason: the last human venue had never produced the human, nor claimed to have secured its presence where it could be commodified and judged. Rather, like all good laws, the true measure of the law of live arts, was the aesthetic marking of a recalcitrant gap, an incompatibility, a condition of parallax, an irreducible asymmetry between an apparently human perspective and what eluded it.4 It was this parallax, the minimal difference between the affects attendant on first appearances and the second thoughts as to what appearing of this human kind implied, that performance as such, and theatricality in particular, drew attention to. Despite the best efforts of the dialecticians the dramatic tensions between this material process and that mental state remained happily resistant to any form of trite resolution. The twentieth century symptoms of this resistance took the form of debates about naturalism and realism, practices and theories, actors and audiences, auditoria and what lay outside, theatre and politics. But in each case the singularity of each of these braided phenomena were confused with the binaries of an easier and less interesting opposition. Here there was no opposition, in each event there was one, and those things that

4 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement

eluded it. In retrospect, it became apparent that the human laboratory had, inadvertently perhaps, measured the degree of recalcitrance to the fantasy of transparency that once obscured these problems, the protective fallacy of performance that Theodor Adorno might have been describing when he talked about the measure of resistance and transgression that something ‘safeguards within itself’.5 The theatre was the last human venue in as much as its objects were measured, not for their potential to act, but for their impotential to be realised. Literally – realised, to become in some way more real, more than palpable and present, to become really excitable, or at least just a bit ‘less fake’. Perhaps, rather contrarily and disappointingly for the futurist technocrats, the mark of human nature at work in this venue (as distinct from professional success) was one of old-fashioned, pre-bionic, underachievement, and it was this falling short, this remedial quality, not exemplary excesses that marked it out as peculiarly human, and peculiarly alienated. The human animal was witnessed, unlike any other high-achieving, perfectly realised creature, to make play of this impotential. Other animals could not quite make affective theatre because they did not have this capacity to disappoint. In contrast to the perfect perspective of Cirque du Soleil’s final solution to the prat-falls of clowning, the veneered digital remastering by Aardman of their ‘stop-go’ plasticine figures, and the regimented spectacle of Christophe Berthonneau’s ‘fail-safe fireworks’ at countless Olympic openings, performance, in all its contingency, appeared like any other mortal frailty, ‘truly human’. So it was there, the industrial north-west, and then, the late nineteenth and twentieth century, a location and time described as urban modernity, that theatre was discovered, recalling in its own image-conscious, imitable way, an appearance of ‘human dependency’. What was it about dependency that the theatre was making appear? The theatre had always been a place where the human was said to appear in various states of conflict and disarray. From A Doll’s House to Richard Maxwell’s House at both ends of a century, doors had been slammed as though to signal agency and independence. But the human laboratory had demonstrated again and again, late in the day, that the humanist claim to the political realm beyond these performances was always premature. Almost posthumously, in the late-age of homo sapiens, the human laboratory had been the place where the human had singularly failed to appear, had decided not to show up. This condition had, at the time, been rather literally described as ‘Godotnia’, after Samuel Beckett’s tardy messiah had left Vladimir and Estragon to their fate, but that was simply the measure of an anxiety of waiting that haunted a post-war generation reared in the time of rationing. For the next generation, who experienced continual war at one remove, the suspension of a denouement took on a more chilling aspect signified by the obsessive reiteration of the need for closure.

Introduction 5

The disappearances fleetingly thought of as the defining ‘being’ of performance, its late twentieth-century ontology as a theatre of exits, would in the twenty-first century give way to the problem of theatre’s appearance, its recalcitrance to sight, its impedimenta to speech, its resistance to hearing, despite the lab technicians’ best efforts. It was these failed entrances, rather than another age’s confidence in summoning the subject, that had occupied those who worked in the laboratory, and it was this interruption in the ‘lo and behold’ expectations of experiment that marked theatre’s claim to be a human venue of some distinction. There was also, however, one serious problem with this apparent advance over the triumphalist fawning to the exemplary stage-technician of the age of ham. The recognition that theatre was characterised by its propensity to ‘undo itself’, to generate opportunities for fiasco, to interrupt and to supplement the writing of disaster, appeared to sustain a fallacy that its political significance might lie internally, to its own mechanisms of face to face, alienated labouring and leisured, if embarrassed witness.6 But this apparently effortful internality could only leave unspoken an apparently effortless externality, where the explosive signs were, from Baghdad to Bali, that there was still serious and pleasurable work to be done in resisting the divorce between apparently incompatible worlds that the parallax between theatre and its ground invited. The parallax that characterised theatre could not countenance this appealing claim, that its perspectives were ‘none of our business’, but rather precisely measured exactly those things that eluded its claims to be a human venue and, in so doing, imagined the possibilities and potential for a theatre that was not just beside itself, like all mimetic acts of performance, but in some way was able to reach outside itself with some purpose. When Randy Newman asked in his song The Beehive State ‘What is Kansas thinking, what is Kansas for?’ the question to the delegation was not simply, what use if any is Kansas, but what might it be said to stand for? The question raised in the last human venue was not dissimilar: ‘What is theatre thinking? What is performance for?’ The answer explored in this book is that thinking about and making theatre alerts us to the precise ways in which performance confirms our commonest sense, that we are sentient beings. Jimmy Porter might have cried out, looking back in anger, ‘I’m alive!’ but what it really means to feel that one is alive through the intimacy and engagement of performance now requires more than the words and good intentions of angry young men.

Nature, theatre & politics: the present project Repeated claims have been made as to the political efficacy of theatre but, without a historical sense of how theatre has operated as a human laboratory, objects and subjects, causes and effects, ambitions and outcomes have

6 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement

been serially mixed up. It was just before the time of the parable above, and in concert with its participants, that the possibility of rethinking the human condition arose, not as an inviolate state nor as a definition to be protected, but as a conditional arrangement to be superseded by circumstance. The politics that applied to theatre were no longer exterior to performance, marked by the demise of the political, but bounded in intricate ways with and in performance, threaded like the ampersand (&) that binds two apparently separate terms, intimacy & engagement for example. If the split between nature and theatre was to be marked by the caesura of a comma, (the bracketed space within which the laboratory could do its work), the link between theatre and politics was to be remarked by this ampersand and its binding of theatre & politics. That the ampersand turns its back on the theatre with its two ends binding politics to itself simply marks the ambiguity of an association that cannot be taken for granted any longer. Given that the political and its parties, religion and its churches had long been superseded by a migration of belief towards quite different objects, coalitions, movements and virtual processes, the suspension of the ‘suspension of disbelief’ in theatre for the more prosaic promises of performance was one more indication that there was not enough belief to go round. This book is one response among others to the unravelling of this association and resolutely unfashionable in its affirmation of the present project: to reassemble the social on renewed terms, to begin again. It does so, not on the ground of conservative values, morals and ideals, but rather less salubriously on the opportunistic tactic of circumstance and sensitivity to situation. The wily ‘Bargee’ in John Arden’s play of violent retribution, Sgt Musgrave’s Dance, did not sing for nothing: ‘There was an old man called Michael Finnegan / He grew whiskers on his chin agen / The wind came out and blew them in again / Poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again.’ The ‘returns of the real’ have perhaps been more elegantly put by Hal Foster elsewhere, but in the continuous state of warlike emergency that characterised the context for this writing, it is the Bargee who perhaps puts the cyclical demands of time and the anticipation of the impotential of human agency in the storm of history more melodically. In the spirit of beginning again, the first part of this book responds to an invitation by Richard Schechner in conversation with Richard Gough, two of the ‘pioneers’ of performance studies in the late twentieth century. Characterising the emergence of performance studies as a ‘molten’ period of growth, followed by a ‘frozen’ moment, an ‘institutionalizing phase’ that ‘somebody’s going to come along around 2010 and break … apart again’, Schechner comments that if this were not to happen ‘… we’d enter into a kind of long medieval period’.7 Well, there was much to recommend the medieval, but perhaps it is worth taking Richard Schechner at his word. Having, then, been invited to do so, by Richard I and II, my book will

Introduction 7

propose a new discipline, perhaps even a scientific discipline, through which to reconsider the relations between performance and politics, theatre and ethics. This discipline will give equal consideration to actors and audiences, but also to an amplified collective of other entities, beings and non-human things that characterise the expanded field of performance in the human laboratory and the field it describes.8 Instead of following the route that almost all performance writing takes in pursuit of politics, evoking the potential links between theatre and the political, promoted on a synthetic elision between previously singular entities, this opening methodological section will trouble the presumption that there are any such links to be made, and from that contention set out the consequences. In this sense I take my starting point from the first line of Augusto Boal’s seminal work Theatre of the Oppressed: ‘This book attempts to show that all theatre is necessarily political, because all the activities of man [sic] are political and theatre is one of them.’9 But I depart from Augusto Boal’s argument in his second sentence when he says: ‘Those who try to separate theatre from politics try to lead us into error – and this is a political attitude.’ My contention in this book is that it is only by separating theatre from the political that their potential relations in a practice of politics can be realised. The error has precisely been to leave these two terms bonded in a fantasy of expectation and hope while patronising them both with the commiseration of a failure. The political and its claims to our attention will be temporarily set aside for consideration of the social and how the event of theatre and performance interrupts its relational associations as a process of politics. Building an argument with the anthropological and psychological emphases that enhance the contestational credential of performance studies (largely as it has been commodified within the US Academy, following what has been described as its ‘Schechner moment’), Part I explores the limits of paradigms uneasy in admitting their disciplinary status and offers concrete disciplinary objects, with axioms and rules, for debate and challenge. It does this for a reason. The serious state of conflict that characterises contemporary politics exposes the synthetic conflictual ambience of disciplinary study and aesthetic practice to a harsh reality principle. This book contends, following the trenchant philosophical analyses of Adi Ophir, that the current distribution of superfluous evils and the consequent order of suffering in the contemporary world demand a response from theatre’s politics.10 This response cannot solely come from a psychoanalytically informed narrative of memory, melancholia and trauma, nor can it come from the anthropologically informed pluralism of multiple metaphysics. Emphasising the native potential of theatre, the way that performance generates the sentient sense of ‘a life’, of sensation and speculation, this new discipline traces the association of the social and critically examines how social engagements are to be restarted after their closure in the

8 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement

entropy of allegorical explanation common to other disciplines.11 Good theatre will always be able to make the social appear and create conditions for sufficient goods to exist. But none of these potentials of performance are possible without a comprehensive examination, assessment and redistribution of the political claims currently being made on behalf of theatre. Part II of this book, on the extended nature of childhood, goes straight to the heart of sentimentality, that most politically becalmed yet treacherous of regions, and examines ways in which infants and children operate within performance while confounding theatre’s protocols, and in so doing create a life for themselves that is distinctive and in tension with the adult’s imagination of their imagination. By putting into play infants, animals and the ways in which they are anomalous to a politics of performance, I will mark the powers and oppressions that their presence in the theatrical set-up expose. I can here begin to tinker with, if not dismantle, what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls ‘the anthropological machine’ and examine its meaning for theatre.12 In the introduction to Part II, I will argue that theatre operates alongside, within and on the periphery of other apparatuses, other anthropological and desire-machines, in labouring to bring the human to view. More precisely and more commonly, in failing to make the human appear, the anthropological machinery of the theatre exposes the horizon and limit of human being. I am, perhaps typically, less interested here in the appearance of the animal, as I am in the strangeness of the human animal in that company. I suspect the recognition of the propensity of theatre to ‘undo itself’, that has become a fertile currency of debate in current theatre study, will miss its own potential if it rests secure within its own elegant and wholly internal logics.13 In tension with theatre’s failure to stabilise itself, I prefer to spend time in this section exploring how this anthropological machine becomes a mediating mechanism through the workings of which what Michel Foucault once called ‘bio-politics’ is recognised. How this machinery is to be stopped, stripped down, and then, following its interruption, how it is to be reassembled and restarted to the contrary ends of equality and justice is what I am interested in. It is in this active response to the prescriptions of bio-power, after all the location of all human venues, that the practices of performance become politicised, not through the desultory pleasure of recognising a long history of an anti-theatrical prejudice. What I am additionally doing in this section is acknowledging the material nature of my own family life over the last decade. In this recognition (there is an inherent ambivalence to labouring one’s children in such a Dickensian way), I am doing no more than writers such as Hannah Arendt and eminent practitioners such as Chiara Guidi have invited us to do over the last half-century. I hope, I suspect in vain, I can do this without profiteering from the work of my partner Beryl Robinson and our daughters Florence and Hermione, to whom this book is dedicated, whose own mate-

Introduction 9

rial labour, painting and play has produced the conditions within which the remedial acts and excesses recorded here can take on secondary meaning. Nor would I wish to ignore those, such as that exemplary democrat Doreen Massey, who have called for a re-imagination of the grounds of care and association, beyond this convention of the family of adult–child relation or Rustom Bharucha whose appeal for a reconsideration of families is predicated on a nuanced rethinking of the possibilities of intimate relations ‘at a distance’.14 I emphasise here my reluctance to extrapolate anything more general from this very personal history than the performance trajectory of particular class-bound family relations conducted in a riverside dwelling in west London over a decade. If the United Kingdom accounts for 0.0174069 per cent of the Earth’s surface, then this enterprise in a small corner of that statistic is by definition a minority pursuit. At the same time I am suggesting there may be some association possible between these and other lives beyond the conventions of identity politics in general, and the ubiquities of theories of the ‘other’ prevalent in the discussion of the politics of performance in particular. Certainly in the multifarious orthodoxy of worlds common to this genre of theoretical exposition, exemplified by the evocation of minorities who have become fetishised for their ability to deliver political credibility to any discourse in search of a victim, I have not seen much of these really ‘other’ worlds, however apparently limited they may seem: infants and animals, children’s plays and playgrounds, nature-tables and school stages, bed-time stories and child disappearances, council house estates and projects, circuses and shorelines (the entities, beings, objects, and things that make up the expanded currency of my new discipline). In doing this I recognise Karl Marx’s complaint that the bourgeois mistake their world for the world. While continually falling into this fallacy, the following seeks to expose the tension between the personal and the political, the private and the public, without sacrificing precisely those conditions of intimacy and variable scale that have been excised from the political discussion of the engaging quality of theatre for too long. What is more, I am emboldened by the simple fact that of all social groupings and minorities, families, that most majoritarian power, are by no means prominent, indeed strangely absent and minoritarian in theoretical debate and philosophical discourse. I am not sure that this gap can wholly be accounted for by what Nicholas Ridout describes as the ‘Family’ and its propensity, like the theatre business, to arouse what he calls a general sense of ‘social revulsion’.15 This elision prevails despite the fact that, as Jackie Bratton has called our attention to, the legacy of theatre has been one of the family histories as much as exceptional individuals, from Greek, Roman, African and Asian cultural genealogies through the Stanislavski’s in Moscow, the Castellucci’s in Emilia Romagna and, more parochially, the Redgraves a few doors away in our local neighbourhood in

10 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement

London.16 These are life-lines that in their diversity blow out of the water presumptions from others as to the conservative, nuclear, disconnected nature of families. Families are only celebrated in this stereotypical way by fundamentalists and conservatives who would wish to impoverish the radical potential of groups of young and old, men and women, human and inhuman (our ‘live-in animal’ formerly known as pet is not a human, and indeed is named after a plant as if to remind us of this distance) living together in various permutations, splitting apart and regrouping in infinite fashion, for which family has become a lovely ragged name. If a figure as remorselessly reactionary as the French president Nicolas Sarkozy in the Elysée can sustain what French voters recognise as a complex ‘blended family’, what Madeleine Bunting described as ‘a constantly changing carousel of membership in multiple families with differently defined sibling relationships’, then it would appear that any continued objection to the concept of the nuclear can only refer to his continued commitment to a nation’s love affair with atomic fission.17 Adam Phillips characterises the family as a group with a passion for living together.18 ‘Social’ is another word that means living together, sometimes passionately, and both have been derided for too long. The fact that the family established itself during capitalist industrialisation as the pre-eminent sphere of privacy should not deter us now from reimagining ways that families always operate between privacy and publicity in deeply performative, and not always inhibiting, ways. There are no family values, the abyss that lies between the Osbournes and the Osmonds, just to take two apparently related televisual family-commodities rooted in perverse heterosexual extension, suggests this, but that does not mean families should be exiled beyond the circulating, essentially individualist, economies of theatre that owe so much to them. I would make a play here at the outset, as a number of others between Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler have done, for the wager that Antigone’s family values: ‘… suggest a more flexible model of ethics, one that is focused on the encounter with the inhuman and the fragile boundary between life and death’.19 Like the model of theatre espoused here, families are as dynamically related to the inhuman as they are to human relations. Without this renewed sense of the complexities of kinship, there is little leverage this book can have in the concluding pages of Part I, dealing as it has to there with the familial emergence of martyrs seeking witnesses for their acts, suicide bombers doing what comes theatrically naturally according to their jihadist law in twenty-first-century London. Family life in its most normative and therefore perverse state is often cited, however unwittingly, as a precursor to the serious business of theory and a place to return to after (other, non-domestic) work has been realised. Performance study has rarely ventured towards these dangerously orthodox hinterlands from the security of their transgressive hideouts.20 There are

Introduction 11

notable exceptions. In the sensitive hands of a writer such as Peggy Phelan, families really are expected to carry equal responsibility for theoretical impact and freight. In ghosting her tarrying with the negative – in a book dedicated to the subtleties of absence and insubstantiability, Unmarked – Phelan, through her sister’s death and spectral presence says far more in the passage of a haunting car-ride than my caricature of absent families in theory might suggest has been possible. If families are about some conformity to model, just check the Janus-faced crowd in that station-wagon, bowling along from Long Island to Carmel. While Peggy, accompanied by her sister, is looking backwards at a disappearing landscape from the rear seats, the rest of the Phelan family are looking forwards into the storm of history.21 While recognising the strength of Peggy Phelan’s work, I am simultaneously indebted to, and attempting in the chapters of this book to supplement, her ‘ontology of performance’ as outlined in her influential essay of the 1990s in Unmarked, especially those psychoanalytically informed aspects of her project which would appear to inherit the reproductive rhetoric of psychoanalysis while vainly wishing to escape reproduction. As this book proceeds I will try to emphasise where my phenomenology of appearance within an ontology of morals departs from Phelan’s groundpreparing work on ‘the politics of performance’. Suffice to say here, if there are any arguments to be had in the conciliatory field of performance studies, this most widely quoted of texts surely deserves more critical engagement. There are no arguments to be had in this subject area without accounting for the distinction and disagreements with inherited discourses provided by the discoveries and debates of performance studies. I am happy to validate the exceptional voices of this tradition through citation in the belief that a worthy discipline resembles a field more than a territory. As Isabelle Stengers said of chemistry’s discursive claims: ‘To territory corresponds a power of definition, of delimiting, and this power inevitably creates the possibility of dismemberment.’22 I will identify where a discipline which was once a sumptuous, ragged garden, an overgrown field attempting to elude disciplinary status, has constituted itself as a territory with powers of membership and exclusion and, in contrast, encourage the creation of another new and untilled field, a ground of histories, what Stengers herself has called, drawing on the performative: ‘a theatre for events and operations with sometimes necessary but never sufficient reasons.’23 Part III of this book reconfigures a politics of theatre as a set of practices that could be described as ‘proxy performances’, on the part of those who have no part. Here, as with the failure of the appearance of the human in Part II, it is the measurement of the resistance to representation, from censorship to exclusion from the collective that gauges the conditions of dependency of the human constitution. Against ontology, a seventeenth-

12 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement

century idea of being in general, I will pose Michel Foucault’s historical ontology of the ways in which we constitute ourselves as moral agents in quite specific local, vocal, historical and material ways.24 Here I examine a sequence of situations, in which the ‘distribution of the sensible’ is determined and what is at stake for human beings in these arrangements. This evocative term is what the French philosopher and historian of ‘the poor’ Jacques Rancière has identified as a system of division and boundaries, ‘that define among things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetical-political regime’.25 The spatial imaginary of margin and centre, and all political arguments as to the nature of the transgressive and the conservative that shape essentially binarised political debates in performance study, are really dependent on this ordering for their effects. It is this distribution that allows what Rancière calls a ‘police’ to evoke an organisation of the sensible, accessible or attainable by some, and by definition not others. The way that politics relates to these forces and frameworks is in their interruption of the distribution of the sensible by those who precisely have a reduced, weak or wholly lacking part in the ‘perceptual coordinates of the community’. Rancière’s analyses are particularly relevant to a study such as this, simultaneously wishing to empty essentially exterior politics from within the regimes that make up theatre that allow it to be what it is, and constrict it in ways it might not recognise. A pre-eminent, if widely abused, regime of discourse in the theatre would for me therefore, in this context, remain the aesthetic, for it is precisely through the aesthetic that the ordering of these politics is revealed, and critically given the task I have set myself in this book, having been disrupted, can be restarted to new associative ends. Again, these more or less abstract questions will be engaged through a series of evidence-led case studies that counter the metaphorical uses to which ‘ideas’ of death and disappearance have been put in the performance studies field, but also, importantly, begin to consider and examine material instances of death, loss and suffering. The first study in this section considers censorship as the most visible evidence of an ordering of the sensible that maintains the exclusion of those ‘who have no part’. The second involves an analysis of the conditions that circumscribe who speaks, and for whom. It asks whether an act of proxy performance might expand the collective and extend the parliament of humans to a parliament of humans, animals and things (before they become extinct thanks to humans). By proposing a parliament of performance made up of a series of collective assemblies in which things, as well as people, do their own performing, this section is able to mark the limits of the ‘representative fiction’ played out in parliamentary democracies where humans toe the line, verbally jousting at sword’s length. The third study situates these debates more pointedly within a particular neighbourhood and explores how performances of dif-

Introduction 13

ferent kinds emerged excitedly from the recounting of the death of a young man and then how the trial of his alleged murderers became the stage for a sullen injustice. The fourth study considers an aesthetics and politics of hide and seek inherent to miniature, or ‘barely there’ performances that redistribute the sensible through engagement with their optic-resistant, aural and tactile innovations. The fifth study reiterates the ethical dilemma that defines the relationship between Part II and Part III of the book, that moves from concerns close to home towards other less familiar engagements. This chapter examines my own family history in the British civil service within the context of Asian colonial history and the imperative of protest against the second Gulf War that this history invites. The distribution of the sensible that each of these situations effects establishes something common that is shared and something exclusive that departs from this commonality. These case studies reveal who can have a share in the community ‘based on what they do and the time and space in which the activity is performed’26 and, of course by implication, those who therefore cannot have a share in this community. Any call for a ‘new kind of theatrical criticism’, especially one that wishes to examine the ways in which theatre operates as an affect machine, any ‘attempt to speak and make meaningful such affects’ as Nicholas Ridout affirmatively proposes, would of course be wholly dependent upon a detailed materialist understanding of the history of affects that are never solely the generative outcome of the theatre machine, but all those expressive machineries within which theatre does its own labour.27 So, Part III of this book, dependent as it is on the human’s freedom to do less than they can, attempts to restore politics to theatre on carefully reconsidered grounds and reapproaches the human laboratory through the permeability of its own walls. It takes this question of community, and the performances and theatre that occur within it and form it, much further and asks what conditions for the operation of community might emerge from the ways in which the inoperative community functions.28 Here JeanLuc Nancy’s prescient claim that community cannot be presupposed, but only exposed provides a performative means for restarting the association of the social beyond the common, entropic presumption that community is currently dissolute and dislocated. Inverting the facile assumption, belied by the workings of the last human venue, that performance lacks something, while community has plenty, it is theatre that is perceived here as excessive and abundant, concrete and critical in the midst of the inoperative assembly. Through a discussion of the categories of the ‘singular’ and the ‘specific’ the relationship of the ‘singular being’ to community will be considered and the manner in which community is precisely forged from the interruption of singularities, the suspension of what singular beings are through performances. Here the complex of performative dynamics discussed in the previous parts of the book will be played out with different objects.

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The concluding fourth part of this book, which mirrors the socially orientated methodological questions of Part I, considers those environments once generically bounded by the term ‘nature’, that is, all that supposedly lies outside the laboratory and its workings, in which a life is threatened by the failure of performance, the extinction of theatre. It does this first through a reading of a growing bibliography of theatre that gives precedence to ecological questions and asks in turn what a natural history of theatre might be. If naturalising phenomena is regarded as the most heinous crime by social constructionists, this chapter situates itself at the centre of that crime scene to examine its clues. In seeking to argue for the principled amateurism of the natural historian, in reasserting the relationship between the local and the global, in celebrating pedestrianism within panoptic procedures of knowledge, this final part of the book takes seriously Adi Ophir’s contention that the promise of the extinction of the world as we know it might provide an extreme, yet imaginable, point of reference, a teleology from which to read back certain demands and appeals to our current disciplinary fields and practices.29 It would be in this most final of contexts, in the time that remains, that I would ask again not whether the theatre I sit before and act within is radical or conservative, transgressive or reproductive, but is it good, or let us say for now, good enough to become a politics, if not the political, once more?

A second naïveté: the future constitution Projecting a future, apparently without performance, E. M. Cioran wrote in the last century: ‘What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music, in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of the means of expression, as well as by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naïveté, without which the arts can never begin again.’30 This book is an account of just such a second naïveté, a culpable project whose singular aim is to politicise performance and in so doing restart the social, to remind us to begin again.

Part I On The Social Life of Theatre: Towards a Science of Appearance

Let’s get on with the show. Irving Berlin, There’s No Business Like Show Business

Introduction Theatre and its study, performance and its analysis are caught between two phantasms: nature and society.1 Neither exists yet each in its own way exerts a beguiling hold on the dramatic imagination. Despite a century of critical effort from Gabriel Tarde to Margaret Thatcher, from William James to Bruno Latour, almost all appeals to artistic relevance are routed through one of these two spectres. And each, in their own way, spells doom for the critical project that performance might be expected to participate in. Given that this book seeks to politicise performance, the ways we speak and write about it, as well as do it, I will have to unravel the continued commitment to ideas of nature and society in the field of theatre while, in this part, fostering renewed relations between practices of the social and what I will call here, an ‘ethics of association’. I will begin with some methodological reflections on the problem of society and conclude, in the last part of this book, with a reassessment of the claims of nature, to reverse the common assumption inherent to the infrastructural imagination, the yearning for a primordial condition to be transcended by a cultural resolution.2 Simply put, let us work backwards from Capability Brown, nicknamed, after all, for his ‘capability’ to order nature, to a less manicured state where the proliferation of hybrids reminds us how much has been obscured in the ordering verges of modernity. I undertook the same reversal in my last book, Theatre & Everyday Life, and a formal symmetry between the two works will expose most readily the flaws (and perhaps strengths) of both.3 This book does not follow the other like a sequel; on the contrary, it comes before it. You can trust you are in the right order even if, at the end of this, you have no intention of following 15

16 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement

these ideas into the realm of the everyday where I took them some time ago. Contrary to much current work in the field, I am in this reorientation as interested here in order, ordering and orders, as I am in dispersion, dissolution and disorder, and, while always partial, the ideas presented here do follow a pattern as surely as day follows night. They do not rehearse a general theory, they present a discipline to be conducted through specific practices in order to politicise those practices. If this project sets out a task, to politicise performance, it also makes a demand: politicise performance. The task is political, the demand is ethical. In most writing on theatre these terms are either subsumed to each other or considered so incompatible as to be incommensurable. The difficulty of their relations is not here an excuse for ignoring their implications. If the human laboratory described in the Introduction brought about a recall, the recollection and distribution of previously rejected objects and subjects through its own political economy, this ethics is marked by a calling beyond that self-generating theatrical system. It is in this parallax relationship between politics and ethics that this book proposes that the affects of performance are activated and their social life become measurable. As much of what follows is conducted through just such a parallax view let me be clear how I intend to use this perhaps ominously visual term, as a concept and as a practice. The simplest sense of the phrase is in the common experience of an apparent displacement that occurs to an object when we change the position from which we view it. The obvious example is the fractured and changing appearance of the oar in the water from a rowing-boat as we move from prow to stern. Slavoj Zˇizˇek has supplemented this common, apparently gestalt experience, with a typically counter-intuitive twist, suggesting that this observed difference is not just one of subjectivity, our problem so to speak, but a shared dilemma in that subject and object are indubitably tied and mediated. A changing point of view for Zˇ izˇek will always reflect ‘an ontological shift in the object itself’.4 Any social science of appearance that I might wish to establish here would presumably be particularly sensitive to just such a braiding of perception, object and practice, especially a science dedicated to expanding the humanist collective towards the ontological vitality inherent to the materiality of things. The multiplicity of appearances of the ‘same thing’ are immediately transformed by the minimal parallax condition of putting a frame around them, once referred to in phenomenology as a form of bracketing. This bracketing has been the lot of theatrical art since the inception of the relationship between orchestra and horizon, between wagon and street, and between proscenium and auditorium. But our common awareness of this stage rhetoric requires us to acknowledge now, with most of the interesting performance of the last century, that things can no more ‘simply appear’, if they ever could, but are always in the process of appearing to appear. It is in

On The Social Life of Theatre 17

this tension that the minimal difference, the precise and measurable noncoincidence of a thing with itself, becomes apparent. The point of evoking and conducting this practice of the parallax view is the resistance it might offer to a too easy dialectic or symmetry between performance and its effects, between theatre and the political for example, and the encouragement of a revealing dissonance between previously undisturbed objects and the way we look at them and listen to them. Some performance companies, including those I am interested in accompanying through this work, Forced Entertainment, Societas Raffaelo Sanzio and Goat Island, are especially lucid in their treatment of these minimal differences in theatricality. To take one example, in Bloody Mess, a theatre piece created by Forced Entertainment in 2005 and revived in the company’s repertory on a regular basis across Europe, the cacophony of flailing claims to our audience’s attention through absurdly heightened gesture, retro-rock soundtrack and stupid wigs is suddenly collapsed into an attempt to realise a stage silence. We know from John Cage and his ‘silent’ work 4’33” onwards that Zˇ izˇek was right when he said: ‘Hard work is needed to create silence …’, but in this case the labour of quiet is particularly strained.5 The demand for silence is here announced, timed, spoken over, ventriloquised and interrupted until the minimal difference between any such speculative state and the static of the event becomes inconceivable. At which point of course, this being an old-fashioned company of troupers with sentimental attachment to the delivery on a theatrical promise, not so much confronting as charming a willing audience, silence is as fully realised as one might have thought inconceivable in this venue, a few yards from one of Europe’s busiest traffic intersections. The studious measurement of the quite obvious difference between this silence and that other disco-trash noise has been calibrated for us by two members of the company as a sequence of ascending types of silence: ‘You know, the kind of silence that occurs when …’, ranging from apparently banal instances of quiet to the kind of silence that ensues following the switching off of a lifesupport machine at a hospital bedside. The minimal differences between this example and this next one become a litany of increasing moral urgency which, when reflected upon after the event, might account for the feeling that one has, amidst all this bloody mess, experienced something close to a quiet epiphany of everyday ethical dilemmas. The tracing of such minimal differences in this book, both within theatrical practice but also between a child’s wave and a parent’s return gesture, between the hand-drawn line of a human animal and another animal, between the sculpted feet of a sepulchral figure and the paw of their loyal pet, might appear to be relatively cautious and passive when compared with the current racy debates that treat ‘Globalisation’ as a local term of reference. But one simple thing that the parallax view invites is to assist in the work against the biggest threat Zˇ izˇek believes we face today,

18 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement

that is the threat from ‘pseudo-activity’.6 It is the absolute resistance to any such pseudo-activity announced by the political, while appearing to show how appearances appear, that the performance work I am interested in here marks a certain parallax. A parallax espoused in this book between the understandable desire for a politics that encounters those in difficulty and an ethics of association that makes no presumptions as to where such difficulty now lies. I do not for a moment abjure the political, nor do I concur with the theatrical equivalent of those lily-white cricketing fantasists who once proclaimed at the height of apartheid in South Africa: ‘Take the politics out of sport’. But I do take issue with the false claims made on behalf of theatre and politics, performance and the political and, with others, take exception to any presumption as to where such political efficacy lies. I am not alone in contesting the old avant-garde vocation of art or isolated in being troubled by the pre-emptive link between artistic innovation and the dynamics of emancipation. Nor would I appear to be whistling in the wind when it comes to signalling a certain ambivalence to yet another performative transgression that looks strangely, despite the rearrangement of the props, like the last. Zˇizˇek, unaccustomed to hedging his bets, puts it like this: ‘is there anything more dull, opportunistic and sterile than to succumb to the superego injunction of incessantly inventing new artistic transgressions and provocations (the performance artist masturbating on stage, or masochistically cutting himself) …’.7 There is a theological dimension to the retreat of the historical materialist analysis of these acts in the face of fatuous repetitions of the same, and a state of suspended belief in the rightness of such repeated acts that cannot be admitted as such. In an era of grand narrative questioning there is, I believe, not enough ˇ izˇek’s question: ‘Do you belief to go around. So if I am going to respond to Z really believe?’, and I presume any politics worth its salt would begin from the willingness to stake something on such a belief, then my only option here is to retrace as faithfully as I can the material influence of a catholic experience in my own background in order to ascertain what G. K. Chesterton once called: ‘the thrilling romance of orthodoxy’.8 I am hardly in a minority when it comes to such rethinking of the theological in tension with the political. From Zˇizˇek’s perverse rereading of Christianity, via Alain Badiou’s reassessment of the witness of St Paul, via the continuously Catholic concerns of René Girard, Jean-Luc Marion and Victor Turner, there are very few writers whose work I have been interested in over the last two decades who have not been playing in the trace of a catholicity of witness and belief. To have lapsed from such commitments to faith, as I did long ago, is of course simply a confirmation of their remainder to ones investment of that store of belief elsewhere, in my case in theatricality. And there should be no presumption that such catholicity of spirit is irrelevant to those who would insist on their predominantly

On The Social Life of Theatre 19

secular interests. To witness the familial Pieta style dependency of a truly live artist, Ron Athey, on his deeply conservative and conserving performance carer, Dominic Johnson, in a performance duet Incorruptible Flesh (Perpetual Wound), performed in 2007 at the Chelsea Theatre in London, is to recognise the subversive intimacy inherent to that most shocking of performances, an engaging entertainment that protests too little. Indeed there is very little live art wrought from the bleeding bodies of Marina Abramovic´ , Chris Burden, Franco B and Kira O’Reilly that does not have the good grace to route these secular rituals via the central repository of blood-letting imagery of southern Europe, namely Christian iconography. The illusion of the social bond that informs performance practice and infiltrates theatre thinking has to be dispelled for the truly collective character of live art to be exposed. It is not power, per se, that performance interrupts, but through its politics theatre, as a human laboratory, marks and measures the errancy of power and manifests, through its deeply felt pleasure, processes, and prescriptions, the potential for injustice and the possibilities of change. While performers and those who study performance might like to claim errancy, accident and improvisation among their defining qualities, it is order and the ability to articulate it that is demanded from performance study under the duress of the anarchy of global capital now. Given this violent situation and its urgencies, the attractive mutability, insubstantiality and ephemerality of performance will have to, temporarily, at least for the duration of this book, give way to the clarification, fixation and exhibition of power through performance and its study, theatre and its thought.9 It is this imperative to gauge oppressions that makes the metaphor of the human laboratory, as well as its concrete materiality, worthwhile. The political may not exist but politics and performances most certainly do (even in the UK and USA) – so it just remains for us to reacquaint them, to politicise performance.10 Where not to start? The orthodox will not be threatened by a conspiracy of silence. The mainstream will not be diverted by the confederacy of ignorance. The garde from which the avant departs has nothing to fear as long as the radical confirms its own significance with reference to only one-half of this odd couple. The simple fact that the politics of performance are so often figured through the transgressive and the oppositional is understandable given the historic conservatism of so much theatre. But it is also obvious that a politics that celebrates marginality is a politics of marginality. As long as this historically specific expediency is welcomed as a universal condition of performance then this book has little to offer. But if there is something more that theatre and politics can do with regard to the centrality of pleasure and suffering in peoples’ lives, then there is more to be said. I am resigned to losing some of my readership here on the hunch that I will be joined by others for whom the current terms of debate in performance do not seem to have very much to do with their difficult lived experience.

20 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement

There should be no presumptions either as to what I might consider characteristic of marginal or central, each requires elucidation in turn. As Janelle Reinelt has made clear, the manifest advances of queer theory in part emerged from the direct political interventions of ACT UP, which were in turn performative engagements in response to an attack on bodies by a virus that was constructed as sexual.11 That many of these events courageously recognised the significance of the central, and centralising, hegemonic ideological state apparatuses of church, school and army as the site for their actions was to recognise an imperative to resist the separation of intimacy and engagement. Here ACT UP refused the implication of Richard Sennett’s historical narrative in his seminal work, The Fall of Public Man, where he argues that intimate vision was reciprocal to the abandonment of the public domain. For Sennett, intimacy in nineteenth-century Europe was ‘an attempt to solve the public problem by denying that the public exists’.12 ACT UP understood in its performative interventions that ‘playacting requires an audience of strangers to succeed’, but were unwilling to continue with Richard Sennett’s logic when he says: ‘but is meaningless or even destructive among intimates’.13 Inverting the logic of the fall of public man again, ACT UP insisted that members of an intimate society became artists not, as Sennett once insisted, deprived of an art, but granted an art. There is no reason to conclude with Sennett, then, that ‘theatricality has a special, hostile relation to intimacy’, but no reason either to contradict him when he continues: ‘theatricality has an equally special, friendly relation to a strong public life’. ACT UP would appear from the perspective of the centres from which it arose, especially New York and London and the centres to which it applied its theatricality, not to have invested in a presumptuous split of intimacy and engagement. By refusing the convention of a public politics at odds with the accidents of the individual, by contesting Diderot’s paradox of acting, in which the tears raised by the everyday tragedies of loss in real life are distanced from those realised by the touching narrative of those lives, the absorption in intimate affairs was the contrary of an uncivilised society of a previous era. ACT UP marked the centrality of, and claim to, an intimacy without fear, played out on a central stage and a high altar not in the wings or a side chapel. This book explores those terrains exposed by ACT UP and others, left for performance at the margin of that other margin, variously described as the centre, the dominant and the majority, in order to decide whether the edge, the subaltern and the minoritarian is where it’s at, and where it wants to be. When the seriously unorthodox artist Vito Acconci said: ‘I’d welcome the chance sometime, the risk, of having to start from the center,’ I imagined this to be a journey of the most complex and radical kind, not a surrender to conservatism.14 When, recently, I proposed we might reimagine what a ‘civic centre’ might be I was surprised to hear Richard Sennett earnestly remind me that it was the margin that it was where it was

On The Social Life of Theatre 21

at, especially given this warning was made in the presence of Doreen Massey, a geographer and spatial critic who has done more than anyone to complicate the gender, economic and political presumptions that might accrue, equally, to these much abused relative terms.15 By setting out from anywhere other than a border, by facing up to the possibility of performance ‘as such’, this book is an anomaly in performance study where interest has long been invested in the exemplary exception. My critically orthodox concern here is with the innovative convention of performance as such and its relationship with human performance in particular and the relationship of specific performances to politics in particular and their precise distinction to ‘the political’ in general. But what can such a claim mean more prosaically? A brief example from what follows will suffice for the moment. The political project always requires a legend telling of it to do what it has to do, and most legends of the political have politics begin at a border. The philosopher Jacques Rancière has demonstrated, with considerable wit in the opening to his book On The Shores of Politics, how Plato dragged philosophy from the borderlands of the coast, the threat of the seascape and the anarchy of the sailors, the tumultuous ebbs and flows of the littoral, towards the shimmering illusions of the cave, submerged within the safety of dry land. While I dive deep into the caves of Lascaux in the next chapter, I am not there to establish another philosophy of appearance predicated on shadowy illusions, but rather more mundanely to consider the ways in which humans remaindered themselves at the fringes of a company of other animals. Politicising the performance of the hunt here recognises its centrality to pre-historic life while contesting the presumed centrality of humanness implied by these first marks of human representation. Here subterranean mark-making is recognised as cognisant not of the exemplary nature of humans as the first animal artists, but rather as other animals’ illumination of a human’s shared ability to be irritable. It is not quite yet a question of ‘to be or not to be’, suicide would be a luxury in such an environment, but here, perhaps less promisingly, simply the possibility that I might be able to be irritable, in the first place. Politicising performance, within this reduced scale of measurement, could mean gauging the inner sense of such irritability, our sentience, and asking how such knowledge might engage with those limits which are put upon it. So, in each of the case studies that follow, the alluring appeal of the political will be deferred for just long enough to allow the apparently reduced circumstances of a more reticent, less ambitious reading of possibilities to be carried out. Having announced the project to politicise performance, I would now like to do the work of temporarily displacing from the centre of attention one of the most fervently imagined yet little realised relationships between theatre and society, that is the contention that performance has something to do with ‘the political’. By political I mean that gesture towards the

22 Theatre, Intimacy & Engagementt

resolution of an injustice that in its instrumental character observes the more difficult, slower recognition of the process of politics that encounters continuing injustice. Those with a vested interest in the potential political impact of their field should not worry: where there are well-developed theoretical relations between these terms, for instance the relations between direct action and radical performance Aldo Milohnic is able to evoke in Slovenia, urgent political work will continue irrespective of the temporary arguments I make here.16 Furthermore, in the United Kingdom and North America, in the first decade of the 2000s, where there is currently little of the sophisticated performative interventions widespread in central and eastern Europe, the anti-theatrical prejudice that gives the theatre academic, fearful of their shrinking relevance, so much perverse pleasure, will not go away that easily either. By the end of the book I will have reaffirmed Plato’s fears of the poets and the potential affects of mimesis by reacquainting performance and politics on renewed terms. But first I will do some more careful and admittedly less promising work that I would like to call, inadvisably and only until a more mellifluous term is offered: ‘showciology’. I am forced to adopt this hybrid term (a socially informed philosophy of appearance) in the absence of a discipline. I am not homeless but, discursively at least, performance seeking the social is. Denied the solace of either nature or society, performance study would itself appear to be a vagabond insisting on its right to be left to its own devices, apparently free of social constraint and yet unable to secure any kind of leverage on the dominant conditions it knows so much about, and senses it could do so much to effect for the better. Performance studies in the US university system was, before it was rolled out internationally, partly sired by Victor Turner’s linear ideas of ‘social drama’ channelled through the feedback loops of Richard Schechner’s ‘direct theatre’. Of course Schechner’s influential essay ‘The Street is The Stage’, published and republished several times in the early 1990s, is as marked by its moment as Theatre & Everyday Life, written in the same period, and both appear somewhat distant now.17 The last decade has seen a veritable explosion of politically inflected critiques of theatre and performance, but little of this work has examined the conditions of its own terms of reference. Framed within the desire for political resolution, through an expedient rhetorics of solution, theatre politics has somehow been assumed to be operative through efficacy, commitment and opposition. Now in a state characterised by Bojana Kunst as one of political exhaustion, where the impossibility of resistance has long been recognised, where oppositional interventions are folded into bureaucratic normativity, some slower thinking is required on these matters. And that is what showciology has been designed to do – to retard thinking, and, in the process, hopefully, to make that thinking thick. A certain idiotic quality in a name does not mean the subject has to be stupid. Once this ill-starred dis-

On The Social Life of Theatre 23

cipline has retarded the romantic voluntarism of the shot-gun wedding called ‘political theatre’, it will have done the philosophical part of its work and it can be consigned to the disciplinary reject shop along with phrenology, astrology and ethology. So, for the purposes of doing this remedial work, to seek a politics that others presume is already present and correct in the end-game of political theatre, I would like here to create a ‘prefab’ shelter for performance study, not so much a lean-to around the back of the human laboratory, rather a temporary porch that joins the laboratory and its field, that is outside itself. I imagine something like the flapping canvas that shelters the entrance to ‘Billy Smart’s Circus’ grafted on to the revolving door of Glaxo Smith Kline’s pharmaceutical headquarters near my home in West London. Here there is just enough history to be going on with, but not so much as to allow memory and mourning to set the scene. Neither amnesia nor nostalgia can characterise this threshold. The flickering neon sign above the canopy that reads showciology should attract those that wish to describe, examine and reaffirm theatre’s social credentials against theatre’s singularly anti-social tendencies. Like all ‘prefabs’ this is as temporary as one requires and provisional enough not to worry anybody when the time comes for its removal. It is made of prefabricated materials, elements drawn from the disciplines that border theatre practise from within and outside the laboratory, disciplines that might welcome the considerable insights performance has to offer: philosophy, sociology and phenomenology. In the end all performance is about a certain kind of formatting, it cannot escape the form at its heart and showciology is intended to provide a critical means through which to recover an order between theatre and the social that is discernable, identifiable and the reasonable object of a disciplinary study.18 After all, the human laboratory has already provided multiple examples for description and analysis. The first requirement of this new discipline will be to guard against preemptive politically correct presumptions while undertaking a critical assessment of the claims of politics. Removing the fear of premature political recrimination reminds us straight away how timid our use of concepts has become since the post-structuralist purges of the last millennium. For instance, here and very much against the grain, to anthropomorphise performance study as a ‘vagabond’ is not a pitiful aberration, forgiven or not by the reader, but just the first of many such anthropomorphisms in this work. These occur on the understanding that, as the historian of science Bruno Latour has made clear in his histories of technology, all good facts are necessarily anthropomorphised to come to our attention in the first place and as a ‘good fact’ (always material, always substantial, always present), performance does not deserve to be left out any longer in the atomistic cold. There is a social life to every fact, and some more

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colourful than others. So the first axiom of showciology and this book is: Anthropomorphise wherever necessary but with due regard for both partners in the odd couple. Performance theoreticians have long argued the reservations they have with these existing paradigms and their relevance to performance analysis, and I share many of these reservations. Yet at the very moment over the last decade when the lacuna left by this observation might have been filled with propositions of alternative strategies for addressing injustice, if not politicising performance, there has been, from the institutional discipline of performance studies at least, an immediate withdrawal from the ground cleared, as though to say that to offer alternatives was inherently stabilising and conservative. Various words were used to describe this gap, however, from ‘anti-discipline’, ‘inter-discipline’, to ‘post-discipline’ and ‘paradigm explosion’ all of which have concretised, to all but the most inside of the insiders, the ineffable very nicely. Text-books (however partial), departments (however inaccessible) and founders (however inspiring) are patronised by pretending they do not constitute a discipline with the responsibilities and privileges that go with discourses. The inherent contradiction of claims to the oppositional was confirmed when fast upon the loss of a discipline came a welter of genealogies claiming its hereditary purity, most of them North American and most of them, funnily enough, based within the academy.19 I am suspicious of any claims to pedigree and no more so than when it is a performance pedigree. As Georges Bataille pointed out in his philosophy of religion, there is no purity in birth, simply purification. I celebrate the energy of those, such as Ian Maxwell in Sydney and Rustom Bharucha in Calcutta, who have painstakingly recorded the wholly partial manner in which their own geospecific genealogies of performance study have been reduced to buzz-boxes, or elided completely by this new orthodoxy. But the more these local appeals, ‘You have left us out of the story!’, are repeated, the more obvious the need to step aside from the conditions of the game, set by the paternalism of the inclusive father-figure of the field, and create some substantial alternatives. It is for this reason I want to offer in showciology a new, if temporary, discipline, an exposed and less architecturally secure home for some work, one that is both immediately apparent in, and relevant to, the locality, but available to be mobilised further afield if required. Do not adopt this discipline if you have a perfectly good one already as it has had limited testing and is potentially unstable. However, if you do not find yourself or your interests reflected in volumes with titles that combine the terms Introduction and Performance Studies, then the following may have something to offer. I will return to these arguments with ‘performance studies’, braiding them throughout this part, with the hope of making the apparently esoteric more palatable and retaining the interest of readers who believe there

On The Social Life of Theatre 25

are other more urgent debates than discourse disagreements to be getting on with. Suffice here to say that appeals to resist defining the shape of a field always serve those in power, hideously limited as that power is, more readily than those wishing to broach its borders with their own generational perspectives. Stabilisations would of course be unwelcome in an Elysian field in which academic practices had no relevance to the perfect world outside, or such elegant solutions had been found for theatrical problems that alienation, like all other solids in modernity, had floated away on the polluted city air. But this book recognises other landscapes, one of which, Israel and Palestine, was brought back to our attention in the most uncompromising philosophical manner by Adi Ophir, in which the proliferation and distribution of superfluous evils requires performance to think more carefully about its relevance to suffering. Showciology is proposed here as a method to be knocked back by students, practitioners and public in the field, it is a discipline (with a baker’s dozen of strict rules of conduct masquerading as liberal ‘axioms’) and the following chapters will determine whether it works. But like all prefabs it does not have to last long, will never have the last word, and might provide the last laugh when it collapses ignominiously when lightly pushed by a well-balanced newcomer, whether they come through the revolving door of the laboratory or, perhaps more likely, from the exposure of the field. This capacity for demolition and rebuilding by future generations is in my view favourable to the tilting at glorious windmills that the Sancho Panza’s of Performance, successors to the Don Quixotes of Drama, have been left to pursue in a terrain of shimmering, ephemeral objects.

THE ENDS

OF

POLITICS

So let’s begin by removing right-off one of the foundations to almost all discussions, discourses and theories of theatre: the political. Contrary to Augusto Boal’s view, it is not that not enough is said of politics when it comes to theatre, but rather, as Michel Foucault was apt to point out, regarding the proliferating verbality of Victorian sex, that too much has been said of the political (with so little practical action and effect). Prefabs do not need foundations, certainly not ones as shaky as this. If one of the central questions I wish to ask in this book is: ‘What does it mean to act politically?’, a question for which there is obviously no simple answer, my sense is that performance might have something critical to offer as long as those of us interested in the question surrender a latent and unfounded belief that commitment marks theatre’s primary political will. If indifference to politics is indifference to the principle of representation, then indifference to politics is indifference to theatre. Politics is here used, after Bernard Williams, as the word to describe the means by which

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safety, trust and the conditions of cooperation might be organised for the greatest number.20 This definition of politics is self-evidently performancefriendly and one that will make my task of separating theatre and the political more, not less, difficult. The political, on the other hand, denotes that tendency to still the continuing process of politics, instrumentally interrupting the performative capacity of politics and predicting effects that in reality are far more elusive to representation than any party would like to imagine. Theatre is here used as the word to describe expressive practices that through the presence of performer and witness affect an excitation which sustains the performative process while necessarily interrupting any premature political outcome. Given this definition, the one state that is intolerable to theatre, that indeed denies the existence of theatre, is indifference. By indifference I certainly do not mean the defining pathologies of theatre attendance, all of which confirm rather than deny that you are in the presence of theatricality: boredom, embarrassment, and wonder at the inherent ineptness of it all. I laid these concerns out some years ago in Theatre & Everyday Life and though my thinking on some of that work is questioned here, the basic premise of an argument there about the significance of a ‘lay theatre’ retains its contemporary impact.21 These sideeffects of the theatre machine, which are the real thing, that Nicholas Ridout discusses with great ingenuity in his book: Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, do undoubtedly share an elegant symmetry with a number of Marxist concerns to do with alienation and labour within a capitalist economy. But while theatre can be read as another site of production of oppression among many, with its own workers and profiteers, it is unclear quite how such internalised questions of political economy relate to anything other than a general sense of the symmetry between the unfairness of the theatre industry and the unfairness of the world. As Randy Newman, to stay with one lyricist, reminds us after the school parent’s evening at which a bunch of froggish husbands parade their beautiful wives: ‘Karl, the world isn’t fair, It isn’t and never will be.’ So to raise the stakes in this argument I will not here seek an apparent symmetry between the theatre machine, its politics and more general political processes, I will take a parallax view and initiate an incompatibility and a gap where there has been a presumption of comparability and relation. I will introduce an asymmetric difference between the two terms. The first political difference, and the only one required for politics to begin, is the recognition of the antagonism that arises between friends and enemies. The tension I will introduce might be a surprising one for such old friends (especially given the sub-title of this part) yet it cannot be avoided any longer: theatre and the political are enemies. The proposition that theatre and the political are enemies is a contestable given that I would like to sustain for the duration of this writing to see

On The Social Life of Theatre 27

what happens to both theatre and politics, a polemical tactic of limited durability intended here to invite other kinds of possibility for performance and politics. It is not so far-fetched. The defining qualities of performance after all deny the political. Theatre is a total stranger to the instrumentality of political effects, a stranger to the instrumentality required to secure the conditions of trust, safety and cooperation described above as the defining qualities of politics. Performance and the political are incommensurable if not downright contradictory. Contrary to closing out and abandoning my project to politicise performance, before it has begun, this book begins again by representing the irreducible relativism of the two terms, rooted in the brute fact of the gap between differentiated genres of discourse. This restarts the social project because this ‘gap’ is not in my view an aporia that invites inaction, but a social site and an opportunity for engagement. I said it some years ago; contrary to Peter Brook’s claim, there is no such thing as an ‘empty space’ for theatre. More recently Simon Bayly has put it more felicitously: ‘There is … a void at the heart of appearing. But rather than simply existing as something missing, a lack or a gap, this void is possessed of a latent potentiality …’.22 This latency, a form of arrested life that I will return to later, is simultaneously the greatest strength of theatre and its weakness. When performance appeals to the political it cannot secure its claim on the grounds of this promissory note. One strand of this book aims to explore how this apparent weakness is what makes theatre so significant and so potentially full of politics. While performance has the potential to be saturated with politics, theatre cannot be political. Having admitted that one of the central conjunctions of twentieth century cultural practice, political theatre, is so problematic for me, what might I do in the space it previously occupied? What I propose to do through the rest of this part of the book is to reiterate the political terms while substituting each with less impressive, but perhaps more considered associations. In the meantime, in order not to mislead anyone, let me be clear from the beginning: despite the fact that politics are never far away, this is not a book about political theatre.23 Indeed, I would suggest that to politicise performance requires us to do away with the idea of political theatre, if not political theatre itself. Despite what Bertolt Brecht said in The Messingkauf Dialogues about the inadequacy of slogans, here goes: Down with political theatre! I am consciously mixing the terms theatre and performance here in order to re-establish their affinity at a disciplinary moment that would appear to witness their withdrawal from each other. I am unwilling to sacrifice theatre, the term and the field of practices it describes, precisely because of the apparently intractable instrumentalism that makes theatre appear so conservative to some of those who would wish it away to be replaced by a more pliant term, performance. To simply replace the term ‘theatre’ with ‘performance’ and then to appeal to the plurality of practices that continue

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to escape the instrumental under this more diverse wing of aesthetic and social processes is to solve an interpretive dilemma without facing up to the implications of such a sleight of hand. By placing the term ‘theatre’, with the implication that it is there to be grasped, alongside the term ‘performance’, which is so interesting because of its characteristic of continuing somewhere just beyond our reach, I wish to sustain another minimal difference for this project, one in which the goal-orientated teleologies of the political, sometimes discernable in the theatrical but by no means always, are put into tension with the apparent dispersal of the performative, that more than often confirms its audience’s expectations in quite the most conservative way possible. I would not go so far as to describe this audience, as Jack Smith did in Lower East Side New York in the 1960s as ‘one hundred art school cripples’, but I would take heart from this most recalcitrant and interesting of live-artists, that the apparently radical is likely to be the object of special scrutiny among those for whom any serious fissure in the continuity of the margin as the margin would be as unwelcome as disruptions are to the status quo for the equally conservative conservative.24 My own sleight of hand in mixing the terms ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’ is plainly visible to an audience more commonly used to their exquisitely nuanced separation. My goal is not the continued interior definition of their minimal differences, but the recognition, tracing and measurement of that remainder to them, the processes of politics that, despite protestations, remain remaindered by both their marginal practices. While performance cannot secure the political, it is, despite itself, a part of politics. When it announces its political purpose, it sacrifices its claim to political charge. This does not mean for a moment that theatre is in any sense apolitical. In its denial of the political, theatre affirms the politics of which it seeks to be a part. This realm is not theatrical, but almost as real as that most durable of the arts. This is the realm of action in and on the world in which performance plays a rôle. To maintain the possibility of such action in the world while continuing to practise and think about theatre in that same world is the ambition of this work. There is no point, in my view, for theatre to be consigned to the marginalia of the ‘merely cultural’ while the centres of brute force assert and reassert their conditions of oppression on the very performative grounds that theatre might have some affinity with, or leverage upon. While I share with a wide range of performance colleagues an interest in the attraction and repulsion of theatre, compulsion and disappointment in the face of performances we have often shared very differently on the same evenings in London, across Europe and the USA, to situate the political value of theatre in such ‘discomforts’ is to expose the more serious marginality of that theatre to other discomforts being felt elsewhere.25 It is that apparent parallax between theatre and its ground that interests me here.

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The antagonism I create between theatre and the political wagers that their relations can no longer be presumed. In suspending this assumption I want to suggest another way of understanding an old arrangement. As Carl Schmitt has said: ‘Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically practical in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy.’26 It is for Schmitt a high point for politics when the enemy is ‘in concrete clarity, recognised as the enemy’.27 It is in this spirit, against my better judgement, that I separate them, for now, in mutual hostility. In sundering such good friends my liberal appetite for theatre’s political potential gives way to a critical sense of theatre and politics’ more troubled, but fruitful and honest associations. Theatre might have lost a friend, but in doing so it has gained an older ally and one that I am happy to reintroduce it to as this book proceeds. The name for that old ally, and a name which invites me to call my temporary discipline showciology, is the social. The test of my temporary polemic is to ask whether, with the political in the frame, a term as apparently ambivalent as ‘the social’ would ever have got a look in? I suspect not, and certainly not with a renewed sense of its associative if not its relational capacity. The social may (or may not, depending upon your associations with the word) be more welcome than the political but it cannot become the standin for speeding up the analysis underway here. Look at what the excitements of the upper case ‘Social Theatre’ can do to otherwise exemplary figures in the field. Speed kills in this case. When James Thompson and Richard Schechner declare in a journal dedicated to ‘Social Theatre’: ‘Performance studies as a discipline promises to lead theatre studies out of its parochialism and into a necessary and powerful interdisciplinarity’, I say, speak for yourselves, theatre studies was there long before performance studies took its hand, and any perceived caricature of performance studies in this book cannot be any more harmful than this travesty of an immature, isolated ‘theatre studies’. This ‘promise’ is predicated on a glaring, and I suspect for the purposes of the journal it appears in, wilful, elision of a history of socially oriented, wholly interdisciplinary European theatre study it surely knows well. When Thompson and Schechner then say: ‘Performance studies recognises all areas of social life as topics for the performance theorist’, then I say, with great respect, been there, done that, with my excellent colleagues in theatre studies. The one thing that theatre studies, if such a thing exists any more than performance studies, has not encouraged, is for anyone to do what Thompson and Schechner in a Salvation Army moment, worthy of Guys and Dolls declare: ‘Social theatre carries this banner into practice by going to hospitals, prisons and war zones and proving that performance itself is a method for understanding what goes on there …’. Sit down you’re rocking the boat! The feel of a maternal hand, Sarah guiding Sky Masterson to social virtue, is all too much, not to mention the impression that it is the veracity of an

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interpretive tool rather than the suffering that is happening there that would appear, in this caricature at least (if not the evidence in essays that follow), to be the object of the exercise.28 So, on these grounds, I will maintain the artificial excision of theatre and the political, believing that the social, whatever your initial reservations, might still have some surprises for us. Some categories, like those resilient phantasms society and nature, do still have an impressive sleight of hand about them. One of them is not ‘Social Theatre’. Down with Social Theatre!

A SINGULAR ART So far so polemical, let me rephrase this opening with attention to material detail, and then attempt what was once quaintly called ‘empirical observation’ by situating these critical questions back in the thick description of performance observation. If the theoretical tone of this part is off-putting, then there is a good deal of performance description in the rest of the book. I spend a great deal of time in and outside theatres witnessing and participating in performances, this book is made up of some of those experiences, and I am happy to say that in very few of those events can I presume to understand everything of what I am seeing and hearing. I have always taken the act in front of me to be one of good faith and have therefore always presumed clarity to be my responsibility, not its. This creative wastage makes the theatre an act that I enjoy, an economy of loss that may be proportionately different to my experience of reading, but nonetheless one that shares, rather than denies, a familial association of leakage and constructive confusion with what confronts me, whether it be on the page or the stage. As long as writing generates affects in me, then I do not expect it to be any more instrumental than the most elliptical of solo performances. So, given the centrality of theory to the world I am describing, and the fact that thinking is anything but a marginal pursuit and orders almost everything we are able to do, it would be negligent to leave it behind too quickly here, as though it were done and dusted. I agree with the ethnographer Philippe Descola when he writes: ‘there is no justification for assigning causal or analytical pre-eminence to the material over the conceptual. Every action, every labour process begins with a representation of the condition and procedures necessary for its execution.’29 For instance, writing about theatre, and particularly theatre and politics, in an adequate way seems to me to demand some notion of the ‘radically particular’ for the writing to get underway. In these terms, what I have just written, and you have just read, would appear to fail in its welter of generality. Exemplary texts such as Baz Kershaw’s The Radical In Performance and Ales Erjavec’s work on politicised art under late-socialism, unravel these associations in genealogical ways, but there is much more to say on this matter as the

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argumentative spine of this book depends upon a certain understanding of what it means to appeal to the ‘radically particular’.30 I have shown elsewhere, in a book called Architecturally Speaking, how a fetishisation of spatial analysis in theatre, drawn from readings of cultural geography and cartography has over-determined questions of context and situation.31 The problem with these emphases, as Peter Hallward has demonstrated in the realm of post-colonial theory, is that any appeal to a more general sense of what is being analysed depends now upon recognition of the greatest possible diversity of particularities. There is a glaring problem with this kind of local focus, however well-meaning its exponents. As Hallward says: ‘a mere insistence on particularity … is unable to resolve any theoretical questions whatsoever.’32 In its slipstreaming of a soft version of cultural studies, performance analysis falls into the same dilemma. The consequence is that performance studies, if not recent theatre studies, is at risk of becoming a theory of pure particularity, of radical fragmentation and irreducibly pluralistic. Almost all current publishing in performance studies wears the badge of radical particularity as an a priori imprimatur of relevance. In this it mimics the trend of a theatre studies that, rooted in textual traditions (most notably the imperative for a more and more relevant Shakespeare to be ‘Our Contemporary’), increasingly marginalised its operations by multiplying its objects of study without giving equal reconsideration to its efficacy as an interpretive strategy.33 This is the challenge that showciology is expected to encounter: as a discipline it is required to formulate general theses as well as particular descriptions. Evidence of this problem is widespread but one need look no further than the fine quarter-century published history of the London International Festival of Theatre, Turning World, to recognise immediately the tension between the anecdotal particularity of the majority of the book and the much wider theoretical ambitions of Rustom Bharucha’s work on the international and Dragan Klaic´ ’s forensic work on the problematic idea of the festival included in that book.34 Neither the anecdotal nor the general are at fault here, but their tension does not amount to the sum of their parts – a festschrift does not a philosophy make.35 As an example of theatrethinking and writing, this example pales when set against the queasy feeling one gets in the performance studies arena where ‘particularities’, from the theatricality of bayonet practise to the performativity of the order to execute, FIRE!, are awash in the same morally evacuated plane of consistency, effortlessly reinforcing the uncritical assumption of the power of the pluralistic. So what can showciology do about this old problem? The first thing not to do, as a later chapter on the disappearance of the flea circus shows, is to mistake reducing the scale of an enquiry toward the infinitely small as being of any advantage beyond its own expansion of the conventions of the analytic scale. The particularity of a given event cannot be grasped by

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that miniaturising move any more than making the point of study infinitely BIG (as Sally Banes once beautifully showed us with her analysis of the use of elephants in Balanchine’s ballets, and as Royal de Luxe peculiarly failed to materialise with the vastness of their Sultan’s Elephant in the streets of London).36 Rather in the interests of avoiding the common condition of hopping frantically between the local and the global, to redeem the usual acceleration towards a premature paradise signed ‘context’, I will do what Bruno Latour has encouraged when dealing with the vertigo-inducing polarities of the infrastructural imaginary, I will recognise ‘the impossibility of staying in one of the two sites for a long period …’.37 What follows this temporary limit to the securities of dwelling is slower (Latour’s term prompted mine, but is worse than mine: ‘slowciology’) but at least this initially de-accelerated outing is commensurable with the evocation of ‘reticent representation’ in the middle part of the book, and a slow-poetics of natural historical method at the book’s conclusion. The two spectres of nature and society will have therefore been met by the same pace of enquiry on the basis that, in showciology if nowhere else, what is good for one is good for the other. Bruno Latour in his reconstructive work, Reassembling the Social, applies clamps to this process to retard unwelcome leaps of interpretation, I would prefer as a London driver, all-too-often clamped and towed, to evoke a theatrical machine of limitation: the proscenium frame. This will allow for just the requisite degree of bracketing without subjecting the object to unnecessary static. The arch I would like to return to the theatre with is that of philosophy. That is, a philosophy that figures as the binding agent for so much that is worthwhile in contemporary European theatre studies, and indeed was recently characterised by Janelle Reinelt as the identifying quality of current theatre studies in the United Kingdom.38 Philosophy that is, as Simon Bayly puts it ‘generated with a concern for what was originally overlooked or forgotten, even as it constructs and deconstructs the very idea of an origin.’39 But also philosophy as read by Anastasia for her father, artist and filmmaker Gary Hill. In 1994 Hill asked his young daughter to read to camera the entirety of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks On Colour, and in so-doing elicited an extraordinary document of working a text for its surprises and its concealed rhythms, its poetry and its renewed meaningfulness for our understanding of colour, but also the world in which those pigments are perceived.40 To circumvent, via the long path of philosophy, the premature leap from local to global, commonly expressed in the surprisingly fluid passage from theatre to society, I will adopt Peter Hallward’s typology of the ‘singular’, and the ‘specific’ to help distinguish general modes of particularisation or, another way of putting it, individuation, in theatre.41 Politicising performance beyond the generalities of the radical and the oppositional demand attention be given to this typology if only to refresh the very terms on which our understanding of theatre’s efficacy rests.

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Here is a summary of the key terms I will use in this reorientation over the coming pages. The ‘specified’ describes that condition and process through which the individual is characterised as more or less passive and objectified, the ‘conformity of actors to a presumed nature’. This is a demarcation in which the individual, automatically and unconsciously, conforms to a specified state, and then, importantly, the manner in which the relative authenticity or not of this conformity is supervised from outside.42 An obvious example from my home-town in estuary Essex would be the appearance of ‘unwitting’ (and this is the important unconscious aspect of the process) Madonna wannabees through the 1990s, goths in the 1980s, punks in the 1970s, mods in the 1960s and teds in the 1950s. While specified from outside, the fallacy that these individuals somehow lacked cultural capital in their ‘innocence’ of what was sartorially befalling them was of course laughable when set against those who were really impoverished. They were precisely free to assume the projection of the specifying force of cultural capital upon themselves for as long as their propensity to boredom and irritation, their consciousness of the mimetic compulsion in the situation, was deferred. In a more dramatic context, the history of one peculiar form of Western theatre, its privileging of an amorphous yet ever-present audience and its dalliance with ‘truth to character’ appears on first sight to conform in its own way to this ‘specified’. The specified and its tyrannies of classification from outside is what the work of gender theory, and particularly Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of gender, has done so much to resist.43 Hence the uneasy way in which a performance studies paradigm of enquiry, predicated partly in recent years on Judith Butler’s work, has inevitably found itself in tension with the theatrical artifice of specified character from which it distances itself in embarrassment. I will return to the disciplinary implications of this later. The anti-theatrical prejudice of performance studies is of course just the latest in a long lineage of detractors of the dramatic. In the meantime the ‘specific’, to be distinguished from ‘the specified’, is for Hallward: ‘a function of what we do rather than what we are; it is a matter of how we see rather than who sees or what is seen, and of what something means, rather than what it is or commands’.44 Theatre and performance study might on first sight appear to associate more with this condition given the communitarian appeal of its special forms of resistance to the objectified and the cooperative sense of the field’s idea of itself acting as a subject-with-others. This is the political animal that Marx spoke of ‘in the company of others’ and only recognisably human because of that company. This might stand as a soft argument for the inherent politics of community that the assembly of performance invites, but again as Philip Auslander, Sonja Kuftinck and others have shown with great persistence, there should be no presumption about theatre’s ability to create

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community of any kind, and especially not over and above other media such as television, digital networks or indeed that most innovative and oldest of screens, the glazed ceramic tile. Lovers of theatre with diplomatic leanings might hope for a mediating role between the specified and the specific, the forms of performance on first sight apparently well-suited to easing the passage implied between these terms, between the object and the subject. As Peter Hallward puts it, critical theory would appear to share this investment: ‘To move from the specified to the specific, without yielding to the temptations of the singular: such is the only general goal of a critical theory of the particular as such.’45 The political problem for theatre is the obvious question that must be asked of the specific: specific to what, and to whom, and how? This trio of questions frames the threat of the demand for context that teases theatre at every turn and has given rise to a good deal of the antagonism that I have identified as the defining relationship of the two parties, theatre and the political. The tension between theatre and its political claims has come about because most theatre is neither able to manage, nor to effect, the move from the specified to the specific, most theatre is in fact, singular. Specific individuals relate to others, to themselves and to an environment (however one wishes to describe that combination of the symbolic and the natural that surrounds us that was once described as nature-culture), while, as Hallward points out, the singular individual is one that ‘transcends all such relations’.46 Theatre and the political are enemies because, despite everything Nicholas Bourriaud says in his much-quoted book Relational Aesthetics, the relationality expected of politics is betrayed repeatedly (different each night) by theatre’s inability to relate. Theatre is dysfunctional in this respect. By definition performance does what the singular does, it: ‘collapses (specific) subject and (specific) object together in one force, one creative power that generates the medium of its own existence.’47 This describes very well the moebius-like dynamic of performance and its apparent affinity with disconcerting philosophical texts such as Jean François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy with its manically circulating energies.48 The current Gadarene rush to ‘relational’ studies in performance is just the latest in a long line of diversions from the real problem and potential of performance that I identify here, that is its singularity. If performance is in some way self-individuating, that is somehow beyond relationality, then a singular theatre is one which would create the medium of its own existence. This might appear at first sight to be an unpromising conclusion for an enquiry seeking to politicise performances as I wish to do. But when strangers temporarily constituted as audiences speak of a theatre event ‘creating its own universe’ this might be one way of recognising the singular quality of performance. This ‘universe’ can only be immanent to its operation, it cannot be accounted for by anything

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outside the event of performance as such. The sense of the unlimited that prevails in the most hidebound of performance places (the ramparts of Elsinore) and constrained theatrical scenes (the darkness of a meeting between guards and a ghost) is generated by the event’s singularity, the opposite dynamic to that sense of impoverished generality that mitigates against the inopportune appeal to the outside. There are no ‘universals’ in Hamlet, but at the moment a ghostly figure is ordered to raise their visor at its outset in order that they might be identified beyond their spectral speech, surely the spectre of the lifting of other veils on authoritarian order, elsewhere, is immediately obvious, apparent and unlimited in its dramatic impact in the mid-2000s? It is not that the burkha and the jihab are being evoked by this act, nor that this visor stands for those other textile visors in some direct metonymic association, but rather that this singular act is a process of subjectivisation that marks this aesthetic territory out from that other, much larger historical one in the world. What occurs in theatre is thus always singular, immanent to itself, and yet the remainder to another reality from which it is in a process of continual retreat. Far from being a weakness, it is this singularity that is the great strength that performance offers our understanding of the social. Politicising performance requires us to mark and measure the way that politics ‘subtracts itself from all experience of what the social world actually is’.49 It is in this dynamic of withdrawal, this vector of retreat, the way that the singular performance is recalled from the plural conditions of its appearance that performance politics operate, not in voluntaristic advances across apparently virgin territories under the banner of the political. Like Alain Badiou’s idea of politics that he lays out in his work Metapolitics, performance is thus always to be figured as a ‘mobile singular work’ before it is thought as in any way socialised. The second axiom of showciology then follows: theatre in its active transcendence of the specific always singularises what was once, but is no more, particular. The singularity of performance comes about through a peculiarly redemptive form of agency. That is because the given of performance is not neutral but problematic and always waits to be overcome in some form of supplementary action. The state of performance is commonly posed in terms of loss and instability, inadequate to the claims being made for it and on it. Ever since Plato and Aristotle first wrote about poetry and theatre this commonly shared sense of lack has run like an unbroken thread through all other accounts of performance, a chord that knots Hans-Thies Lehmann’s ideas of ‘Post Dramatic Theatre’ to his forebears two millennia ago. I have been doing much the same in characterising performance’s lack of political affect, one of a number of lacks that psychoanalysis has done much to fill with its own narratives. Showciology is intended here as a delaying tactic, on the understanding that premature filling of this lack cannot begin to respond to the political implication of this lack. Here

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theatre reaffirms Hallward’s sense that for singularity to be understood, and for me here the significance of thinking and practising theatre in a singular sense, there needs to be an idea of the real (which performance always plays with), an account of the given (which theatre always exposes) the means to dissolve the given (the raison d’être of performance) and an affirmation of this dissolution as redemptive rather than destructive.50 That final expectation, as we shall see when we explore the ubiquity of melancholy in performance study, is somehow a singularity beyond theatre’s capacity, at least in as much as it is commonly figured through what I have caricatured as its depressive rhetorics. What theatre’s singularity prohibits is any facile adoption of, or acceleration towards, context as an explanatory principle. At the same time the singularity of performance renders next to irrelevant any sense that theatre acts as a privileged example of ‘face-to-face’ encounters. For the big also goes the small, for the distant the near, so if we are to politicise performance, out along with context goes the well-worn ideal of ‘face-to-face’ interaction. I am sorry about this as considerable effort in Theatre & Everyday Life went into trying to understand what Emmanuel Levinas meant philosophically by something his translator called the ‘face to face’, and then even more effort went into naïvely trying to apply this to an ethics of performance. Well all that may be as well, but with apologies for being so literal in the face of Levinasian poetics of faciality, the one thing that is obvious from any witness of performance, even to the most passing eye, is the lack of anything that could be described as ‘face engagement’. The marvellous theatrical ‘failure’ of Jonathan Stone’s very well funded performances exploring ‘face dancing’ at The Place theatre in London in the early 2000s, are at once the successful exposure of this limit and the betrayal of performance’s inherent facial banality. Here was an event that in magnifying facial tics and inscrutability reduced the theatrical act to a degree zero of gestural entropy at the edge of its consumption by the cinematic. Agents’ mug shots and the black and white airbrushed photographs in yesterday’s theatre foyers, and today’s conservatoires, might invite us to think of the privileging of faces in the theatrical encounter, but ‘the face’ is a cinematic invention that only made sense to an audience as a face after the invention of the zoom and the faculty of the close-up. Until then it was all indefinable surfaces and volumes, indistinct pits where eyes might be, jowls and cheeks in vague motion, in other words a delightful indistinctness, never privileging the mouth or the eye over the sounds, gestures and apparatus of the whole. The removal of a visor might well reveal a ghost to a guard, but an audience will be left in the dark as to quite what features characterise a spectre. The choreographic painter Edgar Degas captured this imprecise phenomenology of the spectres of the stage more than a century ago, and performance, despite its claims to social veracity, has never estab-

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lished any kind of serious realism beyond this truer impressionism (Figure 9). When Bruno Latour says that ‘Scale is the actor’s own achievement’, the zoom effect might be taken for granted in the cinema, but in live theatre Latour is right to caution: ‘Size and zoom should not be confused with connectedness’.51 And, as the tracing and enactment of connections beyond oneself is the definition of the social, and the social is what I want theatre to participate in, given the absence of the political that I have denied it, then this qualification of the limits to the ‘face to face’ is moot. There are face-to-face encounters in the theatre but there should be no presumptions that these encounters occur across the footlights, between performer and audience in a school-gymnasium, nor between the Boalian Joker and witnesses in a Romanian orphanage. They are much more likely to occur with another set of actors whose ciphers should not obscure the fact that their engagement with us operates on an adjacent yet concrete economy: meetings with the usherette, the barman and the ticket seller, the janitor, the pupil and the parent, the management, the resident and the orphan, are far more facially specific encounters than theatre agents, called actors, can maintain. This book is less interested in perpetuating a fantasy of face-to-face encounter between actor and audience in the modern theatre, than it is in unravelling the order of this other economy within which the complex surfaces of theatre operate. Philippe Descola describes such an economy very well when in attending to the socialization of nature by the Archua people he describes economy as: ‘that structure which combines, in a different way for each society, the system of energetic exchanges consciously organized within an ecosystem with the system of sociocultural devices which make it possible to reproduce these flows …’.52 These surfaces are not in my version ‘surfaces awaiting inscription’, there is no separation between inscription and its site, but the crossing and re-crossing of intensities across and between these surfaces gives rise to what we experience as the excitation of performance. I imagine the realm of performance here, despite all its stagey, binary-inducing machinery, to operate as a sequence of spheres in a multiplicity of movements. This may of course be for no more sophisticated reason than that the earliest performances I saw in Matcham’s Palace Theatre in Westcliff-On-Sea in the early 1960s were witnessed before being diagnosed as seriously short-sighted. I would like to describe two modest encounters in the theatre to serve as an example of these all-too abstract examples. I promised some empirical observation among the abstraction earlier and this is one description of something that happened. The fact that it takes the form of an explanation and a description followed by an anecdote should alert us to the third maxim of showciology, which is: descriptions link event and context in critical ways and should replace social explanation wherever possible. It is my ‘suspicion’ as to the political efficacy of a certain kind of theatre that is most

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obvious from the explanation that follows. The veracity of the objects I am introducing, their very existence in the expanded collective I am seeking to encourage, is in doubt from the very beginning of this attempt to explain my impatience with a certain kind of political dramaturgy. It is the recalcitrance of the object to such explanation, the impedimenta it demonstrates in reducing it to the apparent coherence of that explanation, that for me explains the significance of description. It is description, not explanation that maintains and cultivates the variety of frames within which an act might be considered most adequately and variously, the agency of the author in this process acting performatively to gather what Bruno Latour calls ‘a provisional staging of the connections’. The process of writing here acts more in the spirit of ‘keeping things in play’ than the explanatory hierarchy of ‘ordering by exclusion’. In keeping with my evocation of the note-taking capacity of natural historical method later, it is the capacity for note-taking by all, not the social explanation of the few, that excites me. I wrote of a ‘lay theatre’ in much the same terms a decade ago and the eruption of the critical audience in the emergence of near-universal blogging and the digital democracies of print since has done little to dent my optimism as to the significance ahead of what I said there, and the topicality of what I argue for here. Of course any thick description will be shot through with explanation, the trick is to recognise at what points such explanation adds a new agent to the collective and what the implications of that entry entail. Is it an agent, an actor that by dint of its veracity makes a difference, or is it a weak actor that makes little conceivable difference to the outcome of deliberation? Taking this consideration to heart in all the descriptions and anecdotes that follow in this book, I mix ostensibly weak autobiographical examples with apparently stronger theoretical ones to expose the reciprocity of these two sets of interchangeable terms. The celebration of description over explanation is not an invitation to innocence but a recognition of the false dawn, an innocent one, that often befalls the explanatory principle that presumes there to be a correlation between an oppression wellexplained and an injustice righted. Bruno Latour signals this warning in the following stark way: ‘You might feel the pleasure of providing a ‘powerful explanation’, but that’s just the problem: you partake in the expansion of power, but not in the re-composition of its content.’53 Descriptions in all their variety tend to recompose potential contents better than explanations, and it is for that reason they are especially valued here. So what of my explanation cum description cum anecdote? David Edgar’s dramatic work Playing With Fire at the National Theatre in London in 2005, is unable to affect me politically. Let me rephrase that: I am wondering why this play is so resolutely recalcitrant when it comes to anything we might describe as ‘political’. The more it seeks relations with the world, the more singular and isolated from that world it seems. Its author, who

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coincidentally is sitting a seat away from me to my right, and a number of commentators in the past week, who have yet to arrive because this is the final preview, have prepared me for a performance which I thought would be political in some sense of that word. But it is not political in any sense, which is marginally, other than it is about politics. Its subject is politics while this subject (I cannot speak for others though friends and colleagues have expressed their frustration with this piece in associated terms) appears to be escaping its politics. I turn at the end to David Edgar and, knowing that he does not know me, tell him of the memorable (for me) occasion when we last met, 30 years ago, in 1976 at the west-country premiere of his early work Wreckers. I remember that had political claims made for it too. But it was, equally, not political. I tell David Edgar in the embarrassed silence that follows the revelation of this one-sided, unreciprocated relationship that I am attending this play with some American students. Without malice or a hint of grandeur, indeed, more against himself than them, David looks me in the eye and says thoughtfully: ‘Oh they won’t get it’. He was right and wrong, they did not get it, they got something else. This seems to me to be a hopeful start if an untoward one. At the very least I could say I had had a face-to-face encounter, though not one with a play made up of a cast of entertaining ‘National’ accents yet distant figures. Two weeks later I am with the same students enjoying ‘not getting’ a performance by the Massachusetts-based theatre and song company Young at Heart. I am not here setting up this event as another example of anti-theatrical prejudice where enigmatic performance trumps didactic theatre, indeed for the purposes of consistency I am in this part limiting myself to a very narrow range of events commonly and confidently called ‘theatre’ drawn from mainstream, hegemonic institutions. This is an event, taking place in the most traditional and sumptuous of Matcham theatres, the Lyric in West London, on a stage raised above us with set and costumes. We are not getting anything because we are being overwhelmed, literally moved in our seats, by something other than the political, a genuinely processual and fluid politics of performance. The company moves slowly, but purposefully and somehow redolent of the task-based ambience of recent live art and performance work. What would appear to be limitations of flexibility of movement reveal themselves to be a restrained, and sometimes strained, choreography. This is a chorus of absolutely singular spirits for whom solos appear to be an opportunity to show-off not only their difference but their heightened aliveness and their ability to sustain a breath, any breath, for longer than seems wise given the height of the raked-stage. The accompanying band straddle more than seven ages of man with the presence of a woman playing a violin that makes the middle-aged drummer appear to be a baby with sticks. While experience might appear to be the framing dynamic of this company of

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egos looking to the future, a collective will against reminiscence would appear to be their shared modus operandi. It is only on the rendition of Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner by a 93-year old, a song so hopelessly out of joint with everything that has gone before in its sentimental local kitsch that it illuminates the bracing displacement of these octo-vaudevillians, that one realises these folk must have a home to go to, somewhere, they cannot always be on the road. No claims have been made by anyone for this work, The Road To Nowhere, beyond the curious and simple conceit of the attraction of watching a generation of men and women in their eighties and nineties perform songs from a generation in their thirties and forties. The gap that opens up between the lyrics and the artists, the ‘original’ rendition and its subsequent covers, the message and its medium is saturated with ethical potential. The simple fact of extinction, that Joe in his ubiquitous baseball cap is in front of us now but one day won’t be and nor will we, but in the meantime there is time for another rendition of Forever Young or I Feel Good. This is a situation that alerts us to a condition in which there is something worth doing. There is no good to be done here, in this company nobody would presume to murmur the words wellbeing or welfare, but what is being done is very good. The name for that condition of an ethics of association in this book is: the social. A fourth axiom of showciology then ensues: The social life of theatre awaits a politics that will not come and acknowledges an ethics that precedes its appearance.

THE SOCIAL CONDITIONAL Showciology, like sociology in many ways before it, is concerned with show-making, the question of appearance in tension with the social. This distinguishes it as a discipline from those that are not interested in appearances or social concerns. And not all are despite their protestations. Many disciplines conduct their trade on an economy of the hidden, driven by the allegorical opportunities of apparent absence, and performance studies has certainly invested heavily and hermeneutically in this sparse terrain. The argument of this book is predicated on the binary opposite of that absence in art, it characterises the image as saturated and excessive, charged and enduring. By the end of the book I will also argue that it is not an absence of identity that is the common multicultural dilemma but a surfeit of competing claims made on identity, a saturated state that mimics in critical ways for our understanding of it, the plenty of performance. Showciology is interested in the inherent hide and seek of performance, it certainly, as I have made clear rather literally, does not take things at ‘face-value’, but it is nevertheless unusual for its willingness to commit to understanding the mechanisms of appearance. This is important to note as it may serve to retard the wasted journey of social interpretation. At the

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exhaustion of ways of speaking about performance, a sleight of hand often takes place, an analytic acceleration, and social context is figured as that dimension, mysteriously reached without the fatigue of journey, which will prematurely curtail any further argument and become the cause for a muted celebration. But as Bruno Latour has pointed out, the origins of the word ‘social’, socius, suggest something quite active and certainly not the least bit depleted nor goal oriented, for the social is the work of ‘the tracing of associations’.54 In this regard the social, like society before it, is not lurking in some background waiting to account for what otherwise cannot be explained, but describes the marking of types of connections between those things that are not, or not yet, social. Since his ground-breaking work We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour has been busy expanding the collective at every opportunity, he is as interested in a parliament of things as democratic idealists have always been in a representative house for humans. I am drawing on his work here in order to mark the distinction between an understanding of the social that is content to rest with a degree of representation for those already assembled and a movement towards representation for those that are not, or not yet, so represented. I am especially concerned in my critique of ‘context’ that a social dimension is so easily added to a property or event with little actual evidence of how such a social site has been reached. Latour’s emphasis has always helpfully been on the performative process of making connections, which for a project that seeks to strip out the unwarranted ‘political’ from theatre while recognising its ‘potential politics’ is critical. This process is always one of reassociation and reassembly. It is not always, nor perhaps often, the marking of a new alliance, but more likely the recognition of an older one that, before the work of modernity, existed as a hybrid association between currently sundered objects and subjects, things and humans. If political theatre marks a property in the way that the term ‘social’ once erroneously marked a property, then politicising performance marks a process, a movement and a making of connections that resist the instrumentality of ends for the resumption of deliberations. For Bruno Latour, and his actor-network theory of reassembling the social, it is particularly important that non-humans become what he calls actors, ‘not simply the hapless bearers of symbolic projection’.55 Society and Nature, two of the most symbolically projected chimera, do not exist, as I proposed at the outset of this section, because each simply manifests certain elements that, denying the legitimacy of their current home-categories, will have to be reassembled in new arrangements in order to take account of them, perhaps for the first time. Let me take a specific example of this process of tracing association and migration from today’s newspaper as I write this paragraph. Perhaps in this simple, journalistic way, I can relieve the fear that phantasmic terms as apparently wayward as ‘society’ or ‘nature’ can be talked about sensibly at all.

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I am reading George Monbiot in The Guardian writing under the title: ‘A million road deaths every year? It’s just the price of doing business’.56 Monbiot is not telling us anything new when he says: ‘Death and injury on the roads is the world’s most neglected public health issue. Almost as many people die in road accidents – 1.2 million a year – as are killed by malaria or tuberculosis.’57 But his prognosis of how to act upon this matter of fact by turning it into a matter of concern is far from commonly expressed and requires some careful reorganisation of previously sundered objects to get started. It is the poor who disproportionately get hurt in this vehicular scandal: 50 million are injured a year by cars, of which 85 per cent are accidents that occur in developing countries. And for a book such as this that would appear to identify, if not necessarily celebrate, the human-defining quality of an extended childhood, it is moot that the vast majority of these accidents happen to children walking on roads. Auto-extinction will soon overtake malaria as the biggest killer of the young outside the industrial West. While the current scientific understanding of a ‘nature’ of malaria and its impact on ‘society’ would appear to generate $1.9billion of foreign aid, the invisibility of road deaths in either nature or society generates an annual global road safety budget of just $10m.58 One would be surprised if an entity as powerful as the ‘motor industry’, which cuts so seamlessly across the petrochemical extraction from ‘nature’ to the road-widenings of ‘society’, were to take the lead in exposing these figures to some serious scrutiny. But those vested with responsibility to represent these hidden losses from the collective back to the collective, the Global Road Safety Partnership for instance, or the ‘independent’ Commission for Global Road Safety would, according to Monbiot, be advised to reroute their analyses from the hegemony of the car, to the far more fragile relationship between industrial vehicles and pedestrians, cyclists, ox carts and rickshaws that are mixing badly and with tragic outcomes. As an internationally recognised representative of the speed industry, the ex-Ferrari driver Michael Schumacher, a member of the international Make Roads Safe campaign, cannot dislodge the gaze on the automobile as the key term in the collective. There is simply no proxy arrangement in place to bring the ox cart over from bucolic ‘nature’ to a gas-driven ‘society’, nor is there much hope that the human-powered rickshaw can make the journey from a ‘slow’ social sphere to the perceived speed of accident culture. None of these journeys is impossible for the various entities invested in the statistics that George Monbiot cites, but the continued maintenance of the spectres of nature and society serves the continued expansion of autopolis at the expense of its victims. Thus petrol and highspec vehicles can go on being sold without recourse to their true social impact, good and very bad. The point of reassembling the social and rethinking the collective is precisely modelled by Bruno Latour on the

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imperative to increase the number of possible questions that can be asked of this apparently insoluble dilemma. The performative capacity of retracing the social alerts us to the embedded way in which a continuous status of performing on behalf of, and in expansion of, the collective perhaps evokes an equivalent of a common historical paradigm of continuous dramatic contingency: Balinese theatricality of the daily processes of justice, law and politics. Now, having summarised the impact of Bruno Latour’s thinking on this project, the empty gesture of the abstract appeal to the political can be rethought, finally, through the more mundane, but serious work of articulating the movement of re-association and reassembly. It is this process that I am talking about, and nothing more mysterious, when I talk of politicising performance.59 There is little point in putting theatre in a ‘wider context’ (previously discussed as exteriority) when it already shows the complexity of that context in so many interesting ways within its own acts. This inherent context, performance’s social immanence, has the added benefit of showing itself in very practical ways, thus doing away once and for all with that other phantasm beloved of performance study: the spectral split between practice and theory. The fifth axiom of showciology therefore links two great phantasmic clichés of performance analysis: no practice without theory, no theory without practice, and neither in context. If the social ceases to be a property, as Bruno Latour suggests, and becomes a movement, then it will have to stop interrupting the flow of these movements with ceaseless social explanation. The theatre machine, as I will show in this book, is well-tuned to ‘interrupting flows’, that is the definition of a machine after all, how to restart the flows is another matter entirely and one that performance studies has taken surprisingly little interest in. It is this capacity for restarting the social process of association that showciology will attempt to articulate wherever possible. When I suggested earlier in this part that mourning and memory were not the first affective priority of this ‘prefab’ discipline, I was hinting at this retrospective fetishism of hindsight that can stand in for the responsibility to act. What is left by the social is traces, but these traces are only identifiable at the moment and site of new associations being born between elements that are not social. Performance affects mutate at the boundaries between those things that are already social and those things that are not yet social. For this reason I will foreground these moments of emergence, appearance and dissonance as much as any of disappearance. While theatre and performance have found themselves, through no fault of their own, tangled in the webs of deconstruction and dispersion, showciology will identify ways in which performance literally generates procedures and concepts uncommonly well-suited to collect up and reconnect the social. The name that Bruno Latour gives for the outcome of these tracings of movements, collections and reassemblies, is not society, society

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does not exist, but collective. This is a lovely, rather old-fashioned word that I believe is of great resonance to theatre and performance now, and one that showciology, scientifically attuned as it is to the history of collaboration and association inherent to ‘show-making’, is well positioned to elucidate. I am of course not referring to collective simply as a numerical sign of multiplicity, though this is a welcome after-effect of the collective, that more, not less, can be involved, but the degree to which an event is political is marked by its collective nature, that is its propensity for something within it to ‘belong to all’.60 If theatre cannot do politics but does do the social, it is because it is excellent at tracing the connections between controversies while wholly unable to settle controversies.61 This is the crucial distinction for my argument and the overall sense of this part’s purpose. Performance recognises that the best places for politics are the least bound places, or at least those places and situations where the illusion of the bond has been met by a collective made up of singular actions in relation to the ‘immediate solution of problems’.62 There is no need to stabilise such controversies in political outcomes because, as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed has shown, in its many manifestations, it is always and only the actors themselves, by which I obviously mean all participants in the process, not just those ordained actors by the theatre profession, that can settle anything. The contradiction of Forum Theatre, as just one small part of this wider investment in the political potential of theatre, is that in its rhetorics and stagings it precisely (and despite all the protestations of its exemplary facilitators) announces a premature end to the constant process of collective, performative politics. Performative politics is understood here as the constant care and attention required to maintain the efficacy of groups as collectives. The ideal would be for theatre of this kind to move the ostensive definition of current conditions, that remain the same despite the relationship to them of the witness, to the performative in which the witness participates continuously in the maintenance of what is underway. This might appear an unnecessary proliferation of the political imperative to include everyone, but given Jon McKenzie’s characterisation of performance rhetorics (in his book Perform or Else) permeating widespread systems of daily conduct and business, this expansion might not be so misplaced. The sixth axiom of showciology is therefore: Interrupting or delaying the premature closure of the performative is a prelude to restarting the association of the social and the assembly of the collective.

BEGIN AGAIN Does my characterisation of this antagonistic distinction between theatre and the political justify inaction or quietude, does antagonising theatre and the political sacrifice the only agency left to theatre in an age of indif-

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ference? No, on the contrary, a modest opportunity for action arises. Between the incommensurability of the two terms theatre and the political emerges a brief moment, in a small network, in which something can be done. Beyond any moral determination, ‘where there is something to be done’ describes the possibility of an ethics. But where exactly is this to be found if exteriority is to be suspected? Well, it is certainly not behind the foreground action of performance (where society used to lurk) and not around performance (where nature used to float), rather it is ‘in between’ everything I have described so far, which, until it is rendered, remains unknown. Of course this small ‘space’ is infinitely replicated throughout the system I am describing and, in the interests of preserving the only sustainable argument of Theatre & Everyday Life, this cannot be imagined as the ‘empty space’, beloved of Peter Brook, in which aesthetic action can occur wholly innocent of its forebears. Rather, not despite, but because of its resolutely scientific and technological overtones, I will follow Bruno Latour in figuring this medium of connecting distances, volumes and surfaces as a plasma. This might strike you as a curiously immaterial term for a ‘science of appearance’, a faintly updated version of the ‘ether’ that has for centuries stood in for everything not known and out there. But plasma carries with it the implication of a moulded or formed thing, ‘an image’ is one of the first dictionary definitions offered for the word. In physics it is described as a colourless liquid in which entities float. For chemistry the collective interaction of the charges of plasma make it an electrically neutral medium providing ultimate mobility for its constituent parts. Unlike the idealised empty space in which theatre and performance were once said to happen, this medium can literally ‘give rise’ to new developments and therefore better describes the productive and latently energetic miasma that surrounds our endeavours. It is, however, also the defining example of ‘unformatted phenomena’ and therefore never to be confused with the ultimately formatted: that is performance. Plasma is described by Bruno Latour in the following way: ‘that which is … not yet measured, not yet socialised, not yet engaged in meterological claims, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized or subjectified.’63 The ‘yets’ imply the affirmative possibility of this project as well as its expansionist risk. It might well be this year’s televisually driven version of ether, but at least it is better than ‘context’, and, given the urban myth that it has a propensity to leak from the screen, all the better for its delinquency. Phenomenology with its human-centric outlook, psychoanalysis with its grand narratives, anthropology with its multiple metaphysics might be able to recognise small parts of this plasma and try and call it ‘context’ but its complexity, of course, as they all know, eludes them. And as I am concerned that my division of theatre and politics has taken away one imagined arena of its agency, I use the term ‘plasma’ to describe the state, that remainder to performance, where something remains to be done: that is, it is where ethical acts occur through new and renewed associations. It is

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precisely across this plasma that the laws of the social world do their work in retracing their associations: ‘They are not behind the scene, above our heads and before the action, but after the action, below the participants and smack in the foreground. They don’t cover, nor encompass, nor gather, nor explain; they circulate, they format, they standardise, they coordinate, they have to be explained.’64 Sociology, a twentieth-century invention, might be the newest of the established disciplines having a go at explaining this terrain, but Sociology makes showciology look positively infantile. How might this newest discipline offer something specific to the reacquaintance of performance and its politics? If there was anything that we could usefully describe as ‘plasma performance’, I would prefer it, for the time being, to a ‘Political Theatre’ or a ‘Social Theatre’! If, as Bruno Latour points out, the practice of law should, if it is willing to follow its chosen mission, circulate through the landscape associating entities in a legal way, and science should be tying entities together in a scientific way, then the purpose of showciology will here be offered as the discourse to describe the multifarious ways that entities can be reassociated through performative means. Of course the benefit of the name is the reminder that ‘shows’ tend anyway to take such reassociation as their raison d’être, and having benefited from the prognosis, of Jon McKenzie in Perform or Else, that we are embedded in the performative; it is this capacity for restarting the social that is the affirmative key here. Indeed if Peggy Phelan’s ontology of performance, laid out in Unmarked, has been supplemented over the last decade by Jon McKenzie’s historical ontology of the command to ‘perform or else’, my ontology at this moment in the 2000s might be best described as a ‘historical-site ontology’ where the social begins again. But any amount of bad theatre reminds us just how fleeting this capacity of performance can be. Theatre that pretends to be continent when it is in fact an accidental art with no control over its outcomes, therefore, unfortunately for those nervous about moral ontology, requires an ethics to ascertain what is worth doing. Where and for whom or what? We should not be squeamish of such decisions, others are making them every day. Gill Hicks caught in the Russell Square tube-bombing in London on 7 July 2005 spoke of her relief when a rescuer from the emergency services placed a hand on her shoulder and spoke the words: ‘Priority One’. She said these were the most precious words in the language to her at that time. ‘Priority One’, in this current state of serious play may not be my command to politicise performance, but for lovers of theatre there could be worse places to begin again as the dust settles.

SUFFICIENT GOODS If there is one extraordinary faculty available for theatre and performance that will help showciology describe the complexity of this plasma I have been talking about, it is its historic foregrounding of not just human, but

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importantly non-human entities. This book represents my own effort to lay out a cosmology of infants, animals, objects and other anomalies and their significance for theatre, work which is itself part of a wider movement over the last decade that has expanded the performance collective well beyond the predictability of the actor-audience twin-set.65 This is the expansive challenge that showciology wishes to enhance and can be summarised in axiom number seven: Showciology is dedicated to releasing previously caged entities for consideration and reassociation. But the releases, recalls and reviews, which will occur over the central three parts of this book will of course depend upon some kind of ethical judgements that I wish to focus upon now in order to survey the conduct, pace, range and inclusiveness of responses to rejection from the collective. There should be no fear of ethics here, there is no praxis without them (as Roland Barthes was wont to point out to his students), and the fact that Marx and Freud wrote so hard to repress them should make them more, not less interesting for us now. More recently Alain Badiou has twinned his exploration of the widespread and often uncritical return of the referencing of ethics by twinning it with what he calls ‘an essay on the understanding of evil’.66 Badiou’s ‘affirmative’ philosophy suggests in a series of concluding theses that: ‘It is from our positive capability for Good, and thus from our boundary-breaking treatment of possibilities and our refusal of conservatism, including the conservatism of being, that we are to identify Evil – not vice versa.’67 I am not sure that anyone has been misreading and reducing Alain Badiou’s ouevre as that of a ‘Christian’ thinker recently, despite his detailed work on St Paul, and while recognising the provocation that his universalist concepts of fidelity and truth to the event raise in his work, there is a reassurance here that terms lost previously to sectarian thinking can be re-imagined and made fit for purpose in new alignments. Just as there is no political ‘in general’, but a continuous politics of specific processes; just as there is no social ‘in general’, but a performative commitment to the reassembly of the collective; so there is no ethics ‘in general’, but the identification of singular situations, ‘ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation’.68 The first singular situation to explore here is that of theatre itself: Is the theatre good? Is it any good at least when it comes to the social? This is as critical a question for showciology as an associated question was once for Sociology. In Sociology the construction of texts, that strange combination of the ‘artificial and the accurate’, led Bruno Latour to believe that: ‘good sociology has to be well-written; if not the social does not appear through it.’69 The same goes for theatre. The social, that is the tracing of connections, the reassembly of the collective, cannot occur unless theatre is good. This is the simple fact that so much ‘political’ theatre forgets – Playing With Fire is certainly not the most serious culprit there. For showciology, therefore, evaluative judgements will be based upon specific criteria that deliver an

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unapologetically prescriptive eighth axiom: Good theatre is a theatre through which the social appears. Why should this bother us now, why not rest with the elegant solutions inherent to theatre itself rather than risk the vulgarity of these parallax views of incompatible dimensions? In a world recently characterised by Adi Ophir as one of continuous production and distribution of ‘superfluous evils’ this question that combines quality and virtue, despite its apparent banality, bears asking again.70 Theatre’s liveness, its peculiarly public nature, its immediacy, its foregrounding of the presence of the performer and its engagement with a present audience have all been cited recently in theatre’s defence against its own superfluous nature. The implication is that these features make theatre somehow full of political potential, socially relevant, or even necessary. But here, as I have said, I want to suspend the fetishism of the political and ascribe an ethical agency to theatre in the form of a calling, a demand, one that could be identified with theatre’s very reason for being. Given that humans have no choice in the face of the evidence, this is my appeal: I want theatre to become the art of the ‘good choice’. In case this is misunderstood, I want this goodness to manifest itself as a resistance to the naturalising of conflict. It is not that conflict does not exist, it is the material environment for almost everything said so far. It is rather as Roland Barthes warned in his course notes for his Collège de France sessions on The Neutral: ‘That everything in the universe, in the world, in society, in the subject, in reality is formatted by conflict: no proposition more widely accepted: Western philosophies, doctrines, metaphysics, materialisms, “sensibilities,” ordinary languages, everything talks about conflict (about the conflictual) as if it were nature itself.’71 The ‘self-evidence’ of this proposition, should, if we heed Brecht’s warning, alert us to the special need for historically addressing and de-naturalising such an assumption, especially one as ubiquitous to presumptions about performance, from the conflict-theory of Hollywood scripts, through to the dramatic denouement of final showdowns. The recognition of conflict does nothing to make choices, it merely confirms that one has become stage-struck. The discourses of choice have little to do either with the guilty secrets of theatre’s past, its shame-faced embarrassments about itself, (that was the self-possessed privilege of the human venue before last), nor to the public truths proclaimed as the innocent pleasures of performance’s future.72 I want to ask theatre to concern itself less with the banality of conflict, and concern itself more with the nuance of reticent choices, choices that are the other of the conflict paradigm. I want theatre to be less concerned with the ‘as if’ that characterised a previous era of disbelief in suspension, and more to do with the ‘what ifs’, where present practices make for future freedoms against the further erosion of civil liberties. This would be the only justification for theatre’s

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continuance in a world of superfluous evils. If it cannot make choices, by which I don’t mean decide on anything ‘for itself’, but expose non-choices, lateral choices, possibilities and impotentials, it is, itself, superfluous. That this superfluity happens to be the common condition of much theatre should not conceal the remarkable vitality and relevance of the good performances that I, and others, have witnessed over the last decade. Let there be no misunderstanding, there is no ambivalence here as to the continued vitality of theatrical form in the twenty-first century – the names Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Forced Entertainment and Goat Island are testament to that truth. But beyond these specific examples, I have said it before: all theatre is as perfect (good) as it can be given what is available to it at any one time or place. But it remains that in a world of scarcity theatre is, by and large, an expensive superfluity. The point here is to alert us to the dangers of what Roland Barthes once called, ‘the theatre of pugnaciousness’, elevating conflict to a nature and a value and therefore making a value out of conflicted nature.73 Some might take my opening polemic splitting theatre and the political as the act of a reactionary conservative ameliorator, fearing the political potential of performance. The first qualifier is true – I am a socialist who is reacting to the indifference shown to the political potential of performance. I would not be surprised if some were to choke on the ambition of this first principle, but the second is bound to provoke a coughing fit among disinterested postmodern ironists. Rather than consign theatre to a state of irrelevance I wish, without being too idealistic, to ascribe to it an imperative that will enhance its life, and more importantly improve the conditions of others’ lives. To be worthwhile, theatre must contribute materially and imaginatively to the conditions for ‘sufficient good’ to exist. This will require choices to be made and decisions to be sustained. Sufficient good describes conditions in which superfluous evils are identified as preventable and the creation of circumstances in which superfluous evils are prevented. For this to occur, the tracing of networks of cause and effect, action and reaction, a meteorology of social atmospheres is required in which all entities are treated with equal respect both within the auditorium, between stage, stalls and the gods but also beyond, between those things commonly thought of as theatrical and those things remaindered by performance. This will of course require ‘the artist formerly known as actor’ to take their place alongside neither above nor below all other actors, or mediators including: costumes, lights, auditorium viruses and mobile signals. The adaptable actor will welcome this extension of their collective and as the definition of acting is adaptability, all true actors will welcome my proposed expansion. Those theatre folk who wish to plead their special status can do so quite easily by criticising this book for reducing them to a proportion of a bigger picture, they do after all have shelves of specialist monographs in their own names that already back up their claim to further attention.

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I undertake this proportional task in the spirit of Bruno Latour’s project, that is not only the writing of his books but the calls he has made for an expansion of the collective at public events, often in the company of artists, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts where I promoted his work and presence in the 1990s, but also at Tate Modern in London, as much as his more specialist lectures given to economists and sociologists at the London School of Economics more recently. But I also engage with these questions as a response to Judith Butler, who, in an invitation to readers of Adi Ophir’s magisterial work on the order of evils, celebrates his ‘model for responsible intellectual work in our times’ and his precise philosophical critique of the material conditions within which contemporary injustices are taking place.74 Struck by Butler’s excitement for an ‘ontology of morals’, I sought to question my own residual moral ontology, latent to the extended familial and catholic working-class upbringing that I experienced among the ‘weak’ oppressions of a suburban environment, through the lens of Ophir’s more obviously contemporary, crisis laden landscape of Israeli– Palestinian strife and violence. My arguments for a reassessment of a naturalised conflict theory, the creation of a meteorology of suffering and loss, and the reappraisal of the unmodish yet continuously important question of sufficient goods to meet superfluous evils are consequent upon this reading of Butler and Ophir. They are not plucked from the blue skies of my seaside upbringing as a perverse antidote to my own relatively eventless childhood, but rather, as I propose in the chapter that completes Part III, ‘The Democracy Machine’, born of a public secret that continuously hides causes from affects for all of us in different degrees of acuity. My own enthusiasm for these sorts of question, expressed sometimes through the secular force of Ophir’s materialist philosophy, but often also through direct and unembarrassed evocation of the perverse core of Christianity, should be an invitation to scrutinize ways in which I further mystify already opaque objects. But this enthusiasm should not be the excuse for lazy dismissal because of its peculiar heretic insensitivity to a group who have established an almost hegemonic hold on critical practice since post-structuralism – the indifferents. The presumption might have been, after Jacques Derrida and his own steely commitment to causes, that with the ever-nuanced sense of differance there was no longer a need to ‘make a difference’, the kind of difference that Adi Ophir (and Judith Butler?) believe philosophy ‘in this world’ strives to develop. There is no urgency in relativism, nor means to ascertain those imperatives that require attention before others. While my agenda will be no one else’s, it does seek to reorientate a presumption as to what might attract attention now, in and beyond theatre. While a liberal is never left indifferent by a victim, Adi Ophir is quick to remind us, a liberal is equally unable to distinguish between victims. My own catholicity and Christian imagery, (reflections on a child-sheep and a Virgin Mary in a school nativity, my thoughts on my

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grandfather’s proclivity to prayer, my feelings for an animal-human sculpture of St Francis of Assisi surrounded by broken birds), may, on occasions in the following case studies that make up the central part of the book, mark out some zones of discomfort for secularists. But each will determine quite prosaically and materially where one victim differs from another, where a wrong has to be distinguished from a superfluous evil, and what sufficient goods might be anticipated to meet further suffering. The test of this writing, beyond the events it considers, will be the same as all writing: can the event of the social be extended through to the event of the reading of the text that encounters it?75 Here the kinds of descriptions I have been arguing for, not social explanations, become the key, an inversion of the common academic hierarchy in which exemplary texts of description such as Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout’s descriptions of Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s odyssey, Tragedia Endogonidia, across three years and 12 European cities, somehow sit outside what might be expected of academic analysis. As Kelleher and Ridout know, and as Bruno Latour has pointed out: ‘If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description.’76 But in saying this, these descriptions from the profession, while all too rare, should join the murmur of a million unrecognised texts: student essays, abandoned PhD notes, reviews, after-show pub conversations and pillow talk that stand as the great lost-archive of thick description of the theatre. The London Theatre Museum’s appeal for the public to send in theatre videos abandoned ‘beneath their beds’ was a charming recognition of the tip of an archive. A ninth axiom for showciology states that: Showciology is committed to the critical task of recovering thick description of theatre and performance. These analyses and recoveries of the social should not be understood as the return of the political by other means. The problem, in my view, has been that a well-meaning pursuit of this social cannot be confused with the accelerated ambition to solve the social question ‘by offering some prosthesis for political action’.77 This is the dignified but increasingly desperate role of theatre in the hands of political aspirants: from George Bernard Shaw’s polemical works to well-meaning but misguided perpetrators of Augusto Boal’s method. Performance is much more pliable, much more potent and has much more potential than a mere prosthetic. To reiterate: theatre is not political because it cannot predict its outcomes nor can it determine its effects beyond itself. Jon Erikson makes a similar distinction when, in an excellent essay on theatricality, he writes: ‘There are many who would claim that performance is “inherently” political; I disagree with the unequivocal nature of the claim. But I believe that much of theatrical performance engages ethical judgements that can be appropriated for a political purpose by its audience. On the one hand, anything can be politicized. On the other hand, one has to make a distinction as to what, at any moment, is worth being politicized and what is not, and for

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whom.’78 Theatre therefore has no sovereign power, it does, however, have the kinds of friends and enemies that in ascribing it a premature politics are missing its most powerful potential. For this reason there is no presumption at any point in the discussion that follows that prescribes a preordained position to theatre along a braid between entertainment and efficacy, nor any kind of banal relationship sought between previously defined categories of theatre: the contradictory term ‘political theatre’ itself, ‘community theatre, or ‘applied theatre’, ‘dominant theatre’, ‘mainstream theatre’, or ‘alternative theatre’ and an intensified or reduced potential for ‘doing good’. None of these categories has an a priori claim to a close or more distant association with the possibility of improving the conditions of those who are suffering – being singular, each in its own material circumstances awaits this judgement. Let me escape the common assumption, (an assumption that persists despite Nietzsche’s best efforts), that the individual subject is the source of good and evil. Sole characteristics at either end of the spectrum of behaviours do not make a simple soul however much headline writers wish it were true. You do not have to be a relativist to recognise that. Andrew Lloyd Webber is neither devil nor saint, Augusto Boal neither guru nor reprobate. Marilyn Manson is neither nice nor nasty, Mother Theresa neither cruel nor kind. Potentially in this reordering, Manson is no less able to effect change through performative actions that lead to the creation of good than Theresa. Like most mortals, both are bound by a complex of selfish and selfless acts – Manson emerges as one of the few rationally educative and redemptive contributors to Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine, while Theresa is submerged in a welter of accusations of self-serving from Christopher Hitchens. At the time of writing Boal has moved from a position of hagiographic awe coupled with sniping attacks on his guru-like status in world theatre, to a figure whose unpaid state-pension has become a matter for widespread concern, support, argument and agency among these very supporters and detractors. Indeed, good as it is ascribed here has little initially to do with individual persons or agents, it refuses to be subjectified in the manner of the tabloids. More promisingly, let us move beyond individuals to projects. In the first instance, for showciology at least, if not the academy, a musical show like Les Miserables is no less able to ‘do good’ than ‘Forum Theatre’, Italian theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio and their brilliance of opaque imagery no more able to alert us to an emergency than the durational performances and innovative comedic patter of Ken Dodd. All of these previously defined categories come up for review in the rearrangement of theatre’s relationship to the arts of distinction, just as each came up for realignment when, a decade ago, I considered the significance of rethinking theatre and its relationship to the everyday. By unravelling some of these presumed associations in the first part of this book, I would hope that each of them could be rearranged more critically at a later stage in the argument. None of the above delivers theatre

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over to a formalist relativism nor does it for a moment deny that value judgements are possible. Showciology simply states that, however well-meaning, claims for theatre’s efficacy, calls for performance’s relevance and agency cannot be based on a misunderstanding of theatre’s political power. This book maintains that theatre has no political power. But it does have ethical effect. The test of showciology cannot therefore rest with an academic imperative alone to deepen understanding and to test hypotheses, but rather the test of this writing, its political test, would be its own contribution to the prevention of superfluous evils beyond its own immediate terms of reference.79 I am happy because of, not despite, what I said earlier regarding the relations between page and stage, that writing such as this should be considered more instrumental than theatre. That is why I am interested in mediating theatre experience through writing, just as I have, for 15 years, been committed to articulating theatre through a number of London-based talk events. These ‘speech-acts’: after-show discussions, Daily Dialogues for the London International Festival of Theatre, talking events for the annual festival Meltdown, artists’ exchanges with the Public Art Development Trust and Artangel, international conferences and symposia, talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, were curated, directed and chaired as palpably social occasions encouraging the expansion of conversation’s own, relatively directive, instrumental politics.80 But within all this instrumental talking what kinds of purposeful writing am I referring to here? The writing of theatre’s past is critical in this respect, but if political imperatives and their reduction of suffering are to be the test, ‘these times’, the contemporary and the future become the place where the preventable is identified and contested. So another priority of showciology would be to argue for the significance of the historicity of the present and the critical temporality of the future as paramount in theatre and performance enquiry. This should not be read as an argument against the considerable academic investment in analysing theatre’s past, nor a belittling of its considerable achievements, but rather growing out of this regard for theatre’s history the encouragement of an increased academic attunement to its current forms and future possibilities and how pasts shape presents and futures as subject to change. In this ambition I am proposing no more for performance study than Isabelle Stengers has posed for chemistry: ‘It is not … a question of predicting the future: but of experimenting on the present with a sensibility sharpened by an analysis of the past.’81 The tenth axiom then reads: Showciology recognises the priority of action in the present through critical reflection on the future and the past.

THE PRESENT IMPERFECT I would of course like this increased investment in the research of ‘these times’ to be made from ‘those budgets’ currently being squandered around

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the world on the distribution and proliferation of superfluous evils. That would itself justify the existence of critical reflection on theatre, a default mechanism in the restraint of harm just as generously subsidised theatres such as the National Theatre in the United Kingdom stand as beacons projecting the fiscal message: Your Taxes Invested Here In The Affirmation of Life Not Death. But in the likely eventuality that this realignment demands displacement of scarce resources from within the disciplinary field, then perhaps Shakespeare Studies, given its hegemony within the theatre academy for so long, might step-up and self-sacrifice first. The urgency of this call (it is certainly not meant as disrespectful nor flippant) will both alleviate the modest academic distress caused by relocation and recruit those most historically equipped to attend to ‘these times’. I am here making as clear a call as I can for a concept of ‘interested’ as distinct from ‘disinterested’ scholarship. Not all disinterested scholarship is indifferent to superfluous evils but no interested scholarship can be. And the eleventh axiom follows: Showciology is an interested science and a science of interest. In good faith with the Shakespearians, who I tease here, I would expect the same kind of urgency from the performers and companies whose work I most enjoy because it makes a claim, however spurious, to the contemporary. A single example of this even-handedness might suffice for the moment. Forced Entertainment, at the time of writing, ‘the UK’s leading experimental company’ and particularly the company’s reviewers and academic critics, make continuous claim on the contemporary as though Forced Entertainment had a hot-line to now. But as I have made as clear as I can over some time, without offering a soupçon of solace to those would-be detractors of their inimitable legacy, their claims to the contemporary are unwarranted and unnecessary. This is a company whose finest theatre work, up until 2006 at least, has very little to do with the contemporary. Their singular presence in our lives over the last two decades is another matter entirely and one that can only be gauged with attention to the understanding of an expanded economy of performance that I outlined earlier.82 In the last week, at the time of writing, I have seen two productions by Forced Entertainment. Another revival of Bloody Mess, a piece as evocative of the 1970s and 1980s in Europe as one could wish for (but certainly not the ‘now’ of my students or me) and a text-piece by Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain, that is firmly rooted in the fascinating personal politics of the moment of its writing, 1985. Again, certainly not now in any other sense than they are there in front of us now, which is the same for all theatre from the first tragedy to the last. Bloody Mess and Exquisite Pain are as ‘historic’ (that is separated from the present by their being in the past) as the works of Chekhov and Ibsen and as demanding of our serious attention for what they tell us about then, as well as now. ‘When was Forced Entertainment?’ is a question worth asking. And the answer, for the moment, is: not now! If Bloody Mess was about now it could not so beautifully expose us

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to an era of disco-trash, head-banging rock and Cold-War extremism. When, mid-way through the production, Bruno Roubicek’s clown gives us his impressions, much to his doppelgänger’s disgust they rise in severity from a rifle shot to a nuclear explosion. Neither are set in history, and both might have a persistent afterlife beyond their heyday, but neither is paramount in the audience’s mind as anything but intriguingly dated means of killing.83 There is no easily reproducible sound for the contemporary threat of the suicide bomber, or perhaps Forced Entertainment, unlike Mark Ravenhill in his jihadist Hollywood epic, Product, are too civilised to expose us to it. Given the other delights in this piece, from the silence of infant car-crash victims to the withdrawal of a life-support machine, I think not. The purpose here, through the creation of a discipline called showciology, is to widen the scope of this discussion of the present imperfect while limiting it to the conditions permitted by a hybrid word. My argument here is going further than the recent tensions in the US and European academy between theatre as discipline and performance studies as a brand, a field of research and a discourse of paradigmatic analysis. To ignore the power of these discourses is marginally worse than fetishising them any further than they already have been, so a few more words are due here on how my arguments above relate to these discourse developments now. The lines of that debate are variously drawn out in a number of incisive works and I consciously mix the terms of reference, theatre and performance in the first pages of this part to mark their connectedness for me in this project and point out the critical mixture of both within showciology. For instance, Jill Dolan’s prescient reading of the North American academy, performance, queer and feminist politics, Geographies of Learning, goes a good distance to defining a local field of operation and gives unusual regard to activism, while Drama/Theatre/Performance by Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis reverses the favour by examining British as well as US histories of these associated disciplines. But neither of these genealogical works make the link, that is made here, between theatre and performance and a moral ontology that demands the serious consideration of the production and distribution of evils. Indeed, their modus operandi shares Nicholas Ridout’s caution that theatre would, in all probability, ‘choke’ on ethical claims made on its behalf by people like me. What follows is situated somewhere beyond the two positions commonly held by performance theorists and theatre thinkers characterised within this arena of performance studies and articulated by Peggy Phelan with the distinction she draws between her work and that of Richard Schechner: ‘He values performance’s ability to invent new-Reals; I value performance’s admission of the impossibility of securing the Real.’84 If Schechner’s position could be identified as a binding to the social, while Phelan’s was recognised as a tactical withdrawal from the social, then is there a way that performance could be politicised by a simultaneous process of binding and

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unbinding, best characterised by the moebian band that figure-eights without making obvious the point at which its interior skin becomes an exterior surface? A similar doubling process is underway here: an unbinding of theatre from the political and binding to the social that could begin again, restarting a really theatrical politics, if not the Real itself. Given the origin of the moebian process as a laboratory means to separate gold from silver by electrolysis, the inherent economy of distinction within the act is telling. This operation would not then be the recasting of the social bond, nor its unravelling, but the simultaneous reassociation of these two operations that the parallax, double-dealing nature of performance might conduct. Performance and theatre are unusually well equipped to circulate at this level of doubling but require a philosophy, tried and tested in the human laboratory, to measure these effects. Contrary to the inherently political inflection of the anthropological and psychoanalytic approaches of performance study, I therefore situate this work within an ethical domain that precedes, and is preparatory to, politics. This is because the kind of good that theatre and performance in their own way can do, can only be estimated with specific regard to the demands and calling made by the suffering of others. By this suffering I might include the ‘exquisite pain’ of Sophie Calle’s lost love, but as she herself wryly admits late in the day (and very late in Forced Entertainment’s rendition), that suffering is barely suffering when considered within the order of evils that bring about widespread superfluous suffering. Expanding the repertoire of this relationship is one of the political purposes of this book in particular, and showciology in general. For that objective, the combined aesthetic and ethical armoury of both theatre and the expanded field of performance will be required. It is their increased spectrum of affects that is so relevant now and in saying this, I mark the moment as an inopportune time to reduce their significance by sundering them. If this move appears to be unwarranted, a vulgar headlining, a raising the stakes where more detailed meticulous work remains to be done, then a series of events, from the riots accompanying an apparently not-so comic production at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in the United Kingdom in 2005 to the murder of theatre director Safdar Hashmi in New Delhi would suggest that the stakes for some are already higher and more intense than for others.85 It is in this material context, not the abstract world of idealised disinterested academic reflection, that this work of reconciliation seeks attention. To ask theatre to ‘do good’ is to have some means by which to recognise and agree upon choices as to what goods are. And showciology is certainly expected to facilitate these kinds of judgement given its investment in the social. Let’s start with what good is not. I am throughout this work not identifying good as some facile dematerialised binary of evil. Inverting Adi Ophir’s commentary on evil, good can also in my view be expressed as

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part of reality; a ‘quotidian, routine, and ordered part’, it can be characterised beyond the beatific elements that transcend reality and should not be identified with a meaningless and unreal absence of evil, ‘but as part of what is’ (my emphasis).86 So this book has no truck with religious conceptions of good and evil or metaphysical associations of right and wrong, and certainly no residual association remains between good and ‘nobility’ that Nietzsche so decisively exposed as the ordering ideology of morality more than a century ago. Rather, this work, over its chapters, seeks to recognise and recover for speculation the banal, shocking and beautiful presence of the ordering and distribution of goods in a number of material locations. I am not here only commenting on the simple (wholly unromantic) fact that for 25 years at my local subway station, I have never seen a visually impaired person left by the much abused ‘self-possessed’ commuter to negotiate the flights of stairs towards their sheltered housing on their own. Nor that these safety-couplings at the top of the steep stairs are brought about by a complex of call and response theatre as subtly dignified as they are practically effective. If I were, I would be forgetting this local’s equally impressive distant other as volunteers for the international charity ‘Sightsavers’ bicycle to and from South-Asian villages, remonstrating and demonstrating theatrically with dubious, fearful parents, and bringing children with cataracts to their first focused clarity in the world they have only up to now seen as a shadow play. These two examples show, so readily, that there is no such thing as the ‘non-local’, and showciology will continue to explicate both by remaining in both for long enough to do some serious work but not long enough to mistake its temporary location for all. The current scopophilia, what I call ‘neuroptics’ in performance theory, will not deter me from marking the order and beauty of the appearance of these practices of goodwill. I am unwilling to ignore these ‘sufficient goods’ being acted out daily and would like this book to begin to imagine a way of examining their production, and distribution, in order to establish the conditions for a more general sense of ‘Good’ to be recognisable and understood, if not created. That is surely one reasonable aim of a moral ontology worth its salt and certainly one that Adi Ophir, and Judith Butler’s espousal of his work, would not appear to confuse with a narrowly Christian ethos, or any reductive belief system for that matter. On these occasions, and many others I would disagree with Adi Ophir when he writes: ‘We know nothing about Good.’ 87 That these locations are far more geographically limited than Adi Ophir’s locating of the ‘order of evils’ should not for a moment suggest that other examples do not exist and persist, or that evils are somehow more geographically widespread than ‘sufficient goods’ to encounter them and overcome them. They are simply not fully represented here and await responses from elsewhere. Just as the physics and economy of loss and suffering

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waits to be written, so the physics and economy of the order of goods waits to be drawn up. The absolute imperative of the first, and its ultimate urgency, should invite those of us interested in theatre to consider the part performance might play in the second. Showciology thus, in its twelfth axiom: is as attuned to the order and distribution of goods as it is to the order and distribution of evils. It is in this seeking of a renewed contemporary role for theatre before and beyond the political, within a continuous politics, and the marking out of a new (very old) ethical terrain for its study and research that the following is situated. I am therefore proposing that showciology not act as a call to arms (theatre academics are all too ready to rush with their banners to the nearest political bandwagon and, like Mother Courage hitch their rickety cart to that express88), but rather more patiently, and certainly more modestly, to articulate ways in which theatre always already conducts itself within a network of exchange mechanisms (all of them concerned with politics and none of them political), an economy within which good appears and disappears, is fostered and is stubbed out. In this ordering of good after evil I concur with Adi Ophir (via Nietzsche) that a slippage between the two is distracting. So, by summoning the weak term ‘sufficient’ to qualify the term ‘good’ I wish to mark its identity within a task rather than a value. Good sufficient to what? Sufficient to the prevention of evils. So no need for an excess of hyperbole, outlandishly brave interventions, hagiographics or heroes, just material and specified action (some of it theatrical, some of it performative, much of it political and therefore not of theatre) within particular spheres of operation and conduct. That will do for now given the state we, and others, are in.

DISCIPLINE

IN

DISTRESS

Let me be concrete about how to distinguish performance and politics as these are material not abstract questions. How would I move from some of the key performance interests, as I outline them in the opening paragraphs, to my own concerns within the politics outlined in the last? The metaphorising habit of theatre study and practice is disturbing in this context and might provide a summary conclusion through which to identify the gap between theatre’s current soft sense of its relationship to the political and a more critical sense of theatre’s relationship to actions in and on the world, that is its singular politics. Showciology, interested as it is in the ethical grounds of theatre will be especially alert to the metaphoric and its abuses. Essays with titles such as ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ and books with ‘lo-fi’ ambitions such as Towards a Poor Theatre play with aesthetic notions of cruelty and poverty that this book seeks to make concrete. These authors, Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski, cannot be blamed for the use of their work since the time they wrote it (the

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words aren’t theirs but the translators’), but the heirs to this work have alltoo-easy a relationship with a naturalising and metaphorising language that the original coining of terms, the naming of conditions, appears to have facilitated. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin’s much-repeated concern about the dangers of the aestheticisation of politics bears repeating here. Given the concrete particulars of Artaud’s finest work and the compelling, sheerly frightening imperative within its ambitions and demands, it is significant how easily, and often inaccurately, the term ‘cruelty’ from within this legacy is drawn upon to describe the mildest of shocks within performance work. It is perhaps symptomatic that between 9/11/01 and 7/7/05, between New York and London, I did not hear this word used once in a theatrical context. In countering this proclivity for the metaphoric and the dramatically disempowered, performance studies has become more interested in the ontological a priori of theatre: its liveness. But, through showciology, let me reconfigure the quasi-political questions associated with this liveness to an ethical question prior to this political domain, that of theatre’s life. This is an essential, if not essentialist, move in a cultural milieu in which, continuing the habit of metaphorical play of performance studies discussed above, the death and disappearance of theatre is spoken about all too often as though it bears some relationship to real deaths and disappearances in the world. From adjacent fields we might take some lessons regarding the proportionality of cultural loss. When the Bristol-based, Oscar-winning, UK company Aardman lost their 30-year archive of ‘Wallace and Gromit’ sets and figures in a fire in October 2005, animator extraordinary Nick Park was quick to dismiss its significance when set alongside the South Asia earthquake which two days before had taken, at a modest estimate that would inevitably grow, 70,000 lives and left two million homeless. The media surprise that he should express this relational perspective can be measured by journalists’ own lack of perspective in language used to describe the fire, variously drawing upon terms such as: ‘tragedy’, ‘catastrophe’ and ‘total loss’. This is not to deny the special kind of hurt felt through aesthetic loss, but to reapportion its claim on our attention. Indeed, when the artist Patrick Heron’s daughter spoke about the ‘loss’ of 50 of her late father’s later paintings in the MoMart warehouse fire in East London, one might consider the serious sense of mourning that such material loss invites when compared with the hypothetical losses inherent to performance. And both might be put into comparative circulation in which the demands of a plasticine figure called Morph on our mourning gauge might register higher or lower than the loss of pigment suspended in flammable viscous oils. Despite their limited claims on our attention these losses are losses and the proof of that is that damages can be, and are, paid on them proportional to their perceived seriousness and value.

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The disappearances and deaths of performance and theatre are wholly different to these kinds of material considerations – no compensation is forthcoming. They are necessary not superfluous, nothing can be done about them. They are so necessary they have become the life of theatre. I would therefore invert Nicholas Ridout’s formulation: ‘We who believe in magic, in this brief traffic with the ghosts of the stage, will always be cruelly deceived by the truth that there is no life here, only death (life’s copy, its double).’89 The spectral fetishism starts with the ghosts, who are material, the brevity of the occasion, which is long enough, and the cruel deception of the act, which is the obvious truth that life is here abundant. It is in the nature of performance death that, even in death, as Ridout himself has commented on the breathing corpses piled up at the close of Hamlet, makes theatre an act of memento vivere never mori. Keith Arnatt understood this well as far back as 1969 when his photo-sequence Self Burial involved him disappearing from view, gradually submerged in the ground, every alternate night on German television for two seconds. The piece highlighted Arnatt’s own ironic sense that increasing talk of the art object’s disappearance, even back then in the 1960s, should necessarily involve the material disappearance of the artist as well.90 Buried alive, not, at least not there, while meanwhile, elsewhere, others were being buried alive. So, from this lively perspective let me in the interests of enhancing the claims of my own discipline, showciology, take one stage further my argument with performance studies. In its challenge to the innocent affirmation of theatre as a positive life-force (see countless books of anecdotes and celebration of lives well-lived) a psychoanalytically informed strand of performance studies has, over the last decade, taken on a certain morbidity, a dubious death drive, a thanatalogical affectation. It is not the problem of fine books from eminent theatre scholars with titles like The Haunted Stage (Marvin Carlson), or Cities of the Dead (Joseph Roach) that have taught me so much that is lively in the world, but rather a discernable emphasis within contemporary cultural analysis that a certain death is where it’s at.91 Or, more accurately, that an aesthetics of ‘disappearance’ might reveal, politically perhaps, something about death and suffering in the world. Within this wider context, performance’s analysis with a proclivity for all things melancholic, an emphasis on the ephemerality and disappearance of performance, a constant reiteration of the loss of its archive, mirrors its own insecurity as a field whose borders are marked by the continuous threat of nervous and corporeal breakdown. Performance studies was, after all, wrought in the very cities where AIDS and HIV-related deaths were harrowing the very community for whom performance meant something very special, and those conditions of production within serial loss have not been alleviated and certainly persist in other theatres in other communities for whom drug access is denied by pharmaceutical politics. But these very

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precise historical, medical conditions cannot surely be taken as an apologia for general melancholy, only sadness in particular, and certainly not for the emotional shaping of a field of research. We are afraid, we are very afraid and for good reason. But these fears are quite different to the synthetic fears peddled by politicians whose post 9/11-7/7 modus operandi is the manipulation of anxiety.92 In this climate the importance of unravelling these two kinds of fear, to counter a deference to fatalism and a general infantilisation of the public that has come with them, becomes critical. Without going as far as the Wooster Group, who in the midst of all this cried out, much against the grain and perhaps wholly ironically, Brace Up!, there is now, with these conditions in mind and body, the opportunity to begin again, if only for those of our colleagues who cannot. In this climate a curious appeal to the political of postmodernist contingency, a timely resistance to the securities of ‘truth values’ and ‘right’ comes on, quite unintentionally, with a certain policing force, albeit one that attempts to escape its own affirmative armoury with the sincere epigraphs such as ‘against being right’, playful and good humoured ‘have your cake and eat it’ titles, like ‘Certain Fragments’, and delightful counterintuitive names like ‘Desperate Optimists’, ‘Lone Twin’ and ‘Forced Entertainment’. It is interesting that simultaneous with this development in the self-reflexive United Kingdom, US companies have turned increasingly to prosaic, class-bound and mechanistic theatrical names such as ‘The Builders’ Association’ and ‘Elevator Repair Service’. It was left to ‘Goat Island’ in Chicago to marry the prosaic and poetic in their typically deft way and for ‘Deer Park’ in England to state the obvious. To compound this love of contingency, the sweeping academic interest of the last decade over the turn of the millennium (a sweep that I have accompanied on brushes too) in the failure of performance over the successes of theatre, as exemplified by the dubious claims of standards inherent to ‘exemplary technique’, is another vector of performance studies’ investment in, and fatal harnessing to, its own extinction theory. Simultaneously some of the most prominent texts in the performance studies field, including Jon McKenzie’s expansive Perform or Else, give the inadvertent impression that theatre events have little or no purchase on the performative world being described and incisively analysed. To all intents and purposes theatre has disappeared from this landscape (if not everywhere else), being described as shot through with the power and problems of performance. Yes, theatre might, in a land-mass as vast as the United States or China, India, Africa or Australia, be so hard to see or so culturally irrelevant as to leave it stranded at the margins of metaphoric utility (though I doubt it). But in Europe in the last two decades this has not been the case – theatre has not only survived, but thrived. This may be a perspective borne of the privilege of proximity and transnational metropolitan mobility, but one which needs to be acknowledged if only to

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reconnect the relevance of theatre practices and their histories to the very prognoses of social ills being proposed by performance studies’ analyses of the social sphere. Here I am concurring with Jon McKenzie’s trenchant and original view of the condition of the industrial West in which to perform is an imperative with very real material consequences (certainly if not met) but I, like valued North American translators of theatre study, Marvin Carlson, Janelle Reinelt and Theodor Shank (among others), who have witnessed and written about the generosity of this work, would not for a moment wish to untether theatre from the possibility of playing its part in the analysis and alleviation of, and activation against, these ills. Let me put it bluntly: the ‘brand’ (PS), if not the complex genealogy of performance studies, first arose in sites of study where the quality of theatre was suspect or where those who were responsible for performance studies’ development were ambivalent to the claims of theatre on their attention. Here is a relatively early take from Richard Schechner: ‘But what of the professionals? If there is little else to say about the American professional theatre, one thing is certain, it is irrelevant … The artform is irrelevant.’93 It is peculiar reading the materially precise work of Steve Bottoms, Sally Banes or Bonnie Marranca on the vitality of the New York performance and theatre scene to hear theatre described, during this very period, by Richard Schechner as ‘the string quartet of the twentieth century’.94 I suspect this is meant to have the air of redundancy about it. By affirmative theatrical contrast it is of great credit to its apparently marginalised Welsh origins, in Cardiff and Aberystwyth through the Centre for Performance Research, that this relative geographical isolation from hegemonic theatres was simply a spur to ensure theatre of the deepest quality and aesthetic range was invited and supported, produced and critiqued from within these sites distant to the metropolitan centres of London and Paris, Cardiff and Warsaw.95 This has been in my view a much more substantial contribution to the internationalisation and more critical understanding of theatre’s relationship to the wider fields of performativity and performance than hallowed projects such as Peter Brook’s Parisian experiments with cross-cultural casting at the Bouffes du Nord. And what it marks is a continuous tradition of engagement and experiment between performance, choreography, music and theatre that was long underway before what Christopher Balme has called the ‘Bermuda Triangle of Performance Studies’ established itself. Any counter genealogy would surely mark out Dartington College of Arts in the United Kingdom from the 1920s under its founders the Elmhirsts, via the Cornish School and Black Mountain College in the United States to Ritsaart Ten Cate’s ‘Das Arts’ creative pedagogy of experiment in Amsterdam, the coincidence in Europe of the foundation of London International Festival of Theatre, Arts Admin and the work of Lois Keidan as curator and articulator for a live-art field, the discursive triangle of discussion and education that developed around ‘On The Boards’ in Seattle, the Walker Arts Centre

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in Minneapolis and PS122 in New York, as worthy of as much serious attention as the outstanding but relatively isolated private campuses marked by the great globaliser Tisch and the Evanston home of the Rotarian small businessman, Northwestern. (And of course these are all too painfully local examples completely ignoring the force-fields that long existed between Ninasam in India and Tbilisi in Georgia.) In this process of reordering the modest priorities of a discipline in distress a number of more significant conventions within theatre’s vocabulary invite further review. This conduct would resist consigning a secondary level of argument to what Judith Butler called the ‘merely cultural’ and rather examine ways in which aesthetics themselves are always already a matter of politics. To take one example, which will be multiplied as this book proceeds, that is, the habit, despite all the incisive efforts of semioticians and phenomenologists, of considering audience and performer as separate and immutably sundered entities goes. The continued interest in, and arguments about the apparent over-determination of interest in spectatorship, as distinct from the professional or expert performance practices of artists, is a measure of the resistance of this old saw to disappear quite as readily as performance is meant to.96 Its fall is perhaps aggravating for those for whom the divide provides grounds for a modest professional living (actors and usherettes) and better remunerated scholarship (audience reception theorists, actor analysts), but welcome for all those whose experience of theatre has never subscribed to this artificial schism. While few of us would readily volunteer to practise bridging this apparent divide (we still think twice before accepting the offer of a seat in the front row), materially and imaginatively we do it all the time. We live within, and imagine ourselves outside, the times and spaces of performance, ferrying back and forth, at once engaged with, at other times distracted from involvement. It is this ‘to and from’, then, now and to be, that characterises all those involved in the act of theatre way beyond the promising, but eventually contradictory redistribution of terms such as ‘spectator’ and ‘witness’. The obvious fact that some have characters and costumes, some expose themselves while pretending that they are beyond such theatricality, and others ‘watch’ while pretending to concentrate, should not lead us to assume that the affect of a life as evidenced by excitation and pleasure is being generated and received in a one-way process, nor one overly determined by signifiers of spectatorship and immersion. This is not to say for a minute there are no directions or dynamics of exchange, rather that the way in which they are tracked by showciology, like the moebius band of Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘libidinal economies’, should not admit to the perseverance of an over-simplified divide that has long outlived the fall of the fourth wall. Against the alienation of performance studies, affirmation is now the priority of showciology. As Lyotard says: ‘it is not because it is prohibited that it is invested, nor because it is represented, beyond a stage set and because one hasn’t the right to climb

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on to the stage – but because one desires to climb up there and seize it!’97 The return of the seizure of the event again in Alain Badiou’s theatrical philosophy is perhaps not surprising for French contemporaries who in the mid-twentieth century shared a certain moment of political seizure on the streets of Paris. Yet one need not swallow the hallucinogenic pill of Lyotard’s ephemeral fantasy to recognise quite soberly how it might alleviate the symptoms of a discipline in distress. Remaining with an author, as distinct to an artist or a disciplinary field, briefly, what kind of prescription does Lyotard offer the patient performative study? First, following Lyotard’s own twisting spatial logic, we might draw upon the moebius band’s curious metaphoric power as a sign for something which combines its exteriority and interiority in a continuous process of binding and unbinding. Second showciology will propose that theatricality and representation are not givens, but the results of labour circulating through this continuous loop. Third, that the chamber of representation (what I have called the human laboratory), the theatrical cube, needs to be occupied and its functioning made explicit. This architectural volume and its workings should not be ignored by performance studies’ apparent claustrophobia. I do recognise that to annex an outside from an inside, for the sake of relevance, means a certain pain will inevitably be encountered. It is this relatively mild pain that describes the distress of all disciplines, and none more so than performance studies with its possessed and possessive sense of the lost potential outside its own entropies, its special economy that uses up the world. Lyotard was not thinking of performance studies (at least the US version) when he wrote the following, it was not invented, but he seems to be aware of these annexations of theatricality: ‘What anguish in these limits, in these devaluations followed by exclusions! How they are loved these exteriorities! Hence voyages, ethnology, psychiatry, paediatrics, pedagogy, the love of the excluded: enter beautiful Negresses, charming Indians, enigmatic Orientals, dreamers, children, enter the work and the spaces of my concepts. All this is theatre; it is the white innocence of the West in expansion, base cannibalistic imperialism.’98 Recognising the legendary nature of these political boundaries, the anguish in limits, does not mean one can re-tell the story through performance and reconfigure such limits. That sobriety about the limits of the political in performance does not warrant a retreat from such story-telling, simply a caution concerning the conclusions one might draw from narrative’s ends. If the singular events of this theatre are socially disjunctive, as I have argued earlier, they produce no memory, but they do mark a tense, literally a ‘time of tension’ with the social. As Lyotard says: ‘If one wants to explain the birth of the theatre, its secret must not be sought in the pain of loss only for a memory …’,99 rather, it is necessary ‘to describe the circumscription of a theatre … affirmatively, energetically, without presupposing lack, when this would be under the name of pain.’100 To look at the paint-

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ing in Tate Britain of The Ghost of A Flea by William Blake is to recognise the theatre that Lyotard rather elliptically describes – an internal labyrinth with no apparent exit before exteriority and context make their inevitable demands (Figure 20). Lyotard might well have been describing that apparition, the apparition of the cry in that spot-lit space, when he wrote: ‘It is necessary to hear the cry of the insect thrown under the glare of 500 watts, and fleeing into the maze. Every labyrinth is traced as flight towards an outlet. There is no outlet: either one grows accustomed to it, as the professor waited for the beast to do, the way of being accustomed that is depression and inhibition; or else through an encounter, in a new cry, another labyrinth, another time opens up, but nobody is the master of encounters. Love is not giving what one does not have; it is having to cry near to areas struck by lightning.’101 This stands as a definition of what it is to be in the limelight of scrutiny, irrespective of whether its glare falls to this or that side of the curtain, this or that side of the exit. We will return to this spectral flea later in the chapter ‘Arrested Life’, and the question of where the limelight falls, in a more historical, rather than hysterical, mode. The characterisation of performance studies and its melancholia might be woefully general, but if there is any hint of recognition in my broadbrush caricature, then a consequence for theatre and performance study ensues.102 The consequence, that showciology takes up, is to think and practise theatre within a continuum of choices, distinctions and decisions that operate within, without retreating to metaphor, the world marked by the suicide bomber and the disappearance of a cause. From now on showciology relishes an unfashionable decisiveness, while recognising that all effects and affects are accidental ones, beyond the metaphysical control of anyone out there, or up there on the stage. This implicates us all in the demanding nature of good theatre, the appeal of performance. It would perhaps be forgivable for a discipline to be distressed if, contemporary with this deadly emphasis of performance studies, there had not been an exponential rise in the material deaths, including suicide bombers and their victims, occurring outside performance’s aestheticisation of politics. I am not here calling for a cheerful refusal of material limits, but rather asking performance academics to reconsider the degree to which the melancholy of the field is standing in for the conduct of politics elsewhere, where there is something real to be achieved, defended, spoken up for or identified. Almost as real as the theatre itself, that most solid, enduring and utterly unquenchable of venues humans have invented to re-imagine themselves within. So showciology might serve as a temporary antidote to emphases elsewhere before the negative dialect of an age of cynical reason can be happily restored. Where I asked in Theatre & Everyday Life for recognition of the complex everyday that was already underway within the ubiquitous ‘empty space’ for theatre, here I am asking for a reaffirmation of a life in theatre prior to its inevitable termination.

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In characterising my work in this apparently voluntaristic, hopelessly hopeful fashion, I would not want simply to replace the current morbidity of performance studies with an inane and unfounded optimism. The notorious case of the British newsreader Martin Lewis who, on declaring he wanted to concentrate on ‘happy news’, immediately, and for good reason, lost his job at the BBC, alerts me to a paradox shared by anyone writing against the ‘ironic’ grain. I am, rather, more with Rustom Bharucha when he says: ‘It is what begins after the performance that is interesting.’ And in the spirit of Bharucha’s evocation I would acknowledge the influence, throughout this book, of Hannah Arendt’s writing, whose work was dedicated to retrieving a politically sophisticated understanding of natality and pitting it against the mortality of totalitarianism. I would furthermore in this spirit wish to situate this argument more centrally in the trajectory of performance studies itself and reiterate that vital aspect of Peggy Phelan’s reading of performance artist Angelica Festa’s work in her essay on the ‘ontology of performance’, a reading that fully rounds out the tensions between birth and death inherent in, and latent to, this work, and certainly does not for a moment limit thought to one or other end of this lopsided binary.103 Here in exemplary fashion, performance, and a theatre event at that, stands in for and stages explicitly so many of the urgencies discussed in the first paragraphs of this part. It is these urgencies that appear to resolutely inform Phelan’s non-hierarchical, culturally pluralistic, utterly ‘hopeful’ enterprise: from Angelica Festa to Operation Rescue, from Robert Mapplethorpe to the Rose Theatre, from Tom Stoppard to Piplotti Rist, from Robert Smithson to Samuel Beckett, from Andy Warhol to Ronald Reagan. As a matter of balance showciology will take a brief pause in its toying with an aestheticised understanding of the spectre of death. There are enough deaths outside theatre to be concerned with and to act upon to make such a temporary, stress temporary, moratorium on metaphoric morbidity worthwhile. So, with metaphors of death and disappearance temporarily deferred to next year, what might be done in the interim? The trouble for performance is not death, as E. M. Cioran said in another context, but a far more ‘inexhaustible abyss’, that is: being born. I would add the manner and material of that birth might provide showciology with an opportunity to begin again and illuminate its binary other in interesting ways.104 That would present theatre practice and its analysis with a complex engagement in the twenty-first century, and in a century of unprecedented proliferation of superfluous deaths one that might have some political as well as ethical life in it. These multiple births might be eventually found to be theatre’s way of doing good. This might also mark an agitation that alerts us to the imminent loss of theatre, a loss not just signalled when the curtain, materially and metaphorically, drops. Adi Ophir says little about the arts of theatre in his magisterial work The Order of Evils, having unravelled some of the most pressing concerns of

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his age and location, he says modestly as regards the different arts: ‘I can’t say much about these matters.’105 But he does say: ‘something does, after all, end when the curtain falls.’106 Something ends, it does not die or disappear, this is the inevitability of a beginning that is a far more fragile and worthwhile invitation to political analysis and empowerment. Performances are terminated, they no more disappear than Siegfried and Roy (except when other animals with sharper teet are involved). One ending inaugurates another beginning, as Richard Yates has shown in his masterpiece Revolutionary Road. Following the most precise and moving rendition of amateur theatre in modern fiction, he brings the chapter to a close with the observation: ‘When the curtain fell at last it was an act of mercy.’ But the novel that follows shows how short-lived this mercy is. If life is an affect of performance, then the final, thirteenth axiomatic proposition for showciology, following arguments for ethics before politics, and the affirmative before the entropic would have to be: Instead of metaphorising death in the loss of performance, loss, suffering and death might themselves, beyond metaphor, become an object of attention in their own specific and historically immediate right. What might begin after the fall is the direct addressing of certain deaths in these times. Instead of a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, a question of cruelty, its distribution and arrangements might be posed; instead of aesthetically mimicking Towards a Poor Theatre, a question of poverty, its means and effects might be at issue. Following the work of Adi Ophir, I would here wish to articulate the order of evils, that is, superfluous suffering, that showciology of theatre and performance might be in a privileged position to articulate and expose, if not act upon. I am not seeking the political through performance, that is unavailable to me, rather unoriginally, repeating the invitation of Theatre & Everyday Life, to consider what an applied ethics of theatre might be within an ever-changing and transformable ontology of morals. The disappearances of theatre are the nature of the presence of performance, as the calm is to the swell of the sea. There is no point in being sad because we are unable to surf every day of the year and no point in recriminating about the Tsunami other than to determine how repeated warnings might have been heeded. But this apparent indifference does not for a moment deny the politics that saturates these losses from elsewhere: that we might be aggrieved and wish to act when that sea begins to swell due to the preventable consequences of human-induced global-warming. The face in the sand that Michel Foucault characterises as being rubbed out, washed away in the closing beach-bound passage of The Order of Things, was not merely a metaphoric humanity, but a figure whose end is predictable as well as nigh.107 It is this predictability of loss, shared by performance and the end of the world as we know it, that removes both from the realm of the superfluous and situates them firmly within the inevitable, if not the necessary.

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A LIFE

IN

THEATRE

For the purposes of articulating theatre’s capacity to ‘do good’ in an ethical sense, as distinct from ‘make change’ in a political fashion, this book is not about life in the theatre, (that would have to assume too many prevailing conditions of separation and isolation from the urgencies I am taking as characteristic of this operational plasma), but rather about a life in theatre. The distinction is an important one for what follows and was particularly apparent throughout the time of the workings of the human laboratory. Despite Foucault’s anti-humanist efforts and Schechner’s prescient announcement of the ‘end of humanism’, the canon of twentieth-century theatre literature is illuminated by works with titles such as My Life in Art (Konstantin Stanislavski) and A Life in the Theatre (Julian Beck) and plays with titles such as My Life in Theatre (David Mamet). There are countless works dedicated to a life’s work in the theatre, written by those for whom a vocation in theatre meant a life’s work. I take great pleasure with others in these autobiographical exercises. But I want to draw attention to something quite different here, something no less personal, but less singular as I defined that term earlier, and more specific. Something that might have the broad relational appeal that any theoretical system such as showciology, reaching for explanatory credibility, might demand. I would like showciology to replace the auto-biographical nature of theatre reminiscence with an enquiry into the precise way performance practice resists the smooth running of bio-politics.108 Bio-politics is the term Michel Foucault gave to the specifying power exerted on humans as a species, as distinct to the ‘anatomo-politics’ of the eighteenth century which characterised the power exerted on the individual body. Bio-politics masses where anatomo-politics individualises, bio-politics is interested in humans in as much as they are a species and would therefore appear to contradict the singular, individualism of performance studies’ interest in bodies in particular, and ‘the body’ in general. This bio-political observation will itself be predicated on the individual autobiographical occasion in the second part of this book, but this does not consign the data explored to the disconnected self-serving milieu of personal memoir. While in my argument theatre fails to claim any stable politics for itself, it is itself, as an order and distribution of certain bodily practices, always inscribed within a bio-political domain and interrupts the smooth working of that domain in potentially powerful ways. All the time it is failing to ‘do the political’, in the wider sense hoped for it, it is continuously exposing the horizon of bio-politics from within. Theatre has no more control over this politics than it does over the wider, weak sense of the political denied to it by me (sorry, still enemies), but this lack of instrumentality does not deny the affects that arise quite voraciously, yet accidentally, from performance processes. In this sense performance is its own best political enemy

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as it produces a remarkably wide-ranging and intense scale of such affects, some of which make up the studies that form the following chapters. The nature, the distinguishing characteristic of theatre (and I do mean here practices as wide ranging as plays by H. Ibsen and performances by Franco B) is the manner of theatre’s revelation and concealment of a life. This is a quite different thing to saying it creates life – that would be biological, if not political, and it cannot do biology either despite the propagating quality of the plasma. All the interesting questions currently being asked of theatre regarding its liveness, its spectatorial economy, its presence and its appearance, come down to this faculty. My proposition here is that this faculty is immanent to anything we might wish to ascribe to theatre through the properties of performance. And yet it is precisely this faculty that has been taken for granted in performance studies and has only recently emerged as an object of interest in theatre analysis.109 This is not surprising. It is the question of what ‘a life’ might be that has had to be presumed for other significant debates to get underway, including those ‘definitely-articled’ specifieds: ‘the body’, ‘the virtual’, and those article-free singularities: ‘gender’ and ‘identity’ that have been prominent for a while. But failing to address this most primordial and critical dimension of performance has squandered the political and ethical imperatives that might be recognised within it. That is, in other words, the way a life is immanent to performance shapes what we recognise and realise in, and through, performance. And then, perhaps most importantly for me and many others, what theatre does in the state of emergency to resist the official determinations of any system it operates within. Given what I have said so far another title for this book might have been Theatre & Life: An Ethics of Performance, but that would have suggested a simple subtraction and contextual retreat from a decade ago when I wrote Theatre & Everyday Life. The association is useful in one sense. It reminds me that while I thought the everyday the most obvious, yet little recognised, domain at the time of writing that work, I now sense it is life itself, in all its local intimacies and its distant engagements, that remains veiled with metaphoric miasma. In Theatre & Everyday Life I began: ‘Is the theatre good?’ and I extrapolated from this familiar start a set of questions for theatre that I perceived had become, in its rush to politics, unmoored from theatre’s ethical concerns.110 I have been emboldened by long-term responses to that work to suggest here that theatre has nothing to do with the political in any instrumental sense, but everything to do with ethics, it contributes to an ever-changing ontology of morals. The argument here then, in the context of seeking theatre’s relationship to preventing superfluous evils, is that theatre does not represent life so much as conceal and then, on more or less special occasions, reveal it through us, rather than to us. Here is another way of writing the simultaneous binding and unbinding of the social discussed earlier. This play is in the

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nature of the event that makes performance what it is. Lives are represented in theatre, yes, but life itself is an affect that performance makes manifest through a process of hide and seek, excitation and pleasure. This is why theatre is always a simultaneous binding and unravelling of instances of intimacy and engagement that I wish to pursue as this book proceeds. The question of presence in performance is interesting, but the affect of excitation, its ordering and distribution is now a far more stimulating realm of enquiry, and a realm of enquiry which reaches much further than the identifying affects of a certain embarrassment, laughter and shame in the ineptness of bourgeois theatres. How this happens is the subject of the next part of this book. Without this affective charge, theatre would be consigned to a potentially entertaining, yet impotent, world of representation, repetition and, dare I say it, reproduction. I can say it, because despite some claims that performance somehow resists the economy of reproduction, psychoanalysis can only do its work precisely through constant and vigorously maintained reproduction. If performance did nothing else but complicate through its subtle affects the banal reproduction of beautifully complex past-events of psychoanalysis, it would have been worthwhile. Traumatology, the ‘science of the troubled soul’ validated by its psychoanalytic pedigree, is a Western discourse currently razing indigenous responses to crisis, suffering and loss, as effectively as the other colonial discourses of narrative dislocation that preceded it.111 With its affective complexity theatre cannot do the political but it can participate in the encouragement of agency and the critical articulation of injustice and tyranny through the reanimation of the social. It is for this reason the third and fourth parts of this work examine ways in which a life is rearranged and distributed through the politics of the sensible, and how these politics (not the politics of theatre) determine the kinds of relationship possible between the singular and the plural that are the stuff of community, within which theatre and performances are always more or less operative, and more or less inoperative. But having laid out these methodological suggestions at some length, how, in the last section of this opening part, might the human laboratory and the field its parallax views distort at every occasion be brought together through the prefabricated canopy provided by a new discipline? Well, like all other works, this one cannot escape the time and location of its own production and it is from within, not outside, these conditions that the potential for reassociation arises.

THEATRE RETURNS London, England, during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first has been a city of delights and tolerances, excitements and artistic achievements, but it has also been a city of racism,

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poverty, aggression and philistinism, and the landscape for other, volatile ‘spectaculars’ that demand attention in a book concerned with articulating the contours of theatre’s ethics of association. My argument with the presumption that theatre can affect the political is borne out, once again, by the diversity of politics that this writing demands we might consider as congruent with the theatre in their midst. London might be all things to some people and nothing to many, but from my view over the last two decades it has been caught between a triangular arrangement of threats to its market-driven stability. Anyone who has experienced this period in the city will wish to replace these examples with their own. For me, among many small-scale politics of great significance, I want to identify three larger claims on our attention: the tail-end of militarised Irish nationalism and the mainland bombings of the Irish Republican Army, the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism and Al Qaeda supported terrorist acts, and the first post-cholera awakenings of the city (well known in the country following ‘foot and mouth’ disease) to ecologically-linked pandemics. I am not here, given what I have just said, going to subsume these political, ethical and ecological forces to some metaphoric relationship with theatre, but ask showciology to consider the various ways in which theatre and performance could stand and be considered adjacent to them and within them, setting off metonymic associations here, providing us with insights into the conduct and response to each challenge there. For instance, in the case of Al Qaeda, the question of who loves life and who loves death has become a rallying cry. It should not in this climate remain unsaid that theatre is, if anything, a live art, it is conducted by those who love life so much as to excessively replicate it and obsessively conceal it, and it is utterly opposed in its sovereign confidence to cultures which would curtail its long – if not hard-won – freedoms. I have mixed feelings about the terms on which this economy of freedoms of speech and deeply held beliefs is circulated and circumscribed by a relatively privileged and powerful cultural elite. But before I return to that economy later in the book, there is a more primordial relationship that showciology, with its expanded sense of viable entities, might draw between the diverse characters of these three appeals to global attention. In the case of the IRA the instrumentality of the goals are explicit and announced – hence their political demands on our attention. This is (was, if the 2005 ceasefire and disarmament, and 2007 self-government agreements are to be maintained) a political movement with political ambitions and ways of gauging progress and success. This movement was deadly indeed but goal-orientated and easy to understand for anyone not directly involved in and committed to the continuation of the conflict. On the contrary, as Faisal Devji has made clear, jihad as espoused by Al Qaeda and others is non-instrumental, fragmented and globalised, unwilling or unable to express any goals, unable to determine its outcomes beyond its local

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effects, but affective none the less.112 Made up of a complex of duties and beliefs, jihad for Faisal Devji is figured, surprisingly and controversially, as an ethical act with no single, stated aim. Indeed bearing out the secondary nature of politics to the jihadists, the insurgent Abu Theeb recently said: ‘Politics is like filthy dead meat. We’re not allowed to eat it, but if you’re in the desert and your life depends on it, God says its OK.’113 My third manifestation of appeals to my, if not our, attention is simultaneously more amorphous and more immediate and yet in the common imagination directly emergent from what Abu Theeb has said in a different context. Avian Flu (to take a modest, local example of what will unfortunately become an all too serious global condition) is an ecological and environmental threat, a pandemic that lies beyond politics, though it requires politics to address its global spread, an environmentally linked condition that poses ethical questions concerning the relationship between humans and other animals. This challenge is ultimately an ecological question that demands attention precisely because it is closest to the extinction of the species that the other thought-systems seek to explain and protect from its excesses. These three manifestations of a ‘context’ for cultural critique are braided in the city of London, as they are globally, in material ways, reminding us of the complex of their associations and their common relationship to aesthetics, symbolic capital and the media. They are not exterior, but interior to everything said so far. On the day after the London bombings of 7 July 2005 the Evening Standard newspaper was the conservative journal of this complexity carrying cover-page images of the aftermath of the suicide bombings, reports of the final disarmament of the IRA and, buried inside, the death of a green bird on the outskirts of London heralding the first fatality from avian flu in the United Kingdom. It is not conspiracy theory, but nor is it solely coincidence, that radicalised young Muslims would know, reading the paper that day, that green birds have long populated the rich inner-life of jihadist martyrs in the tradition of Muhammed: ‘The souls of martyrs reside in the bodies of green birds that perch in chandeliers suspended from the Throne and fly about Paradise whenever they please.’114 The material threat of course is one thing (there are material deaths that suffuse individuals and families in the city in sorrow), but in each case and more generally felt than these immediate losses is the permeation of what can only be described as an ambivalent panic within the everyday lives and life of my home city. The distresses of a discipline are modest when aligned with the concurrent demands from these challenges to stability. In this alarming context, wholly bearing out Latour’s own journalistic examples of hybridity in We Have Never Been Modern, we might seek a more politicised or relevant theatre. No go. The instrumentality and didacticism of a certain kind of ‘political theatre’ should now, again perhaps temporarily, give way to performance, which has nothing to do with instrumental-

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ity, but everything to do with an ethics of duties, beliefs and risks. In this sense, as well as others I will come to, performance finds itself in my analysis, whether it likes this company or not, on the formal side of the preferred mechanisms and accidental affiliations of jihad. In that sense, if no other, theatre might be a form truly contemporary with an appeal that is in a privileged ethical and aesthetic, if not political position, to ‘do good’. Performance, I would contest, in its resistance to a cause, is homeopathic to jihad, sharing as it does a number of its defining non-instrumental features. While it might seem deeply naïve to draw these parallels I have no idea why jihad, the single most forceful transformation of the atmosphere and daily practices of cities in the West in the first decade of the twenty-first century (avoid rear seat of bus, double-take rucksack-bearer, buy bicycle, cancel tickets with national airline carriers,) should escape comment from the theatre that is labouring to survive its own dramatic means of increasing states of excitation. I would certainly not wish to exclude the extremist threat of the nuclear (this work ends in extinction politics anyway), but suspect these are more immediate contemporary questions to be dealing with for now. Let me push this further with regards to theatre’s relationship to the revelation and concealment of a life as distinct to its unavoidable status as an art, the art, of disappearance. It is not insignificant that the word martyr has the word art within it, at its heart. Until the London suicide bombings of 2005, most of the attention of commentators of jihad focused on violence as the characteristic of Al Qaeda’s actions. The pictorial reiteration of the red London bus, opened like an outsize torn can and abandoned on Tavistock Square opposite the British Medical Association, was surely indicative of an editorial search for a specifically London manifestation of the brute-force which, in three other locations, remained subterranean and ill-illuminated. But since those bombings and their complex web of associations, which wholly congruously arrived at the doorstep of ‘fish and chip’ shop-owning families in the north of England, there has been wider interest in what Faisal Devji calls: ‘the invisible world of ethical, sexual, aesthetic’ forms of behaviour inherent to jihad and its proponents. Given that martyrdom is the only action that jihad claims responsibility for, then it is towards the martyr one might turn attention here, particularly as the practices of the martyr would appear to bear more than a passing challenge to metaphoric instances of a performer’s willingness to ‘sacrifice’ themselves to their art, in their mortality. Devji goes on to say that in the absence of any coherent politics: ‘martyrdom neither represents an idea nor is in any way instrumental, but constitutes rather a moment of absolute humanity, responsibility and freedom as a self-contained act shorn of all teleology.’115 The counter-intuitive logic for Devji of this thinking is that martyrdom becomes the most ethical of acts, assuming responsibility for a personal fate beyond need, interest or idea. Here martyrdom becomes ‘an act of

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inauguration rather than of retaliation’ – a proposal which sounds very much to me, in its analysis of material not aesthetic deaths, related to and the obface of the inauguration of ‘a life’ in theatre. The root of the word martyr, witness, alerts us to the inherent relationality of ‘acts’ and their observation that is the well-spring of performance. Tim Etchells, the founding director of Forced Entertainment, commented on this some time ago when he said: ‘To witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s place in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as an on-looker.’ Indeed, I use witness as my defining condition of a performer being recognised as such on the first page of this part.116 Peggy Phelan, picking up on this ethical invitation, reminds us that ethical action ‘might not be completely dependent on empirical truths.’117 While witnessing events cannot escape fictional forebears, this does not mean, however, that the fictional and the real warrant equivalent responses. When Phelan then suggests that ‘performance might be an arena in which to investigate a new political ethics’, it is not at all clear how the conjoining of these two terms can operate. The reason for that split is the chosen method of explanation, psychoanalysis. It is the structuring devices inherent to the narratives of psychoanalysis that have contributed to performance studies’ allegorical mode, what Claire MacDonald in a characteristically non-partisan piece describes as ‘an illustrative form of criticism, in which art works are seen as exemplars of themes, issues and ideas, and in which the kind of art that is discussed is that which most clearly and readably illustrates theory.’118 The following suggests that as well as witnessing what Phelan calls the ‘unbearable’ we analyse and order the trauma that makes up this unbearable. While trauma has come to stand for an affect well-suited to the mechanisms of psychoanalysis, I want here to break that circuit of object and treatment and return us to the word and the experience of suffering. Without labouring this point here it should not escape notice that theatre conducts itself in a formal manner which always and everywhere denies its separation from these ethical considerations, while always and everywhere proving the case mirrored in jihad that it simply does not, and cannot construe political outcomes. Theatre can, however, do good by affecting a life. This affect might not meet Phelan’s ambitious claim for witnessing that she says: ‘allows the dead, the disappeared, the lost, to continue to live as we rediscover their force in the ongoing present’.119 The definition of loss is after all that it cannot be compensated for, and, as in the economy of unredeemable damages, so in the economy of theatre, which simply cannot secure the Palestine activist Rachel Corrie’s presence. The fact that theatre exists in the ethical domain equips it to do sufficient good in its encountering those evils that are superfluous to the jihadist’s immediate cause, and demands action on those preventable Palestinian deaths among which Rachel Corrie’s stood out for aesthetic treatment in the West.

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It is, in this fearful context, of passing political and social significance that I have, during this period, found myself with students on two occasions watching plays while hearing explosives cripple, maim and destroy lives outside in the street. Our sonic witness overwhelms our visual observance in this instant. This is not surprising given the number of nights over the last two decades I have spent sitting in a comfortable seat, facing forward in the dark. Indeed, on 12 September 2001 I joined with an audience at The Pit in the Barbican in London grappling in discussion with Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players, considering the significance of sitting comfortably in that theatre on that sober night while the group’s New York friends, family and colleagues grappled with another kind of dusk and darkness. Given the inevitability of follow-up attacks as expressed by the international media since the Madrid Atocha station bombings of 2003, it is again, however unfortunate, inevitable that a number of friends and colleagues, as well as my daughter and partner who went to look for her with other mothers, were directly effected, physically and psychologically, by the suicide bombings of 7 July 2005 in London. These are personal narratives, typically removed from the time and place of their occurrence, and in this rendering simply point a finger to other more intense times and impoverished places where such happenings are far more routine and devastating to immediate and more distant lives. But beyond the personal and the autobiographical it is a reminder of the material context in which work, including writing, is done. And given these immediate reminders it behoves theatre, and particularly those professionally involved in the study of performance, to recognise its potentially excessive status, its characterisation by some, by implication or neglect, as a surplus to these economies of suffering and loss, and to ask whether it wishes to stay within those, by definition, ineffective, unaffecting metaphoric margins. Forever claiming its political potential, theatre, like the university of the last eight centuries, might be perceived as having been excluded from any kind of actual political power. Theatre, perhaps true to its history, has only been characterised in this way, the following, beyond character, shows how performance now demands consideration from within, not outside, these ethical imperatives. The discomfort one feels in reading of another’s involvement in such events (of another order, but not essentially different from the unease one feels on being asked to listen to the recounting of someone’s dream from the night before, to be invited to tarry a while with their holiday snaps, or to linger with their annual e-mail round-robin) is the selfishness of such a recounting. Especially when set against the register of the martyr’s apparent selflessness. It is, with this in mind, my investment in my experiencing of these events that precisely, within an ontology of morals, discounts them from primary consideration. It is, for Adi Ophir at least, only where others beyond my immediate care, investment and concern are effected

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that I might test the ways in which theatre ‘gives gratuitously’, only when I move beyond my ‘extended’ self’ and its embeddedness in family, nation or society, its appetite to make capital, profit or loss from a situation, that I will be in a position to come to terms with the appeal of concrete others and their concrete or possible plight.120 But in saying this I am not at all sure I could identify for Adi Ophir, if he asked me, or for anyone else for that matter, where the beginnings and endings of such ‘otherness’ occur. It is through this condition, caught confusingly between intimacy and engagement, that this book proceeds with a study of the performance and theatre of those closest to me, with and within whom I feel the strongest feelings of extended-self and between those I sometimes find it difficult to distinguish myself from. This will inevitably occur to some as the height of insularity. But given the foregoing, I appeal for the reader’s patience in this overtly self-interested enquiry in order to mark the imperceptible points and boundaries, fissures and volumes, sites and sounds, times and absences when these concerns for the ‘close to home’ begin to dissolve into more distant, and for the purposes of the aim of this book, more morally relevant engagements. In this sense the next part of this book could be read as an extended ‘azza’, that is, qualifying cultural-positioning beloved of the academic when faced with a diverse audience: ‘as a white male’, ‘as a middle-class educated woman of means’, and so on. But in surfacing this prolonged riff of an ‘azza’ I would ask that it is read not as a mark of limitation, but as a measure of an extended horizon that might qualify the ‘selfish’ with the beginnings of an act of moral engagement. That I do not get very far in this distancing should not disqualify the potential relevance of the following (it probably describes the proximate nature of so much politics and action for those with family responsibilities, young and old, as well as those vulnerable from disability or the oppressions of racism), but it does in my view qualify the work and mark a local horizon and an invitation to do what the painter Paul Klee encouraged us to do in his Pedagogical Sketchbook: to go further than one thought possible. In the interests of going further, if nowhere else by way of looking forward to the following pages, let me reiterate the 13 axioms of showciology through which the rest of the book might be read: 1. Anthropomorphise wherever necessary but with due regard for both partners in the odd couple. 2. Theatre in its active transcendence of the specific always singularises what was once, but is no more, particular. 3. Descriptions link event and context in critical ways and should replace social explanation wherever possible. 4. The social life of theatre awaits a politics that will not come and acknowledges an ethics that precedes its appearance.

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5. No practice without theory, no theory without practice, and neither in context. 6. Interrupting or delaying the premature closure of the performative is a prelude to restarting the association of the social and the assembly of the collective. 7. Showciology is dedicated to releasing previously caged entities for consideration and reassociation. 8. Good theatre is a theatre through which the social appears. 9. Showciology is committed to the critical task of recovering thick description of theatre and performance. 10. Showciology recognises the priority of action in the present through critical reflection on the future and the past. 11. Showciology is as attuned to the order and distribution of goods as it is to the order and distribution of evils. 12. Showciology is an interested science and a science of interest. 13. Loss, suffering and death, beyond metaphor, become an object of attention to showciology in their own specific and historically immediate right. Well, they leave a lot to be desired, but that’s as it should be. At least they are explicit and up for grabs. If any of them are unfamiliar, then they can be found chronologically in the preceding sections of Part I. But now, to replace the language of the political that used to answer so readily for everything socially aspirational in theatre, I will have to deepen and rework these axioms in the coming three parts of the book. To do this the theoretical route, or curve of each section, is amplified by an area of research common to contemporary European philosophy concurrent with the theatre experiences that I discuss. In the following, second part of the book, the intimacy of the ‘close to home’ that I describe above is considered as the ground for exploring the implications of the extended childhood of the human animal and what Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘anthropological machine’. The third part of the book, explores some sites of engagement where the peculiar ability of the human to do less than they can gives rise to what Jacques Rancière has called ‘the distribution of the sensible’, a politics of aesthetics that determines what can be heard, seen and said, and governs who is in a position to hear, speak and see. The concluding part of the book reconfigures these approaches to thinking and practising theatre through an analysis of what performance beyond the phantasm of nature tells us about our sentient selves, our intimate feeling that we are alive and our common sense of what such being alive means for our engagements with others. The inevitable extinction of theatre, just before the extinction of the human, provides a small chronological gap within which to rethink what theatre might become before it is no more.

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What does this delay between one extinction, ‘the end of performance’ and the ‘end of human beings’, signify for us as we prepare for, and approach, this inevitable end? An end that is certainly not metaphorical for, at the simplest level if no other, it will be marked by the weight of pages in your left hand and the lightness of the pages in your right, the tactile measure of the ends of all reading. A reading that will not be without its own politics.

Part II On Performance as Such & On Human Performance in Particular

All living beings are in the open: they manifest themselves and shine in their appearance. But only human beings want to take possession of this opening, to seize hold of their own appearance and of their own being manifest. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends

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1 The Anthropological Machine

You need to know the difference between this and this. And that is an elephant. This advice is given by a white-coated lab-technician of dubious intent at the beginning of the London-based performance collective Shunt’s Tropicana at the London Bridge Vaults in 2005 (Figure 1). Standing on a ladder in front of some kind of battery-animal arrangement, or vivisection cages, the imperative is helpfully diagrammed for us on a large scroll of paper: a stick figure, a line-drawn elephant above an abstract disc. A group of ten or twelve of us had found our way there, from beneath London Bridge station, ushered from a lift that, while travelling through space, appeared to go nowhere while under the malevolent eye of an operative in a concierge’s uniform. Given that previous experiences with this company had included sudden audience revelations, revelations of audiences, explosive effects and the kind of darkness reserved for found-spaces beyond the luminosity required of licensed theatre arenas, the apparently calming scientific patina of this episode, with its hand-drawn equations between humans and other animals, came as something of a false-dawn of security. That elephants were unlikely to forget, nor were they able to ignore the passing of their own, mourning those lost to their herd, suggested that the stick figure otherwise known as ‘man’ in this rendition was going to come in for some thoroughly abrasive treatment. From this point on the now-caged concierge travelled laterally through the cellar space, a customised hearse was used as a platform for exotic featherdancers, and an autopsy scene reminiscent of a clumsy replaying of a Crime Scene Investigation episode was strung out at inordinate length in a faux anatomy theatre configuration. In the same week in London, Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Hamlet playing at the Barbican Theatre sets the not wholly unassociated question of what kind of ‘piece of work is man’ amidst rotated barbed wire, dropping in thorny vertical rods through the stage space. Here the caged anatomy 81

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lessons of Shunt have become fenced power-plays in which swords can cut the air as much as their protagonists wish, but cannot touch the conditions of restraint within which the overall action is set. Ninagawa aestheticises politics too much for my liking by making little serious theatrical use of modernity’s most potent technological symbol. He nevertheless inadvertently directs our attention, as onlookers, to how this strange, sharply constraining material, shares an animal and a human history. With barbed wire before us there is no escaping the legacy and incontrovertible relationship between the enclosure of animals and the human camp. This chapter, intended as an introduction to Part II, arises from between these two performances and the propositions they offer regarding the tension between humans and other animals in theatre. If performance has commonly been associated with this, that is, human, what would be at stake if it were to acknowledge that? – another animal. A category of performance that I want to mark by calling it performance ‘as such’ must, if it is not solely human, begin somewhere around this operation. So I want to do one modest thing in this chapter and that is to remind us that human performance is just one category of all possible performance ‘as such’. The small gap between the part (i.e., those performances that are particular and material) and the whole (those that are not) provides us with the minimal difference for some critical thought and the thinking through of an ethics of association outlined in Part I. In this murky gap, another part of the plasma I described earlier, I will construct, continuing my mechanistic language from the human laboratory, what Giorgio Agamben has called an ‘anthropological machine’ and show how performance is one, an anthropological machine that is, and how it works in affirming and resisting this separation between humans and other animals. To do this I will need to follow the first of my axioms as laid out in Part I: Anthropomorphise wherever necessary but with due regard for both partners in the odd couple. In this way, while speaking on behalf of animals in general, while taking into account humans as a particular species of performing animal, I hope to move current thinking about the relations between humans and other animals in performance beyond the acknowledgement of a shared history of violence towards a material sense of how the suffering and loss that arises from that history can be encountered and acted upon. ‘And this is a pill’, says Gemma, the lab-technician from Shunt helpfully, as though thinking the difference between this and that will give us a serious Hegelian headache. Well let’s see. The title of this part of the book might be reminiscent. Walter Benjamin wrote an early essay which was never published in his lifetime entitled: ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’.1 The point that he makes in this essay, as Slavoj Zˇizˇek has called to our attention, is not that human language is a species of some universal language ‘as such’, which also comprises other species; for instance Zˇ izˇek suggests the language of gods and

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angels, animal language, other intelligent beings in space, computer language, the language of DNA. There is no ‘actually existing’ language other than human language. But in order to comprehend this particular language, Benjamin has to introduce a minimal difference, conceiving it with regard to the gap which separates it from ‘language as such’, what Zˇ izˇek calls ‘the pure structure of language deprived of the insignia of human finitude, of erotic passions and mortality, of struggles for domination and the obscenity of power.’2 The particular language is thus the ‘really existing language’, language as the series of actually uttered statements, in contrast to formal linguistic structure. My proposition here is that there might be a means to substitute the event of performance for language in Benjamin’s example and to learn from the minimal difference that subsequently ensues between the general and the particular. As I said earlier with regard to the singular and the specific, the particular might well be the ‘really existing’ performances by humans, for example Tropicana and Hamlet above, but the performance ‘as such’ of formal structure, retains its fascination against which the particular is always set. This is not just for the obvious reason that, as in all theatre writing, my examples are not yours, my examples are precisely exceptional because they cannot stand in for yours, and yours will replace mine as exemplary quite quickly, in the process of your own reading and recollection during this chapter. But also, because my example of Hamlet is simultaneously set off against all those other Hamlets and Shunt peripatetic events that were so much better or worse, that, as Marvin Carlson might say following his work on the ghosting of performance, ‘haunt’ the machinery of theatre. It is critical to measure here not just the distinction between these two apparently diverse works of theatre, but to prepare ourselves for the possibility that the apparently junior member of the dramatic pair, Tropicana, might transcend its own conditions of immaturity when set off against the longevity of Hamlet’s influence. And then, importantly, having taken into account this rather obvious inter-textuality, we would wish to retain a sense of the remainder to these examples, the species-specific reasons for thinking theatre within the continuous negotiation between human forms of ceremony and other ways of showing and appearing. If we were able to acknowledge this part-whole relation we would have much less difficulty with other languages such as those of the ‘political theatre’ discussed earlier, but also academic squabbles over ‘practice as research’, ‘actor-audience relations’ and ‘performance vs. theatre’, that act as a fig-leaf covering this fundamental and ubiquitous philosophical tension that the particularities of theatre have with the performances which form their ‘significant other’. There is a problem here with the universals that haunt theatre and particularly its canon. Hamlet is the prime example of a performance text that can generate wild claims to universality. This is particularly curious for a performance history so readily bound, by all those who know anything of

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Hamlet’s chequered textual past, to the idiosyncrasies of three entirely different folio and quarto versions drawn up somewhere close to the stage in its earliest renditions. As long as such generalities smooth out difference and diversity, then any post-colonial criticism will have no truck with that. But the loss of the universal to theatre has also been the loss of the possibility of a generality of affect, the possibility that some texts and performances might have sustained depths of engagement with a diversity of individuals gathered into assemblies, scattered houses and audiences. The fear of universals comes about because of their apparently becalming nature on the possibility of an active politics, they would appear to elide difference and reduce the radically singular affect of theatre. I have shown why that apparent radicality is a phantasm in the first part of this book, and so some slower thinking on universals needs to be undertaken. As Alain Badiou has been attempting to do with his innovatively abstract philosophy, and what Zˇ izˇek has reminded us of, is that the universal is an arena of antagonism and contestation. He puts it in this combative way: ‘The Universal is not the encompassing container of the particular content, the peaceful medium background to the conflict of particularities; the Universal “as such” is the site of an unbearable antagonism, self-contradiction, and (the multitude of) its particular species are ultimately nothing but so many attempts to obfuscate/reconcile this antagonism.’3 The fear of the Universal (as Zˇizˇek uppercases it) can only thwart the claims being made in this book for a general theory as well as an account of radical particularity. The universal as such is thus brought back into orbit here with the radically particular that departs from it. Two brief examples, from the canonical works of performance and theatre study that I referenced in Part I, suffice to situate this debate in the wider arena of theatre and performance studies. The opening line from Peggy Phelan’s well-quoted essay from Unmarked, ‘The Ontology of Performance’, reads: ‘Performance’s only life is in the present.’4 The present has become one analytic attraction of this sentence while ‘life’ extrapolated into liveness has become the reference point for a lively correspondence with Philip Auslander and other performance critics. But what of ‘life’ itself, that is, ‘bare life’, is there anything after Giorgio Agamben’s bodybaring work in Homo Sacer that could be more specifically said about this strangely ambivalent term? Is there a way to extract particularity from its apparently universal ambiguity and analytic uselessness? Given the significance of the live in live arts, it is peculiar that this root term has remained more than elusive for so long. The ubiquity of the concern of ‘life’ for dramatists, since Sophocles had Oedipus discourse on the nature of man with a Sphinx at a crossroads, has meant a generating principle of performance has been elided. Given a life is the only Universal of performance, its elision in critical commentary is something of a disappointment, and one that Hans Jonas innocently alerted us to some time ago:

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‘The phenomenon of life itself opens up a “genuine present” because it gives us a future worth caring for …’.5 In a more parochial sense the second sentence of Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, 40 years ago, was doing something equivalent to what I am commenting on here. In Theatre & Everyday Life I addressed why the first sentence of that book, ‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage’, was more complex and problematic than it might appear. The second sentence of The Empty Space is no less attractive for my argument now: ‘A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.’6 So the two key qualifiers of performance, its liveness and the audience/performer act of spectation are set up ‘as such’ against which ‘actually performed events’ are consequently figured. But there are some obvious problems in the ‘as suches’, never mind the consequent examples. Which man? I am not so troubled by the gender presumption in this, more the species one. At the heart of these two deeply humanist writers lies, in Phelan’s case, a multiply differentiated human, sensitised to differences of gender, race and class, while in Brook’s writing there is the ideal human figure, presumed to be male and able-bodied. The analytic strength of their respective models derives from the way in which both Phelan and Brook resist positing ‘performance’ and theatre in general as the norm of actually existing performance. The subsequent problem for Phelan and for Brook (as Zˇ izˇek has pointed out in a different context) is that every politics which grounds itself in reference to some substantial particularity (whether that be ethnic, religious, sexual or concerned with lifestyle) is by definition reactionary. The real struggle therefore, as I laid out in Theatre & Everyday Life and in Part I of this book, is not the one between the two particular classes of the whole, but the one between the whole in its parts and its remainder. Within the particulars that make up any forceful performance discussion, it is this remainder which stands for the universal, for the whole, the ‘as such’ that is opposed to the parts within. To put that in plain non-Hegelian English. In Theatre & Everyday Life, perhaps because I had been running a neighbourhood theatre for eight years, I was frustrated with externally applied subsets of performance analysis and description, such as political, community, amateur, radical, being pitted against each other in a form of disciplinary civil war when the vast remainder, the everyday, was being elided and forgotten. In the current work, perhaps because I have been participating in bringing up a family, and, in the last year, have finally given way to a dog in the house, I am equally wary of the apparently liberating, interminable differences of identity that have come to stand in for critical enquiry: gender, race, lifestyle (and if you are lucky, class) being pitted against each other while the vast remainder to this humanist agenda, the inhuman (within which, for reasons I will explain later, I would include infants, animals and other anomalies,

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such as things) is simply denied access to this multiply finessed. but deeply conservative, humanist-theatre collective. These differences and their faux expression have reached their apotheosis in what I call, in Part I, ‘azzas’, (‘as a white middle-class male’ etc.), that is, those apologetic prefaces that frankly would appear to excuse the speaker from acknowledging the state of emergency and the recognition of bare life that the inhuman alerts us to. Let me examine this idea of bare life for the theatre more closely. The anthropological machine is so named because it is in the business of manufacturing an appearance of this life. But there is a paradox at the heart of this operation, for life is easier to see when it is not, or at least not quite, there. This is what attracts me to the proposition of the anthropological machine, it shares with theatre the incapacity to make the human appear. This shared sense of human recalcitrance owes much to the simple fact of the example from which the idea of ‘a life’, and therefore the anthropological machine, arises in the modern period. In the case of this question of life, a paragraph in Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend was of talismanic interest for Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben in their formulation of the idea of ‘a life’ beyond the subjectivity of the individual. The novel, a great book of the River Thames, hovers, in its multiple half-drownings, in an ambiguous state between extinction and resuscitation. Being Dickens, this carries both a sense of suspended animation and an intricately detailed urban limbo within which the figures of the novel hover awaiting some kind of narrative resolution. This is how Dickens himself describes the moment that the rogue of the story, Riderhood, is dragged from the Thames, and is taken to the Tavern, where among his potential saviours: ‘no one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been the object of avoidance, suspicion and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it is life, and they are living and must die.’7 Life ‘as such’ here outweighs the particularity of ‘this life’, because death ‘as such’ faces all of those now engaged with recovering that life. That life is the remainder that forestalls that death and is therefore to be cherished. Dickens clearly distinguishes Riderhood the individual and ‘the spark of life within him’ from the rogue in which that life lives. The place of this separable life is neither in this world, nor the next, but between the two that Dickens describes in this way: ‘See! A token of life! An indubitable token of life! The spark may smoulder and go out, or it may grow and expand, but see! The four rough fellows seeing, shed tears. Neither Riderhood in this world nor Riderhood in the other could draw tears from them; but a striking human soul between the two can do it easily.’ So Riderhood’s spark of life is interesting for this state of suspension, which cannot be attributed to any subject. Whether the life dwindles or grows is not the point, it is rather that it is there, it is present, and it demands attention, it calls to those who

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look on. Of course, it is not there, a ‘token’ is, and it is this token and its problematic status that I will return to from the perspective of performance in the following pages. Gilles Deleuze, in the first philosophical treatment of this passage, picks up on the theatricality of this sequence and describes the episode in this way: ‘The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal yet singular life, the life that gives rise to a pure event, freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, of the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens.’ The bare life revealed by Dickens apparently only comes into being with its struggle with death. But of course, in keeping with my arguments earlier, this impersonal life is also well known to those of us who are parents or guardians, not in the vicinity of death, but birth. As Deleuze says: ‘The smallest infants all resemble each other and have no individuality; but they have singularities, a smile, a gesture, a grimace, events that are not subjective characters. The smallest infants are traversed by an immanent life that is pure potentiality ….’8 It is curious that life is here figured through death (as above it is more apparent when it is not there) and only in postscript through birth. But the ordering is very much in keeping with the ontology of performance that separates Phelan’s Lacanian melancholy from Brook’s enthusiast mania, characterised in the two quotations from their work above. In ‘The Ontology of Performance’ Phelan puts it like this: ‘Performance’s being … becomes itself through disappearance.’ Brook puts it like this: ‘within the Deadly Theatre there are often tantalizing, abortive or even momentarily satisfying flickers of a real life.’9 I would prefer here, by way of acknowledging the parallax of these two comments, to consider the Dickensian natality, nascent within the mortal, that is, theatre’s birth within its death. When we speak of the ephemerality of theatre, its propensity to perish, a certain pleasurable melancholy falls upon proceedings as though our task is somehow privileged. Those who preserve image-making against this thanatos, or death wish, this special art form that eats itself from within, perhaps inadvertently, but with a dubious heroism, figure themselves as a form of International Theatre Rescue with Brains and Lady Penelope in the vanguard. The point here is that these two apparently contrasting views of Brook and Phelan’s, though 40 years apart, are closer to each other, more affinitive, than the position I am willing to establish in this chapter, that is the degree to which both figures, the life of both, are split in a different way to those that ‘identity politics’ has cultivated. Not between gender, race and class, but by species and objects – and more specifically, between humans and other animals and things. Saying that ‘the witnessed man appearing’ is all that is needed for an act of theatre to occur, or that ‘the life of performance is in the present’, are interesting, but to say that performance and theatre are what make the horizon of life and the human possible in the

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first place by precisely promising, and then withholding, their appearance, might be more so. Here performance would become primordial in the best sense of that term, with theatre as its currently sanctioned, if admittedly close to bankrupt (if Richard Schechner is to be believed) agent of mediation. The way that performance affects us, makes life possible, is by working as an anthropological machine. This is slightly different to saying that the exemplary work of theatre anthropology has revealed this fact crossculturally. Theatre anthropology has (with the possible exception of the sustained work of Jean-Marie Pradier and a brief sortie into ethology by Schechner) more often than not considered its operation to be one of situating the human within its performative context culturally. It has tended to domesticate the exotic (that which is alien and distant to the investigator) while forgetting to exoticise the domestic, that which is closest to the investigator: the question rather than presumption of their own anthropos, their own human nature. The key question for anthropology: what makes ‘man’ him or herself should surely be routed through those life-forms with whom we are in continuous ambiguous relation? Or has ethology and the biologies of race of the twentieth century exiled such considerations beyond the politically correct? It is the testing of conceptions of humanness within animality that might be most relevant now in the face of climatic, environmental and genetic change. Determining the border between human and animal is after all, for the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, not just one question among many but the question, a fundamental ‘metaphysico-political’ operation through which something like ‘man’ can be decided upon and produced. Here the legend that situates the political at a border is realigned to detect that border at a nebulous hinterland between man and other animals. The registration of such a border, rather than the commitment to a project to align man and other animals exactly, the aspiration of some forms of ecological argument and Gaia inspired harmonies that seek a political acceleration towards an imagined reconciliation, might be a disappointment for the ecologically minded. But with such an alignment as distinct from the registration of the minimal difference, the human would simply cease to function as a thinking animal. When Beckett says in Waiting for Godot, ‘think Pig’, he sums up this gap and this potential quite succinctly.10 Drawing upon the poetry of Rilke in the Duino Elegies, and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben constitutes this ‘space’ of realignment, this boundary condition, as ‘the Open’. Where I have previously characterised that which surrounds us as a plasma, and elsewhere attempted to dislodge over-easy assumptions of context and the empty space into which ‘man’ apparently enters and asserts himself in politics and theatre, this ‘open’ operates on a quite different level. The Open, in Agamben’s writing, is figured as a ‘suspended substantive’, as Leland de la

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Durantye calls it, a condition that goes some way to bridge the tension between the singular performance and performance ‘as such’. The openness being discussed by Agamben is not only about the local, nor the general, but the potential of a life that is revealed as inoperative, that ‘energy that cannot be exhausted in the passing of the potential to the actual.’11 Here emerges Agamben’s inherent sense of theatricality, the philosophical ‘as if’ in the occasion of the animal-human relation, what he calls a ‘paradigm for politics’, an ‘operation in which the as if integrally replaces the that in which formless life and lifeless form coincide in a form of life.’12 This form of life has no need of a politics to be laid upon it, to over-read its own functioning, in its malfunctioning, in its inoperativeness, it is politics. This is why the terms political theatre and social theatre are tautologous. There are many ways to read the association between animals and performance, since Thomas Acquinas noted some time ago, the manner in which man drew what he called ‘experimental knowledge’ from his naming of the animals paraded before him.13 Townes van Sandt sang: ‘God gave names to all the animals, in the beginning, in the beginning … [pause] …’, as though to emphasise the founding gesture of this knowledge and the (human) breath that was needed after its audacious colonising of other creatures. And there are of course contemporary differences of approach to these namings that are worth noting emerging among colleagues within the discipline. Una Chaudhuri certainly recognises the potential of this field, but takes a somewhat Jesuitical approach, worthy of Acquinas, to the problem in her excellent essay ‘Zoo Stories’: In recent decades … many disciplines have begun to ‘take animals seriously’, looking at them through disciplinary lenses that include the geographical, the literary, the philosophical, the art historical, the psychoanalytical and the performative (the latter being represented so far mainly by a special issue of the journal Performance Research). What might it mean to turn a specifically theatrical lens on animals? What light might be shed on cultural constructions of animality by framing them in terms of dramatic movements, genres and structures, or in terms of theatrical protocols, conventions and aesthetics?14 This reveals the demands of theatre very precisely, but less about the twoway terms on which such operations depend and the parallax between them. I am worried here by an excision of the animal in a mock experimental rhetoric worthy of the laboratory, if not the human laboratory, in order to isolate and then examine them, shining lights on them, framing them, making them work again as though they have not laboured enough on our behalf. Nicholas Ridout in a recent book, referred to in Part I, Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, posed the question of the animal in

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more fully economised terms and indicated ways in which animal and actor labouring might reveal something about the contracts of performance in capitalist modernity.15 In an exemplary essay considering the animal on stage Ridout examines the practices of a small menagerie, horses in the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, a duck in a production by Theatre Bazi and, among a number of conclusions, makes the point that the ‘expense and inconvenience’ incurred by such anomalous inclusions in the event is not a side-effect of reintroducing the animal to the stage, but its point.16 I share the urge not to lose these questions of politics and economics in a vague ‘bio-aesthetic web’, but would hope that the questions could be turned outwards from the apparent shame of recognition, and the perverse pleasure that Ridout is always quick to attach to such embarrassments when constituted within the theatre, towards a slower dawning of how such engagements are always already about the strangeness of the humans in animal company. Yes the animals are ‘always with us’, as Ridout says, and yes there is ‘nothing strange about them’, it is the strangeness of the human animal in this engagement which is moot. Rather, here, by returning to the ‘suspended substantive’ of Giorgio Agamben’s category ‘the Open’, one might ask: open to what? The relations between humans and other animals might, unfortunately for the animal rights activists and ecologists, be less to do with the animals than the humans themselves, ourselves, the way that human agencies such as politics, ethics and law are already and everywhere suspended between man and animal. Here the experiment in question will always return to the renegotiation of what counts for human nature. The fictional work of Michel Houellebecq in his novels Whatever and Atomised, the theoretical work on ideas of life by Deleuze and Foucault, and the daily narratives on genetic engineering in the popular press, are indicative of the constant collapse of terms and categories into each other and the need to remark them each time anew. For Agamben it is the concentration camps of the twentieth century that most starkly experimented with the relations between human and inhuman and dragged the possibility of a distinction between the two towards human ruin. This ruin readily reminds us now (in the age of incarceration without trial at Guantanamo Bay) of the need to reassert the grounds of these negotiations between man and animal at every political turn. And as Agamben knows, tuned as he is to contemporary European theatre work such as that of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, it is, perhaps surprisingly given its obituaries, in the theatre that the human laboratory has been most subtly at work in the twenty-first century, measuring the tension between humans, other animals and things. It is in this context that I marked my unease at Ninagawa’s all-too-easy use of barbed wire in his production of Hamlet at the Barbican, to striate a stage on which a certain form, though not that form, of human experiment is being played out. This experiment is called Hamlet and needs to be

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distanced from that other experiment in which barbed wire was really doing some serious labour as the founding material of modernity, a history that really does take place at the particular ‘level of flesh’ rather than the body ‘as such’.17 From the concentration of the native American Indian in reservations, their quarry the bison extinct, through the controlling of space and the cattle there through the wire, to the invention of the concentration camp by the British in the Boer War in 1900, the incongruous violence of barbed wire, as a means of ‘preventative quarantine’, prefigures the state of exception that characterises the conduct of politics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As a biologically driven ideology Nazism established its credentials through an anthropological machine whose operation was to render the ‘future corpse’ from the Jew incarcerated within the wire. As Revel Neitz put it rather theatrically, there are no extras in this history: ‘they are all actors – humans, animals and their shared terrain. And because all these actors occupy the same stage, they cannot fail to interact …’.18 Surely though, as the British writer and comedian Ricky Gervais showed so painfully and stupidly in the celebrity Gestapo parody in his television series Extras, it is precisely a matter of this rendered remainder to the apparent action that tells us something particular about the general state of emergency. The week before Ninagawa’s Hamlet, I had seen Romeo Castellucci’s long-running, ‘wired’ production of Amleto in its final showing at the Odeon in Paris. At least here Hamlet, played by an autistic actor flexed up to menacing looking car batteries, pissing over a live metal bed-stead and firing off deafening blank rounds in the mist of exploding filing cabinets, seemed to be taking seriously the import of what this piece of work called ‘man’ might be, and do. To be and not to be, here, seemed a serious possibility, especially when compared with the ‘not being anywhere in particular’ of Ninagawa’s interculturalist exercise at the Barbican Theatre in London. It is a measure of the comparative failure of one performance of Hamlet, in the face of the other, that one of the few things that redeemed Ninagawa’s Hamlet was a stage fight of such ponderous amateurism and ineffectiveness that the inherent insubstantiability of all ‘stage fighting’ was finally exposed and consigned to the growing inventory of those things that theatre should never do unwittingly if it wishes to protect itself from dystopians who would turn it into this century’s equivalent of the string quartet. A fight that, ironically, cast my mind back to the theatricality of the car batteries in Amleto and the obvious electrical con that, despite a great deal of theatrical sparking, their nine-volt surges would not harm a hamster. This flair for theatrical appearance did not for a moment retard the effect and affect of a truly charged performance. But following my encouragement earlier stated not to remain in one place for so long as to become unaware of its provisionality, I wish here to

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draw back from ‘human performance in particular’ (Hamlet, Barbican, 2005; Amleto, Odeon, 2005) to a deepening and expanding of the possibility of the universal ‘as suches’ that surrounds it. A zoological perspective is overdue. The founder of modern scientific taxonomy, Linnaeus, had never been able to distinguish man from apes, not even through language, resorting in the end to registering the absence of difference between man and other primates. As Giorgio Agamben draws our attention to in the Linnaean taxonomy, next to the word Homo he simply adds the philosophical cliché: nosce te ipsum, ‘know thyself’. This is not a biological given, as with other creatures in his Systema, but an imperative. What is more it is an imperative of performance, for if man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself ‘as human’, then humans will need a theatrical machinery to affect this defining quality, to stage itself, him or herself, as human. Man is the animal that recognizes itself ‘as such’, man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human, and humans perform particular things to ascertain the limits of just such a conception within the general category marked Human. Humans are not creating their humanness in this process, in this I would disagree with the eminent anthropologist Wendy James that it is the human’s ‘ceremonial’ nature that makes it human, rather I would propose it is the human’s recognition of the limits to their ceremoniousness, precisely their deep ambivalence to show, that alerts them to a life and its impotential to be realised. When questioned about their greatest fears most people place public speaking first, above the fear of death. It is this anxiety of exposure that marks the true life of the human. And this fear should not be surprising when one reiterates that the only significant difference between humans and other animals (despite what Linnaeus says) is the human’s ability to sustain a controlled unbroken breath for an extended duration.19 As Ann Maclarnon, the evolutionary anthropologist, and Gwen Hewitt the psychophysiological researcher, put it: ‘the huge gulf between the breathing control of humans in even the simplest of phrases and the most demanding instances evident in nonhuman primate vocalizations clearly indicates that humans have evolved respiratory control mechanisms far beyond those of other primate species. These control mechanisms are essential to human speech production.’20 It is this unique capacity over all other animals that has allowed homo sapiens to become homo lingua and homo performans, never mind the obvious symmetry that allows for the apotheosis of homo rhetorica to become so by being homo shakespearians. And it was Shakespeare who recognised in the sustaining of iambic pentameter verse the simple universal rhythm of a suspended, human, breath. The language that flowed on that breath is immaterial to this argument, literally. As Colletivo di Palma showed so beautifully in an Italian vernacular version of Henry IV I could not understand, but fully understood, it is not its Englishness that makes Shakespeare

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humanly universal, it is not the wholly particular and locally bound narratives of kingship and courtship that make Shakespeare last, it is the simple fact of a species-specific sustained breath in which we recognise one of the few things we do better (or at least longer) than other animals. And then, being human, having ascertained one of our strengths, we make a great play of it and start singing (inventing opera), and then discover the capacity to dance and sing at the same time (inventing musicals). We make so much play of this heavy breathing that Harold Bloom can seriously contend that Shakespeare ‘invented the human’. Thrown bare onto the earth in infancy, one of the very few creatures that need such prolonged care to survive through extended infancy and childhood, Linnaeus points out that man can only become him or her self, man, by raising himself above himself. Kant of course characterised the human animal’s difference to all other animals as their unique need for a master. Many animals have masters but that is our problem not theirs, none of them needs a master like we do. The paradox of Linnaeus’s system was that in not recognising themselves, humans were consigned to the species of apes. Hence, according to Giorgio Agamben, the emergence of the anthropological machine, to secure this process of recognition and status contra related species. If homo sapiens is alone in being neither species nor substance, it is rather a device for producing the recognition of the human, and this device is performative. The early versions of this machine were figured as predominantly optical, a series of mirrors as Agamben puts it, in which humans saw their own features distorted to some degree in those of the ape. But the device of the anthropological machine was an anthropomorphous performance device, calibrated to register the differences between humans and other animals, the very absence of a nature ‘proper to homo sapiens’. The shape-shifting animal, the human, as Johnny Cash was melodically apt to point out in his hymn to the anthropological machine, The Beast In Me, was able to confess its relationship to that other from which it wished, but could not depart. So to anthropomorphise wherever necessary, as suggested in the first axiom of my science of appearance, should not be considered a threat to humanist rationality, it is already the device of choice for all humans knowing themselves. Aesop understood this well, as does Agamben. The nature of their legends may differ but each situates human politics at an indiscernible horizon, a continually shifting boundary between animals and other, human, animals. But sentience is not all, a surplus of sentience is required to think Homo Ludens. Homo sapiens is homo performans because it can pretend. It is certainly not unique in this among other animals, bower-birds and stotting-gazelle, for instance, display gloriously and intelligently as we shall see in the following chapter, but the human is able to receive a remarkable variety of forms and faces upon its evacuated identity. The human is, as Elvis said after Sam Cooke in The Great Pretender, the one who ‘pretends too much’. Where other species

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know who they are, humans do not, and hence this excess of display to cover an aeteliolated identity. In this lack, which psychoanalysis has made so much money from, Giorgio Agamben discovers a lack of dignity. Perhaps this is why, for me, the use of the word ‘dignity’ to describe the public response of the Lawrence family, the Taylor family, the Bigley family, to the loss of their loved ones in the racist estates of South London or the US/UK colony of Iraq seems so fiendish and inhuman. It gratefully describes, from the self-interested position of the politician, the passivity of the tragic parent or sister and registers their silence, while ensuring no further comment is possible that might have unwelcome political implications. This conferment of ‘dignity’ is a gagging order – a ban on further speech and simultaneously an abandonment by those in government of those in its care. The pronounced verbality of the de Menezes family whose son was executed by the armed special forces of the Metropolitan Police at Stockwell station after the bombings of 7/7 in London cannot be remarkable for its cultural specificity alone. If I hear another Home Secretary or President intone that dignity line again, when someone seriously able to prevent evils in the world with good is killed, a Margaret Hassan perhaps, a Rachel Corrie, or the most tragic death imaginable, that of a translator or interpreter in the war field, well what? What am I going to do about it? Nothing. Homo Academicus has little beast left, nor breath of any extended kind, just a pet at my feet, reminding me who I am. The anthropological machine, then, does not simply create something, any more than a machine in a factory simply creates something. The machine, like all machines, marks the interruption in a flow, any flow, that would otherwise go unrecognised. You only know a machine is there when it breaks down, or when it is turned off. At the risk of over-extending the metaphor, this is the very complex and philosophical way that Giorgio Agamben describes the working of the machine, as close to a manual that anyone has so far offered: Insofar as the production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/inhuman is at stake here, the machine necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is always already an exclusion). Indeed precisely because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside. And the anthropological machine of the modern era functions by excluding as not yet human an already human being from itself, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human.21 This sounds complicated, especially without Gemma’s diagrams to help, and it might be that the process being described is quite tricky. But it is no

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more complicated than the Moebian band discussed earlier in the context of the libidinal economy of the theatrical act, with its subtlety of side, interiors and exteriors. If there are any doubts as to our abilities as humans to do all this ‘including and excluding’ everyday, just join me on a short tube ride to Arsenal underground station in North London and see the 500-meter cage that runs down one side of a tunnel that used to lead to a local football ground that was called Highbury. The ground has moved down the road now to Ashburton Grove where it operates under the less romantic title Emirates Stadium, but the cage is still there. If we now, in the age of market-driven sports sponsorship and Premiership-product think what this cage was for, and what kind of animalising rhetoric was used to accompany any discussion of football in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, then you will be aware of the kinds of language preparation that had to be conducted to allow, indeed necessitated, the penning-in of supporters and the fencing-in of their vain attempts to retreat from death by crushing, suffocation and fire. And then think about the way in which these animals were corralled and induced, through the means of aggressive season-ticket campaigns that targeted their children, to ensure they could not escape the centrifugal attraction of a fortnightly death-wish. Or, if that football example is too parochial and your sport of choice has less passion than English football, then think of the Jew, the non-man as Giorgio Agamben puts it, produced within the human in the Nazi era. Or more recently to shift the political geography, the suspension of Yassar Arafat in his military hospital bed, his animal life of course linked to his political life, suspended, animated for all to guess at, if not to witness. Of course Arafat could not be named by George W. Bush and Tony Blair the respective political leaders of the United States and United Kingdom at the time of his death. In their valedictions, to have named Arafat would have resuscitated ‘a life’ for political profit by the intafada. Meanwhile, the Première of France, Jacques Chirac, found his way to the hospital where Arafat lay stricken, and on that day in Paris, just before my visit to the Odeon to see Amleto, Palestinians ran up to me in my very English black and white dog-tooth scarf and held me and cried Vive la France! This could have only been for the French government’s ability to host a leave-taking, to stage a truly dignified death for their political father. If in this modern model of the anthropological machine the outside is produced through the exclusion of an inside, and the inhuman produced by animalizing the human, in its historic form the inside is obtained through inclusion of an outside, the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal. The common figures of this historic functioning of the anthropological machine are myriad and include in Giorgio Agamben’s list: the man ape, the enfant sauvage, the slave, the barbarian and the foreigner who figures in human form. In plain English, this reminds us of the old tabloid newspaper, Sun story (replace Sun with local/national

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equivalent as all communities with journalism boast inside/outside spectres of fear) about refugees eating the village donkey. This in turn is of course simply an updated frightener of the age-old lore, that eating and ingesting mean becoming. Here a totemism is transformed by Rupert Murdoch’s crepuscular night-editor to a primitivism, becoming donkey the foreigner is animalised again, the outsider is made to appear (as) an ass. A Midsummer Night’s Nightmare. This talk of the anthropological machine begs the question where in this machine the ghost of performance is at work. I have suggested some ways in which the machine is inherently already a performance device but want to clarify its theatrical mechanics here – for there is much talk of this machine at present, as though it were producing something positive. On the contrary, what the machine is producing is not so much negative as ‘a negative’. I would hazard that the anthropological machine’s performative function is isolated in a zone of indeterminacy, or indifference, that Giorgio Agamben suggests lies at the centre of any such machine. If I was able to draw it below, as Gemma does, the human and elephant at the beginning of Tropicana, my diagram would illustrate the way the centre, sketched in charcoal and then bled across the page, is marked by a lack of articulation. That necessary charcoal blurring is because the tension between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being is always already virtually present in a space that performance might like to imagine it can occupy. Contrary to my caveat that there is no such thing as an empty space for theatre, this space of exception, like others that Agamben is interested in, this zone, is really empty, and the truly human being who should occur there, who is summonsed by performance to present themselves there, is in fact only the place of ‘a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesura and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew.’22 Neither the human life nor the animal life is ever going to appear there, but only ‘a life’ that is separated and excluded from itself. It is ‘bare life’ that has finally appeared after all this machine’s grinding and whirling, and it is performance that nightly in the human laboratory, that is, the last human venue, has demonstrated the workings of this device. In so doing some have claimed, quite enthusiastically but erroneously as I have shown in Part I, that theatre has played its part in alerting its audiences as well as its performers to how it might set about stopping this machine, or perhaps more realistically, interrupting it. I am afraid the anthropological machine is a much more smooth operator than that, and below in a series of related chapters I will briefly try to show why. In case you think that the abstract ‘as suches’ have finally got the better of the particulars in this chapter one might, perhaps unadvisably for such a philosophical figure, seek to locate if not these anthropological machines themselves, then their relics, the sepulchres, that stand as their prototypes

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and death-masks now. If ‘a life’ in the live art of theatre is my criteria of judgement, then this chapter grew from inauspicious circumstances, written largely as it was in the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. On my way to the library I encountered daily the two Cast Courts of the V & A, a mausoleum to mimesis, a spectacular and sublimely ironic reliquary for the culture of the copy in this copy-quick world. But lively they would not appear to be. I returned there on a quiet Sunday afternoon with my four-year-old daughter Florence and her mother. We were using some papers and crayons from the ‘art cart’ to make a head-dress to simulate that of the simulation of the effigy of Elizabeth Fitzherbert, lying alongside her husband Sir Ralph (d.1438), the original of which is to be found in Norbury Church, Derbyshire. My view, from top to toe, was of a distinguished figure in plaster-cast mock-alabaster laid out cold. But at a height of 90 cms the view from Florence’s angle was somewhat different. She asked me why the lady was standing on her pet? Ignoring the ostentatious visual sophistication, typical for any child in that freewheeling phenomenology prior to formal education, having read this prostrate figure in a vertical plain levitating it from stiff-death to alert-life, I realised I had either not noticed the animal, or more likely ignored the animal for the human animal. On inspection it turned out to be a miniature dog. And on closer inspection there turned out to be plaster-cast dogs, lions and other animals, everywhere: fearsome creatures at the foot of the Portico de la Gloria of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, (1188), the lion in bronze from the Cathedral Square Brunswick (1160), the Miraculous Draught of Fishes and the Raising of Tabitha (1160), the Prague Dragon being slain by St George (1373), and growling big-game holding up the Nicola Piano Pulpit from Pisa (1260). Around Elizabeth Fitzherbert there are serried ranks of effigies, John Talbot 1st Earl of Shrewsbury (d.1453), William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke (d.1231), unidentified knights lent by the Crystal Palace all with dogs or lions at their heels or beneath their feet. I ask the attendant who appeared to be livelier than his surroundings ‘why?’ and he simply says, rather enigmatically: ‘Protect in Death’, as though it were in Latin, and noticing my concern that this does not go far enough, continues ‘Dogs and lions do not back down’. None of the animals is noted. All of the humans are. A child sees an animal, an other, where an adult sees themselves ennobled in death. If a pet is for life, what kind of life is signified here? The ‘wild’ life of the lion and the domesticity of the dog would appear to be curious bedfellows as companions in the catafalque, a further blurring of what might be deemed seriously animal, certainly confounding the contemporary intellectual disdain for the domestic in the face of the wild. And if one admits that a figure is standing on its pet, where in the making of this effigy of an original did the one end and the other begin? Unlike the original where a

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certain species distance could be maintained, in this simulation, this second nature of sculptural mimesis, the gap has closed for good. Here the animal at heel, becomes heel, the chain-mail, fur, the shoes of leather, skin. In this blurring of boundaries the physical and philosophical indeterminacy of this final resting place, a primitive form of anthropological machine, is kick-started. I look up and am struck by the second nature, double dealing the exquisite fakery and conning all around us. The Cast Courts, or Architectural Courts as they are more properly known, consist of two cavernous halls running from north to south across the vast footprint of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The purpose of these courts when they were built in the 1870s was to contain the Museum’s collection of plaster casts of large-scale architectural sculpture, ‘better than the original’ as the afternoon guide describes them, the most prominent feature of which is the severed cast of Trajan’s Column. Here is a Victorian vision of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, throughout the nineteenth century the Museum was simultaneously, in a schizophrenic doppelgänger effect, acquiring its masterpieces and the forgeries, fakes and copies that confirmed the worth of the original. The world’s cast collections were destroyed in the drive for authenticity in the twentieth century, but, in a postmodern feint, years before Daniel Libeskind’s architecture was finally deemed too angular for the Exhibition Road, the V & A retained their faith in these mimetic marvels. Given the spectacular use of glass and iron, it is appropriate perhaps that throughout the 1920s the scepticism for the ‘copy’ was expressed through demands to have the collection removed in its entirety from South Kensington to Crystal Palace. The residue of this embarrassment remains in the notice that meets you at the two entry points to the Courts where the word reproductions is amplified in scare italics as though the Victorian ideal of education through entertainment might be about to irretrievably swing to the counterfeit pleasure of the copy. Even architecturally the building was saying to us things are not quite what they seem, they are seeming beneath your feet. The stunning mosaic floor that divides the east and west rooms of the Cast Court is known as the opus criminale, it is where the fakes and forgeries of the museum are exhibited in all their authentic mimicry. The floor was intricately and expertly laid to the designs of Frank Moody by the women convicts of Woking Prison, out on day release under the direction of Lt Col Du Cane. This became a model of labour that was replicated at Westminster Abbey and other establishment settings where the propriety of the property was the key. In this ‘cons’ alley’ Florence recognises the letters of her name, as in the label: ‘A lady Terracotta by Giovanni Bastianini (b.1830 d.1868) Italian (FLORENCE) about 1860’. Now she wants to know if this heavy-lidded woman, whose upper torso and head are above us, is called FLORENCE and

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if so why? I am on safer ground here until I begin to paraphrase the provenance of the piece we are looking at from the label by its side: ‘The bust was acquired as a work by Bastianini. It was thought to be a copy of a polychrome wooden bust now in the Louvre ascribed to Desiderio de Settignano. However the bust in the Louvre is itself probably a forgery by Bastianini and the present bust may well have been the model for it.’ I suppose you might call this an identity crisis. The lady terracotta’s, the museum’s and mine. As we head out of the museum towards the High Renaissance court we pass a triangle of distant cousins. On the left is The Archangel Michael from the Ile de France (1325), on the right a headless torso, a sepulchre effigy of a knight of the de Lucy family and behind us an alabaster devoted to the legend of the eighth-century Norfolk martyr Edmund. In hindsight they were pointing me towards the three modes in which animals’ interspecies relations with humans have been commonly considered to be of historical significance: as allegorical representation, as metaphoric vehicle and as phenomenological practice. The alabaster is part of the heart of England, hewn from Derbyshire where you can still see its imprint. In the legend Edmund literally lost his head for his faith. His likeness is studded with arrow marks, but when these failed to puncture his appetite for prayer, like Saint Sebastian, he was finished off with decapitation. His head rolled into the undergrowth where it was found by a wolf. A search party hoping to restore his parts were attracted by the shout of the wolf: hic, hic, hic (here, here, here). Edmund’s head is shown being wired back on his body, but the wolf has disappeared. We know that a martyr was a model, an exemplar, a mimetic template for an exemplary life, but also an intercessor between earth and beyond. But the intercessor between species is lost from sight. What is left is that least likely animal quality, not a cry, but words, hanging in the air, drawing us back to the discovery of the human in the grass, whose sense of wholeness is only possible within iconographic allegorical representation. To our left Michael is raised above us looking down, a beatific smile radiating from a mop of curls. Evoking the fourteenth-century cult of the Archangel Michael, he is here trampling the devil in the form of a dragon (Figure 2). Underfoot is not the pet nor the protector but the wild of sin, tamed but open-mouthed and gasping. Michael carries a shield but in an exquisite irony, not lost on the mimicking boys round its base, he has lost his spear which leaves his right hand, raised and curled, signalling an obscene gesture to the dragon, a literally off-scene provocation beyond the litany of the saints. The smile becomes a supercilious gloat. The dragon might be down, but it is not out. The nature of walnut has the last laugh. His face is riddled with worm, the same worm that has travelled up through the angel’s shield and into his arm. Where the reliquaries of the cast courts represented life in deathly palids, and the alabaster bleached the exertions

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of Edmund, here is the tentative return of the life that is live and it takes a certain death and decomposition of the materials to reveal it. As the adolescents’ gesturing back to this weaponless figure becomes more lewd, Florence and I defer to the knight to his right. It is pink, and real (as in ‘the real thing’), in sandstone, gesso, paint and gilt. Because it is real it is badly damaged (the guide was right) having been recovered from the Lady Chapel at Lesnes Abbey, Kent, where it was blessed in the mid-1300s (see Figure 3). All the knights templars’ gangland marks are there: fingerless, decapitated, toeless. I point out the lion, again at the feet, ‘Protect in death’, and notice that it has been separated from its tail in dilapidated mimicry of its master. Florence is looking the other way. She asks why there is a shark on his shield? I look closer and there in fifteenth-century fine-point is the forbidding graffiti of a killer shark apparently floating upside down. Like some latter-day Lascaux, or sketch for Damien Hirst, this specimen has swum into view across the chalky plane of this knight’s guard. From the angle of float it is obvious the Elizabethan tag-master from Lesnes has climbed onto the effigy from the far side and executed their trademark prostrate across the body of the prostrate knight. The artist of the anomalous enters the scene marking the significance of a natural history of performance for this second nature of mimesis. A human being has returned to make herself known, leaving their signature of presence, a small proxy performance. The second nature of this beast is the image that keeps it at one remove from the human hand that executed it. The ubiquity of the tension between animality and humanity in each of these earthly scenarios is less to do with the deaths each memorialises so much as the indeterminate lives lived. It is the phenomena of life itself, ‘a life’ as I referred to it earlier, that negates the boundaries that customarily divides disciplines and fields. If each of these lives is a matter, as Hans Jonas thinks, of coaxing, or bullying a ‘lease’ from death, then the apparent robustness of each of these machines is a dissimulation of the precariousness of each life lived. The sensitivity and irritability that marks a life in the first place is doubled by the plasticity of the containers designed to protect in death. All here is ultimately corruptible, despite the labour of the mason or the carver, the museum, like Canute, fends off the inevitable. The advances of another animality, of the woodworm or the gouged icon, are simply different paces of decomposition. The anthropological machine is thus marked by its alternating rhythms, noticed only when it accelerates or retards an organic return. Of course in the end the sepulchres are so many shed-skins of this reptilian life force, there is ‘no analogue in the machine to the instinct of self-preservation – only to the latter’s antithesis, the final entropy of death.’23 The biological uselessness of ‘mere representation’ makes each of these imageful artefacts truly human in their surplus to need, their mortal

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excessiveness confirms their immortal inadequacy. It is the human animal that takes pleasure in the uselessness of these anthropomorphic tombmachines because it is only the human animal that has the ability to perceive likeness: ‘For the animal mere similitude does not exist. Where we perceive it, the animal perceives either sameness of otherness, but not both in one, as we do in the apprehension of similitude.’24 Thus while animality might be prematurely and romantically ‘immediate’, humanness might be soberly qualified by its dependence on mediation, the human age is literally the media age. In its registering of the same as ‘not quite the same’, humans recognised somewhere else, in a much older sepulchre, in a cave at some point in their pre-history, the possibility of the minimal difference within which performance begins again. As Gemma said at the beginning of Tropicana, in another shallow vault, apparently deep in the earth, never mind that, ‘You need to know the difference between this and this’.

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Strange, how some act when no one sees them. Some make faces in the morning, others do a little dance, most hum senselessly to themselves. Ernst Bloch, Traces I have never felt more useful at a performance, that most gloriously useless of enterprises, than when I was at a street-festival in Sitges on the coast, south of Barcelona. In front of me the human pyramid, the Castellers, the human-tower rising skywards, began to sway under the pressure of its five stories. As the Catalan child, it had to be Jordi, ascended to the top, the huge men at the base began to call for help from the crowd of onlookers to shore up the staggering mass. It was uncommon, but not unheard of, for the child at the pinnacle to be pitched to their death thirty feet below. The delicate balance that was involved in the operation depended on generations of experience and yet was, at this precarious moment, open to support from the onlooker and the accidental tourist. And despite my apparent lack of qualifying muscle, that included me. The word ‘understanding’, that is to stand-under performance, to ‘understand’ it, begins from this premise of practical involvement and intellectual perception, a kind of tact, that is, informed, by intellectual judgements, and yet is utterly tactile.1 There is no room here, on the street at the very moment of toppling, for that facile and opportunistic split between practice and theory, that old argument is won, unpractised thought is as absurd an idea as unthought practice. It is not a question of whether practice is a form of knowledge generation and research, but how it is. What kinds of knowledge are inherent in performance practices and what kinds of understanding do they encourage and enhance. Within the apparent restraints of the subtractive fifth axiom laid out in Part I: No practice without theory, no theory without practice, and neither in context, the pressing question might well be, then, what? what is left to do? The work to be done, in this chapter at 102

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least, is not the work of interpretation, but the understanding of affects and their precise relationship to ways of seeing. What might account for the intensity of feeling, the tears that flowed, on being able to support a child for such a fleeting, glorious moment, on high, until the enxaneta, the weathercock, releases one hand from the base for a second, to signal a victory sign, and for the Estrellas to flow. Theatre, intimacy and engagement would appear to be indubitably bound here among families, friends and neighbours from a barrio of Sitges during the feast of St Anthony. But I wondered, at the base of that pyramid, what linked the outside eye and the outsider’s hand in an action of apparently simple support? This Catalan memory came to me while participating in a workshop with the theatre director Peter Brook organised by the London International Festival of Theatre and taking place in the Young Vic Theatre in London. Surrounded by onlookers such as the actor Ralph Fiennes and the writer Caryl Churchill, Brook was running us through a remarkably nimble tour of European directing traditions and innovations. There was a lively exchange of questions and debate with the floor but after about an hour I heard Brook say, sotto voce to his stage colleagues: ‘We are drowning in words’. I know I was not alone in thinking we had barely begun, that our appetite for speaking about performance, talking theatre, considering its effects and affects, is still so easily satisfied. Brook asked Yoshi Oida, a performer whose work I have admired over the years, to take us through an exercise. We stood and, encouraged and guided by Yoshi, found our own way to ‘point at the moon’. There was a veritable sigh of relief as we sat down, having gestured towards the ceiling and the lunar light, that we had through this action recuperated the authenticity of the body in action, the tyranny of the word was repelled for another day. My contention here is that we should have no fear for performance, for performance is prodigious. Performance is threatened by many things, philistine utilitarian government rationales, lack of resources, obsequious patronage and fawning fashion, but it is not threatened by my speech or yours. It is threatened by the monstrous silence that falls upon it in the misplaced interest of maintaining its mystery. This does not for a moment mean we can be random or uncaring with our words. W. C. Fields is alleged to have said it: ‘Never work with children or animals’, and I would enjoy the joke too if it had not slipped, in Fields’s xenophobia, natural and cultural, from a hatred of dogs and babies to a hatred of other ‘others’, including people Fields described as ‘Negroes’. Thinking expansively and inclusively about what, and who, might constitute theatre is one small resistance to these kinds of exclusions, racist or otherwise. So here I want to join others in encouraging a dissembling, from a closed culture of professionalised theatre whose overriding concern is self-protection and the defence of its already ragged borders, towards the recognition of those beings who disassemble the propriety of performance:

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infants and animals first, but inevitably, then, if we are to take the anomalous seriously, other ‘others’ (including those relative late-comers in the early twentieth century, the avant garde). From the lateral, and almost wholly unexplored movement-genius of people with disabilities, to the vivid older tonal range of voices in their third or old age. From the perfection of all those who have had the good grace to fail all auditions they have ever attended because of the beautiful non-conformity of their normally elegant bodies and plain gorgeous faces, to those school caretakers for whom some wooden planks knocked together with nails become stages for other mysteries. These acts of recovering personal performances would be a worthy challenge to Oberon when he speaks of nativities to come at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Never mole, hare lip nor scarre, Nor marke prodigious … Shall upon their children be.’2 In the face of Fields’s fear of a threat to professionalism from the anarchy of the infant and the animal, let us first welcome a prodigious performance, performance that causes wonder, amazement and at which we marvel and that always has the potential for monstrosity and the anomalous. That is, not the abnormal, but the anormal – in my performance context here: the frayed, the unfinished, the inconsequential and the interruptive. In other words everything that a performer like Fields, whose principal skill ‘juggling’, the death-mask of creativity, would wish to resist in the interests of conservatism and security. If on the one hand, in this book, I appear in a generous intellectual mood, willing to expand the terrain of theatre, I would probably wish to consider juggling as the only practice that really should, for the sake of us all, be exiled from the Republic of Play. To continue to think theatre without what Bonnie Marranca described some years ago as an ‘ecological’ continuity between culture and nature might appear to submit to a hopeless apartheid, giving up on a beautiful complexity before analysis is even underway. But as Caryl Churchill exposed in her coruscating play Far Away, this parallax condition is an apartheid driven by an anthropological machine with very specific rhythms, a renting of the foot and mouth, that can only result in some surprising and inherently violent alliances between those dentists, wasps, children, Moroccans and crocodiles once sundered from collective consideration by our need for cultural security. So if Chapter 1 concerned itself with the anthropological machine that stalls on its promise of an appearance of ‘man’, this chapter considers the possibility of the ‘unaddressed’ that is to all intents and purposes, ambivalent to human interest. This unaddressed phenomenon in performance is distinct from the ‘addressed’, the licensed, the staged and the celebrated. That is the impulse to display, shared by animals and human animals, that, unlike mating signals, camouflage and the repertoire of the National Theatre in London, has no utilitarian function, and no presumed audience. These displays, far from escaping the machinery of theatre that motor the

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last human venue, and discussed by the growing band of animal watchers in performance, are what makes those ways of watching possible in the first place. They, after all, were widely evident before the relatively recent emergence of an urban tragic theatre and would have accompanied whatever pre-historical forms of performance one might care to imagine in the long absence of history prior to the papyrus. My thoughts here are influenced by the peripatetic philosophy of the translator and writer Alphonso Lingis but also the writings on animal form and colour by the Swiss zoologist Adolf Portmann in the 1940s, and the work with children of the Italian theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Here I am like other researchers across the human and life sciences, drawn to examining that which resists representation: things that don’t need representing, that cannot be represented, that are between and beyond representations, things that are too quick, too slow, too near or too far for representation, and things that have deliberately been kept from representation. This work suggests to me that, contrary to academic emphases of the last decade, performance might be reasserting the possibilities of the intensely visual, yet unaddressed. This is neither process nor product, but a ‘prodigious performance’ that raises some vexed questions of vision, and then later in the chapter, beauty, that really do require addressing before we submit to the theoretical evacuation of the pleasure of seeing. It is seeing, after all, that provides one mechanism for the affect machine to operate as we currently understand it and, despite laser treatments and prosthetic implants, it is seeing that might be expected to remain bound to our understanding of what constitutes theatricality.

Play ground Let me focus this discussion with two quotations: the first from Adolf Portmann and the second from the French novelist and writer of children’s fiction, Michel Tournier. Floating within the intensity of the blue waters of the ocean are living creatures called Radiolarians. Their beauty could never have been seen without the invention of optical instruments …Yet the Radiolarians existed long before anything made by man.3 When I got to the playground of the College Sainte-Croix, I stopped for a minute to watch. The strange ballet of the children’s rushings to and fro, the figures ceaselessly formed and dissolved and reformed, must have some meaning. What? Groups, combinations, ensembles, arrangements, breaking apart – all here is sign, as elsewhere, more than elsewhere. But sign of what? That’s my eternal question in this world covered in hieroglyphs to which I haven’t the key.4

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What kind of provocation do the Radiolarians present to Michel Tournier’s sign seduced, semiotically challenged anti-hero? Why look for a key before looking otherwise, is it too late to watch? Who, despite contemporary squeamishness at an all-enveloping generality such as ‘voyeurism’, would not admit to being in thrall to the intensity of the playground, the schoolyard, its flagrant disregard for the ameliorative justice of adults, swift retributive acts and asymetrical alliances that flare and fade, forgotten (Figure 4). But first there is the poetic resonance of: ‘Ip, skip, sky, blue, who’s it, not you!’ and keening away from the centre, by the dreadful simplicity of the last one’s untouched presence, the unnameable, ‘it’ is revealed. ‘You’re IT!’ And in that instant ‘it’ pauses, observes and summarises the challenge, the prey to their predator, they’re game. Children know the performance potential of their playmates as intimately as Venus knows Serena Williams, those who know themselves to be slower than the catcher run to all corners as fast as they can, while others who trust their superior suppleness, speed, stamina, stay close, and closer, asking for it, flaunting it, you can’t catch me. To whom are these curious sights and sounds addressed? The catcher often ignores and circumvents the taunting, teasing proximate and pursues the weak, who flee to the distant cover of a bench or tree, or simply arrive at the perimeter fence frozen with delicious fear. The ethologists Amotz and Avishag Zahavi interpret this scene, radically rereading a set of signs that had always previously been interpreted as a utilitarian function of ‘scaring-off’. They say: ‘The handicap – the risk of approaching the catcher – taken on by those who are confident in their ability to outrun him or her convinces the catcher not to waste any effort trying to catch them.’5 The encounter between a jumping gazelle and its predator, the straight-legged leaps known as ‘stotting’ that the fit gazelle will flourish in the presence of the stalking wolf, rehearses these questions and leads the Zahavi’s to conclude: ‘in order to be effective, signals have to be reliable; in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly’.6 Like a jockey at Epsom, Longchamps or Kentucky, or a golfer at St Andrews, the handicap that is endured by the strongest of gazelle, or peacock for that matter, is indicative of its reliability. If you have observed the peacock waddling, swaying, in anything but its mating postures, you will have recognised that ‘by its very nature, the reliability required in signalling militates against efficiency.’ According to the Zahavis: ‘Handicaps increase the reliability of signals not despite the fact that they make an animal less efficient but because they do. Any improvement in a signal must be accompanied by a cost in the signaler – that is, it must make the signal’s bearer less well adapted to its environment.’7 Can this be true, could risk outrun prudence so ostentatiously, could the excesses that precisely migrate through utility to performance be reconceived more sensually and affirmatively than theory has recently allowed?

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Of course they can, we see them everyday, but forget to revise our memory of Darwin’s utilitarian functionalism. The performance theorist Richard Schechner has a puzzling take on this. He says: ‘A great difference between human and non-human performers is the ability of humans to lie and pretend … Although a few species specialize in ‘deceit’, most animal performances are automatically released, fixed and stereotyped. There is no irony, no pliable back-and-forth play between the role and the performer, no trilogical interaction linking performer to performer to spectator.’8 But as the animal-lover and watcher David Williams has pointed out, it is precisely the inability of the animal to sustain fictional ironies that makes for its quality of presentness. And that, to my eye at least, seems quite pliable enough to be getting on with. Why should the catcher trust these signals, why do they rarely pursue the closest, displaying themselves? Surely our camouflage culture has taught us not to misconstrue signs for wonders. The child is smarter than this recent bias of philosophy, they can judge an honest threat and calculate instantly (through an ecological economy much older than the Western philosophical frame) the catchee’s ability and willingness to evade. They have to, because like, but not the same as, the wolves of the prairie, there will be a limited number of runs possible before fatigue sets in consigning the catcher to eternal catcherhood. Now, I could continue to interrogate this model, teasing out a relatively new economy of rethinking performance within an expanded field of ecological and biological concerns. But it is the nature of my endeavour, laid out in Part I, not only to make these particular critical gestures but to articulate how these new insights question existing assumptions, generalities, that permeate the field of discourses, discussions and arguments, within which performance research is advancing. This ‘camouflage culture’ I speak of, invisibility politics masquerading as an idealised ‘unmarked’ state beyond reproduction in pure representation, a live economy of signs untainted by reproductive commerce, has been setting the agenda for what some consider to be the defining quality of performance, the ontology of performance, its ability to ‘be’ something as distinct to something else, to qualify as theatre, say, ontologically distinct to film or television media. Again, to reiterate my reference in Chapter 1, one of performance theory’s most interesting exponents, Peggy Phelan, particularly in her work Unmarked, ubiquitous now in discussions of what constitutes performance, takes her book-cover starting point from ‘closed eyes’, in Robert Mapplethorpe’s wonderful image of Alice Neel, a symptomatic blindness for Phelan who speculates, and I quote: ‘Visibility is a trap: it summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession. Yet it retains a certain political appeal. Visibility politics have practical consequences ….’ Now those last two admissions seem

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worthy of more than a coda, they are much more than one can say of the writing that has uncritically adopted a squeamishness of the visual, wholesale, from Jacques Lacan’s notorious dictum in Four Fundamental Concepts: ‘In the matter of the visible everything is a trap.’9 By way of distancing myself from such a neurotics of vision, perhaps we might say neuroptics, without for a moment downplaying its passing polemical value, I want to begin to roll back this Puritan Performative whose scopic interpretations reciprocate inversely the blinded, effaced, and silenced body of ‘the artist formerly known as’ expressive. Here I would place Angelica Festa, the primary object of Phelan’s scrutiny, in a long, recently privileged academic lineage, via Harold Pinter, Franz Xavier Kroetz, Samuel Beckett and John Cage, where silenced blindness has invited a certain intrusive interruption from the academic community of interpretation. This is a ‘cryptic culture’ in which the profession of interpretation is promoted at all costs, in the preservation of a highly developed species, not I would hasten to add the artist – no that would be a preservation order worth slapping-on for the well-being of us all – but the ‘cultural theorist’ as ‘therapist’. All animals, including humans, combine cryptic and somatic elements, there are so many signal-like effects, not background colours but striking boldnesses that now require our attention, not over and above, but alongside the fascination with the cryptic if we are not to consign the human and its expressive acts, butterflies seen on the wing, to the status of those pinned collections destroying the truly significant colour relations in forced, splayed poses. I’m not here so much shadowed by the semiotic banalities of Desmond Morris’s ‘man watching’ as tuning myself to the performative tactics of his zoophilic, maverick namesake, Johnny Morris, long out of fashion for his crazier anthropomorphisms, but worth recovering from the archives of 1960s British television for his willingness to look again at animals, his ocular-eccentricity, his anim-orality, animal-magic indeed.10 If puritans are going to tell me what to look at, I’d rather be taking on, considering and critically addressing the real thing, the out and out ‘cultural bigot’, from Jeremy Collier 300 years ago, to Jesse Helms or Mary Whitehouse through the last decade, or Richard Littlejohn today; they are objectionable but really do look closely at the things they would prefer we didn’t see. While their ‘consciousness is in the tradition, descending from Plato, that distrusts excess, ornamentation and … the seeming truth of appearance’,11 at least they don’t confuse the discussion with specious arguments about the formal qualities of, for instance, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. As the Hellenicist Alexander Nehamus said in The London Review of Books: ‘I remember one expert who claimed in all seriousness that what counts in “Jim and Tom, Sausalito” … is simply the formal grace of the curve which

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occupies its centre: she thought it completely irrelevant that the curve is made by a man’s leather gloved hand, his penis and a stream of urine flowing into another man’s mouth.’12 This admittedly nuanced nonsense contrasts with Jesse Helms, who ‘in his antediluvian innocence, at least saw what was there, understood what Mapplethorpe was proposing, and took it, correctly, as a direct challenge to everything he believed in …’.13 My argument here, then, would be that we might, within an ecological context, have critical regard for what we are looking at. We might, adjusting our eyes to this new light, look again in a less-blinkered and nervous, though not naïve, way at the object of our attention, that is, performance. Martin Jay in his book Downcast Eyes has made clear why this might be a worthwhile corrective to a French century just passed, from thinkers and writers such as Bataille, Sartre, Lacan and Levinas, for whose followers ocular-scepticism became an unexamined norm.14 For instance, if we are going to continue to discuss ways, modes of looking, such as the gaze – which gaze? Is it the gaze that perception theorist James Gibson had, well prior to his ideas on the moving, ‘raiding subject’ in his Ecological Approach to Visual Perception of 1974, dismantled through his work on the ‘gradients of deformation’ of the visual field by the ‘active observer’, or, as the theatre writer Herbert Blau suggests the ‘gradients of the gaze that may move from a state of beholding or contemplation to outright stupefaction.’15 After semiotics, signals were there to be analysed and in the interests of complexity, animals’ signals as well as human animal signals were more often than not interpreted as efforts to ‘mislead’. But why the suspicion, the cynicism before the seeing? The flounder rippling with the current on its sandy bed, the stick-insect matched to its twig are still ‘showing off’, and with a conspicuousness that would seem to belie our age of cynical reason.16 A Caribbean Reef Squid may mimic vegetation, black sponges or corals. It may therefore hope to pass unperceived by predators, but it may also truthfully suggest the presence of plants, sponges or corals in the neighbourhood. Squid, Octopuses and Cuttlefish, cephalo-pods, do not bluff, they may conceal their identities, but they do not conceal their intentions. Our wish to read these occlusions as utility, function and instrumentality cannot hide the aesthetic audacity and innovative expression involved in becoming a nothing to remain a something, or a nobody in order to become a somebody. From The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, to The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith this passing has always had a sense of decorated display and revelation about it. It is after all Tom Ripley’s penchant for his dopplegänger’s jewellery and street-smart café hang-outs that brings him closest to discovery and exposure in Anthony Minghella’s film of Highsmith’s work. From here one can no longer see signals as mere conventions, they might rather have some inherent claims to make on our sensual attention before

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interpretation. As Alphonso Lingis says: ‘Let us liberate ourselves from the notion that our body is constituted by the form that makes it an objective for the observation and manipulation of the outside observer … the form and substance of our bodies are not clay – shaped by Jehovah and then driven by his breath; they are coral reefs full of polyps, sponges, gorgonians, and free-swimming macrophages continually stirred by monsoon climates of moist air, blood and biles.’17 Acknowledging these sensual predispositions, including the tactility of sight, might fruitfully take the place of another critical era’s penchant for ideological confessions, those prefatory apologia that were frankly hard to quibble with, ‘as a white male’, ‘as a middle-class academic’, which if the audience were awake was quite obvious. Intoning one’s subject position as I emphasised in the introduction to this section seemed scant defence, I always felt, against the vicissitudes of prejudice. Rather, what I am thinking of here is recognition in one’s writing, speaking and making, of one’s own ecological, inter-species subjectivity. ‘Human animals live in symbiosis with thousands of species of anaerobic bacteria, 600 species in our mouths, which neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies, 400 species in our intestines, without which we could not digest and absorb the food we ingest.’18 Given this cohabitation, might an ecology of informed sensual relations imply a more subtle model of communication than current production/consumption models tolerate? might it contribute in some small way to the disruption of classic subject-object binaries ‘as we dissolve bounded forms into notions of intensities, pulses or irritabilities’?19 and might it invite us to acknowledge a ‘parasite performance’?, as Adrian Kear has expressed it, a thermal-exciter that does not so much ‘site’ itself in the ‘specific’ of the space-age as mediate inter-subjective and interspecies exchange between hosts and guests in this, the time of our lives.20 What could this inter-species subjectivity imply for the social sphere and the retracing of associations that I figure as the obface of the suspended political investment in performance? In the fourth axiom, proposed in the first part of this book, I introduce an ever-present ethics as the condition for this encounter: The social life of theatre awaits a politics that will not come and acknowledges an ethics that precedes its appearance. The child who flees across the playground is silent, save for a cacophony of adrenalindriven gasps, the child who stays sings, compounding the boast of untapped energy and resources, masking the aeteliolated disposition of their asthmatic friend. Like modest threats, ‘singing, aerial displays, electric pulses, puffs of noxious chemicals, posturing …’21 are communications for the benefit of both parties, like birds acting as sentinels in trees above their feeding extended family, barking their announcement of the arrival of a highflying predator, reciprocal acts of altruism offset the petty jealousies of the schoolyard. These acts are ritualised, and restored, behaviours that serve to increase the clarity of the signal and the communicative efficacy of the

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chase. Despite common assumptions borne of competition, communication here requires the cooperation of both parties. The contemporary fetish for the banality of conflict makes for an easier ride than this cooperation, and the serious pleasure that can be taken in it. When Roland Barthes was a child, playing tag in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, his participation in the game was driven by a conflict with alltoo-easy conflict: ‘When I used to play prisoner’s base in the Luxembourg, what I liked best was not provoking the other team and boldly exposing myself to their right to take me prisoner; what I liked best was to free the prisoners – the effect of which was to put both teams back into circulation: the game started over again at zero.’22 As the industrial West moves from a postmodern ‘Geometric Age’ of space-fetishism, to the ‘Genometric Age’ of invisibility clues, ‘now you see me, now you don’t’, this cooperative gesture at least has the interests of ‘looking pleasurably’ at its heart. In a parable about the current state of the human sciences, the French writer Michel Serres claims that the contemporary modes of communication based on codes and computers have put an end to the reign of ‘panoptic theory’, that pervasive sense of continually being overlooked, watched, so elegantly analysed, or was it invented, by Michel Foucault? As Serres says: ‘The informational world takes the place of the observed world’. He writes, ‘things known because they are seen cede their place to an exchange of codes … Everything changes, everything flows from harmony’s victory over surveillance … Pan kills Panoptes: the age of the message kills the age of theory.’ The eyes of the ‘all seeing god’, he concludes, have been transferred to the plumage of a peacock where ‘sight looks blankly upon a world from which information has already fled. A disappearing species, only ornamental, the peacock asks us to admire, in the public parks and gardens where the gawkers gather, the old theory of representation.’23 But Michel Serres must know that no animal is stupid enough to be frightened off by mistaking these markings for eyes, an insult to the predator’s perception, and given most predatory behaviours occur at night, in the dark; eye markings would appear to be irrelevant in the dimness. Unlike Michel Serres, I really am interested in that ‘only ornamental’, especially when it is ‘only’ for ‘nobody’.

Swimming pool Let us dive for a while to look at this ‘only ornamental’, prodigious performance where it is reflected in a glass darkly. Jacques Cousteau, in one of his deep-sea forays had this to say about octopuses and squids: ‘cephalopods are excellent actors, with vast repertoires, and they are able to play many roles by making use of stratagems which, on dry land, are usually found only in the theatre: disguises, gestures, mime, poses and posturing.’24 All or most of the signal patterns that Cousteau cites are elaborate and ‘ritualised’

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displays, performances which would appear to have become stereotyped or exaggerated expressly for the purposes of communication. But such displays are not the only signals used by these animals. It is becoming increasingly apparent that a substantial part of the information transmitted between these, and other organic individuals, is conveyed by patterns of relatively simple forms which have a multitude of other functions in addition to communication and a myriad valences that have nothing whatsoever to do with communication, in other words, unaddressed expressive phenomena. As Adolf Portmann writes: ‘there are small oceanic creatures living in the interiors of the larger deep-sea creatures, or living below where light can penetrate, yet which present vivid colourings and symmetrical markings that can never be perceived in their habitat nor by their own species, which have no optical perceptive organs. These patterns bear no useful purpose, neither for camouflage against enemies, attractors for breeding, signalling messages, staking territory, nor lures for prey. This is “sheer appearance for its own sake”, “unaddressed phenomena”.’25 The eyes of the octopus, identical to human’s in almost every respect, are very prominent and so clearly important that they have tended to distract attention from the rest of the animal’s sensory apparatus. There is no equivalent body of information about, for example, the animal’s chemotactile sense, which is probably quite as important to it. The brain weight of an octopus represents only the more specialised sensory integrative higher movement control and learning parts of a rather diffuse nervous system – the ganglionated cords of the arms alone contain almost three times as many neurones. Not unlike the common perception of the rhetorical stage performer, the layman’s octopus is an animal that consists of arms, in amongst the arms, somewhere in the middle, is a head, with almost human eyes. But the majority of the brain is in the arms. The animal cannot move without affecting the colours it shows so that the different postures and forms of locomotion that it adopts all play a part in determining the patterns it displays. A cephalopod can turn black or white depending on its background and, proximate to a white and black background, it will go black and white precisely according to its adjacent surroundings with no greys in between. All these creatures know their interlocutors and distinguish between themselves and other ‘others’, other species, individuals and sexes. On logical grounds it is hard to conceive how they could distinguish others without having an idea or impression, conscious or not, of what one is oneself. There is a haunting similarity in the history of the octopus and ourselves (that is, presuming a human is reading this). Both of us have evolved from groups obliged to spend a period in the wilderness, eking out a peripheral existence while other animals, temporarily better adapted, dominated the more desirable habitats. The result of these evolutionary coincidences is a mollusc that a primate can recognise as a fellow creature. But there are of

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course dangers in my celebratory axiom that encourages anthropomorphic aspiration to association. The octopus is an alien. It is a poikilotherm, it never had a dependent childhood, it has little or no social life. It may never know what it is to be hungry. Depriving an octopus of food makes it less, not more, liable to emerge from its home and attack things that it sees. It knows sex, but it does not get excited about it. The heartbeat of a male octopus in copulation is as steady as in a resting animal. The male’s heart misses a beat when the female comes into his proximity, but he loses no time in inserting his hectocotylus. A heart beat is missed at each ejaculation, but there is no indication of a change in beat frequency or amplitude associated with copulation. Like other dynastic species cephalopods are blue-blooded animals, they have a copper-containing compound in their blood, and the ink or sepia that most cephalopods possess is their chief means of defence. The ink is contained in a small pear-shaped organ between the gills. The ‘ink sack’ ends in a long neck which leads into a funnel from which the ink is discharged. The ink belongs to the melanin group, relating it to the pigments of hair and skin in human beings. Ink, as Christopher Hitchens and other octopus-like polemicists know well, confuses the enemy but how? It is not just a smoke-screen for the ink often hangs in a definable and characteristic ‘shape’ but rather the ink acts as a dummy, a spectre to confuse while the octopus, rapidly changing colours, darts off sideways, or more often than not, simply looks on bewildered by this oceanic scripture. Ink paralyzes the olfactory sense of the predator the Moray Eel but, significantly, is fatal to its owner if over concentrated in too restricted and enclosed a container. The ink will envelop and suffocate the squid if it is contained, modularised, divorced from its oceanic embrace, from the passing columns of crabs, the schools of fish. As Adolf Portmann would have it, describing something we may never see, but may one day feel: ‘Waves of excitement are always passing over the body of the cuttle fish and other cephalopods …’. If, as Michel Foucault said, the last century would one day be recognized as Deleuzian, a dedication to his philosopher colleague Gilles Deleuze, a dedication that I find somewhat predictable, one French thinker recognises our global age as signified by another French thinker from a neighbouring arrondissement, I would like to think that the current century will one day be considered ‘cephalopodian’, if that is not too ugly a word to describe such a propensity to prodigious performance.

Class room The school-bell goes and children return to their classroom whose modernist, white-walled aesthetic is overlayed, overplayed by the exuberance of expression. As though a pantechnicon of powder paint has careered into

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this igloo of cool, Julien Schnabel meets Kasmir Malevich’s white period in a messy conflagration of cloudy vapours, these infants slough off their puritan heritage, the flat protestant grammar of modernity with their baroque flutings, rococo daubs, nouveau curves, pop incandescence, psychedelic swirls and graffiti tagging. Like other natural anti-academicians these children prioritize: ‘complexity over simplicity, pattern over form, repetition over composition … curvilinear over rectilinear, and the fractal, the differential and the chaotic over Euclidian order. They celebrate the idea of space over the idea of volume. They are literally and figuratively “outside styles”. Decorative and demotic they resist institutional appropriation and always have.’26 They confuse and confound the white wall of modernity, most famously pursued by Le Corbusier, who wrote in his The Decorative Art of Today of 1925: ‘Whitewash is extremely moral. Suppose there were a decree requiring all rooms in Paris to be given a coat of whitewash. I maintain that that would be a police task of real stature and a manifestation of high morality, the sign of a great people.’27 The children mill around the ‘nature table’, hands reaching with the imperative of tactility to caress the shells, eggs, crabs, star-fish, sea urchin, sponge, nests, furs, feathers, barks, Pikachu with a glissandoing ball-bearing bottom. Adolf Portmann would not be surprised to find touch, sight and smell at work here, prior to interpretation, children, as they tend to ‘regarding much in the appearance of the higher animals as a “feast for the eye” …’.28 They hold their prized possessions and finds above their heads in affecting display, animating their melancholy still lives, and the teacher has to remind them there is another question to be asked beyond the ubiquitous: ‘How much do you love it?’ Our educational spirit ‘protests against the artificiality of outward show, it demands essentials instead of facades and thinks that the very observation of natural objects should make us proof against false appearances and superficiality.’29 But the perceiving eye of the child insists that the appearance that meets the eye is of significance and refuses to allow it to be ‘degraded to a mere shell which hides the essential from our glance’.30 Symmetry of course helps as an aide memoire here but has little to do with ‘the beautiful’, for while only a few creatures are asymetrical, the sponges, the hermit crab and fiddler crab, and the mature plaice, whose eye shifts from one side of its body round the corner to the other, (where is the gaze of the plaice now?), a child will always be able to compare knowledgeably the outside appearance of things to their internal visceral arrangement. If as Adolf Portmann suggests ‘what is presented to the eye is formed according to different laws from what is invisible’ some interesting questions are raised. For instance, what of the ‘other’, the apparently invisible but nevertheless lurid, to the ‘privileged’ of the nature table. I am sure when Homi Bhabha was at school he would have enquired after those other, hybrid,

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organisms: ‘the rabble of vermin, monsters or abortions, worms of maggots, a collection of monstrosities from which just a few groups are separated off to receive one-sided aesthetic respect … what is this series to which we give preferential attention, compared with the immense field of animal forms which mean little or nothing to our technical sense, but which nevertheless provide morphological research with problems quite as difficult as those concerning structures more readily comprehended by technical methods of thought.’31 I would personally make a play here for consideration of the Deep-Sea Angler-Fish: ‘the male animal grows on to the female at an early stage, most of its organs degenerate and finally it is included into the blood stream of the female. So in the end it forms only a peculiar kind of testis which the female carries about with her for the rest of her life.’32 Now these are bodies that really matter, worthy of a closer look for some spectacular gender trouble. Here the characteristics of a natural history, that I would like to reclaim by the end of this book for performance, momentarily privilege rigorous amateurism, informed enthusiasm, pedestrianism, observation, collection and identification over the all too premature disinterested dissection and interpretation of the invasive life sciences. On the contrary, elsewhere, in theatre studies as well as other more rationally minded pursuits, our classificatory urge would seem to have followed the evolution of the Natural History Museum diorama display as laid out by Albert Eide Parr: from ‘simple groups’, that is, main emphasis on the zoological specimens themselves (for instance in theatre terms, the artist as an isolated genius, Bertolt Brecht say), via ‘composite groups’ (the artist in context, Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble), to ‘picturesque groups’ (the artist in critical harmony, Brecht with Walter Benjamin), through to ‘narrative groups’, ‘zonal groups’ and finally we evoke the challenge of ‘ecological groups’, complete fidelity to nature, representation of a total living community: ‘the largest generalization made in science, encompassing both the organic and inorganic elements of nature bound together in a single place, all in active, reciprocating relationship.’33 But are we not more often like: ‘Those sessile crustaceans such as barnacles, Balanids, which colonize the inter-tidal zones of the rocky shores in dense crowds, or the medusae, often collected in vast swarms, that swim along with a continuous pulsation of their bell-like bodies …’ all of which conduct a curiously ambivalent form of animal association quite distinct from the schools of fish or noisy colonies of breeding birds for whom living, working and playing together means together. Of course since Plato we have all learnt to mistrust appearances, to be distrustful of beauty, which might be another word to describe simply many of these signals, and accept that only the few philosophers among us can discern the true order of things by working from the visible, to the invisible, to the hidden. But as Adolf Portmann put it: ‘Such probing into

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what is most deeply concealed makes us strangers to the appearance of the living creatures around us, to what is evident in our senses.’34 Guy Debord might have noted how in modern times an excess of display has the effect of concealing the truth of the society that produces it,35 but given taste is critically significant to most people, for some literally (consider the following: ‘is there enough to eat?’, ‘we are what we eat’, ‘to boil alive or not to boil alive’), and often perceived however erroneously to be synonymous with identity, surely we should ask questions about our different judgements of beauty and what our disagreements signify.36 I wonder whether humans’ consideration of their aesthetic acts might learn from this sensitised deportment, and in turn might reward their own environments and micro-systems with enhanced senses of altruism and care. I am here mounting another approach to an argument that I introduced in Part I: to take more seriously the moral ontology within which artistic acts operate. Here I am drawing upon and joining a rich seam of writers and practitioners that I have been referencing here, Dave Hickey in Las Vegas, Elaine Scarry in Princeton, Alexander McQueen at Givenchy, Alphonso Lingis everywhere, for whom the moral, political and intellectual suspicions of modernity and postmodernity towards notions of beauty have evacuated a historically critical arena for discovering how we identify and distinguish ourselves. As Alexander Nehamas said: ‘The value of beauty is as disputable as the value of each life of which it is a part, and since it is a part of every life, beauty is a constant reminder that the value of life itself is a disputable matter.’37 And that makes it worth thinking about in a book where an approach to performance understanding has been proposed that encourages the release of previously caged entities for consideration and reassociation. As Hickey says: ‘far from ameliorating the artist’s radical, infantile wishes, the rhetoric of beauty politicises them, makes them publicly available, and propose them in fact as social options.’38 Indeed, having accepted the obvious beauties of everyday life, ‘the almost total absence of “unaesthetic experience” in ordinary life’, the necessity of performance criticism addressing our ordinary experience of display from whence these expectations flow, seems all the more urgent.39 Here beauty cannot be perceived as a thing, ‘the beautiful’ is a thing, rather ‘beauty is the agency that causes visual pleasure in the beholder, and any theory of images that is not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begs the question of their efficacy and dooms itself to inconsequence.’40 It might seem contrary, but overwhelmed by the urge to address the usefulness of our acts, by league-table obsessed governments and therapeutic educational institutions, let’s first follow our instincts and consider the possibilities of ‘no-purpose performance’. After all, the apparently trivial, frivolous and irrelevant that often have their own beauty in the ordinary

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are always subversive because they distract from the worthwhile, that ‘lets us know it is worthwhile by not being beautiful.’41 The nature table is a tribute to this beautiful, banal diversity and of course it is all headless and habitual. With the exception of a solitary seahorse, the starfish, sea urchin and sponge in their sensuous complexity remind us of their minority status as headless wonders: ‘The higher the rank of internal organization, the more strongly does the head, as the leading pole of the body, detach itself from the general outline of the whole form ….’42 Of course our functional method only allows us to see the human head as a repository of intelligence, a surface for speaking, a bit of ear, nose and throat if we are lucky – contours for caressing. It does not enable us to grasp the ‘peculiar shape and position of these structures’ that are acknowledged and heightened in so many non-Western performance forms and reduced to speech and text in the English Shakespearian tradition. Consider here, for a moment, John Gielgud’s fascinating, luscious ‘late’ voice as it over-vowelled to the edge of signifying meltdown. It is well-known that when a feature becomes exorbitantly developed in a species, it may contribute to the extinction of that species, the stage voices of the holy trinity, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, as perverse an adaptation of that larynx once used for breathing that longest animal breath as one could imagine, contributing to the demise of a certain rhetorical actor and the theatre of the last two centuries that went with them (Figure 5). Adolf Portmann might have been observing this theatrical ‘hyper-specialism’ when he wrote: Higher organization within a type does not mean an all-round increase in the elaboration of all the features and of all the activities, but a onesided, specially oriented increase of certain performances, a promotion in one direction with a corresponding sacrifice of other rich possibilities. In the types of lower rank the mode of form production, of the molluscan body, might be characterised as ‘extensive’, directed towards the greater unfolding of external forms; conversely this mode might be described as ‘intensive’ in the higher types of mollusc, where an outward simplicity is correlated with considerable internal complexity and with greater possibilities of a richer relationship with the environment.43 I could not help recalling this statement by Adolf Portmann as I observed a Government School’s Inspector on an ‘Ofsted’ visit to my daughter Florence’s junior school, perusing the higher (lower from his perspective) forms around him with a certain disdain. His ostentatious salmon-pink tie marked out, literally arrowed, the short-circuit of the heart from head to groin, beloved of the supervisory species, and I thought how strange it was that he should draw attention to his balls in this way.

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Why after all would he address us so unfashionably, but starkly, to the fact that the male gonads, the testes had been transferred to a special scrotal sac outside the body cavity where they could be kicked so easily. ‘How are we to explain that an organ serving for the maintenance of the species, one which appears to need so much protection, should be brought into such an exposed position?’44 This move is rationalised, in reverse, by the explanation that the formation of sperm is improved by occurring at lower than ‘inside the body’ temperatures. But birds produce great sperm at 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). No, hard as it is for some of us to accept, the scrotal sac, even for Ofsted Inspectors, is a semantic feature among others, along with anal specula and colouration of the tail in hoofed mammals, formation of hair whorls in carnivores and the distinctive bareness of the anal region in monkeys. Norman Bryson quite properly asked why male genitalia in Greek sculpture were so small and proposed an answer that Arnold Schwarzenegger could easily have supplied as a body-builder turned politician used to these scopic relativities: ‘reduction obviates distracting comparison.’45 The cacophonous culture of exhibition of the nature table, where there is exhibition without construction, and therefore appropriation, is befuddling to the inspector looking for rational performance measures and targets, but for just about everyone else it invites resonance and wonder touched with the foreboding of the uncanny. Stephen Greenblatt has talked about ‘exhibiting cultures’, among which readers of this book are likely to count themselves, where resonance is ‘the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged and for which it may be taken by a viewer to stand.’ And wonder is figured by Greenblatt as: ‘the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks … to convey exalted attention.’46 There is an openness here which these inanimate things might share with performance, linked to the quality of artefacts that museums most obviously dread: ‘their precariousness’, which is in itself a rich source of their resonance. These artefacts might be ‘compelling notably as witnesses not only to the violence of history but as signs of use, marks of the human touch, and hence links with the openness to touch that was the condition for their creation.’ I wonder whether this ‘precariousness’ nestling within the profuse embrace of the prodigious, the tumbling performative nature of play I have been evoking here, might be an interim, ecologically minded term, that could temporarily splice some of the current binaries of performance and its thinking, through a feeling for sight, a visual tactility. By way of conclusion to this chapter, there can be no ‘vision thing’ without Emmanuel Levinas’s sense of ‘regard’: ‘thwarting the … “avidity of the gaze” in the service of generosity’. In the next chapter, instead of instrumental manipulation and vision, touch might allow me a more benign

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interaction restoring the intimate proximity of the self and engagement with the other who then is understood as a neighbour.47 As the children cruise from nature table to dressing-up box, that old tactile, ‘bespoke’ adage returns: ‘Never mind the quality, feel the width’ or, as Herb Blau puts it in his work on the seriously frivolous business of dressing up, the fashion industry ‘before the signs, the senses …’.48

3 Stage Play

… to turn and greet me is to call for my attention and to require it. Alphonso Lingis1 A child of four years who happens to be my daughter walks from somewhere off to somewhere on and accustoms herself to being watched. This acclimatisation has already begun between the off and the on and first manifests itself in her eyes. They are averted from the habitual assimilation of childhood that links foreground and distance, a visual dexterity that can give the youth-full that magical air of insouciance just beyond and out of reach of the adult in a zone of myriad pleasures and fears. Florence looks at her hands. She studies their peculiar asymetry, tracing the junction between life-lines. This means of telling the future, her potential subjectivity, is qualified by any sense of what that future might be beyond this moment which brings with it the imperative of performance. This is her first theatre and the life-line is about to multiply, proliferate, deterritorialise, at the very moment she has the strongest desire to reside, to return behind the doors from whence she came. There have been countless acts of becoming-animal, a veritable menagerie, but the expanded field in which these occurred gives way now to a field of expansion, a theatrical place. This field is apparently bounded by the reach of an expectant audience, made up principally of relations, more or less like me. We are singing in the third-person narrative that separates us from the first-person mimesis that Plato feared: ‘Once in Royal David’s city, Stood a lowly cattle shed, There a mother laid her baby, In a manger fo-or Hi-is bed.’ Before a rickety bricolage of cardboard effects, in uneasy mimicry of a stable in Bethlehem, edge the lowly and lowing cattle. In the doorway to this animalised place the newcomer stands, drawing us in, contra the Christian narrative, welcoming us to the inn. If there is a gesture of hospitality here, one might paraphrase philosophy and say it is because this site ‘goes beyond animality’.2 Here the horizontals of floor and ceiling are split 120

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by church columns which simultaneously heighten the baroque human handicraft of the enterprise while dwarfing the little lambs that double that first epiphany. The first revelation of a baby in straw to three wise men, 12 days later in pedestrian terms, 12 minutes here in the concentration of a sacred-secular assembly, is a lifetime and world away for these non-speaking roles whose choral function as flock is to provide a sheepish backdrop to the primary action. In white, this corps emerges, etching themselves in the gloom, and each, like Florence, finds something to do between this entrance and a beginning. In the midst of standing still there is still the hint of movement, ‘a small dance’. It is a choreography of hospitality daring to welcome us by implying that ‘someone’ is at home here, even if it is not us.3 The examination of her hand complete Florence looks up, and out, for the first time since entering, recognising a certain betrayal has been visited on her. The fleece she wore in the wings among friends is, out in the open among strangers who appear to have nothing in common, conspicuous, drawing too much attention. As she looks into this attention a frisson is discernible, looking at dissolves into looking for as, tears welling in her eyes, the need to find someone, among everyone, overwhelms her. Who is shepherd? If the Christian parameters of this narrative do not appeal, or if the sentimental would appear to have gained the upper hand without a struggle, then another approach to this commonly witnessed event might harden up its critical potential. I will return to the description of the event, in its own rite, in a moment for those who wish to pursue it to its delinquent festive denouement. It is descriptions after all, not explanations, that are likely to generate the more surprising affiliations and extensions to the collective I am seeking. But as Chapter 2 demonstrated, and throughout the rest of this book, I will insist on diverting apparently over-endowed theoretical strategies to converse with apparently whimsical and slight subject matters. This reverses the common assumption that ‘complex’ contents such as Bayreuth, the Wooster Group’s Hamlet or the performances of Marina Abramovi´c should absorb the maturist critical thinking available to us, while negligible events on the appositely named Richter scale of theatre, such as the native event I am concerned to introduce here, can be safely ignored, or at best suffer the ignominy of the equivalent of a community care order, that is, the discussion of their contribution to a vague rhetorics of well-being. If, as I proposed in my set of axioms in Part I, good theatre is a theatre through which the social appears, I would like to take this apparently simple encounter between a child and a parent in performance as a starting point for speculating on the socially intimate aspect of any theatrical engagement. By this I do not mean to claim any kind of ontologically privileged access to states of intimacy for the live (those romanticisms have been well and truly rebutted by Phillip Auslander, Rebecca Schneider and

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others), nor do I for a moment believe that dispersed assemblies of strangers constitute familiar audiences (Susan Bennett and Herbert Blau have in their turn problematised any such presumptions in their detailed discussions of theatre witness). But amidst my own predilection for the distractions of the everyday I would make an argument here for the peculiar qualities of observation, connection, inner feeling and outward engagement that good theatre, much of it in assemblies not unlike this one, makes manifest through acts closer to friendship and acquaintance than hostility and isolation. As we have seen in Chapter 2, this does not separate infants from the violences common to humans, the routine persecution of the black sheep in this very scene cautions us against sentiment in the nativity, but it would be churlish not to recognise the wonder of welcoming at work here, where sufficient goods are for once equal to the evils that Herod reserves for the sons of those who are unable to change their travel plans. At the end, for the sake of the children, we are asked to leave by ‘another exit’. But hardening up our approach to this soft core Christian scene, rather like the reverse shock that might arise if on breaking through the Kinder egg chocolate-casing there was no ‘surprising’ material object to be constructed, but just the ‘predictability’ of a soft-centre to be handled, one could track back to that entrance to the nativity and ask again, with Florence: ‘Who is shepherd?’. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière might answer by reminding us that it was Plato who consigned the ‘good shepherd’ to the era of fables in order that, beyond this divine figure, power might return to the people in another fable, not of the field, but of the Republic.4 Our return, as an audience of predominantly secular parents, to seek the identity of the lost shepherd in this Christian fable, in this infant company, is the logical consequence of ‘a certain account of democracy conceived as the society of individual consumers’.5 I suspect it is a shared distrust of the model of such a democracy sold on a certain consumptive logic that binds this otherwise disparate group of reticent refuseniks from the out and out secular. That this is only a delay to the inevitable rush for the high street does not fatally wound the felt compulsion to defer shopping for the sake of a holy image or two. It is symptomatically the philosopher of the poor, (presumably the binomial of the property class that owns the inn with ‘no vacancies’), Jacques Rancière, who invites us to think again about the significance of this scene as something more than an intimate occasion best left in the drawer of discarded school videotape. He recommends that we should not, despite our better secular judgement, bid farewell to the shepherd, irrespective of our theological or spiritual reservations, but recover the legacy of this shepherd ‘from the point of view of the nostalgic holding onto the shepherd’.6 The shepherd’s recalcitrant presence at the heart of the Republic has after all signalled the continuous reference point for the distinction between good government and democratic government. It is the shepherd, accord-

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ing to Plato, who is set against the petty tyrant and his anti-democratic actions, but it is also the shepherd whose care for each individual sheep is singular and therefore mitigates against the necessary generality of democracy. In this nativity scene, in a state school setting where equality is still invoked as an organising principle of education, the impulse to act in accord with others, to be sheep-like, is at odds with a theatrical impulse to emerge from the flock, to be star-like (Figure 6). Florence is one, and I suspect from the distance of my miniature seat, would like to be the other. The question of who cares for whom in this tableau returns us not just to the question of the good shepherd but to the very nature of democracy itself. We will all see, by the end of this stage play, that the nature of democracy here is one governed again by an uncertain relation between humans, albeit small humans, and other animals.

Acknowledging A child’s face might not always lend itself to welcome, but here inscribed in this face there is more on show than invitation, an ethics of hospitality. Having welcomed us to the site of the virgin birth, this child’s first theatre, Florence now recognises that welcome is always welcome of the other. Here the relationship between an ethics of hospitality and a politics of hospitality is about to be negotiated. What reciprocation can there be between host and guest when host has slipped to hostage, when in order to flee, one has first to be fleeced? Thus trussed and bound in the costume of the first offering to the audience, the sacrificial lamb peers out. On this primary platform, built by a school ‘caretaker’ (so much more redolent than the equivalent but less committed janitor) from wooden beams and nails, is prefigured the end of an affair, the first Christian flexible staging event, the Crucifixion of Christ. Her eyes move to and fro, across the surface of strangers who return her mute appeal with an anonymous and tacit recognition that she is looking in the right direction but in the wrong place. She continues scanning. Why do I not just call out: ‘over here …’? Because ‘a call can only itself be heard, can only hear itself and hear itself calling, from the promise of a response.’7 And, moreover, because she sees me, and measures me, in her memory against a man she once knew, who was not a spectator, convincing herself we are the same species if a little distantly related. As though a sighting is not sufficient, an acknowledgement of presence ensues. Florence raises her hand above her head and waves. The knowledge that matters here is the agreement to the truth of the other, the admission of knowing something about someone, the expression of appreciation of indebtedness. ‘You came …’ begins to suggest the possibilities inherent in this ethics of performance. Ethics are concerned not with what is, but what ought to be, and you know you ought to be present. The significance of

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coming is more than a pleasure, it is a responsibility: ‘My eyes … are moved to look to her to see what support I can offer, what resources I can put at her disposal. My hand, moved in response to the want and demand that faces me, is affected with tact and tenderness.’8 I lift my hand to return her wave, which is expectant of a reciprocal gesture. Her wave flourishes while mine mimics, returning the favour is to notice a false economy that is already at play between performer and audience. The excess inherent in the staged wave rolls off the shallow apron and down into the auditorium engulfing those looking for their own. The returning ripple barely reaches its intended but disintegrates somewhere around her plimsolled feet. Only later do I discover why this might have been. My wave is saying hello, it greets and welcomes, intended to draw us closer it falls short because it believes it is reciprocating in an ontologically equivalent manner the wave that the child proffers. But my daughter tells me, and it surprises me, that her wave was not saying ‘hello’ but ‘goodbye’. She was bidding me farewell from the beginning. This was the first time I had heard this and, though I wanted to resist its implications, realised it opened up the child’s performance to some intriguing possibilities. If the entrance of the child to performance is simultaneously an exit, from where does the child believe they might have come in order to leave, and where might they be intending to go? If Emmanuel Levinas is right that vulnerability is being able to say ‘adieu’ to this world, there is a small death, an expiration being played out here. Of course in French the salutation adieu can signify equally ‘hello’, ‘I can see you’, ‘I see that you are there’ as it can also stand as the salutation at the moment of separation, at the moment of death. I am not sure if Jacques Lacan might have witnessed this little death and learnt from its intimate relation with desire. With children the fear of death cannot be for their life, but the palpable sense of not having lived. And in this nativity a-dieu is also implicitly ‘to god’, like the idiomatic English greeting ‘god bless’ bestowing the performance offered to a higher patronage.

The imperative of performance The force of the imperative is the command one obeys before one formulates the law … Alphonso Lingis9 The child’s wave is a form of adieu that simultaneously welcomes and acknowledges, recognises the presence of another, all in the process of leave-taking. Like the wave of a child on the roller-coaster, or the carousel at the fair, this marking of presence is a preparation for their disappearance from your sight, and, given that optometric measure is all to the child, life. Their heart is left somewhere behind them and this physiological experience might not be wholly disassociated with the child entering perfor-

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mance. The rush they perceive from being present to an audience is the sound of a shedding of saturated identities forged through the relations who are present and the assumption of identities from elsewhere, in this instance from other animals. The wave of the child, if indeed it is an adieu, recognises the significance of this relationship while committing the parent to their place, in the audience, at a distance. The wave of the child reaches beyond the known body not to a freedom, but towards a stricter directive, an imperative to perform within the bounds of wooliness, strictly speaking to become lamb, not sheep-like: ‘When we set out to feel something, our extending hand locates the level of the tangible, which it makes contact with not as an object but as a directive, imposing the pressure, sweep and periodicity of the movement that will distinguish the grain of the wood, the fur of an animal, or the Braille letters on the surface of the page.’10 The hand that waves may be bidding adieu but it also describes the arc of an animal-human relation within which the child’s leave-taking becomes possible. This is where Florence is going: towards the seduction of an animal whose breath confounds subjectivity, whose familiarity becomes an imperative: the imperative of alterity. While ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ reaches its final stanzas, a nativity at a safe Platonic distance, the child’s wave marks a provocation in the republic of play, the second nature of mimesis. The first nativity, for many children in the industrial West, the first theatre, is also the first imperative of performance. The ‘Other’ that precedes the infant-Mary, the child-Joseph, the junior Wise Men, is the animal in the straw of the stable, the ox and the ass, animal domesticity, and the good flock on the hillside. The condition of this performance is always one suspended between the contingency of humanity on animality explored in the previous chapters, after all the epiphany reveals a creature in a manger. This insistent alterity is peculiarly suited to childhood-rendering, situated as it is on the interstices between a myriad freeform animal-becomings and the directives associated with theatre conventions. It is the ideal performance primer for that transitionary world between infant mimesis and youth theatre. The freedom of multiple animal associations here becomes the setting of certain ‘things’ that Alphonso Lingis says: ‘summon us into their own settings and each summons us to forget the rest and devote ourselves to it’.11 It is this freedom, and this summoning, that the child’s wave articulates, a Kantian recognition that immediacy to where, and when, I am, makes what has to be done what I have to do. These categorical imperatives are practical necessities not aesthetic niceties, and for a child will always prevail over what is undoable. This is why the child’s wave initiates an act of theatre that is never less than perfect. It is essential the child realises this and not that. The child’s wave is momentary, and lost, as the consciousness of theatre convention expands in direct reciprocation to performance’s loss of perfection. It spills out in later years, as a certain kind of bastard acknowledgement in the curtain-call, in the stage-door-greeting and in the

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effusions of award ceremonies. The star, let us say Gwyneth Paltrow, but there are annual successors, that once hung so languidly above the stable, with such limpid ferocity calling out to the kings ‘follow me’, now looks out from the Hollywood stage, clutches her Best Actress Oscar for loving Shakespeare and evokes her ‘dead cousin Keith’. She has out-alteritied allcomers, her mother, father, brother, uncle, agent are all responsible for her presence. Strapped now in $20,000 worth of Jimmie Choo open-toed sandal, Christian Diored and chained at the ankle, this star cries out, tethered, anguished. Jack Nicholson leads her back to the stalls. There is a certain symmetry between these apparent poles in a performance spectrum, between Florence’s raised hand in tears and Paltrow’s grip on the token of her accomplishment beyond tears. The nature of this culture is an imperative to return to the pack. The more exceptional Paltrow becomes, and the Oscars are a trademark of extracting individuality from ensemble, the more will this very setting become the place where she seeks the pack of her relations. The moment she grasps Oscar, the strangely featureless robotic doyen of acting excellence, she becomes deterritorialised, dissembling back into the crowd of her anonymity – where she belongs. There was a lot made of the fact that she cried, but she did not shed tears. But when did she ever shed tears? In five sad scenes in Shakespeare In Love she manages just the one, on realising her destiny is to be with her suitor the Lord of Wessex, a viscous pearl breaks free from her right eye and edges across her cheek, veritable lachrymosity. This is not anormal but anomalous, it links her with the beasts who cannot shed tears, but cry out. The more exceptional Florence becomes, on the other hand, the more she returns to the pack of her anonymity, among the flock who are gently undulating down-stage left. There she turns from me, and us, her hand dropping slowly from on high to below where it becomes a third leg, and presses towards a more intimate, tender species relation. The shepherd has finally turned up and the imperative of performance becomes the instinct to avoid the wielded crook and the over-enthusiastic sheepdog who Judases on the non-human gathering with exaggerated yelps and barks. Above and beyond this bucolic scene an angel appears: ‘I bring you good news of great joy …’ and in this moment Aesop turns slowly in his sandy tomb, beneath a cliff in Delphi, as the animal gives way to the herd, corralled in the corner to ensure the Christian message holds centre stage. Here we herald adieu to the imperative of performance and welcome the gracious hospitality of a theatre, where one can never be sure if what we are witnessing is waving or good old-fashioned drowning.

In the infancy of theatre Speech becomes grave and imperative when we speak for infants …. Alphonso Lingis12

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A year has passed. A child of five who still happens to be my daughter walks from somewhere off to somewhere on and accustoms herself to being watched. Florence had come home some weeks before with news of great import. She said: ‘I have a disappointment for you’. I said ‘And what would that disappointment be?’ and she said, ‘I am going to play Mary in the Nativity’, and I said, ‘Why is that a disappointment?’ and she said, ‘Because you wanted me to be the donkey’. Within a year ‘be’ might have turned to ‘play’. You ‘are’ an animal but pretend to be another human, however blessed. I reassured her I was very happy that she should play Mary (the news appealed to my conventional theatrical aspirations long-dormant within the catholicism of performance, never mind my conservatively human-centric paternal pride). After all, as Florence reassured me, she would throw in some bellows and eyores during the virgin birth to keep on the right side of the animals I took such pleasure in her being. But the potential of A Midwinter Afternoon’s Dream-like hybrid, half messiah half mule, like Bottom, a ‘transformation’, a ‘transportation’ or a ‘translation’, all terms used by Shakespeare to evoke the passing between animal and human nature, escaped me, in favour of a retrenchment of the casting hierarchy: where Mary might be the highest (of the mortals at least), Joseph ambivalent but highish, kings high, shepherds lower, ox and ass low, assorted sheep lower still, and cattle so low their only intervention is lowing. Here, in this moment of holy hybridity, may lie a child’s response to Richard Schechner who, in an uncharacteristic moment of uncertitude, asks in The Future of Ritual: ‘if the classic distinction fencing child play off from adult play is improper … if the negotiated time/space between infant and parent is not the foundation of child and adult play activities … if play is not always transitional, or liminal, or liminoid … how can we talk about whatever there is to talk about?’ His response is assured: ‘we need to stop looking so hard at play … and investigate playing, the ongoing, underlying process of off-balancing, loosening, bending, twisting, reconfiguring and transforming…’.13 In his summary of what child play might not be, Schechner is evoking the anthropologist Victor Turner, a Catholic writer whose conception of the ‘liminal’ and ‘liminoid’ might be expected to be well-attuned to the processes being observed in this Nativity. In his work the transitions people make between states and statuses, if they are to grow up to accommodate themselves to unprecedented rites of passage, are marked by three phases: separation, limen or margin and aggregation. After separation during the intervening liminal phase, the state of the subject becomes ambiguous, passing through a realm or dimension that has few of the attributes of the past or coming state, betwixt or between all familiar lines of classification. Here, for Schechner, Turner has identified an innovative and transformative dimension of the social: liminality as ‘transition or potentiality’. The Nativity is one of the iconic and privileged Christian sites where this

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apparent passing is conducted, from the nursery class as animal to the reception class as role, as speaking part (Figure 7). The ‘nursery’ is the stable of animality, ‘reception’ the antechamber for humanity, a humanity that is expected to have commanded speech and bowels and separated itself from the cries, shrieks and howls of the animal state. In the nursery Florence is a little lamb, in the reception Mary has a little lamb, it is turned out by the teacher but lingers waiting for the reciprocation of love. Like the recalcitrant echo on Thomas Edison’s first phonographic transmission in 1877, this lamb splices the ‘dark play’ where contradictory realities coexist. As a newspaper account of the day put it: ‘Edison then speaks into the mouthpiece: “Mary had a little lamb its fleece was white as Jack and Jill went oh stop that! shut up!”.’ It is presently repeated by the machine, a veritable anthropological machine, with startling effect, but as the cylinder is set back a little too far it laps over upon the former speech, and comes out, ‘Fexta d’un penjat Mary had a little lamb.’14 If Edison had not been prevented by this recalcitrant rewind from completing the tale, we would have known that Sarah Josepha Hale had written in her Juvenile Miscellany of 1830: Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow; And everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go. It followed her to school one day, That was against the rule; It made the children laugh and play To see a lamb at school. And so the teacher turned it out, But still it lingered near, And waited patiently about Till Mary did appear. Why does the lamb love Mary so? The eager children cry; Why, Mary loves the lamb you know, The teacher did reply. This sentimental economy, where animal love reciprocates human love, reminds us that wherever Mary goes, the lamb will go. And so it is here in the School Nativity. Mary brings up the rear in a procession that includes more animals than humans, a procession that cruelly mimics the state of a profession in which there are few enough opportunities for stars from the East. She lifts her maphorian, the long blue veil of Syrian women that

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the Virgin wears, her ‘abiding signature’ as Marina Warner calls it in her study of ‘Mariology’. She sits down next to Joseph and looks out, once again, at the audience. She pets the lamb at her feet, feeling with her fingers for the texture where love ends and fur begins. A year older the eyes scan the audience of mothers, while the audience of mothers scan the mother of all mothers. Here the Blessed Virgin may be small, but she is an intercessor, we are all her children, but she is only the child of two of these witnesses. And she is searching again for those who have come for her. Once more, and maybe for the last time from a stage, her hand rises to welcome us, but now more modestly cradled within the bounds of her own azure outline, so as not to draw undue attention to her recalcitrant primary presence beyond her secondary role. Her hand opens and closes, a discreet flexing of her fingers, barely lifted from her lap, like a deceptively gentle venus trap corralling the sentiments in her vicinity. The Marion devotion that is her due comes from two sources: ‘The first source is learned theory – a body of deductions from the theological doctrines about the role of Mary in the economy of salvation. The second is the practice and experience of the unlearned.’15 Sitting quietly and stoically on a bright orange plastic chair, Mary awaits her moment of revelation. She cannot wield her own power, like the kings and animals around her, because her raison d’être is as an intercessionary body in the service of a monotheistic cult. She is soon to find out what it is like to persuade the messiah to change water into wine, she will receive a bit of holy lip for her kindness at Cana. But here she is able to flourish a small coup de théâtre known only to her. She is a medium, she is not the message and through her, as Luke says in the New Testament, ‘the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn …’ We might be singing ‘Away in a manger no-o crib for a bed …’ but recalcitrantly, in the reality beyond 2000 years of accumulated Christian iconography, a manger, from the Greek thaten could just as well have been a common-or-garden crib.16 The prophecy of Isaiah had said: ‘The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib …’ and thaten is used there for crib, but there is every reason for us to welcome the manger myth. For behind it, beyond the common and the garden, in a special state of nature, arrives the animal scene, the worshippers of the baby Jesus, the ox and the ass that allows for the recurrent Christian theme of the power of the weak. Thus the site of revelation, that Victor Turner identifies in pilgrimage destinations, does not just vibrate with ‘supernatural efficacy’, but also links us to an ethics of salvation in which ‘the communion of saints, the reciprocal action of soul on soul in a corporate circulation of blessings’ might be enhanced with a routing of divination through nature in animal form.

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The delinquency of the occasion returns us to the ambiguity of the terms of reference. Sure enough, true to a minimalist debunking of the sentimental scene, there is no manger here but a miniature wooden crib, dragged from beneath the legs of the chair on which Mary is sitting. The messiah is ‘born in a crib’, not unlike the seventies disco generic, ‘chicken in a basket’, and is returned to a crib, unceremoniously dropped on his head as the action sweeps away towards the epiphany for the kings. Joseph looks on mildly nonplussed. His five-year-old understanding of procreation might not be unakin to the prevailing knowledge of the greater part of the last two millennia. All births were, after all, essentially Virgin births for 2000 years after Aristotle had, in his work On The Generation of Animals, declared that woman gave the ‘matter’ for the embryo while the male contributed ‘form and motion’. William Harvey might have observed the circulation of blood, but as late as 1651 was claiming that woman ‘became fecundated without the cooperation of any sensible corporeal agent … the woman exercises a plastic power of generation and produces a being after her own image.’17 Because, for Harvey, the man is the ‘more perfect animal’, he ‘impresses his form on the offspring’. And so Joseph begins his appointed role, gurning and mugging at the baby in Mary’s arms. Thus in a final tableaux, a member of my family, and other animals, group around the messiah as the congregation, only too aware now of their status as unlearned laity, begin to sing a final carol: ‘In the bleak midwinter, Frosty wind made moan …’. Christina Rosetti speaks for these outsiders when, in the final stanza of her 1880s poem, she writes: What can I give him Poor as I am If I were a shepherd I would bring a lamb If I were a wise man I would do my part Yet what can I give him Give my heart In Gustav Holst’s musical accompaniment the final line has become ‘g-i-ive my heart’ – a last imperative. The line might have been softened by, ‘… give Him my heart’, but Rosetti knows there is more at stake than a simple offering, there is an imperative of performance, the act of saying is a performative here. Belief here is not the object of believing, in Christianity, say, but each of the audience’s investment in an act of saying and considering it to be true.18 Outside this stable, beyond the angels and archangels, the cherubim and seraphim, the laity offer their own gifts, cheaper than gold, incense and myrrh maybe, but somehow more meaningful. Following the modesty of the mother, who ‘in her maiden bliss, worshipped the beloved,

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with a kiss’, they raise their hands and blow across the surface of the palm to bestow on their own infants, their blessing. The cast look out stunned, woebegone, bewildered, experiencing the oblivion of the animal destined to be in the world but not of the world. Applause compounds this melancholia of separation. Rilke acknowledges this loss, an imperative of performance in the infancy of theatre, when he says: ‘In the alert, warm animal there lies the pain and burden of an enormous sadness. For it too feels the presence of what often overwhelms us: a memory as if the element we keep pressing toward was once more intimate, more true, and our communion infinitely tender. Here, all is distance; there it was breath.’19

4 Ring Side

The man who’d lost his grip on himself now began to scream, confusingly: No! I’m a clown, and my name is Chuckles! Tears welled; the everyday, or everynight, had him again. Ernst Bloch, Traces Two daughters, now five and one, go to the circus with their mother one early evening. Hermione, Florence’s sister, is on the cusp of crawling and walking. As the horses were asked to rear up on their back legs she leant forward examining the move from four to two legs, to see how it was done. There are no tigers here now, the local authority has long declared themselves: a ‘wild animal in captivity’ free zone. There are domesticated animals, dogs, pigs and horses, but the absence of big cat acts haunts the action. This disappearance heightens some elective affinities rather than dissipates them. Hermione shares with the absent tiger some new and impressive teeth, the hardest tissue of the body. She will sheer, chop and grind like the tigers, incisors, canines, premolars and molars will do the job as they do for the tiger irrespective of its sub-species. She will groom, prepare food and manufacture artefacts as the tiger will, they will have social significance, she will use them in acts of aggression, status and dominance and place her tongue over them to feed at the breast. She will have just the two sets like all mammals, the deciduous, which are temporary teeth that occur during infancy and juvenile stages to allow the jaw to reach adult size, and the permanent dentition which must last the full adult life span. Constant attrition occurs throughout life, and the complete wearing down of teeth may be said to represent the limit of longevity in most species.1 She seems to be enjoying her infantile place in post-lapsarian society, she is not yet in a position to name the animals, but seems irritable enough to be with them, even if that means being with them in their death and material disappearance, their photographed re-presentation, rumbling, cooing and laughing as they are exterminated around her. 132

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Animals in the twentieth century were different to those in the twentyfirst. Half of all the planet’s occupants will perish in the coming century. By the year of publication of this book more than 12,000 species are already under threat. Most biologists call what is now going on ‘the sixth great extinction’.2 The remaining four of seven species of tiger will be extinct by 2099, but were not in 1999. A temporality of disappearance, century on century, is reciprocated for the aesthetician by a proliferation of presencing, of bringing into view and hearing. In the spirit of Michel Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality that articulates the tensions between the material presence of acts and their reciprocation in a multiplication of discourses, one might construct small histories of these fin de siècle perverse inversions of the material for the mental. You might, if capital had not got there first, call this a ‘tiger economy’, as the corporeal presence of a complex creature, the Siberian, the Bengal, the Sumatran and the Malay, leaves the land, their multiplicity is replaced by another plenitude, of images and iconographies, sounds and whispers, a noise, among a community of those who, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s words ‘have nothing in common’ (except for their teeth). Picking up this invitation to think the incommensurable community, Alphonso Lingis said: ‘All these stammerings, exclamations, slurrings, murmurs, rumblings, cooings and laughter, all this noise we make when we are together makes it possible to view us as struggling, together, to jam the unequivocal voice of the outsider: the facilitator of communication, the prosopopeia of maximal elimination of noise, so as to hear the distant rumble of the world and its demons in the midst of the ideal city of human communication.’3 Where a previous chapter responded to the metaphoric impulse to ‘release previously caged entities for consideration and reassociation’, this chapter works more literally with, and alongside those caged entities, to consider the ways that in the words of the last axiom: loss, suffering and death, beyond metaphor, become an object of attention in their own specific and historically immediate right. This anomalous clamour, once again, and especially so in the circus, is not the ‘a-normal’, but as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘every Animal has its anomalous … a phenomenon of bordering … it has only affects … Sometimes the borderline is defined or doubled by a being of another nature that no longer belongs to the pack … and that represents a power of another order, potentially acting as a threat as well as a trainer …’.4 So here the purpose is to complicate again the inside/outside of the human animal relation and in consequence the inside and outside of the event of their relations. For John Stokes in his critical essay on the wild animal as theatre act, the ‘performative inadequacy’ of the wild animal act, is confirmed by the simple and perhaps sad fact that after the event, for all the animals involved other than the humans: ‘There is no reconciliation, no return home.’5 Not only is trust missing from this event, but increasingly those

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habitats of the ‘wild’ themselves are being wiped out. For Stokes there is ‘no shared outside against which to set the inside of the show …’.6 But this book contests that the communitarian presumption of such an outside is perhaps just as fraught for humans as it is for these big cats. I agree with Stokes when he says: ‘Of course the illusion of trust, the illusion of “nature”, may well be there but, even so, they bear no relation to our global experience, in which wild animals are on the decrease at the same time as the boundaries between human and non-human are being eroded by philosophers.’7 The counterpoint of an ever-finessed philosophical understanding of human animal reciprocity, set off against an ever-decreasing bio-diversity is a nice one, but that illusion is of course made up of a myriad representations that could, each in turn, like the careful work Stokes does on the individual trainers themselves, be unpicked for what they say about this inside-outside relation at any one time. So I am here at ringside seeking a particular economy of power within performance. Following Stokes’s tension between ‘training and taming’ I am beginning to think in the face of these acts of training that this is a site for ‘strict speech’ as much as a site for taming ‘dumb animals’. The failure of the animal here is no longer the failure of plenitude since Descartes, but as other exemplary animal watchers I have evoked earlier maintain, an active event. The animal comprises here an outside of the commentator, the human, and unlike W. C. Fields, we begin to get the feeling we should begin, seriously, to work with children and with animals, and all the better if together, in order to understand the conjunction of this event. ‘Understanding’, as figured earlier, is after all a circus-term, first used to describe those who propped up the efforts of others, and these others are particularly opaque within this performance economy. Levinas’s responsibility in the ethical encounter with another, the face to face, perceives identity, like Judith Butler later, as a process of becoming, alterity is an ‘outside’ beyond the ‘self-same’, opening towards a performative response. As Judith Butler says: ‘The construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less “human”, the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the “human” as its constitutive outside and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation.’8 These kinds of operations are all too apparent at the circus edge, strictly bounded as it is in a circularity of entrances and exits, conventions of animal-human relations and clown-like dissembling of proprieties. I wonder if this constitutive outside, and the ‘face to face’ of Emmanuel Levinas, holds where the inter-subjective is the human face to tiger face. Or, to bring foot and mouth together, as the pop group Mud said in the 1970s: ‘Those feet, those feet, those feet, those feet, I really love your tiger feet’. As a teenager I used to pace out that strictly non-contact dance on a Sunday night at the local youth club, in a striped, knitted tank-top, with all

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the sublimated energy of a distressed and isolated animal, foot over foot, loads of mates but no mate, go tiger! I realise on writing this, with a certain ignominy, that Lulu, a small pop star of a very British pedigree, had first awakened my sense of the promises and disappointments of sexuality with her hit ‘I’m a Tiger’ in 1968. In his classic text ‘Poetics in the Lion’s Den: The Circus Act as Text’, Paul Bouissac takes a semiotic scalpel to the cat act.9 In doing so he overdetermines their signifying, as distinct from their biological, presence. He asserts their ‘specific biological or individual reality has little to do with the part they play … they are symbolic representations: they are not a natural event, but a textual element …’. Bouissac insists the ‘performance of the circus act as a text must be related to the relevant relations constituting what is called the “reality” for the culture within which it appears. The meaning of the act is produced in its decoding by the audience against the background of a larger text which is the total system of the cultural reality as represented in numerous other texts. This reality includes, for instance, the postural and gestural patterned behaviour related to certain animal species. The iconography of the Western cultures provides us with numerous representations.’ Bouissac sketches this context, swinging from biblical imagery to popular cultural texts such as comics, and the iconography of zoological gardens. He concludes ‘What is given to read in the circus ring cannot be considered separately from this general symbolic order of representations. The text of the circus act actualizes some of these representations and modifies others through the universals of poetic figures.’10 I want to tread carefully between Bouissac’s comparative semiotics here and John Stokes’s historical materialist analysis. First, let’s follow Boussiac’s lead and take a random sample of such tigerish representations dictated only by a certain symmetry of fin de siècle dates and English topography. In 1698 tigers were, to the Western eye, dragon-like, unfamiliar others, good for baiting. In one of the most popularly consulted texts in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection at the British Library in London, The Baiting of the Tiger, to the London observer of the Restoration, they are the wonderful beast, an overgrown kitten, with strength, whiskers, talons and vigour. Famed for fierceness, name and nature, the text evokes a beast to be baited, in chains like Foucault’s thief, in the spectacle of discipline, shackled, dogs are devoured, foes are parted and the crowd, grumbling, leaves the fray. The commentator figured in this text could tell us a good deal more about the Old India Company’s view of this ‘sham battle’, but learned, when a boy, how to keep schtum ‘close mouth in many thing makes a wise head’. The speech of the commentator here trails away, there is a silence covering the fakery of the occasion, its inauthenticity. For a start, 9 March in 1698 was a Wednesday, not a Thursday, but the ‘tyger’ of this text might not be wholly fanciful. In William King’s record of the same theatrical season, A Journey to London in the Year 1698, one reads:

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‘I was at Bartholomew Fair … on a sudden I had a hundred people about me, Crying here, Monsieur, see Jeptha’s Rash Vow, here, Monsieur, see the Tall Dutch Woman, see the Tyger, says another … so that betwixt rudeness and Civility, I was forc’d to get into a Fiacre, and with an air of Hast, and a full trot, got home to my lodgings.’11 Christopher Rich’s company, with Colley Cibber, at Drury Lane and Dorset Garden had just produced Aesop Part II by John Vanbrugh, and it was at this time that Jeremy Collier’s work on the ‘immorality and profaneness of the English stage’ precipitated a series of arguments and counter-arguments that were to shape the criticism of the stage for years to come and threaten its prosperity and status. A century later in 1799 tigers devoured the East India Employees and soldiers of the colonial realm. As Harriet Ritvo reminds us: ‘[The tiger] … epitomized what men had to fear from the animal kingdom and from restive human subordinates.’12 In 1800 the East India Company put a mechanical model of a tiger eating an Englishman, which had been captured in 1799 from a rebellious Indian potentate, the Muslim leader Tipoo, on display at its London offices, where it drew crowds for several generations (Figure 8). Within the body of the tiger was a kind of organ which caused particular delight when the handle was cranked, reproducing both the cries of a person in distress and the roar of a tiger.13 Eating human flesh might have symbolised the ultimate rebellion, the radical reversal of roles between master and servant, but there was more to it than this simple Hegelian dialectic. This act of dismemberment is radically disorientating to the colonial psyche. It is an aural encounter with the future, the acoustic envelope detains us at the East India Office as the organ, a good word for the corporeality of sound, mimics the cries and growls of the coloniser devoured. The sly civility of this insurgent is regurgitated in a cacophony of burps and farts. As Homi Bhabha says in The Location of Culture: From the point of view of the colonizer, passionate for unbounded, unpeopled possession, the problem of truth turns into the troubled political and psychic question of boundary and territory: Tell us why you, the native, are there. Etymologically unsettled ‘territory’ derives from both terra (earth) and terrere (to frighten) whence territorium, ‘a place from which people are frightened off’. The colonialist demand for narrative carries, within it, its threatening reversal: Tell us why we are here. It is this echo that reveals that the other side of narcissistic authority may be the paranoia of power; a desire for authorization in the face of a process of cultural differentiation which makes it problematic to fix the native objects of colonial power as the moralized ‘others’ of truth.14 For many years Tipoo’s Tiger sat vitrined in the Victoria and Albert Museum just yards from the graffitied Lesnes Knight described earlier (see

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Figure 3). The entry of the beast to that catafalque is reversed in the painted wood of the body, that is all organ, disembowelling the policing power of the occupying force. Here are two forms of anthropological machine, a tomb and an instrument that cannot quite put the human body back together again, nor finally take it apart. In 1899, in a published tale as economical in length as it was to become inversely controversial in culture, tigers dressed in ‘Little Black Sambo’s’ clothes and reduced themselves to liquid butter chasing each other round a tree. They were unceremoniously eaten and the author Helen Bannerman, and her apologists, were taken apart for her depiction of race and greed. First donning ‘Sambo’s’ red coat, blue trousers, purple shoes and green umbrella, that made this little boy grand, the tigers trade assurances that they will not eat him up. But their delusions of grandeur in the jungle inevitably lead to civil war, they bite each other with ‘their great big white teeth’, and in a frenzied circle they are so concerned with hanging on to each others tails they can only respond ‘grrrrrr’ to Sambo, running faster and faster until they melt into ghi. They are cooked into a pile of pancakes ‘just as yellow and brown as little tigers’ and eaten by ‘Sambo’s’ family. The race debates that have circled this notorious text since the 1930s have not begun to address the species assumptions at the heart of the tale. Jacques Lacan in his essay Of The Gaze writes: ‘Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage … It is not a question of harmonizing with the background, but against a mottled background, of becoming mottled – exactly like the technique of camouflage practised in human warfare.’15 So, moving Homi Bhabha away from his normal literary hunting-ground of Joseph Conrad and Toni Morrison, and into this children’s minefield, what is at work here is ‘not a harmonization of repression and difference, but a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, “metonymically” … mimicry is here an erratic, eccentric strategy of authority in colonial discourse. Mimicry does not merely destroy narcissistic authority through the repetitious slippage of difference and desire. It is the process of fixation of the colonial as a form of cross-classificatory, discriminatory knowledge within an interdictory discourse, and therefore raises the question of the authorization of colonial representations ….’16 In 1999 tigers are back in their cages after a photo-shoot in a circus ring went wrong, or right, depending from which species perspective you wish to view the event. Paul Bouissac says: ‘There is no real informative value in a lion act; the only true information would be the event of an accident.’17 As Deleuze said: ‘Making an event – however small – is the most delicate thing in the world: the opposite of making a drama or making a story.’ I am interested in what Deleuze would call the ‘atmospheric variation’ in the ring of the circus at this moment of breakdown in the narrative, at the

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point where a delinquency or disturbance threatens the permanence of Bouissac’s non-biological, unnatural semiotic text. When I heard this on the radio it stood out from the rest in its limpid pathos. Richard Chipperfield is a member of the circus dynasty that has toured the world since 1694, when the first animal-training Chipperfield and a bear danced on the frozen Thames for an audience; 300 years later Chipperfield was in Florida with ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’. This show is as old as the company hailed as the longest-surviving theatre troupe in the world, the Comedie Française in Paris. Chipperfield suffered serious head injuries after being bitten on the back of the head by Arnie, a Bengal tiger he had reared from birth. A spokesman said ‘At the end of the act Richard goes face to face with one of the tigers as if he is about to kiss it’. He in fact, as a special treat for the cameras, put his head inside the tiger’s mouth. The injury is bad enough but the deeper insult lies in the explanation that follows. Chipperfield, it is claimed was mauled, because he spoke to the tiger. He was whispering sweet-nothings to the tiger to calm it, and the tiger, says the spokesman, interpreted these sounds lovingly, and delighted by what he heard instinctively closed its jaw in pleasure around the back of Chipperfield’s head. Misinterpretation might lie at the heart of this matter. But there is no room for doubt with the material effects. Chipperfield lies on a life-support machine while Arnie was shot repeatedly by Chipperfield’s brother Graham. Chipperfield literally lost his mind while Arnie lost his life because his brother lost his temper and all apparently in the service of each other’s need for attention. Martin Heidegger would remind us that the ‘bewilderment’ that arises here is based upon a forgetting. Here the forgetting is of the tiger’s experiencing presence and absence, as Peter Steeves says: ‘a tiger presences the hunt-as-absent, to assume otherwise is to adopt a false model of the Being of objects and creatures’.18 Chipperfield had conceded, the week before the accident, that while he had raised the dozen tigers in the ring with him they were still ‘wild animals and dangerous’. He may have been taking for granted something that his uncle Jimmy Chipperfield had written in his autobiography My Wild Life some 20 years before: ‘A good tiger … makes a lovely sound – a kind of fluttering purr. You know at once if he is in a good mood, because he blows at you, and the trainer always talks back to him in the same language, blowing and letting his lips flutter. Some tigers never do this at all, being too nervous, but whenever one does do it, you can be certain he is all right.’19 Some days after the Chipperfield incident the drug company Pfizer, the makers of the TCP throat lozenge, halted an ad-campaign showing a man with his head in a tiger’s mouth. The advertisement found its way out and seems to show an uncanny double of Richard Chipperfield decorating a room, with a tiger hanging from his neck. There is a commercial symmetry

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to this affair given that both episodes share a tiger, a sore throat and a promotional photo shoot. But the latter of course is a set up while the former is founded on some other economy of authenticity. The lozenge is meant to appeal to those who have lost their voice while the circus goes on appealing to those without a voice. Exiled from the world of theatre proper, like those lost souls in that underworld called ‘mime’, they are destined along with their children to shout things out, to answer back, to double up with laughter, to wee themselves in fright, as the animals wee themselves in fright. As Martin Heidegger said: ‘That in the face of which we fear is not yet within striking distance, but it is coming close.’20 Between this sweet speech and the strict speech of the orders barked around a ring, ‘hup, down boy, woe’, is a vector of language within which all performers are situated. The cracking of a whip, the swinging of a chair, punctuate these exhortations with all the rhythmic discipline of the most tightly-stanzad verse. The stage conducts a repressed dialogue with this strict speech, moving at one point to appropriate it, at another to escape it. The history of the prompt in the theatre is just one vector of this regime of obedience to an outsider’s demands, and the ground on which Jacques Derrida chose to address the work of Antonin Artaud in his essay La Parole Soufflée. As Derrida said: ‘Unpower … is not … simple impotence, the sterility of having ‘nothing to say’, or the lack of inspiration. On the contrary it is inspiration itself: the force of a void, the cyclonic breath of a prompter who draws his breath in, and thereby robs me of that which he first allowed to approach me and which I believed I could say in my own name.’21 But the dialogue is deeper still for, between Stanislavski at the beginning of the last century and Grotowski towards its end, there is a continual engagement with the politics of speech and animality outlined here. Stanislavski often reminded the Moscow Art Theatre performers of the circus performer’s ‘difficult and responsible work’, one that can serve ‘as an example for actors of the stage’. He believed that the courage and presence of mind of the animal trainers and the ability to concentrate were all worthy of imitation. As a member of his troupe commented, ‘In calling upon us to improve our technique, to muster the art of mimicry, gesture, plasticity and co-ordinated movement on stage’, Stanislavski referred to the circus where there were ‘wonderful examples of all these qualities and discipline in art. It is common knowledge that the slightest deviation from the set order of most circus acts can lead to tragedy.’ During the comic circus performances of the ‘Merry Evenings’ at the Art Theatre, Stanislavski took the part of the circus manager, and the manager’s bell was law to all those participating in the show. ‘We set up an arena on the stage and the manager (Stanislavski) took his place at one of the entrances, he was dressed in shiny black knee-boots, breeches, a vest and a top hat. This was his childhood dream (as we later learnt from his book My Life in Art) come true. He held a staff and, as the emblem of high office, a bell. The finishing touch of

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the threatening figure he presented was his stern gaze from under his bushy black brows. Actually he was impersonating Albert Salamonsky, then director of the Moscow Circus.’22 Stanislavski’s young studio actors regularly staged scenes of the circus in which the participation of circus animals was mandatory, they made the students observe the ways and habits of animals as part of Stanislavski’s naturalist programme: ‘he wanted the actor to have a close affinity with life and nature, for therein lay the key to an understanding of realistic art.’ In a collection that was posthumous, but that he would have named, Discipline or Corruption, Stanislavski is speaking about competition in the theatre and its effects, in a section of aphorisms called ‘animal psychology’ he writes: ‘How we enjoy getting our teeth into those same people whom we have chosen to take authority. We do this by complaining about them, dissecting them and even sometimes humiliating them … This animal psychology, much to the shame of the acting profession, is to be found in all but a small number of theatres. It must be attacked rigorously. Not only is it common among beginners, but it is also to be seen in old, experienced actors.’23 Stanislavski knew about teeth. At the opening of his autobiography My Life in Art he had written of his ancestor, a ‘paladin with a restless soul’ and how his ‘blood flows in me’.24 He was ‘attractive and repulsive’, reasonable and illogical, he would leave work for the sake of a tiger hunt: ‘the man could find no greater pleasure in life than training the tiger in full view of his terrified household … The shouts of the trainer and the roars of the beast … re-echoed through the house. The servants came demanding that the beast be done away with, to which the trainer quietly replied “Take her, if you can”. The only answer to that was a silence interrupted by the roaring of the tigress.’25 Just before he died in the 1990s, at the other end of an age of extinctions, the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski focused on questions of organic lineage in theatre and ritual in an address to the Collège de France in Paris, returning at the end of the century to a preoccupation of the century since Stanislavski with an interrogation of the nature of the human. It is through a series of successive ‘humiliations’, to borrow Freud’s contentious word, that the human species has acquired a greater understanding of its paradoxical nature. The rediscovery of its animality is one such ‘humiliation’ that these chapters are exploring. Grotowski believed the harmonious existence of animality and spirituality to be of central significance to theatre: we are neither fully animal nor fully human, one is moved confusedly between the two. But in the performing arts, one holds these two extreme poles at the same time. It means to ‘be in the beginning’, to be ‘standing in the beginning’. The beginning is all of your original nature, present

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now, here. Your original nature with all of its aspects: divine or animal, instinctual, passionate … It is this tension between two poles which gives a contradictory and mysterious plenitude.26 And it is this plenitude that the actor faces in the animal, what Robert Walser described as the performer in the presence of a mountain. The strictest speech, as Erica Fudge has pointed out in her essay on Francis Bacon in her collection At The Borders of the Human occurs in Bacon’s Valerius Terminus of the Interpretation of Nature, at the turn of the sixteenth century, 100 years before the first text I discussed in this chapter. Here Bacon says: ‘it is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor vistory of wit, nor faculty of speech, nor lucre of profession, nor ambition of honour or fame, nor enablement for business, that are the true ends of knowledge … but it is a restitution and reinventing (in great part) to man of the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of creation.’ As Erica Fudge says of this passage: ‘Bacon asserts that power should be used to change and dominate in very concrete ways: to call the creatures by their real names … is to understand – to “know” them, to know the creatures is to wield power over them; and to wield power over them is to remove humans from their infantile place in post-lapsarian society and to return them to their original position of superiority on earth. Power in Bacon’s terms means exploitation, and exploitation is proof of humanity.’27 But here in this calling of animals and humans by their true names is to recognise the animality of humanity, to begin to at least think through what it would mean to release previously caged entities and to confuse the species boundaries that Bacon was attempting to reinforce. And the ‘Bengal Tiger’, ‘Arnie’, was, after all, not Arnie for nothing, like his predecessor, the Schwarzenegger of Total Recall, he has become a dulled ‘construction worker’ suffering nightmares about another planet called natural habitat, he has been reprogrammed by a dictator from elsewhere and gets caught up in the dictator’s evil schemes. Ultra-violence, spectacular effects, total recall indeed. As Judith Bultler says in Excitable Speech: ‘The jarring, even terrible, power of naming appears to recall this initial power of the name to inaugurate and sustain linguistic existence, to confer singularity in location and time. After having received the proper name, one is subject to being named again. In this sense the vulnerability to being named constitutes a constant condition of the speaking subject.’28 Florence’s name is announced by a white-face clown in the ring. It is her birthday today and her name has to be read out. Long averse to clowns on the grounds of some wholly rational fear of their latent violence, she cries out loud. The small people reappear and set about some complicated business with buckets while a spotlight scours the tent for a stooge. The light

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passes over us as searchingly as if this were a cinematic rendering of Colditz not Zippos Circus, and then, ominously returns to settle on someone who I take to be me because I can feel the warmth of the illumination on my face. The clowns begin to point and gesture to me to join them down below in front of a thousand people. ‘You, you there, come down here!’ Florence cries louder and I ignore her importations not to move and meekly join those with no part in the world and all the power in the ring. Randy Newman used to sing: ‘Short People got no reason To live.’ I forgot that the last verse says: ‘They’re gonna get you every time.’29 I am cheered to the top of the big top. When I get there, the aggressive-looking one on a high-spined monocycle way above me hands me a microphone that, unbeknown to me, or the crowd, does not work. He asks me my name, and some other questions, and then replies for me at the same time as I speak into the dead instrument. But his amplified voice when it is mine is not mine, it is shrill and idiotic and the crowd laughs as one. Except for Florence who is still crying. The clown on the monocycle calls me over, hands me three parafinned juggling skittles, tells me to light them and then to throw them to him when he says ‘now’. When he shouts NOW, I throw the skittles at him. One hits him on the head the others fall into the sawdust beneath his wobbling tyre and a small fire breaks out close to the front row. He bellows at me that he meant one at a time, and I meekly say he should have said so, and that’s not much of a trick for a circus, and that three at once takes some skill but not one at a time. In this pathetic valediction I hear my own voice for the first time, unamplified. The duty-fireman extinguishes the fire with the matter of factness reserved for those in the true risk professions and I return to my seat to muted applause and the now amplified curses of the clown. Florence is still crying. She asks me why I ever let them know it was her birthday. The anecdotal element is obvious, event and context are indubitably bound as in all stories, the theoretical implications more so. The direction of analysis would commonly at this point move ‘out’ into the world as though this ‘ring-side’ effected a portal to some contextual knowledge of an external reality. More ‘popular’ than theatre, therefore somehow closer to life, a social destination would be reached. Well, following my own strictures set by the slower demands of philosophy and showciology, laid out in Part 1, I want here to reverse this route back towards one more reflection on the sawdust, in an apparent feint from that wider environment. This chapter, after all, first came to mind as a way of responding to a short but founding philosophical text of theatricality, Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘The Tooth, the Palm’.30 Here the religious-political absence inherent to representation is described in the simplest possible terms: ‘To Hide, to Show: that is theatrality.’31 Surely this is also most obvious when one is at ring-side, the entrances and exits of the circus are more charged than any other kind of theatrical spectacle, there is more at stake in each act of show then hide, hide then show, than

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most other entertainments except for hide and seek, and a fathomless arena of cynical huckstering. For Lyotard the fin de siècle age that he describes as ‘our own’, but could just as well describe those other century-end moments traced out above in the tiger-economy, is signified by the fact that there is nothing to be replaced, any replacement of one term with another, one experience with another, is in fact a displacement. There is an illusion of presence in this displacement that perhaps tells us something about the inside-outside relationship between these tigers and those others, these are being variously represented while those others are becoming extinct. What Lyotard refers to as an ‘apparatus of nihilism’ might not just be a philosophical nicety where a form of exterminating machine has been set up. The image production literally acts as the conceit that there are more not less wild cats to go round and round. The aggressive human on human fill-in acts that now populate the circus ring are a happy (but oh so sad) reminder of this displacement of one term with another, the human animal for the animal that now has to be hidden, for there is none left to show. Drawing on Hans Bellmer via Freud, Lyotard explains this displacement process with a simple, familiar example: ‘I have a toothache, I clench my fist, my nails dig into the palm of my hand.’32 I have been watching Hermione do this a lot lately as her dental history of attrition begins, and not least of all in this wooden O. The action of the palm in this instance does the job of representing the passions of the tooth. Lyotard sees this reversibility as the destruction of sign and theatrality. This reversibility is not an abstract reciprocity but a social, economic and ideological experience within the ‘law of value’ in any capitalist economy. The critical function of theatre, for Brecht and others as Lyotard sees it, is not satisfied for: ‘the movement of the hand to make a silent allusion to the toothache …’.33 Effectiveness in the theatre is measured here by degrees of understanding or of realization. In the end this is all about appropriation. Theatricality becomes a series of links and connections made outside itself. This Marxist semiotics, read upon a night at the circus worthy of the Marx Brothers, is seen as a graft that has failed, the correlation of performer and performed, the communication of the audience with itself through the ‘mediary of the stage’ remains an arbitrary process. It is precisely this recalcitrant arbitrariness that restrains theatre from the instrumentality of the political. But what about the labour politics of the big tent? Jean-François Lyotard wants us, in the spirit of what has been said at length earlier, to rethink this alienation ‘affirmatively’.34 The key question of alienation is that posed by Marx in the Grundrisse, the ‘indifference of man towards his work and of work towards its man …’, it is this indifference which is the experience of the predominance of exchange-value, and it is this indifference that is intolerable to theatre. Lyotard wants us to stop thinking of this as the ‘loss of something’: ‘Rather, lets think of it positively, it is this indifference that leads to a libidinal economy, to a direct

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linking without representation of a political economy with libidinal economy.’ And here Lyotard makes clear the politics of this work: ‘The theory of value puts us potentially into a non-hierarchical circulation, where the tooth and the palm no longer have a relationship of illusion and truth, cause and effect, signifier and signified (or vice versa), but they coexist, independently, as transitory investments, accidentally composing a constellation halted for an instant, an actual multiplicity of stops in the circulation of energy. The tooth and the palm no longer mean anything, they are forces, intensities, present affects.’35 From this promising immediacy, Lyotard proceeds to lay out a manifesto for an ‘energetic theatre’ producing effectively discontinuous events, instead of the much vaulted coalescence of the interdisciplinary. Between dance, music, visual arts and performance, Lyotard seeks a dissonance, an independence and a simultaneity of what sound like the singular acts of a theatrical depth as rendered by Edgar Degas (see Figure 9). Having eliminated the sign relation and its hollowness, there also goes the hierarchy of power it inaugurates and all the well-worn clichés, if not the actuality, of the domination of director over actor, writer over choreographer, and most tellingly the power that presides over the ‘so-called spectator’. By ridding ourselves of the sign-relation, the political is also deposed in order for another politics to begin. The audience is ‘no more’ because those ‘so-called’ spectators are now redundant: ‘So-called spectators, because the notion of such a person or such a function is itself contemporary with the predominance of the re-presentation in social life, and specifically of what the modern West calls politics. The subject is a product of the performance apparatus, it disappears when the apparatus disappears.’36 And the apparatus in this case moves on to the next town where the trick with the microphone is guaranteed to work on another guilty innocent. If the first engagement with theatre space, as Lyotard perceives it, was with staging and architectural experiment, the crisis now has moved to the relation between ‘the stage and the house/outside’. If the aching tooth lies on the outside, and the clenched fist on the inside acts as its representation, the energetic theatre will no longer make allusion to the aching tooth, but examine the clenched fist for what it is. To produce the highest possible intensity with excess or lack of energy, but now without intention: that is the possibility that Lyotard invites us to think, but how, he asks plaintively, is it to be done?37 As Hermione looks towards a tightrope suspended unfathomably high above her head, and clenches her fist as the walker sets out, I would suggest that we might begin to answer this question by looking more closely at that curled-up hand than the human dangling so vainly and precipitously above us. It is now a question of how spectators make themselves fraught as much as the age-old question of how spectacle is wrought.

5 Redeemed Night

The utopia of sleep is dreamless. Roland Barthes, The Neutral I am reading a letter that was written by Walter Benjamin to his colleague Florens Rang on 9 December 1923. In the letter he is reflecting on ‘the way in which works of art relate to historical life’.1 For Benjamin there is no such thing as art history. While human life depends for its defining qualities on causal temporal events, works of art are essentially ahistorical. Works of art are not generational, as is human life, rather works of art are for Benjamin only relational in as much as they are ‘intensive’. It is only interpretation that for Benjamin can expose the links between works: ‘The same forces that become explosively and extensively temporal in the revealed world (that is, history), emerge intensively in the taciturn world (that is, the world of nature and art).’2 Benjamin thought these ideas ‘skimpy and provisional’ and appeals to his friend Florens to meet his ideas by ‘shining a light into the night of nature’. If nature is figured as this night then it follows for Benjamin that works of art be defined as: ‘the models of a nature that awaits no day, and thus no Judgement Day; they are the models of a nature that is neither the theatre of history nor the dwelling place of mankind.’3 Benjamin calls this state, or condition, ‘the redeemed night’. The experience of redeemed night is very well known to many grandparents, parents, guardians, aunts and uncles at the bedside, where interpretation and criticism of a work become the ‘mortification’ of the work for the child in approaching sleep. The act of bedtime reading to this child, in my case with my daughter half-listening, half-missing (like all audiences) C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, does what Benjamin sought for interpretation, it is this act which ‘concentrates creaturely life in ideas’.4 The purpose of this act, like all acts of interpretation is for Benjamin: ‘To establish the presence of that life.’ 5 The fact that this 145

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presence is always beyond the act, and no more palpably so than when the temporal register is one of heavy eyelids, provides another opportunity to consider the anthropomorphic act within the event of the text as a ‘seeking device’ for this presence. Walter Benjamin seeks with Florens a ‘theory of different kinds of texts’, but this reading to sleep with Florence invites us to consider those other sacred texts that have had very little theoretical exposition, those stories that accompanied us not towards heightened consciousness, but towards unconsciousness. It is these texts that once rendered orally manifest the dynamics set out in an apparently optimistic, yet wholly material and politically strategic axiom in Part I: that our enquiries should be as attuned to the order and distribution of goods as they are to the order and distribution of evils. For what could be better than sleeping soundly, or being sound asleep? The taciturn world of nature and art, that intensive world that Benjamin sought with such critical vigour, is never nearer, yet more elusive, than in this redeemed night. Contrary to Freud, this has nothing to do with dreams, an excuse to allegorise another apparently vacant space, but it does have everything to do with the already saturated nature of sleep, the flora and fauna of a local infinity just round midnight.

Fear ‘I’m a kidnapper for her, that’s what I am. Look at me daughter of Eve. Would you believe that I’m the sort of Faun to meet a poor innocent child in the wood, one that had never done any harm, and pretend to be friendly with it, and invite it home to my cave, all for the sake of lulling it asleep and then handing it over to the White Witch?’ ‘No’ said Lucy. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t do anything of the sort.’ But I would. I am reading this to my seven-year-old daughter Florence. I have lulled my child to sleep. I am singing this girl to sleep, a lullaby, literally ‘Lulla – bye bye’. A fare-well and a good-night, another adieu. Kid-napping after all derives from the stealing of or carrying off children in order to provide servants or labourers in the plantations. Ships would call on Ireland on their way to Virginia bringing white servants, or ‘Kids’ as they were called, to newer and even more dangerous worlds. The vocation of the kidnapper, a stealer of human beings, thieves of human flesh, decoying or spiriting away young children, occurs to me here at bedside to be more topical than C. S. Lewis might have liked. Just weeks before, beneath the Mothercare sign in the North of England shopping centre, a boy clenches the hand of a smaller boy and walks into the forest of shopping-mall neon to the train tracks where, having thrown some stones at him, he will attempt to revive his friend’s dimming life by fitting him with some new batteries. I am handing Florence, in all her suburban security, over to the

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embrace of Tumnus, (where does that fur end and love begin?), but also the white witch in the far side of dreams, in a state of sleep that binds a narrative of risk to a fathomless journey that might be called a redeemed night. As she goes, imperceptibly her eyes flicker with the recognition of this betrayal. This sense of the child’s visual sense is a further ‘anthropomorphism’ among many others in this book, not the reading onto deities of human traits but the residue of assumptions about humans applied to the infanthuman who is not now in a position to speak for themself, who, in a perhaps contestable sense, is closer on the verge of sleep to the gentleness of creatures beyond the human all too human. It is their creaturely life, as well as those of a text, that becomes concentrated in these ideas played out as a small performance in a receding state of consciousness at bedside. It is also, in keeping with my arguments earlier on ‘anecdote’, commonly thought of as part of any anthropomorphic method, although the two, anecdotes and anthropomorphism, are not inherently tied. For those of us interested in the relations between humans and other animals, including those animals in their infancy that we deign to call human, we are faced with the choice between classifying animals, including infant animals, as automatons, or granting them volition and information processing capacities. If anthropomorphism is defined as the misattribution of human qualities to animals no one wishes to be associated with it, while never quite being in a position to escape it. My axiom earlier that encouraged due regard for both partners in this odd coupling is predicated on this uncomfortable truth. There is, however, a difference between the use of anthropomorphism for communicatory reasons, or as a tool to generate hypotheses (as in the first axiom of showciology laid out in Part I), and anthropomorphism that does little else than project human emotions and intentions onto animals without an attempt at serious investigation as to the life of both halves of an unholy alliance. As Hans Jonas has said: ‘The anathema of any kind of anthropomorphism, even of zoomorphism, in connection with nature – this in its absoluteness specifically dualistic and post-dualistic prohibition, may well turn out to be, in this extreme form, a prejudice.’6 Indeed the Cartesian animal-machine may not be far behind if we are not alert to the irony that those very scientists that have outlawed anthropomorphism as a ‘sin of sins’ are now: ‘the most liberal in endowing machines with manlike features …’.7 In this slippage, the donor, man, is appropriated all the more securely to the realm of the machine. For Jonas this mirroring back takes place ‘under the cover of names’, the very anthropological machine we were identifying earlier but now with a certain power of nomenclature demarcating that which the mirroring system is only able partially to secure. How to look at, listen to, and express our understandings of child performance without recourse, as Mick Taussig would say, to some imagining of

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the child’s imagination, which in turn requires some proxy speech, which in turn anthropomorphises that which remains on the side of the infant? Not Shirley Temple, Fame, Anna Sher or Bugsy Malone (though they are overdue some attention), but the imperceptible transitions a child makes between being animal in play, to becoming animal in theatre, to playing animal in performance. Inevitably this has invited me in previous chapters to read gestures, signs and wonders I can delight in, but am left to interpret, on the wrong side of the infans: ‘without language’. The child can speak but cannot say quite why, or how these movements occur. Their concerns are beyond the interpretation that Benjamin sought through the colonisation of the work by knowledge, but not speculation from outside. The redeemed night, that is the read night, offers a taciturn world from which a menagerie can be composed by the child seeking the company of animals while a concerned adult reads on. After the multiple-shootings of an infant class at a school in Dunblane in Scotland, the commonest loss expressed by grieving parents was not having said goodbye. I wonder whether the absence of these verbal rites of passage, as the child leaves this world, even through the wardrobe, or on return from Narnia, this absence of a wave, does not envelope our concern for these sleeping children. The appeal, goodnight, cannot quite cover for this palpable sense of departure. And, in turn does not the ubiquitous wave of the child in performance, the adieu described in Chapter 3, ‘Stage Play’, alert us to their vitality, their vital spirit in the bewildered face of the audience’s applause for their willingness to concede their lives on behalf of performance, their small sacrifice to Dionysus. The child in performance, becoming animal, confounds demarcations in the most constrained Christian settings, they are truly sacred in the original sense of that term, for they are separate. Those stages constructed by doleful school ‘care-takers’ are prepared for by the sundering of these boundaries of care and attention. No less, the Christian undertones of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe become delightful delinquencies in the anarchic listening of the dozing child who, unlike the prosaic-ness of the text, is sacred in a way that organised religion has very little real sense of in my experience. There is ambiguity at work here partly because we are so uncertain about the limits of our own animal species and no more so than when, on the edge of sleep, we would appear to inhabit the skin of our ancestors. Even as late as the eighteenth century the most learned European scholars were still debating as to whether, or not, chimpanzees and orang-utans should be considered sub-species of mankind. On the other hand, we are all highly adept at creating socially defined sub-categories of man and then treating the groups so specified as if they were quite different varieties of animal. Among these sub-groups it is precisely children who are particularly prone to a form of separation which requires anthropomorphic leaps to reassign

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them complex qualities. These categories became petrified in the death throes of natural history and the birth of the life sciences as flora and …

Fauna ‘You are the child’ said Tumnus. ‘I had orders from the White Witch that if I ever saw a son of Adam or a Daughter of Eve in the wood, I was to catch them and hand them over to her … And if I don’t’ said he beginning to cry … ‘… she’s sure to find out. And she’ll have my tail cut off, and my horns sawn off, and my beard plucked out, and she’ll wave her wand over my beautiful cloven hoofs and turn them into horrid solid hoofs like wretched horse’s. And if she is extra and specially angry she will turn me into stone and I shall be only a statue of a Faun.’ The Faun is in popular lore figured as a god or demi-god worshipped by those shepherds and farmers on the underside of the nativity: one of the class of rural deities like men with horns and the tail of a goat and later with goat’s legs like the satyrs to whom they were assimilated in lustful character. Fauna is a simple application of the name of a rural goddess, used by Linnaeus in the title of his work Fauna Suecica of 1746. A collective term, ‘fauna’ is applied to the animal or animal life of any particular region or epoch, a treatise upon the animals of any geographical area or geological period. Despite the genealogies of the Linnean system, in this night-time reading, Tumnus cries out and confirms himself as animal in the region of Narnia, in the epoch of winter, Tumnus sheds tears and asserts himself as human in the region beyond ‘war drobe’ just before Christmas. This simple divide along the lines of lachrymosity is just one of the fault lines that separates humans from other animals. A handkerchief is passed on and remains in the world of the hybrid to remind us of this confusion, a symbol of surrender to its charm perhaps. As Edmund Leach told us: ‘Totemism was low and primitive because men and animals are represented as having a confused common origin; animism was likewise low and primitive because it was said to imply that souls inhabit animals and trees just as they inhabit man. But Christianity was high religion because it implies a clear cut discontinuity between ethically conscious human beings and irrational beasts.’8 Tears provide the liquidity in this circulating economy between animality and humanity. In recent thinking, after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had their antiOedipal animal say, there is a welcome move beyond an essentialist fauna, beyond a Freudian symbolised function of the animal-human relation, beyond the stasis of structuralism: when a man or a woman could never say I am a tiger, a bear, a wolf, but I am to a woman what the bull is to the cow. Becoming animal is again, in philosophy if nowhere else, possible.

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These becomings are neither dreams nor fantasies but are, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari in their germinal philosophy, as they are for all children, perfectly real. For performance here is an alternative to saying you either imitate or you are, what is real is the becoming itself, not the fixed terms through which the becoming passes. There is always the danger of finding yourself ‘playing the animal’. Playing bee for instance, after Arthur Askey’s truly prescient vaudevillian song, not so much ‘To be or not to be’ but ‘To be a grown up busy little bee’. That is not the question, but the imperative. All children and many adults play likenesses to a greater or lesser degree and in so doing bear witness to an inhuman connivance with the animal that they are not, or not yet. The problem here is with the word ‘like’. Gilles Deleuze has pointed out how the actor Robert de Niro walks ‘like’ a crab in a certain film sequence; but he says, it is not a question of him imitating a crab; it is a question of making something that has to do with the crab enter into composition with the image, with the speed of the image. And furthermore, Deleuze has observed how the becoming-animal ‘have their own power distinct from any reality that might reside in the animal corresponded to, rather in the manner in which the becoming sweeps one up into a proximity and indiscernibility that extracts a shared element from the animal far more effectively than any domestication, utilisation or initiation could. This rush is towards the imperceptible, ‘to be like everyone else’.’9 The anomalous that marks the tension between the singular and the specific in this rush to the similarity of the general is the terrain between the animal and the exceptional act of the performer. Every animal has its anomalous and there is always the exceptional individual within the pack, ‘stars’ of stage or screen are not exceptional in that sense. As the second axiom in Part I proposed: theatre in its active transcendence of the specific always singularises what was once, but is no more, particular. In this culture of celebrity, the apparent antithesis of particular individual endeavour, children, apparently at the centre of human experience as the future of that human experience, are so often effortlessly marginalised because of the speed that all societies have appropriated their innovative becomings, to reduce them to totemic or symbolic correspondence as their past. This effortless reduction of the child to nostalgia, a sadness without an object, is the subject of Chapter 10, ‘Arrested Life’. But here I want to dwell on the child’s anomalous status within the menagerie of animals that surround them. The anomaly, more specifically, of Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, then, was not her otherness on arrival in sameness, the curious continuity of the forest, though of course this might have accounted for an acceleration of the pace of becoming animal that she experienced, but rather the proximity of her becoming ‘other than her self’ to the animal pack of her aspiration. The pack, herd, community was absent and in her

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isolation, she became anomalous as the surfaces of one complex enough state of identities: exiled child became enmeshed with not just the characteristic traits of the faun, that would have fooled no one, but with the affects of the faun. That is, beyond the marks of the species, sounds, movement dynamics and intensities of feeling lay not the description of something, but a creature that did something, and through this doing ‘became’. What is called anthropomorphism, then, depends upon cultural and historical conventions which circulate ferociously around these moments of performance, and around the place of humans in nature. Nature is, after all, as Katherine Hepburn said to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, what we are placed in this world to rise above. It is itself an anthropomorphic construction, and only exists as such. These conventions form, shape and determine our human contracts of language as Robert Mitchell, Nicholas Thompson and Lyn Miles have shown in a number of writings reviving the centuries debate on anthropomorphism and animals. As they demonstrate, with an incisive reading of the anecdotal and the anthropomorphic, without the anthropomorphic there would simply be an amorphic perspective, a view from no particular view.10 And post-Nietzsche that would be hard to countenance or sustain in anything but the most naïve circumstances. Unless we are able to dedicate ourselves to continuous efforts of verbal self-control, almost all of our descriptions of animals are likely to introduce anthropomorphisms at various levels of description and analysis. What is more, as Mitchell, Thompson and Miles show, in our time, the use of mental or psychical predicates can be considered a fallacy, that is, a categorical mistake, only if we already know with certainty that animals are completely different from human animals. It is exactly when we are ready to recognise that animals are neither machines nor humans that anthropomorphism becomes a much more complex problem in general, and specifically of interest to performance as an anthropological machine. Since Xenophanes, Bacon, Spinoza, Hume, Goethe, anthropomorphism has not been limited to our views of other animals but is broad and deep, everywhere in our thoughts and actions, it drives the very machinery I have been describing. The impulse to find faces in the clouds in the sky, in the knotty wood of the sideboard, and for Florence in the cracks of the ceiling above her as she pretends to sleep through this reading, as well as our continual search for other non-human forms in shadows and shapes, and to hear a human presence in unidentified sounds in the night, is indicative of this generative anthropomorphic quality. Our perceptual strategy, as a number of studies in Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals discuss, consists in seeing the world first, neither as what we want to see (as folk wisdom has it) nor as what is most likely, but as what matters most. That is why we scan an ambiguous world, first, with models determined by our most pressing interests, the imperative for sensibility. Animism or zoomorphism as a residual category of mistakes seems

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to spring from the same strategy as does anthropomorphism: in the face of chronic uncertainty, we all look first for what matters most to us. For animals what matters most is other living things. For humans and a few other animals it is living things and especially humans. For infant animals there is an ambiguity as to whether it is other humans or animals. And in Anthony Nielson’s play The Wonderful World of Disocia, in which a young woman in an extreme state of psychological disorientation is serenaded by a white woolly bear, it is clearly the semblance of that white woolly bear that is sought throughout her recovery. While anthropomorphism is usually considered an aberration of thought, it is a reasonable, though in hindsight mistaken attribution of aspects of what is most important to us. It is, as the Professor in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe would say, logical in this sense. It is this logic of the various senses of anthropomorphism that collections of writings such as Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals have done so much to recover, a challenge taken seriously by others such as Lorraine Daston and Greg Mitman in Thinking with Animals that in its title, and contents, philosophically challenges some of the traditional boundaries along which previous species debates have run. The boundaries in this redeemed night are no less pliable. The Faun is part of the fauna and simultaneously our mediator with the child, Lucy. ‘Faunt’, shares this boundary condition in its etymological root, in enfant as an infant, as a child or young person would have been described in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. And from this genesis, we have in a very European tradition of children’s literature, Fauntleroy, the name of the hero of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885), used to designate the style of dress or hair (for boys) which the book popularised, and was later applied ironically to a child of the gentle nature of the book’s hero. But in the darker side of American slang lies in wait the shadow of this hero, the kid, who kid-naps, the poolroom idler, the sheep in wolf’s clothing, where the innocent fleece of the nativity becomes…

Fur ‘Farewell Daughter of Eve’, said he. ‘Perhaps I may keep the handkerchief?’ ‘Rather’ said Lucy, and then ran towards the far-off patch of daylight as quickly as her legs would carry her. And presently instead of rough branches brushing past her she felt coats, and instead of crunching snow under her feet she felt wooden boards, and all at once she found herself jumping out of the wardrobe into the same empty room from which the whole adventure had started.’ Animals have fur, they do not have leather, and animals don’t have meat until they are dead. Fur is apparently left unworked by culture in quite the

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ways that leather comes to us, it is the raw to leather’s cooked. But it is not indigestible for all that. The boards of the wardrobe that Lucy treads are the raked-stage for a sequence of anomalous events that bring my bedside concerns towards the architecture of sleep rather than dreams. Fur and boards here are images not metaphors. Metaphor gives concrete substance to an impression that is difficult to express, image on the other hand, as Gaston Bachelard was wont to point out, owes its entire being to the imagination and, unlike metaphor, has phenomenological value, it is a phenomenon of being and is specific to the speaking creature. Lucy does not just like fur, she loves it, the feel and smell of fur, she gets in among the coats and rubs her face against them. Lucy confounds the structures of separation that require the anthropomorphic move, her face in the fur resists the speculation by Walter Benjamin that: ‘In an aversion to animals, the predominant feeling is fear of being recognized by them through contact. The horror that stirs deep in man is an obscure awareness that in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be recognized. All disgust is originally disgust at touching.’11 That this aphorism operates under the title ‘Gloves’ hints at the fact that the finest epidermal contact remains more taboo than the drama of eating the other with whom one is in constant bestial relation, a sense of over-determined finery that weighs down the clothing metaphors of this night-time tale. If Jamie Bulger had fur, if Stephen Lawrence had fur, if Damilola Taylor had fur, there would have been an international campaign to protect them, if Dresden, Sarajevo and Beirut had fur, likewise. As Julia Emberley shows, in her comprehensive survey Venus and Furs, fur has a cultural politics with values which circulate around not just its commodity nature, as luxury good, article of trade, but also its investment within libidinal desire. It cannot be separated from desire.12 As a fetish and fashion commodity fur exists in a field of transactions, unlike Feuerbach’s ‘sensual certainty’, the cherry tree, which becomes a fetishistic ideal. These transactions allow us to mobilise and negotiate otherwise antagonistic oppositions between child and adult, animal and human, and ease them from their fetishistic regimes of truth. Here, with Julia Emberley’s hermeneutic help, in untangling the circulation of fur as traded image and material, fluidity and permeability between borders of the redeemed night, reading can be set back in motion in the day-time unredeemed world of labour and economy. In the narrative of the bedtime story, Lucy inverts the image of the furclad bourgeois woman, the white witch whose origins in the ‘sumptuary’ laws of fourteenth- to seventeenth-century England Julia Emberley lays out in Venus and Furs. Lucy becomes the legislator against extravagant living and the regulatory mechanisms that flowed from this power. The prohibition of those from lower classes, even Lucy’s middle-class credentials do not justify her animal garb from acquiring the visual signs of monarchical

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privilege and therefore challenges the monarchical monopoly over the codes of symbolic power that fur implies. The witch might have known her time was up well before the thaw waters-down Narnia, closer to the children’s return in furs that are described, as they reticently put them on, as looking more like ‘royal robes than coats’. Sex is of course bound up here, but not quite as the Freudian reading might intimate. For prostitutes were forbidden to wear furs to differentiate them from ‘respectable women’, as Julia Emberley points out, and more prosaically, the inference of bestiality, of being between fur and flesh is a constant in a narrative that has been over read for its religious symbolism and underappreciated for its speciescrossing. In Puritan discourse there was clearly a resistance to female dissimulation and masquerade that the artifice of fur invited, an excessive performative quality that has attracted young readers to this narrative since its composition. And by modernity, in Julia Emberley’s cultural history, the violent excess associated with imperial and sexual conquest is said to have begun to circulate through the cliché of the fur-clad feminine despot. But the despot in this reading is on the far side, and Lucy returns via the wood, the boards, to a settlement of her senses, in the bourgeois circulation of sightseers passing through a house that is open to the public. The Professor’s logic extends to the nature of this child’s journey in fur, a journey that draws together the three strands of this chapter. Arnold Van Gennep, the French folklorist and ethnographer alerted us to the manner in which ancient and tribal societies conceptualised and symbolised the transitions humans have to make between well-defined states and statuses if they are to grow up to accommodate themselves to unprecedented even antithetical conditions. He showed us that all rites of transition are marked by three phases: separation, limen or margin, and aggregation. The first phase comprises symbolic behaviour signifying the detachment of the individual or group, either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure or from a relatively stable set of cultural conditions; during the intervening liminal phase, the state of the ritual subject becomes ambiguous, he passes through a realm or dimension that has few, or none, of the attributes of the past or coming state, betwixt and between all familiar lines of classification; in the third phase the passage is consummated, and the subject returns to the classified secular of mundane social life. The ritual subject, individual or corporate group, is again in a stable state, has rights and obligations of a clearly defined structural type, and is expected to behave in accordance with the customary norms and ethical standards appropriate to his new settled state. By identifying liminality Van Gennep discovered a major innovative, transformative dimension of the social, which braids with the earlier transformative reading of becoming animal. Liminality is not only transition but also potentiality, not only ‘going to be’ but also ‘what may be’. It therefore has an inherent ethical quality, not what is but what ought to be. Here

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through fear, fauna and fur, the child in an intimate bedside performance undertakes their potentiality through pilgrimage and penance. The way is long, hazardous, beset by robbers, thieves and confidence men aplenty, as well as by natural dangers and epidemics. Towards the end of this journey the individual’s new-found freedom from mundane or profane structures is increasingly circumscribed by symbolic structures. Here play and solemnity are equally present, unfortunately for any inherent didacticism in Lewis’s text, the child is long asleep before the moral is learnt. They are left with the infinite suspension of a tale without an end. Play is older than culture and its morality, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society – and animals have not waited for man to teach them playing. Animals play so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play, as Huizinga said, and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational. Let us conclude in that dark space, among the furs. Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space alerts us to the hybrid quality of the wardrobe, its intimacy. Bachelard asks: ‘Does there exist a single dreamer of words who does not respond to the word wardrobe … And to this intimacy add depth … the inner space of an old wardrobe is deep. A wardrobe’s inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody.’13 For Bachelard, in his secure familial bourgeois reverie, through the presence of lavender the history of the seasons enters into the wardrobe. Indeed, lavender alone introduces a ‘Bergsonian durée into the hierarchy of the sheets’. But here, in our ahistorical tale of a redeemed night, time is arrested, the pungency of the mothballs freezing the fur in time on the far-side of the winter beyond, which they curtain from view. ‘A wardrobe’, writes Milosz, ‘is filled with the mute tumult of memories.’ Responding to Breton’s wardrobe poem of ‘linen and moonbeams’, Bachelard asks of the wardrobe: ‘If we give objects the friendship they should have, we do not open a wardrobe without a slight start. Beneath its russet wood, a wardrobe is a very white almond. To open it is to experience an event of whiteness.’14 For me any psychoanalytic concern will conceal the depths of the ‘white out’ of this sleep of intimacy. One is never more aware of the monotony of psychoanalytic frames, of clichéd keys and locks, than when considering this wardrobe. When we dream of locks and keys there is nothing more to confess. But poetry and narrative extends well beyond psychoanalysis, on both sides here. The looking glass that is in the door of the wardrobe is not there for us to speculate on the ‘mirror stage’ of these infants who recognise themselves, transformed, on return. From this night dream we are left to make our own day dream of that redeemed night, a daydream that remains in the world, that alerts us to the world, that wakes us to the presence, potential, and the pleasures of performance among infant animals in the time left to wake before sleep. It is now not a matter of mourning, so much as morning, a good morning, even when that morning

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has broken. Each morning that breaks is ‘like’ the first morning, each blackbird that speaks, speaks ‘like’ the first word. The recreation of the ‘first day’ is the basic human right of all children, and for that a good night’s sleep, with, or more likely without, a wardrobe through which to invite adventure, or escape oppression, is the basic human animal necessity.

Figure 1

Shunt, Tropicana, London Bridge Vaults, 2005. Courtesy of Lizzie Clachan / www.shunt.co.uk.

Figure 2

St Michael Overcoming the Dragon. French, 1300–1500, walnut painted and gilded. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, Sculpture Department, London (526–1895).

Figure 3

Sepulchral Effigy – a knight of the De Lucy family. English, c. 1340–50, sandstone, from the Lady Chapel, Lesnes Abbey Kent, UK. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, Sculpture Department, London (A.10–1912).

Figure 4

Pieter Bruegel, Children’s Games, 1560, Oil Paint on Wood, H 118 cm, W 161 cm. Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien oder KHM, Wien.

Figure 5

John Gielgud as Felix (the poet Butterfly) in The Insect Play by The Brothers Capek at the Regent Theatre, London, 1923. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 6

Bettina Rheims, Mouton de face, from Animal, 1994. © Bettina Rheims, courtesy galeric Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris.

Figure 7

Bettina Rheims, ‘Nativity’ Avril 1997, Ville Evrard. © Bettina Rheims, courtesy galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris.

Figure 8

Tipoo’s Tiger, c.1795, Mechanical organ, Painted wood, Mysore. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 9

Edgar Degas, The Ballet Scene from Meyerbeer’s Opera ‘Robert Le Diable’ (detail) 1876, Oil on Canvas. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Figure 10

William Hogarth, Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, Etching with engraving in black ink, 1762. © Trustees of the British Museum, courtesy of British Museum Images, London (195326).

Figure 11

Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Genesi: From The Museum of Sleep, 1999, un bambino dell il parte: Auschwitz. Demetrio, Teodora e Agata Castellucci. Courtesy of Luca del Pia.

Figure 12

Richard and Bomb before Showtime, New York, 1996, Richard Lowdon, Forced Entertainment. Courtesy of Hugo Glendenning.

Figure 13

Robin in Horse Head before Pleasure, Sheffield, 1997, Robin Arthur, Forced Entertainment. Courtesy of Hugo Glendenning.

Figure 14

Dijkstraat (tussen nrs. 6 en 12), 20 April, 1954. Courtesy of Beeldbank Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Amsterdam City Archives.

Figure 15

Dijkstraat playground, Aldo Van Eyck, 12 July 1955. Courtesy of Beeldbank Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Amsterdam City Archives.

Figure 16

Goya, Men Fighting with Sticks, 1820–1823, Oil on Canvas, 123 × 266 cms. Courtesy of Museo del Prado, Madrid.

Figure 17

Le Corbusier, Le Modulor, 6 January 1946. © DACS / Fondation Le Corbusier.

Figure 18

CCTV Sequence, Damilola Taylor, Peckham Library, London, 27 November 2000. © Metropolitan Police Service, courtesy Directorate of Public Affairs.

Figure 19

Graded Word Reading Test from E. J. Schonell, Psychology and Teaching of Reading, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Ltd, 1966.

Figure 20

William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, 1819–1820, Tempera heightened with gold on mahogany, 21.4 cms × 16.2 cms. © Tate, London 2007.

Figure 21

Engineers building ERNIE I, 1956, Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill, UK, first used June 1957. Courtesy of HM National Savings and Investments.

Figure 22

ERNIE I, National Savings and Investments, UK, 1957. Courtesy of HM National Savings and Investments.

Figure 23

Krzysztof Wodizko, images taken during and presented to author on completion of Civic Centre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance, 9–16 April, 2003, London, UK.

Figure 24

‘Mr Cody Met the Queen’, Buckingham Palace, November, 1960. Courtesy of Southend on Sea and County Pictorial, 4 November, 1960.

Figure 25

Goat Island, The Sea and Poison, Wellington Avenue church gymnasium, Chicago, 1998. Courtesy of Nathan Mandell.

Figure 26

Resurrection de Lazare, Haut-Relief, Sixteenth Century, St Mammès Cathedral, Langres, Haute-Marne, France. Courtesy of St Mammès Cathedral and the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Directions régionales des Affaires culturelle.

6 Infant Enthusiasm

The worst crimes are committed out of enthusiasm, a morbid state responsible for almost all public and private disasters. E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born If, as Freud said, the distinguishing features of melancholia were: ‘profound painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, and a loosening of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in selfreproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment …’, one can instantly gauge its attraction to a performance studies in search of a morbid subject. It was once said of Zsa Zsa Gabor, ‘She played the gamut of emotions from A to B’, and, with respect, performance might be in the process of mimicking Ms Gabor in its fascination with this topology between Me and Mo, melancholia and mourning still ensnared in that ‘morbidity culture’ that Peggy Phelan did so much to finesse and sensualise in her work Mourning Sex. While I appreciate this represents significant progress on a zealous century of hagiographic theatre studies now passed, we are duty bound, as I wrote earlier, to examine a certain melancholic fixation, that in the absence of its ‘others’ surrenders us to a semantic range somewhere between trauma and transgression, a field that should not limit us to the banality of the positive, as in ‘ac-cen-tuate the positive’, but precisely pose an invitation to ‘Mess with Mr-In-Between’. Indeed, Freud prompted us to take up this work when he said: ‘The most remarkable characteristic of melancholia, and the one in most need of explanation, is its tendency to change round into mania – a state which is the opposite of it in its symptoms.’1 My purpose here, in a set of concluding reflections to this section prompted by the child-related work of the Cesena-based theatre company Societas Raffaello Sanzio, is to take us beyond what Freud described as the ‘initial bearings’ of a field characterised by melancholia’s contraries, ‘joy, exultation, and triumph’. A beyond which is already and always within the 157

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circulation of melancholia, that does not release us from the circuitry of melancholia (for mania is dependent on the same economic conditions as the condition from which it departs), but to scrutinise that dwelling in the disaffected, with some thoughts on the affects that arise from the speaking, the speech of enthusiasm (Figure 10). These are after all states of ‘object choice’, in the place of love, what Freud called the ‘ravenously hungry’ condition of the searcher for new investments. In this counter-intuitive project I will be taking a tip from Mark, in the Gospels: ‘It was the stone rejected by the builders that became the keystone.’2

Infant I am not interested in constructing another idealised edifice for infancy and animality that figures babies and beasts with the psychic and the ecstatic as ‘sacred others’. Of course ‘Infancy [nor the animal, given what Deleuze and Guattari have said in some detail about ‘becoming’ one], is not a simple given whose chronological site might be isolated, nor is it like an age or a psychosomatic state which a psychology or a palaeoanthropology could construct as a human fact independent of language.’3 Yet the infant does share with the enthusiast a speaking in tongues that resists the readymade of conformist language, something that is, in Bertolt Brecht’s, phrase more seismic than semiotic, that alerts us to the power of ‘showing showing’ in performance. While the word enthusiasm has a 400-year history of describing that loosening of our grip on rationality, from the Greek entheos, to be filled or inspired by a deity, it nevertheless serves as an antidote to those ‘indifferents’ who in their affected alienation dominate cultural commentary. For if educated elites are typically characterised by their continuous commitment to explaining away ecstatic experience, involuntary gestures, fits, bodily excesses, falling down dead, convulsions, cries and shouting, all which over my theatre-going life and time as a father I have experienced with pleasure through performance, infants and those ordinary people who for some reason are never quite like ‘us’, embedded in traditions of practice and faith, have been characterised as the ones having these experiences. The fissure cruelly exposed here between experiencing and explaining is the banal binary paradigm that dogs the economy of performance study, still reflected here, unmoored from the everyday practices it stalks. The enthusiast has always been perceived as ‘falsely inspired’ and, while I would not wish to denigrate the critical faculty, I would like to ask what might be lost in criticism’s pre-emptive distancing of this uneasy realm. I would like to ask here what small enthusiasms we might admit to, ‘In what sense are we all infants now?’ I am not here inviting us to find that spurious, synthetic invention of therapy: our inner child. I am rather acknowledging the precise way that performance is arrested in the enthusiasms of language.

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We might begin by dwelling on the sonic sophistication of the ‘worldful’ yet ‘wordless’ infant and consider ways in which we are all continuously in states of reaching for words from sounds to express things, to name them. This is our Adamic impulse. Consider for a moment the ways in which a constellation of effects and efforts has become a ‘thing’, a reified object, and the possibilities and problems this throws up for us, grappling with sounds and language for future speculation. As Theodor Adorno said: ‘it is a sign of all reification that the things can be named arbitrarily …’ and we have only to think of animals: tiger, dog, rabbit, and infants, to know how true this is. Each of these ways of naming, including different perceptions of performance, brings with it not only different theories but different phenomena, as if the most remarkable property of this thing we take so much pleasure in is not to have any property at all and to vary in accordance with the forms of discussion brought to bear upon it. The Italian philosopher and film actor Giorgio Agamben takes infancy within history more seriously than anyone outside child-conscious Italy might imagine possible: ‘the constitution of the subject in and through language is precisely the expropriation of this ‘wordless’ experience; from the outset, it is always ‘speech’. A primary experience far from being subjective, could then only be what in human beings comes before the subject – that is, before language: a wordless experience in the literal sense of the term, a human infancy (in-fancy), whose boundary would be marked by language.’4 Agamben goes beyond this partial case to a general model when he asks: ‘A theory of experience could in this sense only be a theory of infancy, and its central question would have to be formulated thus: is there such a thing as human infancy? How can infancy be humanly possible? And if it is possible where is it sited?’5 The experience, then, the infancy at issue here for Agamben: ‘cannot merely be something which chronologically precedes and which, at a certain point, ceases to exist to spill into speech. It is not a paradise which at a certain moment, we leave for ever in order to speak; rather, it coexists in its origin with language – indeed is itself constructed through the appropriation of it by language in each instance to produce the individual as subject.’6 The common distinction made between infants and other animals might be confounded here. From Aristotle, via Marx and Heidegger to Agamben we know that ‘Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary they are always and totally language … Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits the single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language – he has to say I. Thus, if language is truly man’s nature … then man’s nature is split at its source, for infancy brings it discontinuity and the difference between language and discourse.’7 Here, in this definition of infancy, then, is the possibility of history, the historicity of the human. There is history because there is the discontinuity

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of infancy, because language is not the same as the human. The disturbing prognostications of the Harvard-based linguist Steven Pinker in his bestselling book The Language Instinct, and his outlandish claims for the significance of ‘babies born talking’, is that this human being, born already with speech, is then without history, this human is immediately united with their own nature: ‘Like the animal, whom Marx describes as “immediately at one with its life activity”, he would merge with it and would never be able to see it as an object distinct from himself.’8 The logic of Giorgio Agamben’s argument is that ‘to experience necessarily means to re-accede to infancy’s [that is] history’s transcendental place of origin. The enigma which infancy ushered in for [the hu] man can be dissolved only in history, just as experience, being infancy and human place of origin, is something he [or she] is always in the act of falling from, into language and into speech.’9 Here history is understood not as a ‘continuous speaking’, but as ‘hiatus’ and ‘discontinuity’: ‘That which has its place of origin in infancy must keep on travelling towards and through infancy.’10 I am interested in the material way in which these ‘echolalias’, echoes and disappearances of speech, have constituted some theatre scenes that are most memorable for me from accompanying the theatre work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio across Europe. These arguments presuppose a ‘condition’ of infancy not as an anormal or abnormal state, beyond the rationality of our reasoned linguistic adulthood, but as the frayed and imperceptible anomalous, always and everywhere the precondition for our historical situatedness within the tension of sound, speech and language. Not least of all when one’s theatre tradition is most commonly marked by the unnatural fluidities of iambic pentameter verse. This anomaly, this ‘state of exception’ which is infancy, is characterised by its continuous inclusion within culture. Infancy is thus normalised and policed as an anomalous condition, that is helpless and which must be endured, and the more privately the better. Let me beg to differ, for, on the contrary, I would concur with the view expressed by Walter Benjamin that: ‘The tradition … teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.’11 We might get a better grip on this all too supple inversion if we think of a theorist who would appear to have told us most about social statuses and power but who, perhaps by choice, is unable to theorise this kind of continuity of a state of exception, that makes every day, for someone somewhere, 11 September now. Michel Foucault privileged the outsider status of his chosen models of history that are all ‘exceptions’: the ‘mad’ and the ‘bad’, that precisely figured outside, juridical-spatial states of normalised emergency. But in his great work of analysis of a continuous state of exception, his History of Sexuality, Foucault did argue that society’s ‘… threshold of biological modernity is situated at the point at which the species and the individual

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as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society’s political strategies.’12 This is fundamentally a question of the infant, in the infancy of theatre, for the realm of the political is precisely the mode of revelation of bodies in the world. As Giorgio Agamben says: ‘Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics, that is perhaps because animals are always already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition; they simply live in it without caring about it … Human beings … transform the open into a world, that is, into the battlefield of a political struggle without quarter. This struggle, whose object is truth, goes by the name of History.’13 In Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s 2001 production, subsequently much revived and toured across Europe and the United States, Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep, the meditative central act of the performance, called ‘Auschwitz’, is an infant history, one which has to find sounds to speak of something, through performance, which cannot yet be spoken of, on stage, or in words (Figure 11).

Infant animal There has been much said about children in reflection on the performance work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, and no more so than with regard to the veiled scene ‘Auschwitz’ in their production Genesi.14 Here there was so little said. The characteristic scrims and diaphanous curtaining of SRS are here layered to the edge of the enormous stage of the Sadlers Wells theatre in London, a quiet stage-deep blizzard of snow-white layers. The infant animals that play this scene look out dimly at us beyond the scrim, but rarely speak to each other or to us. The word, if it were to arise here, would act as an interruption. While this is common to many SRS productions in which the economy of language is more gestural than spoken, the verbal reticence in this instance is doubly significant. With regard to figures of arrested language, Peter Fenves puts it like this: ‘Such is the decisive character of the word: although it cannot be experienced within a continuum of representations, it structures this continuum by interrupting it and dividing it into unequal parts.’15 But in Genesi, and this act in particular, this is a double arrest for it is both the rhythm of representation and language itself that are interrupted. Dramatic speeches, as Hölderlin said of Sophocles ‘constitute the caesura’.16 There is no justification for these interruptions, they are by definition unauthorized, and they continuously contest the apparent politics of stability that emerges from the theatrical act. In this sense when compared with the particular parsimony of language in the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, theatre in general might be characterized as being in a continuous condition of Tourette’s Syndrome, enthusiastic, affirmative and unpredictable. This is not quite the stable economy of the legally binding speech-act theories drawn from John Searle that have so influenced the thinking of the performative in performance

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studies, but rather, an awkward, illegal echo that can be measured, but not wholly accounted for. The enthusiasm of these acts, in this Act called ‘Auschwitz’ is the apparent way, after Plato, that the very thing that cannot be understood becomes singular. This singularity is inexplicable, and enthusiasm accounts for its anomalous nature because something or someone outside our reach and understanding is responsible for it. The Deus ex Machina is the concluding reversal of this apparent inexplicability, precisely resolving in the name of a god those things that otherwise cannot be sorted within the terrestrial dramatic apparatus. The children in ‘Auschwitz’, the scene that is, are certainly not authorised to ‘speak’ of Auschwitz the historical event, and they resolutely do not. They are precisely enthusiastic in this scenario, literally irresponsible, as they are in their vertiginous curtain-calls once out of the costume that neutralises them in the long scene. While unable quite to identify themselves in speech these children would appear to be so many mediating agents between this stage, that historical reality, and the god or gods who let this happen. There is something less than individual, more than human, about these children, for in this enthusiasm they are a swarm. Among hanging organs, exposed to the audience, their own infant-animal relation is thus not just that of the enthusiasts linking the stage to divine, but less than human: ‘less than human because animals, not human beings, aggregate into swarms and more than human because the only animals whose pluralities turn into swarms are those that, like the gods, are able to leave the earth.’17 To leave the earth in this blighted site is not an option, these children only exist in the swarm, there is nothing else for it. There is no improvisation here, contrary to many comments on this company’s work, rather a ‘coordinated disorderliness’ characteristic of the swarm itself.18 The swarming across the stage, without productive outcome, an expenditure without reserve, an excess of play (a white train circulates endlessly marking this ludic track of the scene as well as pointing to the camp beyond) is at odds with the enthusiasm of its actors. For Kant, enthusiasm ‘names the condition under which moral feeling turns into worldly action’, an action that is at odds with the irreparable state of the organs that are ‘flown in’ above the children’s heads.19 The enthusiasm is not ‘done’ by these performers, but done to them by us, the witnesses of this desultory, poetic scene. The haunting musical track that plays from a far-off room makes this one of the loveliest things one could imagine in the theatre with a name that one cannot imagine in the world. Signified and signifier come apart at the seams along with the infants unable to express anything in words. Hölderlin might not have thought measure possible but he did believe in a calculus for this spectatorial enthusiasm: ‘There is a scale of enthusiasm’, he said.20 To encounter the world beyond mourning, in other words to be

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able to speak of this world which by definition has been lost, requires aesthetic acts, the children swarm and mourn because they do not know they are mourners, while we know they are. They are therefore not sad, a presupposition of their performance that does not for a moment undermine the sobriety of the scene that they poetically create with our tacit aesthetic appreciation and happiness at how this has happened so specially for us, here, now. Whenever anyone speaks on the stage, softly, they are interrupted and interrupt themselves. Their spoken language (as distinct to their flowing gestural lucidity) is at odds with itself and the circumstances it finds itself in here where there are no words sufficient to explain what has happened. When people talk about a dying language, they do not quite mean that, but this is a certain kind of dead-end to speech. From all the sounds that are available to the infant before speech, there is a remorseless reduction and limitation that is given the name language, or ‘mother tongue’. The sonic dexterity of the infant gives way to this subtraction of variety and range as soon as language begins to emerge from within this cacophony. The theatre machine in the hands of Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, and their children, insists on the theatricality of the unthinkable. By refusing to offer any explanation in language, but an enthusiasm of effects, sound, light, gesture the inexplicable becomes palpable. The part of those who have no part, the bare life of the passive-protagonists here, is the ground zero of a theatrical politics of representation. Without this, that is, the unforgettable, there is no that, the necessary amnesia of all performance. There is no adequate translation of the name Auschwitz, but that has nothing to do with the paucity of translators. As Walter Benjamin said: ‘certain relational concepts find their good, even their true, meaning when they are not related exclusively to human beings.’21 The unforgettable, is for Benjamin a demand, whether humans adhere to that demand or not is irrelevant. If something demands not to be forgotten then Benjamin believes it refers to an inhuman realm and to ‘God’s remembrance’. Without memorial and memory, without witness there is a life that must remain unforgotten. The audience’s forgetting is predictable, it’s not a problem as such. The unforgettable for Benjamin does not therefore refer to humans who, unlike elephants, are always forgetting, but ‘to a demand indifferent to its realization: the demand that something remain, by virtue of its essence, “unforgotten”’.22 Just because I witness theatre named in this way has nothing to do with remembrance, I have no memory of these matters, it is as Rebecca Schneider said, all about ‘What I can’t recall.’23 But the politics that emerge from this engagement demand a knowledge of the amnesia, that Heller-Roazen suggests, ‘can guard the unforgettable’, a refuge that ‘may even be its safest refuge’.24 There is no secure ‘outside’ within which the audience sit safely removed from the implications here of what they see, we are already all in the same camp, we dwell in the same

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state of exception that allowed for those conditions, not being played out in front of us, to become the rule.

Interval My family are spending some days in Cesanattico on the Adriatic coast, and going to see Societas Raffaello Sanzio in Cesena each morning, and playing on the beach each afternoon. On one of these mornings, Florence and Hermione, no longer in arms but still unsteady, are participating as best they can in a performance called: La prova di un altro mondo. Their relationship to this performance, incidentally for children, is somewhat fraught given that for those who are nervous about the ominous rasping voice of a mysterious figure emanating from a curious arc-like structure at the far end of the long shallow space, the only way to view the proceedings is from outside its obviously delimited witness zone, through a circumference of small windows cut into a labyrinthine tent. The exceptional conditions of this spectatorship are dictated by a growing unease Florence has begun to experience in the presence of theatre of almost all kinds, whether it includes clowns or not, a form of stage-fright that has been given little attention by those for whom the pathology of the actor would appear to outweigh the reciprocal multiple phobias of the audience. Hermione entertains no such reservations, apparently. The narrative is straightforward enough, a princess would appear to have lost her steed to a wicked wizard with a very unsettling and, characteristically for this company, deafening electronic vocal range. Here the acoustics, the architecture, the automata, and the animals of the occasion, notably Corsario the stallion that enters ridden by his trainer Hamed towards the end of the event, are more lively and animated than their adult-actor counterparts, a princess and an old lady around which, and to whom, things happen but whose shell-shocked demeanour does not play into the fairy-tale expectation of excited heroines, but would seem to be more about depressed bed-bound damsels. In and around the occasion a group of white-smock-clad youngsters, cherubic hoodies from a local school, duck and dive in and out of the action, kept at bay by a remarkably flimsy though authoritarian veil of the kind that, and behind which, Romeo Castellucci, Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi play out many other half-hidden scenes for adults. The impressive quality of the event lies, as with all Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s work, in a curious parallax asymmetry between the exemplary technical means of exposure of an action and the exceptional qualities of affect that they induce. Where technique might otherwise leave you or me cold, here the revelation is always mastered to within an inch of its theatrical life and consequently would appear to be somehow always at risk, along with you, and my children, in the event. There is considerable room for the

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inducement of the collapse of the theatrical artifice here by an overemotional device, or a faulty horse, because it is so highly tooled, an occasion belying the short shrift given to difficulty that the aesthetics of ‘junior theatre’ so often bring in their wake. While I am with the company I make a book with the director Romeo Castellucci called Epitaph which is notable less for its texts, at least mine if not others, and more for its absolutely beautiful yet disturbing pages, bled to the edges with one sumptuous violent image after another.25 Few theatrical companies could have been better served by visual documentation than Societas Raffaello Sanzio, and as it is these pictures that I have in font of me now, as distinct to the performances that gave rise to them, it is to this documentation that I turn when I want to show Florence or Hermione something more than their inevitably flimsy recollections of the occasion. In their betrayal of everything that happened they hint at a politics of the cautionary, rather than the promissory note. These pages of course also stand as a provocative archive against this, less well bled archive in your hands, but one nonetheless that would appear to have something to say, intertextually it might once have been said, to the reduced nature of images here. There, they are larger than life, here, in the next part of the book, I will consider those things that are smaller than, or less than, life. If as I suggested in an axiom in Part I, descriptions link event and context in critical ways and should replace social explanation wherever possible, what of those descriptions singularly suited to performance that accompany the afterlife of that company’s work in the form of photographs and documentation? Is it possible to take the temperature of this peculiarly theatrical form of archive fever? Well, first, we would have to do something that is rarely acknowledged, we would have to recognise that we are looking at a book and by definition are no longer at the theatre that gave rise to it.

Infant, animal, automata To encounter the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio in this way, turning pages of a sumptuous volume and looking at images with children who were once within these scenes, is already to have experienced a temporal gap, an incompatibility with their original present, now their afterlife. This uncanny, fearfully familiar sense of always having just seen what is presented to us, now, later, tells us something about the theatrical, and I would like to suggest here, historical relevance, of what the name Societas Raffaello Sanzio might be said to stand for. Not only an afterlife that innocently offers a subsequent, or future life, beyond the mortality of this life, to these images coming into being in front of Florence and Hermione as I show them, but also an afterlife that glows, like the radial light of the first Marie Curie inspired scenes of their production Genesi: from the museum of sleep, with an immanence, a potentiality for performance, that is, by now, back then.

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This historical sense of the work arises in the spirit that Walter Benjamin asked us to conceive of history when he wrote: ‘the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.’ That is the ground and the climate of the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, an ecology in which among other things, infancy, animality and automata construe a life that is always and already after itself, chasing its own being. Forgive me here if I do not write of the actor, but tending to be grown up and ‘in control of themselves’ I am not drawn to them in quite the same way as I am these other things. Their life is the already saturated, socialised life of the performer, not the bare life of the infant, the animal and their shadow, in all of Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s work from Aesop in the 1980s to the final episode of Tragedia Endogonidia in 2004, the infernal automata. This ‘life’ closer to Aristotle’s sense of ‘zoe’, naked life, than to ‘bios’, social life, when it goes live, presents itself in a fourth dimension in and around those who would appear to be present to the stage. They appear in degrees of obscurity and chiaroscuro shamed not by the historical fixity of the audience’s gaze, this work has little to do with lo-fi mechanics of faceto-face encounters, but by the weight of tradition of the proscenium ‘arch’, the ‘camp’ rhetoric of the stage – its continuous state of exception from their life. But they also disappear in a playful rendition of the only childhood game worth playing: hide and seek. This ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ invites us to speculate on that surplus, or remainder to their presence, the gap or produced space of performance in which, if my earlier ethics of association is considered possible within the theatre act, an ethics is underway. Here the history of a continuous state of exception becomes the future of potentialities, ‘what ifs?’ that do not so much open onto the world as we know it (the banal ‘as if’ problem of theatrical correspondence so beautifully detonated by Brecht when he sought the seismic over the semiotic), but rather in an alternating current of illuminated flashes, a charged epilepsy. As Paul Virilio says: ‘with the irregularity of the epileptic space, defined by surprise and an unpredictable variation of frequencies, it’s no longer a matter of tension or attention, but of suspension pure and simple (by acceleration), disappearance and effective reappearance of the real, departure from duration.’26 This time of performance, uncannily enhanced by the fix of photographic shadowing here, is experienced as a continuous flicker of lapses or absences, each, as with the epileptic, lasting a few seconds that nevertheless seem interminable. There, in Cesena, Bergen or Paris, in front of the peripatetic Tragedia Endogonidia, our senses function, but they are disconnected from external distractions.27 This pathological state, which is of course normal, ends as soon as it has begun, and with the same apparent arbitrariness. Why did it begin here and end there? For the picno-leptic (from the Greek ‘picno’, frequent, and ‘epileptic’, surprise) nothing really has happened, in effect a

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missing time never existed: ‘At each crisis, without realising it, a little of his or her life simply escaped’, says Paul Virilio. The picno-leptic is not traumatised by these leaks from the economy of existence any more than the audience holds it against theatre for inducing a reverse vertigo, in English an epileptic state of ‘falling sickness’, into the gravity of the void where the stage once was. Shakespeare might have spoken for us all when Iago says: ‘My Lord is falne into an Epilepsie; This is his second Fit.’28 This is our second Fit, for the first came in the nursery when, at the age of Hermione here in Cesena, we saw the light under the door. The shutter effect of that luminous aperture makes each of us photographic in nature, experiencing in fits and starts what Freud would like to have finessed into dramas and durations. This beautiful, startling banality of childhood might be misunderstood by a therapeutic profession seeking significance in the child subject, but in the work and life of Societas Raffaello Sanzio it is foundational. Not in the trivial sense that by definition we have all been, and continue to be, children, but rather witness at curtain call the turnings, spinnings and disequilibrium that initiate states of vertigo and disorder so pleasurable to the infant animal.29 These turnings are not just gestural but, despite the apparent silence of so many scenes, linguistic, whether in the central auratic spell of Genesi or the coming into speech of Giulio Cesare. Here speech is not just ‘in’ history, it ‘is’ history. That material history of the voice is most obviously pictured for us through the endoscopic searchings of the larynx projected onto the screen of Giulio Cesare, but it is a materialisation of the link between words, violence and power that is no less dramatically rendered by a sword-swallower in another SRS scene, or the pneumatic chunterings of a demented writing-machine in their production of Montiverdi’s Il Combattimento. Contrary to the psychoanalytic preference for forcing its subjects to speak (its trauma which has to be trauma, its wounds that have to wound), here in a parallel performance tradition that reconnects us with the rigorous discipline of the ‘enthusiasts’ of the seventeenth century in Europe, speaking becomes the state of exception in a continuous acoustic envelope of sound-resisting discourses. In what sense could we say that the photographic approximations I am looking at and talking about chime with these resonances, or ‘toll out’. The worldful yet wordless infant might ring some bells. Being by definition ‘before language’ (in-fancy) this pictured performance of Genesi in its infancy does not simply chronologically precede speech, it is not a paradisiacal other to the constraints of speech, but, as Giorgio Agamben has said of infancy itself: ‘it coexists in its origin with language – indeed is itself constructed through the appropriation of it by language in each instance to produce the individual as subject.’30 Here performance is not threatened by its language (in the spirit that Antonin Artaud mourned the theft of speech of the actor) but momentarily, negatively in the best photographic sense, it

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is silenced here in these images of ‘Auschwitz’, in the gaping mouths of infants, suspended in sound, in history. The common distinction made between infants and other animals is also confounded here in this pictorial memorial. From Aristotle via Marx, Heidegger and Agamben we know that: ‘Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary they are always and totally language … Animals do not enter language, they are always inside it.’31 The fate of man exposed in the figures of Abel and Cain, in proximity in Genesi, is a linguistic fate. By having had to have an infancy, by being once preceded by speech, they are bound to cleave the sounded unified acoustic of the world as subjects of language, in their own language they will say, ‘I’. If this ‘I’ stands in for the initial of Infancy, Abel and Cain, and those who have to follow become history. For as soon as their being prior to language is appropriated by the language of self and survival there is a discontinuity, the first of the flickering faultlines that will become the epilepsy of experience in childhood and the picno-lepsy of later life that is history. To experience history is, in these performance records, continuously to re-accede to ones infancy, falling, like the falling sickness of epilepsy, into the hiatuses and discontinuity of language. What these traces of performance inscribe are therefore not anormal or abnormal states, beyond the rationality of our reasoned linguistic adulthood, but as with each of the discussions of animality and childhood earlier, the frayed and imperceptible logic of the anomalous, always and everywhere the precondition of our historical suspension between sound, speech and language. This anomaly, obvious from each and every image collected here, and recalled as the picno-lecptic experience of a Societas Raffaello Sanzio performance, is another way of speaking of Benjamin’s ‘state of exception’ which is characterised by its continuous inclusion within culture. In the simplest sense to walk, with Florence, across the Cesena square from the Comandini home of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, having experienced the sophistication of the child world of Buchettino, to the Bonci to witness the infancy of song and speech in Il Combattimento, from Montiverdi, is to trace a desire path between the proscenium and its histories (the Bonci) and its continuous state of exception (the Commandini), as though Cesena itself, like everywhere, has the One within the Other. As an inky, octopus of an automata fires out its infernal script at the close of play of Il Combattimento, it remains a postscript to the performance of pre-speech. The bracing experience of this short walk reminds us of the kind of politics being played out here. If the political is the mode of revelation of bodies in the world rather than an after-effect of the performance act itself, as I proposed earlier, then Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on this kind of exposure bear repeating here: ‘Exposition is the location of politics. If there is no animal politics that is perhaps because animals are always

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already in the open and do not try to take possession of their own exposition.’32 But what could this question of the caring animal signify for these performances where, since Aesop, a story has not been able without its animal. Sheep, dogs, horses, whom Marx would have described as ‘immediately at one with their life activity’ are among other, equally well-named animals: obese, anorexic, chiropractic, laryngotomatic who would appear to be at odds with them-selves. But look again and in a reversal familiar to the epileptic the ‘at home’ and the ‘estranged’ are confounded. The Sumo Cicero and the stallion in the SRS production Giulio Cesare look out, seeing something that is like the shock of our human being caught looking back at them with equal fascination and dread. In this sense looking at actors is always the embarrassment of looking at their nemesis, animals. By bestowing language upon them, there, a constellation of effects and efforts has become a ‘thing’, a reified object. Each of these ways of naming, these performances suggest, bring with them not only different themes, understandings and experiences, but different phenomena as if, like the humans themselves according to Linnaeus, the most remarkable property of a Societas Raffaello Sanzio performance were not to have any determinate property at all (despite its intense materiality) and to vary in accordance with the forms of discussion brought to bear upon it. I suspect this might be one attraction for the growing group of SRS watchers who show a certain fidelity to their extensive European journeys despite the cost and inconvenience, not quite like the cost and inconvenience of all those animals brought to stages, that such watching entails.33 This would only be partly true, though the pleasure in talking to, and about, these performances is testament to their infinite, detailed and wholly rigorous dissimulation of that materiality. For each of these events invites us into what Dostoevski described as ‘the inexplicable enthusiasm [that] precedes the accident, the shipwreck of the senses, that of the body.’34 If we forgive the naming of ‘the body’ and open our eyes to the infinite forms of embodied distribution in tension here we can nevertheless enjoy the inexplicable enthusiasm for all its worth. For bringing into proximity our concern for infants and animals this inexplicable enthusiasm describes the ecstatic condition just prior to an inevitable fall, what Rilke described in the ‘Duino Elegies’ as that sadness that overwhelms us when a happy thing falls. This accident, despite contemporary dystopias is not technology but the infant animals’ relationship with something far more perfidious, automata. In witnessing these objects which, throughout the mise-en-scène of SRS ‘act of themselves’, one is drawn to the enigma of the living organism, the enigma of naked life itself. We look back to those fleshed limbs to ponder how, confounding our materialism, movement seems to emanate spontaneously from within, unlike the motion of a truck, a plane, a rocket, a sailing boat. Here metabolic transformation driven by the fuel of

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enthusiasm and mania, melancholy and mourning meets the ambivalence of technology to our agency. In this vitality, this animal magnetism, there is the ever-present shadow of the automaton. Whether it is a stuffed cat with a rapidly swivelling head, a chair with disabled legs, a writing machine in a hurry, it would appear to have the power of spontaneous motion or self-movement. Each of these scenes bears out the visionary projection of Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century when he said: ‘The perfect Drama, an automaton supported and moved without foreign help …’.35 This concealing of motive power in conditions of apparent freedom, fixed for it but not by it, simultaneously bridges the infant/animal to the actor and the rhetorics of stage practice in which the further definition of the automaton, a human being acting mechanically, without active intelligence in a monotonous routine, might be said to describe another history of theatre. A history, well known to Societas Raffaello Sanzio and one that invites and makes essential their continuous state of exception. But these automata do not finally threaten us as technology might, they tend towards the scaling down of toys, if deranged ones, that through their recalcitrance to direction prepare a ground for recovering the infant, animal and actor I have spoken about here. For to conclude where I began, with Walter Benjamin: ‘Every child accomplishes something great, something irreplaceable for humanity. Every child through its interests in technological phenomena, its curiosity for all sorts of inventions and machines, binds technological achievement onto the old world of symbols.’ In the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio the preformed world of the adult, our constructs for their pleasure, are continuously being broken down and rearranged in the performed world of the infant, animal and actor. In this play-space, which is as deep as the rhetorics of performance history are wide, there is no imitation, yet there is ultimate technique: the momentary picno-leptic suspension of materials and beings in a new intuitive relationship called theatre. This is, despite their apparent absence from the scene, an adult world in which almost impossibly, given previous disappointments, we discover the new anew through the power of showing showing. The accidental nature of the infant animal in the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio is not a remainder to the ‘real’ action, but, as Nicholas de Cusa said: ‘An accident gives something to the substance; in fact an accident gives so much to a substance that although the accident had its being from the substance, the substance cannot exist without any accident.’36 So while the substance of the work is always rigorous, disciplined and acutely imagined it is not essential for its accidental glories. The accident of this work, that is relative, contingent, has become, in its anomalous yet continuous state of exception, absolute. It is in this sense that we would speak of the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio as being absolutely exceptional.

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Infant ‘inhuman’ Auschwitz As Adi Ophir has made clear in his work The Order of Evils, totalities of evil are never singular. They are often sacralised by being made separate: Armenian genocide, Auschwitz, 9/11, the places and times are always in danger of somehow not being of this world. It is language that constantly betrays again the material detail of these occurrences and, as Romeo Castellucci refuses to do, limits their expression to the reiteration of clichés. It is what Adi Ophir calls the ‘sanctifying discourses’ around these names that remains to be dismantled. Given that, as Rudolph Rummel has speculated, the twentieth century witnessed the killing of 140 million people, then it could not be numeracy that is the gauge of the degree of sacralisation. Rather, as Ophir has speculated, this degree is not an aberration of the part of the human, but rather a symbol of human excellence: ‘a model in which killing was brought to a perfection of efficiency and precision’.37 These might be unspeakable events, the infants who populate the stage of ‘Auschwitz’ would suggest this is the case. But the theatricality of this occasion is the measure we make of the degree to which that act in front of us remains inexpressible. It is these conditions of intelligibility that mark again the limits of the human, in this instance the apparently limitless cruelty of some set off against the innocence of the others. If the sacralisation of the historic reality of Auschwitz is an invitation to stop thinking, then the middle act of Genesi ‘Auschwitz’ is an affirmative, enthusiastic invitation to a profane performance against sacred separation. For Romeo Castellucci and his young company in Genesi the name ‘Auschwitz’ is there to be ‘desecrated’, to be wrenched back from its sacredness and separateness from us, as though it is a camp wholly disconnected from the other camps which we neighbour, a catastrophe yes, but an extreme example among others. The theatre machine operates to produce not an actor, they are diaphanous and barely visible, but a spectator, and one who might be willing to bear testimony. The infant ghosts on the stage are no more the point than are the dead: ‘From the point of view of the economy of evils in general and of superfluous evils in particular, the dead cannot be taken into consideration.’38 The apparent neutrality of the stage work, the snowy opaqueness of this one long scene contrasted with the vivid colourings of the others around it, undermines the all too easy conflict of memory, there is no remembrance without forgetting, never more so than in theatre acts. Theatre thus escapes by its nature the compulsion to remember what Adi Ophir figures as the pathological condition of the State: ‘… there is no place from which to refuse the commandment of memory; there is debate about the nature of the memory, but no debate about the duty to remember itself.’39 But the possibility of the blank child, the neutral child that psychoanalysis repudiates for the sake of its therapeutic economy, suggests that not every forgetting has to be considered a

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repression, nor a disavowal. It may just be a future, and not a thoughtless one at that. There is no shame here in the theatre, nor is there any embarrassment in saying this. As Agamben says, ‘human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman.’40 To survive has come to refer to the one who survives. But it once referred to the thing or other that was survived. In the historical case of Auschwitz, this invites Agamben to conclude: ‘The human being is the one who can survive the human being.’41 It is witnesses bearing testimonies from that human venue that remind us of the responsibilities of seeing and speaking, of witness and testimony in this human venue, the last one.

Part III On The Part of Those Who Have No Part

Power is not so much in the spectacle itself as in the racket that it authorizes. Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor

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7 The Distribution of the Sensible

Richard Lowdon of Forced Entertainment was wearing an explosive vest with a conspicuous timing device on a stage some time ago. I cannot recall why exactly. The forgetting is complicated by the persistence of Hugo Glendenning’s photographic resistance to oblivion that, apart from Societas Raffaello Sanzio, makes Forced Entertainment’s the best-preserved body of theatrical work of their generation in Europe (Figures 12 and 13). This record is the precondition for an oeuvre that others cannot begin to mimic. This forgetting, after all, has always been as significant as the memory of theatre if it exposes the singular experiences of the event to others with which it forms a history of witness. Alice Bell, the eponymous anti-heroine of Lone Twin’s more recent performance, is setting out across a bridge carrying a bomb. A second small explosion in the show makes me jump for a second time. In his theatre work Product, Mark Ravenhill plays a Hollywood film producer selling his script concept to an actress in which she is being groomed as a suicide bomber by her jihadist lover: ‘You are there, you are in Disneyworld Europe and you are stuffed and strapped with every explosive known to man …’. When Nietzsche mimicked the anarchists of his day and said in Ecce Homo, ‘I am not a human being – I am dynamite’, he was clearly not acting alone. I want here to heighten a tension between the visually driven studies of appearance, what I call showciology, that I developed in Part II of the book and examine the parallax between sight and sound that the recent theatre interest in witnessing and witnesses has exposed. The root of the word martyr, after all, is witness – an etymology that invites us to think of these not disconnected acts of suicidal spectacularity. But here I want to supplement this emphasis with a sequence of ‘sensible’ histories that provide a pitch of performance, that is a site and a sound, the combination, congruence or incongruence of which reveal what Jacques Rancière calls: ‘the distribution of the sensible’. If the distribution of the sensible reveals who it is who can have a share in the commonality of community as Rancière suggests, then the practice of that distribution, tracing an activity which is 175

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performed in time and space, is what this chapter undertakes. Rancière, interested as he has always been in theatrical processes, helpfully privileges the ‘stage’ as a locus for such public activity where what he calls ‘fantasies’ disturb ‘the clear partition of identities, activities and spaces’.1 But despite the prominence of aesthetics in his projects, Rancière, like the other theatre-wise philosophers of his generation Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben, does not make specific play of plays and playing. I will undertake this task again, as in the previous part of the book, by working my way through each of the axioms I proposed as a framework for my enquiry, and explore each of these aspects of a social science of appearance by adding some all too personal and weak examples to some ‘strong’ ones. For the purposes of this introduction, theoretically weak, personal examples of censorship will be coupled with the practically powerful contents intensified within a certain historical moment and place (what Alain Badiou might refer to as the ‘logic of site’), that is 7 July 2005, the London Underground and Tavistock Square, where an explosive redistribution of the sensible took place, a vital form of censorship whose mode of operation was an extreme form of interruptive device. These ideas are proposed as a means of staging the recalcitrance of the radical particulars of performance within the general that I established as one of the working aims of this book and a means to reflect upon the ordering and disturbing of the effects of speech that ‘seize human bodies’, sometimes with fatal affect.2 Never fearful of the absolute and the general, pursuing his amoralist concept of politics, Nietzsche’s propensity for a cacophony of explosive rhetorical effects merged into what he called a ‘total war of spirits’. ‘All power structures from the old society will have exploded. Starting with me the earth will know grand politics.’3 But this grand politics in which the ‘joy of destruction’ is proportionate to the strength of destruction, this ecce homo, is typically a megalomaniac cover for a small politics. The volume Ecce Homo is after all sub-titled: how to become what you are. Like a Nietzschean self-help manual, to aspire to that most difficult of tasks: to say who I am. When Nietzsche cries out: ‘Listen to me! I am the one who I am. Above all do not mistake me for anyone else’, he is asserting the most basic, dare I say it given the complications of the first of these two terms raised in Part II, human right, but one which is almost entirely eclipsed in a contemporary multi-cultural society where we are insistently told who we are. This telling is something different, though not disconnected, from Louis Althusser’s ideas of interpolation proposed some years ago in which the hailing of a passer by, the vocal naming of their becoming subject to scrutiny, inaugurated their complicity within a dominant policed regime. Indeed, it was one of Althusser’s closest colleagues in his Reading Capital project, Jacques Rancière, who posed the manner of this telling most forcefully. I will lay out here some of the key concerns that I am about to draw

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from Rancière, before proceeding with a series of weak scenarios through which their potential theoretical impact might be apparent. If the political as I figure it in this book is to be guarded against for its premature account of the ongoing performative process, then politics in this part becomes the term that best describes that interruption of the sensible that Jacques Rancière describes. There is a good deal being said about the interruptive force of performance at the moment, but the ambition to expand the collective, to supplement the ordering of the sensible with those who have previously played a weak or no part at all in their arrangements, is to repeat the unusual affirmative nature of this project.4 It is commonly understood that aesthetic acts are unusually well-suited to expanding sense perceptions, but Rancière invites us to think further about the way such acts ‘induce novel forms of political subjectivity’.5 It is that promise I wish to examine here. Performance theory as I discussed it earlier has aligned itself with a broad front of critical thinking in which bearing witness to the unrepresentable becomes a continuous concern and cause for the nuanced articulation of mourning. This reticence concerning the possibility of representation was a necessary and welcome interruption to those patriarchal projects in which the mental and the material, thinking about and acting upon something, were serially mixed up in the bravado of hermeneutic strategies that presumed invaded fields were conquered fields. But the attractions of mourning the resistance to representation, should not, in my book, become the excuse to ignore some more telling exclusions from representation. This part of the book, written as it is ‘on the part of those who have no part’, at least marks this intention, even if it is fated not to deliver on its promise. The subjects recovered in this text, ignored elsewhere for their banality, sad scale or plain unattractiveness, are the objects of scrutiny not for any intrinsic political merit each might have, but rather for the way that each disrupts our expectations as to what might be worthy of attention in the first place. Along with Jacques Rancière, I am less interested in the part of those who already dominate the aesthetic airwaves by flaunting their old avant-garde credentials, and more interested in those who until now have never entered the scene. It is in this sense that, critically, the project becomes one of politics not the political, ‘establishing a debate’s conditions of intelligibility’ is the primordial condition of enquiry here – not the retroactive mourning on behalf of those without a part, and who justify that mourning by continuing to have no part. Equality is considered the founding principle of this redistribution of the sensible, not its goal, nor the cause for its necessary mourning when redistribution inevitably fails. The affirmation is, as always, to begin again. But before the theoretical implications for performance of this redistribution of the sensible, the ‘telling’ of who we are through aesthetics, gets out of hand, I would like to introduce some description, the first weak scenario

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of someone who was told. Our daughter Florence was born at home in a bath. The midwife talked us through the late stages of labour on the telephone, delayed as she was at Shepherds Bush roundabout in a traffic jam. A social worker appeared some days later to confirm on behalf of the state the weight, name and cultural identity of our baby. In that order. This censor, taking account in our property of this potential tax-generator asked us whether she was Afro-Caribbean, Chinese, South Asian or Caucasian. I said none of those, as the child of a northerner and a southerner she is cosmopolitan. The social worker never looked at Florence and asked me how I was spelling cosmopolitan. I’ll put ‘other’ she said. Censorship is the time of the censor, their duration of officiation, in this case it was about ten minutes including a convivial cup of tea and we had inaugurated the rationalisation of our child. Here the census is being taken, and the intervention comes from where we would expect it to arrive, from outside. The censor’s arrival to the Freudian scene figures censorship as some kind of limit to an implied freedom within. But since Plato first censured the poets, we know that this freedom is an illusion. Plato censured the poets, took account of them, wished to exclude them from the Republic, on the grounds that mimesis violated the principle of natural law: time constraints in the Republic would require that one man did one job. Man in the Republic was not allowed to moonlight, to double identify, two jobs was one too many. Plato’s fear is common to us now, the pejorative mimetic mantra rings out from the puritanical moralising press: John ‘two Jags’ Prescott, David ‘two brains’ Miliband, and especially the football agent’s agent Frankie ‘two bellies’ Mallone (to take just three passing examples from public life in the mid-2000s in Britain). It does not escape Rancière’s notice that at precisely the philosophical moment that Plato abjures this double act, the ‘new machines’ of the theatre are in the business of mimetically undermining his functional division of labour, indeed, as Rancière says, they ‘tear it to pieces’.6 Furthermore, with censorship in mind, as Andrew Parker points out, the dissembling possibilities of this theatrical machinery compel authorities for the first time to construct and organise the spatial arrangements of audiences. Their ambition is to prevent mingling across classes as much as censor the contents of that which passes on the stage. It is this prior organisation of what Plato called the theatrocracy (theatrocratia) that is of interest in the following chapters. For if it is the confusion of orders that is to be regulated against, at all costs, the possibilities of interrupting this policing becomes the possibility and potential of performance. But before we get excited about the possibilities of a political theatre, denied to us in the first two parts of this book, this is a possibility whose horizon is wholly circumscribed by the limits set by the primordial arrangement of powers and impoverishments that precede it.

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Censorship simply describes the order of prohibition that remains when this confusion, the noise, is settled for long enough for performance to proceed. As Rancière puts it: ‘Power is not so much in the spectacle itself as in the racket that it authorizes.’7 In this environment, that appalled Plato in the Laws, the theatrocracy expresses its self-satisfaction through the means of applause and the matter becomes once again, in a censorial sense, a matter of ‘regulating spectacles’. Of course as long as the audience is grouped together, assembled, there is no threat to any police that may wish to regulate it. It is, on the contrary, in the audience’s decomposition that the threat to hierarchies of organisation begins.8 Hence the arguments being proposed in this book about the potential for politics in performance not being linked to the fantasy of a unity that haunts them, that is beyond their reach, but rather the singularity and resulting dissonance within which the performance event operates. Here the consensual fantasy of a phantasm called ‘audience’ gives way to the interruptive dissensus of a multitude among whom individuals make themselves variously known. Censorship is in this reading the most visible evidence of an ordering of the sensible that maintains the exclusion of those ‘who have no part’. Contrary to the well-intentioned gender-finessing of ‘visibility politics’ by performance studies, the aspiration to remain ‘unmarked’, Rancière knows that those who have always been too fatigued to think, those he calls ‘the poor’, have through the archive of their prodigious writing, most forcefully and enthusiastically claimed their right to visibility: ‘the affirmation of a capacity for appearance’.9 It is from this affirmative, spectacular intention that the stages of equality are played out. It is, to repeat, not that equality is a goal to be aspired to, it is rather a predisposition and a supposition for all further actions: ‘equality is not the result of a fairer distribution of social functions or places so much as the immediate disruption of any such distribution; it refers not to place but to the placeless or out-of-place, not to class but to the unclassifiable or out-of-class.’10 Hence the defining imperative of this third part of the book: on the part of those who have no part. If Censorship, as such, is the brute mechanism delimiting the possibilities of such places, then censorships in particular are insinuated throughout the filigree of the sensible. There is no aesthetic act possible without this economy of restraint and relative freedom, continuous acts of self-censorship co-mingle with the most brutal effects of oppressive violence. The old saw dividing practice and theory, the capacity of the performer set against the incapacity of the spectator, have been the longrunning ciphers of a series of internal regulatory mechanisms, beloved of artists and academics alike, maintaining a set of preordained positions that in fact suit those empowered enough to preach them and to practise them. All appeals to breaking these barriers down are simply so many registrations of their persistent distance from each other, the impossibility of their congruence, their parallax constitution. The liberal hand-wringing

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about bringing them closer together is the sweaty sign of the surrender to their inequalities and infidelities. In contrast, for Rancière, emancipation describes that process through which three kinds of opposition, between those who listen, see and speak, are broken down, the revelation or interruption of the ordering of those who are restrained by their identity, and those who are not. Judging by the instantaneous responses to the events of seventh of July in London in 2005 and the speculations about who might be responsible for such suicidal acts, we have some work to do on the question of identity inherent to such affirmations of the capacity for appearance. Quite the contrary to Giorgio Agamben’s much-quoted proposition that Homo Sacer provides the figure of ‘bare life’ in our age of continuous emergency, a conception that I drew on earlier, it is, in the industrial West at least, a case of Homo Multiplex that is the issue for those who have been told they have no part. In turn the ‘partless’ play multiple parts on their way to explosive disruptions of being told to ‘stay in their place’ by the modern rhetorics of multiculturalism and ethnic communitarianism. Yes there are bare lives, organisations such as Amnesty International, Liberty, Médicins Sans Frontières and Live Aid represent them very forcefully to us, and they demand acts of representation, recovery and rescue. But more ubiquitous, and therefore significant for me here, now, is the narrative that Hannah Arendt told us in 1943 of Mr Cohn, the assimilated Jew who discovers himself to be 150 per cent German, 150 per cent Viennese and 150 per cent French, the refugee who has lost all rights and turns into a figure who resists assimilation to any one national identity. Contrary to the minimalist presuppositions of ‘bare life’, this excessive, saturated quality of contemporary identity is the predisposition for the possibility of almost all performance study that plays off the inherent plenty in the polymorphous. But I sense the recent interest in bare life among those for whom Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy represents a peculiarly theatrical ambience, might partly be due to the opportunities critical analysis senses are available to read yet more narratives onto the conveniently blank screen of an apparent lack, a deepening of the allegorical readings beloved of previous movements of aesthetic minimalism. Of course many of those most historically interested in minimalism have been discovered to be trustafarians, with a treasure trove of decorative objets d’art at their disposal, while inviting others to occupy those rationalised, stripped-down, bastard public-housing progeny of Le Corbusier’s functionally beautiful Unité d’Habitation. My second weak censorship scenario. I was a teenager growing up in a seaside town in Essex outside London, the last resort available to eastenders like my grandparents, near to the sea front (and the beach that I talk about later in this book), wanting to see the newly released Stanley Kubrick film of A Clockwork Orange. A local watchdog committee had been created

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for the very purpose of banning this film, to circumvent the perceived liberalism of the British Board of Film Censors chaired by James Firman. So I volunteered to be the projectionist at the local ciné club, the only venue permitted to show such films to a membership-only audience. There I was responsible for switching between two 35 millimetre projectors, one, then two, then three smudge dots appeared in the top right hand corner of the picture to signal this critical moment of exchange. The saturated imagery of Fellini and Passolini ensured that I was always so distracted from my voluntary role that the film would cascade to the floor from the end of a spinning spool. Unwitting and witting forms of technical censorship were mingling here as my excitement at the stylish writhing of the continental avant garde inhibited the pleasure of others. But this within, whose virtues the ‘without’ of the watchdog committee were so concerned to patrol from outside, was not what it seemed. Their censorial reach was utterly trivial when compared with the internal mechanisms of aesthetic accounting and control that striate and order all such communities. The ‘distribution of the sensible’, that is, the system of division and boundaries that Jacques Rancière suggests define, among other things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetico-political regime, this law, was already governed by as forceful a police as one could imagine in this apparently innocuous suburban place. As a posthumous child I personally felt this power very acutely – those who grow up without one or other of their parents will know this quite well. Rancière speaks for those who suspect that aesthetic production from within such circumstances can never be an unmediated activity. While Walter Benjamin might claim the ahistoricism of the effects of this labour, the ordered distribution from which it emerges is always embedded in history. This ‘within’, upon which censorship was apparently doing its work, had long established a distribution of the sensible that divided the locality where I lived into quite distinct and observable groups. This law separated those who took part from those who were excluded, and presupposed a prior aesthetic division between the visible and the invisible, the sayable and the unsayable. Since then, for me, the essence of politics and its relation to performance has always been not a matter of constructing alternatives to the status quo, but rather in the interruption of this distribution of the sensible, by supplanting it with those who have had, or have, no part in the perceptual coordinates of the community.11 I originally called this process lay theatre but more recently Claire MacDonald has referred to my work within a broad spectrum of artists concerned with ‘radical inclusion’. This does not deny the worth of work on censorship, but complicates where and when it might be identified in its most structural forms. The recent emergence in Britain of a phenomenon of suicide bombing, the spectacular sloughing off of one set of mortal multiple identities to inherit others, in a paradise elsewhere, and the associated forms of witness,

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suffering and loss – very well known to those in Palestine, Israel and Bali – are the predictable and troubling context for these reflections. They do, however, present the possibility for a local response, a Londoner’s response, to the call from Amnesty International to think about the relations between political contents and aesthetic forms.12 I am not, however, going to look for forms, as Amnesty International recently suggested, in novels (though Dickens has much to reveal to us about bare life) or music (though Shostakovich’s whole life would appear to be an exemplar of the powers inherent in the distribution of the sensible) but believe the forms to be inherent in the content, they are what I have called homeopathic with that content.13 This is what a renewed taxonomy of censorship might alert us to. Instead of thinking of an outside, where censorship dwells, impacting on an interior, where censorship is experienced, the classic spatial analogy of the volumetric theatre space with its historic machineries dedicated to separation and its deceitful illusion of audience involvement, I am rather interested in tracking this moebian band, that imperceptibly twists between an apparent external and internal face without ever exposing where the boundary between the outside and the inside appears. Form and its other, the formless, is surely always in this state of continuous figure of eight composition, a fact of performance and theory that belies the divide between discourses attempting to defer recognition that this is the continued separation of what has always been one, the singular. The London suicide bombings of 2005, a choreographed form of truly symmetric warfare, not to be confused with the three suicides that followed in Guantanamo Bay which were ‘over spoken’ by US spokesmen (sic) within minutes as ‘PR stunts’ and ‘acts of asymmetric warfare’ (they were of course the deaths of detainees without recourse to legal process or representation), mark a complete departure for this capital from its well-bombed past. The channels of political subjectivisation on display here are less those of imaginary identification, the common assumption with regard to the images and representations of such acts, rather, following Rancière, one might understand them better as acts of performative disincorporation. By subtracting themselves from the many, the majority Muslim communities of North of England towns, the one, the individual as a singular being identifies with the other three in their retreat from the apparently virtuous public roles they held in each of their local communities. It is the failure of their representation in post(Iraq) war British politics, in Rancière’s terms, a miscount has serially occurred concerning these four young men that has forced them into the open. The perceived ‘wrong’, when the proper behaviour of a devout Muslim teacher in a youth club becomes the improper act, becomes a form of extreme tort law, well known to the British establishment as the touchstone of its ancient legal system, to rectify a wrong and to reclaim due measure. In this process disagreement is much more than that, and more serious, it is to invert the circus pyramid model of my opening section to Part I, a misunderstanding. The video

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messages brought from Al Jazeera as to the suicide-bomber’s motives, act in this plane of continual misunderstanding, and indeed most of the jihadist’s message is in turn censored by the media. The proliferation of these mediatised, videoed speech-situations exacerbates an already over-spoken domain of claim and counter-claim while ‘on the ground’ a disastrous coup for the National Front and other right-wing racist organisations in the UK exposes ‘community leaders’ to the ignominy of shoring up the anti-terror rhetoric on the British Government’s terms. Third weak censorship scenario. I was ambivalent when Roberto Bacci, the artistic director of a performance research centre in Pontedera in Italy, won the hard-fought right to cast women in his production of Waiting for Godot in the European Courts in 2006. The more there is talk of the ‘violation of artistic freedom’ that cascades onto the Beckett Estate whenever they state the obvious, that there are aesthetic demands and restrictions if you choose to produce Beckett’s work after his death, the more I believe their ‘good censorship’ work to be absolutely essential for the future of the theatre. I would very much welcome the opportunity to cast Not I for more than a mouth, or less than a mouth, a mouth so wholly unlike Billie Whitelaw’s that it hurts, with Glaswegian teeth not Santa Monica teeth, with Tim Etchells’s scarred lips not Mick Jagger’s, with a whole body, why stop at just the mouth if stage directions are so mutable? But I would also respect the posthumous responsibility inherent to all form chosen from and over the formless, the memory of someone who willed it this way, and not that (even if Beckett did order his sequences for Not I on the letterhead of the excessively expensive looking Hyde Park Hotel in London), and I would value that sacrifice of freedom in return for the continued existence of something over everything, and nothing. As an apparent contradiction in terms this ‘good censorship’ might be simply renamed, theatre directions, or ‘the distribution of Samuel Beckett’s sensible’. I have changed my mind on this. When I was a student I sat in the public gallery of the Old Bailey for three days watching the trial of Michael Bogdanov, the director of Howard Brenton’s play, The Romans in Britain, that had opened the new National Theatre in London, in 1976. Mary Whitehouse, a prominent and much-ridiculed public campaigner concerned with media morality, had brought the action against the ‘lewd and indecent acts’ of the play, including the critical claim that the act of sodomising a Druid on stage was an incitement to public disorder. But true to her own definition that such work would ‘morally corrupt’, she had neither seen the work, nor was she able to represent her argument in court in case she became tainted by its viral power. So a hapless solicitor took her brief, was sent to the show, and acted on her behalf. On the fourth day the judge abruptly announced that the case had been suspended for some technical judicial reason and while Bogdanov was not found guilty, by definition the suspension meant that neither was he found innocent. He has been in a

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limbo for the encouragement of sodomy since. I despised Whitehouse with all my hormonal ire at the time. But looking back from a relative age of ambivalence, I suspect she was one of the last people I met who truly believed in the power of theatre to affect us, to move us in some ethically charged way. At least she cared, for all the wrong reasons. The acts of the suicide-bombers and the current interest of performance studies in forms of witness (with all its implicit, though rarely stated, ethical implications) should not remain tacit. The root of the word martyr, witness, alerts us to the inherent relationality of ‘acts’ and their observation, that is, the well-spring of considering performance as part of the distribution of the sensible, the horizon within which ethics and aesthetics meet. In this context the words of Tim Etchells and Peggy Phelan quoted earlier can be reread more acutely. Tim Etchells said: ‘To witness an event is to be present at it in some fundamentally ethical way, to feel the weight of things and one’s place in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as an on-looker.’ Peggy Phelan picking up on this ethical invitation reminds us that ethical action ‘might not be completely dependent on empirical truths.’14 While witnessing events cannot escape fictional forbears this does not mean, however, that the fictional and the real warrant equivalent responses – I really can’t remember what Richard Lowdon was playing at with that explosive vest on, and I don’t really care, but I do want to understand better the complex motives of Shehzad Tanweer, Abdullah Jamal, Hasib Hussain and their teaching-assistant leader Mohammad Sidique Khan. I am not at all surprised that, integrated, immersed, assimilated as these suicide-bombers were in everything that was and remains British, they should have concerned themselves with a fully paid-up ticket for the car that they left in a car park at Luton station and argued over a short-fall in small change in a confectionary shop on that station forecourt. These apparent pettinesses were construed as somehow incongruous and anomalous to the life and death scenario that would unfold two hours south in London. But in retrospect, if the proposal that their act was one of dis-incorporation, to right a perceived wrong within a strict economy of retribution, then other economic wrongs on the journey would surely demand to be rectified as well. Especially when one has had the propriety to pay in full for one’s explosive-packed car to stand in the train car park all day waiting for no-one to return. Because these acts are extreme acts should not for a moment suggest that they are illogical, it is their rationality within a misunderstood order of sensibilities that requires more careful thought, and performance, whether we wish it to or not, is playing the fullest part in the lives of these people who have no part. Here the Rancièrian link between the power of equality and that of appearance becomes key: ‘… appearance is not the illusion masking the reality of reality, but the supplement that divides it.’15 If the first part of

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this book restaged a number of scenarios in which appearance was seen to appear, in this part of the book the sounding out of an appearance strives to ‘honour the commonplace’ appearance that allows us better to identify the division between one reality and another. The commonplace experience of censorship in this chapter, its continuity, is thus set off in a sequence of appearances against the sudden appearance of exceptional acts of ultimate censorship. It is in the retelling of the apparently intimate details of the mundane that Rancière believes we might find the ‘symptoms of an epoch, a society, or a civilization’.16 Of course these censorships that give rise to explosive outcomes do not only effect everything that humans can do. Their ordinariness and lack of exceptionality extends to all objects in our midst. Few things look as menacing as the explosives wrapped around Richard Lowdon’s torso, but most things, if the expansion of the collective is not to stall at the first hurdle, carry a potential punch. To drag these objects, some fetishised for their quality of consumption, others resistant to such appropriation, to drag them from the continuing ignorance of humans is another ambition of this part of the book as further evidence of the contradictions that belie apparently solid appearances. To be more specific, the following chapters in this section draw the material of cement ceilings, white powders, childrens’ playgrounds, town squares, over towards the land of the living, while the appearances of those living are ferried back towards the sounds of resistance they make to each of these sites. This movement alerts us to the specific ways in which collectives are rarely political in an organisational or communal sense, nor the site for imaginary identifications, they are more often, according to Rancière, the situation of a process of disincorporation. Theatre and performance practices are understood in this process not to offer ‘new’ models of subjectivization; indeed contrary to the promise of modernity, aesthetic acts, Rancière suggests, only add to projects of domination and emancipation what they have in common: ‘bodily positions and movements, functions of speech’. By definition these acts can only act homeopathically with what they intend to treat, there is nothing new in what they offer. Here the tension to maintain the ‘exceptional’ theory of artistic acts can give way to their more adequate role as representing and reconfiguring the distribution of the activities within which they function, as, simply other activities. The consensus politics of the democratic state do little but conceal these kinds of disputes within collectives, disputes that have begun to be heard by some nearby in the loudest possible terms, with the force of ear-splitting reverberations. To be heard, to be able to speak, and to be able to see, might be the expressive conditions described by the term democracy. But they are not, because democracy is not a ‘they’. Democracy is a supplement to these ‘realities’ as Jacques Rancière has shown: ‘In the natural history of the forms of domination, only this supplement can bring forth democratic exceptionality. If equality is efficacious in the social order, it is by means of

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the constitution of this scene of appearance in which political subjects inscribe themselves as a litigious, “fictitious” supplement in relation to every account of social parties.’17 The constitution of this scene of appearance is what performance does. It is this process of a continuous convening of litigious subjects, at odds with the effrontery of the political constitution of parties, that maintains the efficacy of politics. Within the distribution of the sensible, therefore, performance does not have to seek the political because it is already politics. By being the privileged means of mimetically ‘passing’ in the arts, in confusing the orders of those with parts and those who have no part, by attracting the racket of the theatrocracy, theatre is already doing the business of confounding the personal and the common, the private and the public, and, most importantly, redistributing these various parts within the sensible whole. It is this performance, not that political theatre, that most effectively and movingly perturbs all prior policing arrangements of any order. This is the mode of acting that Rancière says: ‘insinuates within its perceptual frames the contradictory theatre of its appearances’.18 The much talked about notion of dissensus, as distinct from the voluntaristic bankruptcy of consensus, then becomes the figure for the coming chapters. This is not simply some form of disagreement or division of opinion, it is rather the productive act (always performative) within a sensible world, ‘of a given that is heterogeneous to it’.19 Making visible something that was otherwise obscure in that perceptual field, making audible something that was noise before, in other words an affirmative act wholly politically adversarial to one of the founding precepts of performance studies, the ambiguity of the unmarked. This ‘antagonistic subjectivation’ is what Rancière believes politics to be, and for there to be any progress in the audit and countering of inequality, there need to be case-studies made of the individual and collective forms of such subjectivization. In the following four chapters these case-studies explore conditions of the collective, justice, security and democracy. Dramatic works such as Talking to Terrorists and My Name is Rachel Corrie are exemplary for their theatrical didacticism as concerns each of the issues raised here. They offer models of knowledge, of action and history that are perfectly timed in this tumult of interruptive improvisations and enthusiasms of dissensus politics. But I cannot forget the persistent, persuasive, wholly transgressive force of Richard Lowdon standing on a stage in an explosive vest with an over-large timing device. He would appear to have little to do with the matter in hand and, yet, he is a constant irritant. His life, a life, is simply that, just on the side of the animal, more than a plant, able to be irritable. It is not so much the absurd costume that he is wearing that is unsettling, but a look in his eyes that forever links his presence with the absence of those, who really are, in peril on the sea.

8 Recalling The Collective

I recall a mêlée of performances between 1990 and 2006 through which the recalcitrance of the human condition to be made manifest in the form of community becomes the politics of the theatre in front of me. Among these I would number Richard Maxwell’s series of works especially House, Drummer Wanted, Good Samaritan and End of Reality, the oeuvre of companies such as Baktruppen in Europe, and in the United Kingdom a long alliance of innovators from IOU, through Impact Theatre, Forced Entertainment to the elliptical dramatic work of Martin Crimp. These works join a noble lineage of inoperative works employing interruptive aesthetics that fail to confuse the lack of internal resolution with any sense of political dysfunctioning, outside themselves. And I recall these works and workers amidst a mélange for whom the expansion of the collective, the inarticulacy of the political became the provocation to begin again with representation, to re-imagine its political possibilities. This scattered number would, for me, include the long-term work of Het Werkteater in Amsterdam in the 1970s and 1980s, the romantic weather of Welfare State in Cumbria, the intricate economic insistencies of Platform in London. The obdurate resistances of one were, night after night, set off against the poetic fluency of this political other. I wonder here whether the provisional if not precarious condition of the collective might provide a venue for such comings together of the apparently singular event? There is something in the bloody-minded persistence of these two ways of working, barely covered by Gramsci’s well-known phrase, picked up by Trevor Griffiths as a mantra for his work Comedians, ‘Pessimists of the intellect, optimists of the will’ that in their parallax obstinacy are worth exploring. It is not that one here seeks some kind of soft-focus dialectical fusion between such intemperate neighbours, a poetic-political theatre, any more than a Freudian-Marxist worker’s dream, but the parallax between them might tell us something about the problem of politics and performance that emerges in the following case-studies, if not in the problem of political theatre itself. If my sixth axiom laid out in Part I has had less treatment 187

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than others in the foregoing chapters, then here it can be restated with the confidence that it will receive some sustained attention: Interrupting or delaying the premature closure of the performative is a prelude to restarting the association of the social and the assembly of the collective. So I would like here, in the interests of slowing up the presumptuous leap common to analysis from example to context, to recall some terms that came to mind within these performances, in much the same way that a company recalls a product. When Coca Cola recalled its bromide-laced mineral water, Dasani, across its European markets, it was thought to be carcinogenic. It had come from a kitchen tap. Facing monstrous loss, recalls are never without profit of some symbolic if not economic kind. To recall in this context terms such as ‘collective’, ‘group dynamics’, from what seems another age of theatre, or ‘community’ and ‘democracy’ from another of politics, is a process of recollection that might provide the opportunity for their relaunch in another arrangement. Not a safer one by any means, but one that acknowledges the impossibility of the innocence or symmetry of these terms once one has sundered the pre-emptive link between performance and the political. Given the European dimension of so many of the discussions that inform this part of my book, it should not go without saying that in a motion diametrically opposite to the diminishment of the Sumatran Tiger discussed earlier in this writing, that entity, Europe, weighed a quarter of a billion souls, by half way through the book it weighed half a billion souls, and by the time the book is published Europe, after the further expansion of European Community inclusivity, will be half as populous again. All will require further translation for there to be any form of foreign exchange – and that of course is only for ‘the people’ to participate. Jean-Luc Nancy once wrote about five billion bodies becoming eight billion in the foreseeable future: ‘Not to say anything of the other bodies’. Humanity was for Nancy becoming ‘tangible’ in its numbers, and tangible in its inhumanity. The questions asked of these bodies is, what is the space ‘opened between them’? This space is what Nancy calls community and it is inevitably a return of this space, not an empty one, that sufficient descriptions of theatre will return to again and again.1 If a body being born is delivered, is born at its weighing, and, as Nancy says, is ‘nothing but its weighing’, the consequences for community of these births might be worth attending to. Where group dynamics once happily described the interactions of the human laboratory, the term collective has the fortunate remainder of the act of collecting within it. It suggests the operative reaching beyond oneself, and itself, for new entities beyond human animals that the term group, with its conditions of membership, does not quite manage. This activity, a movement from the intimacies of humans to an engagement with other things, has the ambiance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of process about it, the dynamics between people being extended to

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the conduct of associations between humans and non-humans that I invited in the first part of this book. Such a voluntaristic process of collective, as encouraged by Bruno Latour, might be set off with the more cautious philosophical predisposition of the ‘inoperative community’ that Jean-Luc Nancy articulates as the historical condition of those not so much existing, as desisting in such states of association. So it is through these two figures, the apparently affirmative aspect of the expanding collective set off against the apparently inoperative singularity of the individual in community that the following is framed. Let us take the collective first and then in the second part of this chapter the question of community. In his work on nature and politics Bruno Latour asks some questions that are worth repeating here. Where should the collective assemble? How can we compose the collective? How can we choose representatives? In order to establish these questions there are three others that then have to be asked: How can we establish public proofs? How can we make others speak and act? What sort of rhetorics can we develop? These are not just political questions, they are compositional, poetic and aesthetic questions. And they are questions of performance. Performance, mimesis, representation and the very similitude of ‘the same but different’ are primordial to each of these concerns. Let me twin Bruno Latour’s questions and consider each from the perspective of a performance seeking politics within itself. Where should the collective assemble? How can we establish public proofs? The collective will not assemble in any environment and certainly not ‘in Nature’. Environmental theatre long-ago betrayed the human-centric presumption of performance assuming human-being as the centre of a system of nature, the human mid-point, the ‘excellent culmination of all things’. It does not take Alphonso Lingis or Michel Serres from philosophy, or Armand Gatti or Brith Gof from theatre, to remind us that we must, on the contrary, place things in the centre and us at the periphery, or even better still, things all around and us within them, in the plasma between, like the performing parasites that we are. Think of John Baldesarri’s absent-object crowd photographs, swathes of interested populous focusing upon a whited out neutral void at the centre of a monochromatic image, to reorientate the privilege of humanist space here. Where collectives assemble and public proofs remain to be established there are always interesting performance consequences, as there are also very real outcomes. To take an early twenty-first-century example. When the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the United Nations in support of the US/UK coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, he alone did not persuade anyone of the merits of war. Something did that work for him,

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bridging a serious gap of credibility that had opened up in the horseshoeshaped space of the Assembly in New York, between what was patronisingly described as ‘Old Europe’ and modern militarism. What spoke on behalf of the need for war was a complex thing, which was falsely represented as a fact. I spoke earlier about the simple fact that all facts have a fascinating social life before they get there, and this one no less so. Of course being a performative assembly this was not a fact at all, but a good old-fashioned prop, duplicitous, double-dealing, and able to stand under and help others understand a rickety argument for opportunistic invasion. By proxy it appeared to be saying something along the following lines (and given my celebration of remedial anthropomorphism, I have no hesitation here in indulging in a form of animist articulation). I am here putting some of my own words into the discourses of things to redress the rampant ventriloquism already underway and the flagrantly inanimate speech of the humanists: ‘I am a dangerous looking object of your attention, you cannot take your eyes off me because I am contained in the vessel of scientific legitimacy, the test tube or vial. When shaken I might have unpredictable consequences. I am white, pure, and like all things white and pure, lethal. I am Anthrax. Honestly, I am. I’m serious. Take me seriously. I am unstable. I am to be reckoned with.’2 Now this prop, masquerading as a fact, this talcum powder, sugar or more entertainingly, cocaine, passing as Anthrax, knows it is nothing of the sort. Although, in Bruno Latour’s phrase, it might represent a legitimate matter of concern, it does not represent a matter of fact. What is significant in this performance scenario is the way a threat is cited through this prop. The verb ‘to cite’ means in ancient languages ‘to shake’, and here, in Colin Powell’s diplomatic hand there is a vigorous shaking of this prop because it is closer to the contingency of these truths than its sponsor would like us to admit. In the aftermath to this world-received event, public opinion enshrined this arbitrary act as a seminal one, an exemplary one, in its understanding of the need for action. A matter of concern, legitimately expressed by Colin Powell, has here through this prop become a matter of fact and therefore has, after the event, become infallible. This is a fundamental theorem of performative law, though it appears paradoxical: the absolute necessity, the organic obligation of arbitrating always inhabits the arbitrary dimension. Hence the ‘arbitrary art’, the inability of performance to do the necessary instrumentalism of the political. So far some subjects, especially in this context of US and UK subjects, have enjoyed all rights, objects on the other hand, despite and perhaps because of the commodity fetishism predicted by Marx, have enjoyed none. So politics, from polis, a people, cannot by definition do anything beyond analysing identity and proliferating difference of those human

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animals. In an ecological context it is perhaps not surprising that the preferred critical mechanism of US campus privilege is the psychoanalytically informed circumlocutions of such identity minutiae. These ‘differences’ refer only to the polis, the city-state and space of publicity, the administrative organisation of groups and existing human-centric orders. This humanist social contract will not suffice, unless of course we wish to ignore all those things upon which our very future depends. Colin Powell was right to that extent. Our future does depend upon the thing in the tube, but not quite in the sense that he meant it. Anything will do. And so to our second brace of questions posed by Bruno Latour: How can we compose the collective? How can we make others speak and act? If we are not just seeking the celebrities among things, the white powder is the Tom Cruise of his milieu – caustic, jumpy and insubstantial – but new things that have previously found themselves under-represented, or like the white powder, badly represented, we would be looking to form the collective on a more expansive conception than the classical preoccupations of politics have previously allowed.3 We will necessarily become more alert to those things that move too fast for representation, or too slow, things that are too near or too far for thought, that are too deep or too trivial for serious encounter. And we will not for a moment wish to underestimate or neglect those same unrepresentable aspects of the subjects of identity politics, gendered beings, raced beings, classed beings, for whom these categories do little but remain outside, unmarked, unheard, despite all the protestations to the contrary. Those others have no part. And it is on their part that a thing I will call here, proxy performance, might make a difference. Indeed I will explore one such example in the next chapter, a boy who moved too fast for representation and too slow for survival, a boy who was murdered in a racist attack in a South London housing estate and who was ultimately betrayed by a failure of performance in a court of law. We know after Bruno Latour’s systematic work that in the realm of law appeals to ‘nature’ have always aborted politics and that for this reason, we, and especially those of us interested in political ecology, will have to give up on nature before it further neutralises our politics. To be clear, I mean by nature here that semi-spatial category of phenomena that would appear to escape the enculturation of humans which, on closer scrutiny, reveals itself to be a holding bay for any number of inconveniently material concerns pressing for our attention. It is obvious that, like the white powder all objects are in crisis, not just the natural objects that are held up for speculation by those concerned on their behalf (the Sumatran Tiger is a prominent example), there is a general crisis of objectivity. The collective will

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not constitute itself with recourse to humans and other things but rather from the associations of beings that take complex forms. It is these associations that form the in-human social that this book takes as its parameter for performance in an expanded collective. In the interests of justice any certainty with regards to what or who is in or out, never mind the hierarchisation or ordering of the sovereignty of humans and things, ends and means, is suspended from here on. This will require performance to give up what it considers its decidedly human ontology: to be and to be present is proposed as something to do with its liveness, its representation without reproduction. This teleological presentness will have to be traded in for a dynamic, or in A. N. Whitehead’s term, a process, in which we guard against what he described as ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Concrete is a deeply ambivalent and powdery term in this context. The ontology of performance cannot be this thing because of the thing’s performance, under this ontological necessity, excludes. Politically, performance cannot function because the accurate expression of final generalities is the goal of discussion, not its origin. The assumption of performance here is an equality that was once espoused at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as something organisations were ‘working towards’ or ‘striving for’. The proper test of performance here is, in Bruno Latour’s terms, not that of finality but of progress, politics simply being the progressive composition of the common world from the a priori foundation of equality. A clearer sense of what we might mean by collective and community is therefore essential if we are to rethink and re-practise theatre’s relations with the social. There isn’t a contemporary thinker from A. N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson, through Jacob von Uexküll to Gilles Deleuze, Manuel de Landa and now Bruno Latour, who has not been concerned with these fuzzy and tangled objects that we are having so much trouble conceiving of as primordial to humanist performance. Indeed, within days of completing this chapter a production of Caroline or Change by Tony Kushner opened at the National Theatre in London with the basement white goods, a washing machine and a clothes-dryer, played with fantastic fidelity by AfroAmerican and Afro-Caribbean performers. What is important now is to end our semi-detached recognition of these entities, our attempt to locate riskfree objects for incorporation in the collective (women of colour, gays, working classes are perversely reduced for a second time by their abstraction in critical theory) and condone and encourage risky attachments that no longer confuse matters of concern with matters of fact, that do not patronise white powders and the stairwells where black boys are murdered, and take them much more seriously and sceptically. As sceptically, if not as musically, as Tony Kushner was able to achieve with the basement tools of domestic survival and oppression that serve to keep Caroline ‘in her place’ below stairs.

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And the third brace of questions: How can we choose representatives? What sort of rhetorics can we develop? What might such a risky attachment in the collective process entail, what could be riskier than those most at risk from racist oppression or gender violence? How could we conceive of a politics of discourse between humans and non-human things? We can of course because, as Tony Kushner knows as a latter day animist, we do it all the time. My second case-study is of an illicit association between my mother, a ceiling and a prop that kept them apart. Like many other women of her post-Second World War generation, with little of the fanfare that greeted Erin Brockovich’s exertions later, as a teacher my mother became responsible for the welfare of her children in a way she could not have been trained for. Under those volatile ceilings across the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and as a head-teacher, she became personally and legally responsible for a decision-making process that required the collective to be widened to include an otherwise perfect entity. High Alumina Cement was a form of quickdrying cement that according to the publicity that accompanied its birth in the late 1950s would revolutionise structural engineering. Well, it certainly turned the normal structural expectations of a building’s integrity upside down. My mother could not detach herself from this risky object, an inanimate thing that was meant to support the layered floors of a school, but was in the habit of collapsing in on itself without apparent notice. This make of cement, this ‘super-cement’ as it was described, contested the old material notion of the unity of self. Cement, you might imagine, was a perfect matter of fact. It had clear if, in its raw state, dusty boundaries, and existed securely in the world of things. The producers of these things remained invisible. But these things began to have the nasty habit of falling into an adjacent social universe and impacted on that world, often violently, as a destructive outsider. Early on in this history, and for a surprisingly long time given the consequences of these ceiling collapses, the cataclysms these objects wrought had little impact on the definition of the object itself. These events could not serve as a lesson to others because the culprit was to all intents and purposes, in a humanist world, invisible. Like asbestos, simultaneously, and with more far-reaching impact, this perfect substance was an ideal inert material that became all too animated under the slightest duress. My mother, and other courageous teachers across the country, were responsible for shifting this simple matter of fact over into the world where it became a matter for concern. This required a certain kind of performance and one which she dressed for each day, and prepared speeches for audiences of engineers and doubting experts each evening. She was

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somehow in her element and I understood something my grandmother had told me about the relative freedoms for women in the war, participating in ways otherwise denied them. This smooth, if somewhat grey, object began to be articulated, spoken for, and back to, a crisis of objectivity began to emerge under the proliferation of discourses. This tangled being now had producers who were forced into the spotlight, embarrassed, resistant, belligerent. These things, like concrete, do not have some imprecise impact from another world anymore, they are of that world, they are no longer independent but attached and responsible for their consequences. I am not for a moment claiming my mother as some sort of builders’ Julia Roberts, but rather something far more prosaic, an expert on the pedagogy of children, becoming expert in an arcane branch of engineering, in order to release this thing, High Alumina Cement, from its naturalised state, from a nature ironically called construction that women of her age were not meant to address in the 1960s. My mother here was simply, and in a very literal sense, standing up to something in the school hall, protecting the right of safe assembly among children. To do this she required props that would literally hold up the ceiling and force the ceiling to speak, to own up to its own confusion: ‘Honestly, I never said I was perfect. I was proud of being quick-drying and enabling fitters to move in on me, carpet me over, before the day was out. But when the cracks started to appear I did not cover them up. I couldn’t. They were there for all too see. It was just that primary school age children were not afforded the same rights as other entities in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, and hadn’t begun to assume the power of the teenager around that time. Indeed they were barely entities at all. You hated them before I did, providing them with poison for their school lunches and little investment in their school buildings. That was why I was such a popular choice in school halls but used in so few office blocks. So, I fell down on the job. You show me something or someone who has not had a bad day at work. Just look at that slurry tip in Aberfan, now that was really irresponsible behaviour by the National Coal Board, and as for the storm that caused the collapse of the hillside and the inundation of the Pantglas School, you can never trust the weather.’ The composition of the collective will require this kind of individual and group activity to be accelerated. The purpose will not be to shift attention from the human world of ontologies spoken about earlier to the pole of nature in which these entities have previously been allowed to rest inviolate, there is no nature, or at least what is left of ‘Nature’ is now in the collective being reconsidered for its claims to attention. But, rather, from a state of certainty about the production of risk-free objects with their clear separations between humans and non-humans to a state of uncertainty about the ordering of relations whose unintended consequences threaten

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to disrupt all orderings, the ‘progress’, alluded to above somewhat optimistically, might be the possibility to suspend the previous assumptions inherent in actors and values. Its goal will be to prevent the proliferation of smooth, risk-free facts, and of course given what I have said so far in this book, it is precisely this interruptive act that performance does very well. Performance’s enduring humanist theory, caught between Plato’s cave and the heaven of ideas, does less well in this respect. Given my definition of politics at the outset of this book, we are not threatened by an objective nature, any more than my mother was threatened by High Alumina Cement. There is no Nature anymore. We are simply, according to Bruno Latour, a collective in the process of expanding. There need be no dramatic conversions to get on the wavelength of these other entities because when these entities turn up they do not interrupt discussions among humans, but simply further enhance and open up processes already underway – just listen to how cordial the powder and the ceiling are when asked civil questions and when provided with a sympathetic spokesperson to assist them in their presentations. Of course the problem here, as the last chapter on the place of censorship in the distribution of the speaking sensible made clear, is that this group can only be judged in the end by its capacity to speak. But as Bruno Latour has shown, there are myriad ways non-human objects are implicated in ways of speaking, from the laboratory, as well as from the field. Continuing the model of the ‘lesser animal’ whose capacity is to disappoint further, it might be anyway the degree to which spokespersons on behalf of objects of concern have speech impedimenta that should interest the collective. In other words the dynamics through which there is a hindrance, or let us say, after Latour, an encumbered process of understanding, become the vector of analysis rather than the apparent eloquence of what is being said. This of course expresses a profound doubt about how to be an actor with exemplary voice technique but nothing to say – Romeo Castellucci was very aware of this doubt when he cast a man with a laryngotomy to miss-speak the words: ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears’ in his production of Giulio Cesare at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 1999, a line that was then famously misspoken across Europe in a myriad productions of this exemplary work of coherent misunderstanding. There is a high degree of recalcitrance in the collective process, that is its defining nature. In the collective, speech, association and recalcitrance are to be redistributed away from the securities of facts and values and into new collective associations, what Bruno Latour calls continuous propositions. Any spokesperson who becomes someone who speaks on behalf of another, by proxy, could only be judged here according to a measure of the doubt we might have in the collective as to their ability to speak in the names of those things that they represent. My own enfeebled speeches on behalf of the powder and the ceiling are all-too obvious examples of the

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limitations of the spokesperson. If you argued here that these things cannot speak on their own, then Bruno Latour might reply, well who does? Everyone and everything speaks through some form of speech device. As Latour says: ‘To limit the discussion to humans, their interests and subjectivities, and their rights, will appear as strange a few years from now as having denied the right to vote to slaves, poor people, or women.’4 The spokesperson simply extends the doubt about the fidelity of the representation to non-humans and allows us to estimate, even, despite Hölderlin’s doubt, measure the degree of fidelity between representations. This is what I suggest throughout this book has been happening as a matter of course in theatre, that makes that theatre, when this happens, a human laboratory. This would be one definition of the process of collective, perhaps refigured from what was once called in theatre ‘group dynamics’. The model cannot be simplified any further than this at risk of fatally foreclosing the collective’s own process of collection by resorting, as in the problem of the political and context earlier, to an incontestable transcendence, putting ‘in order’ before ‘due process’ has been weighed and measured. Of course the interiority of this collective requires, like the volumetric space of the theatre, an exteriority, a metaphysics, which will gradually fill up, according to this process, with excluded entities, beings that the collective has decided to do without, those for which and whom we have refused to take responsibility (for instance the 4000 road deaths a year in the United Kingdom that cannot be taken seriously because of the overriding imperative of profitability from the motor-car industry referred to earlier). These entities are no longer languishing in some no-man’s land called Nature, as they used to, but by definition they do put the collective into danger. It is this continual state of alert to its own exclusivity that is the creative, surprising quality of the collective. Theatre is the last human venue for this doubt to be tried out and performance its final means of hesitant articulation. This exposition of the collective and its potential for performance now requires the sober difficulty of community, a far commoner word in theatre parlance yet one requiring almost total recall to refit it for purpose. If this chapter would appear at this point to be between a rock and a hard place, then we might remember those whose lives really are, in the tension between collective and community, lost at sea. In a founding narrative of Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La Haine, the coruscating 1990s film of les banlieues, the protagonist of the film tells of two youngsters who have just thrown themselves off a high building. Half way down one turns to the other and says: ‘So far so good’. In a founding narrative of The World in Pictures by Forced Entertainment in 2006 Jerry Killick shares an interminable, well 20-minute, tall-tale about an individual taking the same route to the ground. The sudden suspension of this tale for the sake of a retelling of the founding myth of humanity, from stone age to digital age,

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suggests there is more to be said in the time between recognising the futility of community and seeking a collective means to express the affirmation of an act of defiance. The mordant humour of the falling men in their collective expression of optimism plays off against the split personality of the lonely figure appealing to a company of colleagues as to how he might improve his theatrical rendition of extinction.5 Both of course are insufficient means of representing the fate of subjects, but both in their recognition of the impedimenta to any fidelity to such an event draw us close to side-affects that generate laughter and poignancy simultaneously. If the focus now falls to the enigma of association, as I proposed at the outset of this book, it is representation that, in this collective process, will become the task of a political ecology (not political theatre) and the performance that is primordial to it. Of course representation cannot after so much critical work, not least of all from performance theory, be left to rest as just that, ‘old representation’. La Haine and The World in Pictures both trade off the decisive interruption there has been to any such apparently simple rendering of suffering. ‘The end of representation is not insight’, as Jean-Luc Nancy says, eschewing the political efficacy of beneficial outcomes, rather representations become, as Part II attempted to demonstrate, a founding constituent of humanity and animality and their relation to each other.6 As the following will show, the continuous essaying of representation, the repeated attempts by Jerry Killick to ‘get his story right’, or at least ‘get his story half-decent’, designates the dynamic inoperativeness of community. Not one of this theatre collective, a theatre cooperative apparently made up of friends if not family, appears to be able to offer anything like the coherent summative advice that might be able to move him on. The interruptive processes that go to form the collective, is exactly this re-presenting, that is, presenting again and again, of the most pressing questions, the most serious matters of concern. Performance in the last human venue thus becomes the constant recalling and testing of the faithfulness of the representations, the fidelity of the events therein, and of course listening for the signs of those things thereout. It is no longer a question of whether Jerry’s story is true or not, but rather the degree of faithfulness his telling has to the fidelity of the event he describes. In its dreadful inadequacy, a collective of care between that performer, this audience and those other cast members is inaugurated for someone who might otherwise leave us quite cold in the smug sense of his own self-attraction. Those of us who witnessed Jerry Killick’s contribution to Forced Entertainment’s previous work, Bloody Mess, cannot forget that in the anti-character opening introductions in the second long scene of that show, he invited us to recognise him as the only one on the stage with any celebrity. This might provide us with a neat conclusion, but the axioms that opened this book appealed for a general theory as well as the particulars that often understudy for slower truths. There is another way to look at this

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question of assembly that performance seeking something more than the condescension of an audience might do well to consider, and the last part of this chapter is dedicated to unravelling this question of assembly with recourse to a third object from the world of things. Reversing the excision of the political from theatre, proposed earlier, one might follow Jean-Luc Nancy in proposing that: ‘the political is the place where community as such is brought into play.’7 Inverting the common velocity from individual to group, from self to collective, it is here the situation of ‘being in common’ that gives rise to the experience of being-self. It is only through such community that one is posed within an exterior, that one experiences an outside to one’s self and you, in Nancy’s provocative term, become exposed. The photographic metaphor is not wholly inappropriate, though of course never used by Nancy, for the singular being only becomes present in their exposure. Singularities survive this process of being in common because there is no amorphous transcendental leap to a ‘context’ or ‘common substance’. Rather, like the origin of the word venue in its French ancestry, there is the recognition of something ‘coming to’ (from venir) community. It is with this in mind that Nancy warns that community ‘cannot be presupposed. It is only exposed.’8 The first presupposition that this book has been teasing throughout has been that communities are necessarily human, and that it is through community that humans register something of that which is essential to their humanness. Reversing this egoistic goal-oriented ambition Nancy suggests a far more enigmatic but useful velocity for performance. For Nancy: ‘… the individual is merely the residue of the experience of the dissolution of community.’9 Like the ruins and fragments of Rome that Freud so loved and pictured on his consulting-room walls, like the stone pediments scattered to the side of the stage at the Théâtre Antique in Arles, the parts of the whole only become singularly visible on the dissolution of the entity they once were. It is in this historical reverse of their forming that they become apparent and they have no identity prior to that forming. The collective or the assembly in this sense only understands itself on its dissolution, which is why it is more difficult at that point for it to be policed. If a certain resistance to representation has left performance studies increasingly concerned with questions of mourning, then the ‘loss of community’ has surely pervaded theatre studies with its elegiac air. The point being made here, rather, is that despite the obituaries for its loss, community cannot be lost because it has not taken place, yet. Jean-Luc Nancy makes this clear when he says: ‘community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us …’.10 Community is, in this sense, neither a work to be produced, unlike the collective in the process of expansion, nor is it the figure of a lost communion beloved of the nostalgia for neighbourhood, but it is the experience of an outside to the self as a space, a proportion or even a measure. It is this experience of that com-

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munity that makes us be in the first place, and paradoxically, given we are talking about something that often implies loss of subjectivity, makes us be singular, sovereign subjects. The implication of community is that this singular being is only possible because of that other one and that this ontological sociality is importantly set against those others who might disturb its equilibrium: other non-human animals, material things and phenomena once associated with nature. By proposing in this book that these previously sundered entities should be recalled to the collective, and that the collective presupposes a project that the term community could not deliver, is simply to recognise the difference between an ontological category of human sociality, community, and a task, collecting up the collective. The characteristic of the collective is communication, a process of deliberation, exchange and decision-making, and it is through this performative process that the sovereign individual extends themselves towards an outside, a space where community might be engaged. While society continues not to exist, and those things characteristic of nature are in the process of being drawn into the collective, community as the limit of the human rather than human-being’s identifying goal, is what happens to humans in the wake of society. It is the space that humans make through performances, what Georges Bataille referred to as the ‘spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self.’11 The experience of ‘a life’ that makes us be something, anything, might be described by this term ‘community’. With community exposing us in this way the inoperativeness of performance’s political becomes less ominous, less lonely for its activist practitioners. In Jean-Luc Nancy’s affirmative words: ‘Community means … that there is no singular being without another singular being, and that there is therefore, what might be called in a rather inappropriate idiom, an originary or ontological ‘sociality’ that in its principle extends far beyond the simple theme of man as a social being … For on the one hand it is not obvious that the community of singularities is limited to “man” and excludes, for example, the “animal” …’.12 Community is therefore not the work of the assembly of singularities, but of the interruption of what singularities are. The arrested life of performance is one such form of suspension in which the singular does not so much appear, as desist at a certain limit. Mimesis is of course founded in just such a ‘like being’ whose status is somehow secondary to mine and confounds the origin of any identity. But if we wish to pursue the implications of Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of community we would also have to admit there is something of a déjà vu about its principle propositions. The machinery of the theatre, as I have described it in Parts I and II of this book, is designed to expose these tracings-out, these borders between singular beings and their exposure to others in processes of communication. I have described performance itself as retreating from the presumption of audience and assembly towards a

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singular sense of politics that denies the capacity for political resolution. Indeed the primal scene of performance, what I described as its somewhat unnerving capacity to deliver multiple births, is itself the communitarian principle par excellence. I claim there is no fulfilment for performance in the legislation of it as a death machine, rather each birth of theatre does what Nancy says community does, ‘exposes another singularity, a supplementary limit, and therefore another communication’.13 Each of these operations is of course defined by it limits and therefore there is no suggestion here that such processes do away with death. But this reversal from a more common identification of lack, loss and mourning in the theatrical scene, the recognition of an aptitude in performance for generation has been precisely adopted to forestall the confusion that stage deaths might stand in for other deaths. The representations of falling men in performance and film discussed earlier are just that, representations in narrative. Each is set off and materially distinguished from other deaths of a different nature, more palpable, more material elsewhere. In the case of the representation of The World in Pictures, the primal scene is represented by a return to the cave and to the origins of aesthetic man and woman distinguishing themselves from mere animality. But this founding moment of ‘man’, birth, that which is essential to man, his ability to fail to represent other animals with fidelity, is also the birth of man’s ability to conceal the inherent inhumanity of this failure to reveal truthfully. These dark workings, or work in the dark, provide the location of not only the first human venue, but also the last human venue. It is in Lascaux in continental Europe, that (pre-French) human-animals first made representations of their own strangeness in the melée of another community of figures with something in common. The self-knowledge of humans here was of their inherent strangeness to those others depicted, bison, horses and stags. The human, Jean-Luc Nancy says in this context, is the stranger but monstrously similar. Thus, in a performative inversion: ‘The similar came before the self and that is what it, the self was.’14 Nancy identifies the pleasure ‘man’ takes in mimetic acts as this troubling strangeness. The history of humans and their strange relations, their community of being in common, is here set against this strangeness, a happening and an event. It is not an ontological category. And according to Bataille from whom Nancy drew significant aspects of his work in this pre-historic area, this site was a privileged site of ‘pre-history’. If Benjamin earlier was characterised as positioning interpretation of art beyond history, outside art history, then Bataille considers the announcing of the subject before it. For Bataille, in the very images that Nancy refers to: ‘The passage from animal to man announces the birth of the subject, the birth of the human community, the we.’15 These earliest depictions of ‘man’ were significant not for their humanist centring of the subject but for the way that humanity is remaindered, at the

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edge of everything else which is actively occurring: ‘Far from seeking to affirm humanity against nature, man, born of nature, here voluntarily appears as a kind of waste.’16 Here humans are already seen apologizing for their status having not yet prevailed in the order of things. They marginalise themselves in this first pictorial signification. Of course this is just another, rather illustrative, act of performance, a ‘feigned apology’ Bataille calls it, so that the human predator can continue to do what he has to do, kill other animals, without remorse. These are not tragic figures of course, quite the opposite, they are pre-tragic, the human community is one figured in its oldest representations as self-reflexively mocking itself in its disgracefulness. The ‘laughing figure’ in the earliest painting is not therefore an aberration but the recognition that the earliest relations between humans and other animals were comic theatrical ones. If for Bataille art is ‘wealth expanded without utility’, then the lack of instrumentalism in these first images suggests that the economy of prehistoric art lacks the instrumentalism we have established as symptomatic of its post-historical state. If, as Bataille said: ‘every animal is in the world like water in water’,17 these cave-wall images suggest there is something unfathomable for man about the depths of that sense of continuity. Man is figured throughout as the interruptive animal, not just because he does not eat his own kind, but because he alone is lacerated by the end of his kind, it is only then he stops laughing. The human animal is ‘the discontinuous one’ and therefore, contrary to Descartes, much the more machinic for signifying the break in the flow, the streaming that is immanent to animality at home within its various habitats. This interruptive dimension to the human animal is another way of marking the parallax of performance that fractures the human animal while making humans what they are. The discovery of the subterranean images in Lascaux in the South of France in the 1940s can be used to deliver a pleasingly elegant thesis on the mimetic rupture of the earliest pictorial representation of the human animal in their creature discomforts. But the chance discovery of those very images in the first human venue, as Bataille recognised, was happening at precisely the moment of another not unassociated cave-like discovery, of man’s inhumanity to man in the definitive human venue, the death camps. The birth of the subject through cave-painting is here being exposed at the moment of the exposure of the fullest sense of human death in Europe. In the former a necessary evil, the eating of another for survival, is set off by the coincidence of history against a superfluous evil, the absolutely unnecessary killing of another who cannot be allowed to survive. Any attempt to expand the collective, as proposed here, would presumably test its efficacy at this historical juncture through its potential to accommodate both the necessity of the art of life and death in the cave and the recognition of the unnecessary production of death in the camp, neither the one nor the other.

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So how might this performance enquiry extract itself from a satisfying, but ultimately solipsistic conflicted nature in order to engage with suffering elsewhere as was proposed earlier in the last of the thirteen axioms? How would we figure the conflict-less, is there any such thing and would performance studies be interested in such a thing, could it do without its dramatic twists? It is quite difficult to think this one because, as Roland Barthes pointed out in his lectures to students at the Collège de France on the idea and literary practice of the neutral, so much of the writing of Marx, Darwin and Freud is predicated not on the problem of conflict, but on conflict as a motor, as though we all lived in a constant theatre of pugnaciousness. This is of course a very Western preoccupation in which conflict has been turned from a cultural condition into a natural state. So, having worked to quieten the rhetorical range here, the common disturbance that stalks the spectre of community, let me dwell in the last part of this chapter on a less secure figure, the unwitting, to consider how a condition apparently lacking confidence might allow for the hearing of previously drowned-out voices. Having considered the claims of a powder and a ceiling to the collective, how can an abandoned space become performative once again, how can it speak for itself if the ban inherent to its abandonment is precisely an indictment that it should never reveal its public secret. Like all space, it is never empty, but its theatrical prowess reveals itself quite differently to the torch-lit cave, the assembly hall ceiling, and the United Nations powder I have just been considering. I am in Amsterdam looking for a playground that has been recorded in an archive of architectural plans and photographic prints from the 1950s, that has been represented on the walls of the Stedelijk Museum, and has been meticulously researched by Ingeborg de Roode and Liane Lefaivre for their work: Aldo van Eyck, the Playgrounds and the City.18 Not any playground but an Aldo van Eyck playground. For innovative architects this is a little like saying to a group of art historians: I am in Amsterdam looking for a painting by Van Gogh and I can’t find one that has not been defaced or destroyed. Van Eyck was one of the post-war group of celebrated architects called ‘Team 10’ who in the 1940s challenged the rigid orthodoxy of the regimenting urbanism of modernity, the kind of housing you would associate now with Le Corbusier and his modernist successors in public housing projects across Europe and the United States, the kinds of location I will encounter in the next chapter ‘Forensic Display’. Aldo van Eyck began resisting this runaway rationality by building playgrounds. From 1947–74 he built 780 of them across the old city centre and out into the housing projects north and south-east of Amsterdam, where I first came across a trace of his work in Amsterdam-Osdorp. Before others got round to it Aldo van Eyck popularised the use, in the 1940s, of distinctions between ‘space’ and ‘place’ and also first incorpor-

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ated a term into architectural use from Martin Buber’s philosophy in I and Thou, the ‘in between’. Almost all his city-centre playgrounds were inserted between pre-existing urban forms and of course this made them effortlessly site-specific in a way that exposes the tautology of that overused phrase. There, ‘in between-ness’ exposes a very different way to frame their political inheritance as figures of the unforgettable. Van Eyck refused to prettify or decorate the fire-walls of the playgrounds preferring the positive aspect of the ‘plastic reality’ of their roughness. But this resistance to decoration does not answer for the other more subtle form of historical concealing that the playgrounds were conducting. I would join Jacques Derrida and Daniel Liebskind in agreeing that when it comes to this kind of deferral as to the nature of space, site does not exist in and of itself, it is rather a kind of ‘political delaying tactic’. I would propose that van Eyck’s playgrounds are the political ‘delaying tactic’ par excellence, deferring for just long enough a set of pressing historical questions concerning the unwitting and the unforgettable. A history that the novelist and poet W. G. Sebald once described as a ‘Natural History of Destruction’. If the 1960s Situationist rallying cry was ‘beneath the cobblestones the beach’, then Van Eyck’s epitaph might well be ‘beneath the beach the remains’. The novelist Walter Abish reminded us some time ago of the worth of such scenic, hermeneutic work. From a short story called The English Garden Effect Abish quotes the poet John Ashbery: ‘Remnants of the old atrocity subsist, but they are converted into ingenious shifts in scenery, a sort of “English Garden” effect to give the required air of naturalness, pathos and hope.’19 Van Eyck’s playgrounds would appear to me to be, in their abstract outline, to be serving something of the same function but in a sculptural 3D form. The ‘in between spaces’ of Amsterdam, that I have been reflecting on here, reveal their histories more readily than Walter Abish’s fictional palimpsest. They are complex and differentiated in their origins, but one historical feature would appear to connect many of them. Each marks the absence of a house once occupied by Jewish residents, pulled down and burnt for fuel during the occupation of Amsterdam by the German army. The formal ‘concentration’ of the beautiful Dijkstraat playground of 1954, featured in the Stedelijk exhibition, would appear to be dependent on the site of a house which had been pulled down in this way during the Second World War (Figures 14 and 15). As Lefaivre and de Roode show in their detailed recovery of van Eyck’s plans, the playground occupies a waste lot nestling between two high walls with a depth of 25 metres and a width of 9–11metres. The contrasting paving materials van Eyck employed, tiles and clinker laid diagonally, suggest that sections of floor are invading the space from the adjoining properties.20 This, like other van Eyck playgrounds is furnished

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with ‘recurrent type forms’ and according to Francis Strauven, the biographer of van Eyck, on the ‘departure of children they become tectonic memorials’. But what kind of memorial, one might ask, and for what? I would suggest it is not only the realm of child play for which they would appear to stand, but for an inhuman labour, dehumanised and palpably significant. Amsterdam is of course the exemplary city of the Holocaust diary, and in the case of Anne Frank a veritable industry that connects memorial to house to text. But, for people outside the Netherlands, there is a much less celebrated record of play and pain, the diary of Etty Hillesum from 1941 to 1943, most of which is written overlooking the sites I am talking about here, close to the Rembrandtsplein. Etty records the shrinking space around her in the city. She writes, in her Dutch script, on 12 March 1942: ‘We are not allowed to walk along the promenade any longer and every miserable little clump of two or three trees has been pronounced a wood with a board nailed up: No admittance to Jews. More and more of these boards are appearing all over the place.’ By the winter of 1945 the pursuit of fuel had deforested most of western Holland. ‘Amsterdam lost 22,000 of its 42,000 trees in a few months. All the wooden paving blocks between the tram rails were lifted, and even the canals dredged in the hope of finding something that would burn. In the Jewish district, [since Etty wrote about it] now empty since the inhabitants had been taken away to the extermination camps in Germany and Poland, 1500 houses were robbed of every bit of wood, joists, beams, staircases, door and window frames, and most collapsed in ruins often killing the wreckers.’21 In 1946, at the end of the ‘Hunger Winter’, Maurits Dekker strolling through Amsterdam for the first time in four years observes the sites that Aldo van Eyck is about to transform. He records at the time: ‘Was this decaying and neglected city, damaged by greedy looters, manhandled by indifferent barbarians and battered by desperadoes my old, beautiful and noble Amsterdam? Everything seemed to say “Memento Mori”. Where I look these words are visible … they were hanging in the heavy yawning emptiness of the houses that were demolished from roof to cellar, as if eaten by termites …’.22 Memento mori, is a stark reminder of the necessity of death. In the Dutch oil painting tradition it is the ever-present ghosting of the abundance of life, in the still life that is ‘still life’ just before its decay. But there is a less well known term that implies its other side with which I would like to recall the unforgettable, that is Memento vivere, that which lives on because something is unforgettable reminds us of the necessity and pleasure of living. The point in interrupting or delaying the premature closure of the performative in these sites as proposed at the outset of this chapter, is perhaps here not to force performance to do what is often asked of it politically: to help us to forget or to remember, to help us to see to what extent we are unaware or to become conscious. Rather, I would propose it may be to raise the possibility, the less confident condition that is the capacity to remain

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faithful to that which having perpetually been forgotten must remain unforgettable. Performance, including the peculiar way in which I figure the populated cave as an immersive chamber and the empty playground as a performative architecture, has a special relationship to this demand for something to remain with us and be possible for us in some manner.23 A society’s memory is negotiated in the social body’s beliefs and values, rituals and institutions, and these include the performances of identity. There are public sites of memory, museum, memorial and monument, yet the apparent permanence of their state belies the forgetting and denial, repression and trauma that underwrite this insubstantial pageant. As the novelist Robert Musil once wrote: ‘There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments.’ But the constitutive strength of Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds is the way they have offered themselves up to be contested by new, living, perspectives while never surrendering the unforgettable that is at each of their abstract hearts. The vast ‘disappearing’ of human beings from a city is not made to appear by a memorial. But neither is it honoured by the loss of van Eyck’s unwitting memorial. The lesson of the playgrounds is the simultaneous inadequacy of the inscription of those reminisced through performance who would otherwise be forgotten, but also, unfortunately and despite my affirmative sense, the equal inadequacy of constructing the alternative history of the oppressed and defeated in anything more than the hope that such acts of recovery have a habit of effacing the very material conditions of suffering they seek to recall. The possibility that something becomes unforgettable for us through the expansion of the collective has been built by me in this chapter on the shaky foundations of the conditions of unknowing that are the unsure, that is, the prehistorical speculation of the cave, and the unwitting. We should not forget here that the continuous state of exception of the camp, that is the camp that Etty refers to in her diary, has echoes in the contemporary urban slum, the concentration of housing on the outskirts of Amsterdam, or indeed the North Peckham Estate in London in the coming chapter, where the normal rule of law is permanently suspended and where the state of emergency has become sovereign. But the sense of political claustrophobia that this responsibility induces, a return to the cave, cannot permit a lazier agoraphobia that excuses our ambivalence to ethical responsibilities beyond our immediate concerns. If, as I suggested in my opening to this chapter, a process of recollection, of recall, will be required before restarting the social and reasssembling an expanded collective, then politics always requires a process of recollection, of recall, a legend even, before the political can get started. And legends always choose to situate politics at a boundary, however permeable that limit might appear, however watery the horizon marked by mountains. Plato dragged politics away from one of those borders, the sea, hauled it ashore to protect it from the incorrigible sailors and the seductive seascape

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that threatened it, and buried it in the cave where shadows flickered. But as Jacques Rancière said, long before the announcement of global warming: ‘In response to these assaults we know that the sea will take its revenge.’ The combatants in Goya’s painting, Men Fighting With Sticks, now hanging in the Prado Museum in Madrid, are equally unaware of the quicksand they are sinking into (Figure 16).24 In shifting an insecure politics of essentially humanist performance away from combatant protagonists such as these, as Michel Serres has encouraged, towards the hills, marsh and things of their surroundings, the display of a powder at an international assembly, via a corrosive cement in the ceiling of an assembly hall, to the first human venue of the painted cave, to a playground where children would assemble to dissemble history, I am suggesting that acts of performance somehow interrupt this Goyaesque conflictual distribution of the sensible and recall the shared landscape within which acts of meaning occur. The simplest of geography text books will announce a distinction between site and situation and here it is the way that site becomes situation in the histories of a process of collective that has engaged me.25 The policing of the arrangement of those who can see, speak to, or hear aesthetic acts in any of these times and places are conducted in such precise ways as to encourage us to imagine, once again, that theatre might be closer to the political than I have so far allowed. So much so that theatre, a peculiarly self-possessed, marginal and strictly licensed branch of performance, has long been described as the most social of the arts. I still have no such faith in theatre. Indeed, along with Plato, I am not so much interested in this chapter in the theatre itself (that must have been obvious from the speed with which I moved away from my opening theatrical examples) as I am in the racket that the theatre authorises. By which, of course, I mean here all the words I use in this section of the book, but also the noise of the attendant public, the theatrocracy as much as those protagonists’ sticks. This racket also, in wide-boy parlance, sounds out the delinquent and the petty criminal at constant work in any decent public event. It is in this clamour and noise of an expanded community that, if one listens carefully, one might just discern the murmuring of another landscape contoured here, another idea of the collective, another arrangement of the social assembly that is only now being given voice following the realisation of some inconvenient truths. An unsure and sometimes unwitting voice, but the beginnings of something I would like to call here ‘reticent representation’. A quiet warning maybe, but a warning very well known to those in the Netherlands who built dykes, close to those playgrounds, to protect their homes, a warning that, permitting one last animation, goes something like: ‘Once abandoned this human venue will be flooded for one, last, irredeemable, time.’

9 Forensic Display

‘That is beautiful’, said Kant, ‘which gives us pleasure without interest. Without interest!’ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche’s exclamation at the Kantian definition of the beautiful in his Genealogy of Morals, the beautiful that is disinterested pleasure will set the scene. It is an exclamation that would appear to militate against my penultimate axiom in Part I: the proposal that our enquiry into theatre and its relationship to intimacy and engagement could only be fostered by an interested science and a science of interest. This exclamation, ‘Without interest!’ resists the sensory involvement of the spectator that I have been pressing for throughout, beyond aesthetics, gesturing to the ‘interested artist’ and their affective, engaged audience. For those of us introduced to the potential of an impossible theatre through the writings of Antonin Artaud, some words recalled from The Theatre and Its Double resonate with Nietzsche: ‘To our inert and disinterested idea of art an authentic culture opposes a violently egoistic and magical, i.e. interested idea.’1 Giorgio Agamben, alerts us to how old an idea this is, reminding us that Artaud ‘…must have felt for a time that had such a concrete and interested notion of the theatre as to deem it necessary to destroy it for the health of soul and city.’2 Agamben is not announcing any return to relevance at a time when art is ‘oh so interesting’ but of no interest. He says: ‘It is no doubt superfluous to note that today it would be impossible to find such ideas even among censors.’3 Having dealt with the censors in the first chapter of this section, and reticently approached representations of superfluous evil in the second, two words interest me here: the concrete and the superfluous, I wonder just how ‘concrete’ and how ‘superfluous’ for those whose life has become superfluous in concrete? If I have no wish to ‘do’ a site-specific aesthetics, it might be timely to remember that it is no mere coincidence that the word aesthetics was introduced into English in 207

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Thomas de Quincey’s essay: ‘On Murder Considered as one of the fine Arts’. We respect, but do not have to vicariously remain with the model of the concentration camp as the profoundest state of emergency normalised within a culture of ‘continuous exception’, the everyday state of exception that Walter Benjamin asked us to consider now as the rule, to recognise the camp’s latter day urban affinities. Rationalised edge cities, a far cry from the organic downtown beloved of the colour supplements, are the continuation of war on the poor by other domestic means. A war, however, which, if my experience is in any way typical, is being daily resisted and appropriated by the enthusiasms, often performative, of those whose lives are laid bare, literally, by economic attrition. And I don’t mean ‘street theatre’. In my theatre-work over the last 20 years I have begun to build the shaky edifice of my own understanding of performance politics: for eight years running a neighbourhood theatre in the Docklands area of south-east London; as a writer and amateur ethnographer following the correfoc in Barcelona, tracing the folklore and fakelore histories of the barrios running fire through the city streets; working within the Alton Estates in West London and the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, exploring the innovative delinquency of the child resisting the rationalism of utilitarian architecture through urban performance. These reflections on ‘interest’ began while I was working in two urban locations with a talismanic quality for the history of European modernity. In the Alton Estates (East and West) built by the London County Council in the 1950s in Roehampton and the Le Corbusier-built housing project on which these estates were modelled, the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (Figure 17). In these two exemplary sites of modernity – a mimetic architecture that, in its seeming and doubling is inherently performative, functions as the site where the mimetic faculty is already doubling nature as culture before the re-presentation of performance can stage its own artifice. Architectural site precedes humans here in a reversal of the common assumption of dwelling. And so it is back, beyond Aldo van Eyck’s playful diversion, to the inheritance of modernity once again we must go if only to mimic some of its best lines, to ask with Le Corbusier some questions, in his own words, about the ‘historical-biology’ of cities, the ‘creature-like’ qualities of architecture. As le Corbusier said: ‘To put it in a nutshell: we must have plenty of room in order to live in full daylight so that the “animal” in us won’t feel cooped up, so that it can move about, have space around it and in front of it.’ But beyond the Modulor, Le Corbusier’s commitment to discovering an architectural order equivalent to that in natural creation, what can now be said on the nature of the urban, in the spirit of Benjamin’s footsore flâneur, the ‘botanist of the asphalt’. Are we destined to parrot the dialectics of Raymond Williams ‘country and the city’ or might there be

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just enough friction left between the old organic-metropolitan to throw some light on the infancy of the city in its late third age? Perhaps the most significant of Le Corbusier’s ‘extensions to dwelling’ were the crèche and school in the Unité that he laid out in his little book Les Maternelles. As Le Corbusier said in his inaugural speech almost 50 years ago on the opening of the Unité: ‘A way of dealing with the worst blemish of the Unité at Marseilles, which is the handrail of the ramp which runs up to the children’s rest room on the roof has occurred to me. I have decided to make beauty by contrast. I have succeeded in getting a small sum from the ministry to pay a concretor, a Sardinian who understands his craft. Concrete is spoilt only by stupidity and not through its inherent faults.’4 Let us track just one of these children as they resist the framing devices of the roof-top theatre for performative ruses, tactics and operations, who in their din and racket confirm everything that Dr Plichet feared, that the insanity of Marseilles would be multiplied ten-fold by the fadas, or crazies of this clamorous urban liner plying modernity’s course between sun and green, in a thing called ‘space’. The architecture of modernity and what performance can make of it will become in this chapter my science of interest: ‘concrete-casting’ perhaps. I have recently come to an impasse, a dead end, somewhere in the blindspot between the cataracted eye of security CCTV and the all-seeing modernist window that Le Corbusier inaugurated.5 I had been interested in exploring what Giorgio Agamben has described as a place and a state of mind, and of matter that complicates our sense of the street as a site for effacement, a place where ‘homer sacer’, naked life, the counter state to that of the saturated being described earlier, might just have momentarily become visible. Agamben describes it in the following way: ‘… an apparently anodyne place … delimits instead a space in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of law is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act temporarily as sovereign …’, this space for Agamben begins: ‘to look like camps in which naked life and political life, at least in determinate moments, enter a zone of absolute indeterminacy.’6 Here the estate, banlieue, HLM, or housing project is considered ‘… not as a historical fact and an anomaly that … belongs to the past, but rather as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we still live.’7 So where am I? According to the architectural commentator: ‘a small cul-de-sac … an invaginated space, a street folded upon itself, a space halfway between a street and an interior, a private road.’8 A dead-end street. Where is the entrance? ‘… since it is on pilotis the space of the street flows under the house … identical doors almost flush with the facade have a way of saying that we have nothing to look for in them.’9

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I had been doing some research in Cité Karl Marx on the outskirts of Paris, in the Romerstadt in Frankfurt, and closer to home on the Alton Estates in West London, well known by cinéasts as the location in the 1960s for Francois Truffaut’s film, Fahrenheit 451, to think about how performance operates in this apparently rationalist realm.10 I was not interested in simply tracking its cheeky de Certauian delinquency just in time to see it interpolated within an Althusserian accommodating conformity, but to understand how theatre activates a hinge between a succession of apparent tensions, to get to grips with what Laura Mulvey said some years ago about ‘Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home’: ‘the chaotic crowds in the street and the contained privacy of the home both have their origins in the same urban industrialized environment, and are bound together as each other’s other side of the coin … Problems of class difference and sexual difference are translated into mythology through a series of spatial metaphors: interior/exterior, inside/outside, included/excluded. The oppositions exist on the level of fear and reassurance, and give an order to the contradictions that haunted the cities of industrialized society.’11 And of course the public memory of what was once ‘the street’ and what is ‘not the street’ and the private memory of ‘the home’ and what is not ‘the home’ are up for grabs in this location if I could just work out where the one ended and the other began. There is nothing new here; long ago, Walter Benjamin asked us to consider this disorientating experience in the perambulatory non-sequiturs of his pedestrian paragraphs in One-Way Street. Before the work of habit, foreground and distance are connected: ‘As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke like the façade of a house as we enter it.’12 This experience is to be distinguished for Benjamin from that of the proscenium arch theatre: ‘The blue distance that never gives way to foreground or dissolves at our approach, which is not revealed spread-eagle and long-winded when reached but only looms more compact and threatening, is the painted distance of a backdrop. It is what gives stage sets their incomparable atmosphere.’13 But there is an acute tension here for anyone wishing to dislodge a monolithic preconception of the stage with the inherent performativity of landscapes, architectural and otherwise. In other words I would resist Benjamin’s formulation of a proscenium frame, and the theatre it implies as somehow outside or beyond the social matter in hand, what Judith Butler would describe as the demotion to the ‘merely cultural’ of performance, beyond our interest. On the other hand, in its most banal figure do we have any strength for returning to architecture as event? As Beatriz Colomina says, in the wake of modernity: ‘It is not so much that you enter architecture as that you see architecture’s entrance,’14 and Colomina continues: ‘The building is a construction in all senses of the word.’15 That is, a construction prey to, and formed by, agency, not an object beyond that place-making. Architecture

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is, in this sense as Bernard Tschumi says, always ‘event architecture’, but precisely what kind of rhetorical, ham actor is it? Modern architecture would seem never to be fixed and characterised as always moving. I don’t here mean in that simple deferral of interest in the postmodern turn, what Nick Kaye settles with in Tschumi’s architecture that is somehow ‘always already’ something it is not, its ‘restlessness’.16 Rather what I have become interested in is the interstitial performances of the inhabitant of the ‘modern’, moving within a space that is ‘neither inside nor outside, public nor private … It is a space that is not made of walls but of images. Images as walls.’17 In such imageful, walled surroundings the newcomer to a place remains exposed to a double negative of a ‘being seen’ without the care that an overview, a guardian for the watched-over called a care-taker, might imply. It is, as Colomina has pointed out, ‘precisely in terms of the visitor that le Corbusier has written about the inhabitant of his houses’18 and it is as such a visitor, a guest without a host, that the following description of a child might disturb our sense of the permeability of the home in these estates that are le Corbusier’s legacy. So having acknowledged that just as the question of interest is raised, the mantra is evoked, ‘All that is solid melts into air’, what of those things on the air that suddenly, unfortunately become all too solid? If the event of architecture appears to be a slippery occasion, what then, when it is stilled, when it becomes an unwitting part of a ‘still life’, a location for theatre which is suddenly overwhelmed as a site for locution, a place that has to begin to speak, despite the palpable fact that it is an infant architecture, a building in its infancy and therefore before and outside language, ventriloquized by everyone from Tony Blair to Gabrielle. It is here that I am in need of help from some plain description. Consider for a moment the tender objects in this mise(rable)-en-scène. A small bunch of flowers leaning at a slight angle against the boundary between a lift shaft and a retaining wall, at the top of a flight of dank steps, on the edge of a raised walkway. They are familiar to us – at least the cellophane-wrapped flowers have become so at numerous roadside shrines. They are the things that remind us of a continuous state of emergency in which we all live but only some people, in this site a ten-year-old boy called Damilola Taylor, died. They are the props of a too familiar ‘enforced performance’ in the phrase adopted by Richard Schechner to describe the performance of death from the electric chair to the snuff movie. A stair-well. Strange conjunction: stair-well. A corner, not apparently that corner beloved of Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space but some other aberrant corner. The corner might once have been homely, the Freudian heimlich, for Bachelard maybe, but what of this uncanny corner, ‘… a trap, a phobic enclosure, a dark place …’, the corner, despite the transparency of the modern, has been the problem for modern space: ‘the corner [here] emerges as a pathological symptom of architecture as a whole.’19 A cul de

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sac with a silver door to a vertical shaft, a void that stands for one crossroads with the aspiration towards a street in the sky: a lift, an elevator. Would this be the lift that Le Corbusier imagined, attended 7/24 by a concierge, an Otis operator who in the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, the distant cousin of this very angular arrangement, would elevate through primary-coloured hallways to the guest hotel, to the kindergarten, gymnasium and swimming pool on the roof, to a panorama, a prospect, a preoccupation with transparent space, from Jeremy Bentham to the modern maître de, an open view constructed from a fear of dark space. Or another kind of lift where: ‘all the radiant spaces of modernism, from the first Panoptican to the Ville Radieuse, should be seen as calculated not on the final triumph of light over dark but precisely on the insistent presence of the one in the other.’20 And wrapped flowers that, in their ubiquity, have become the modern floral equivalent of a previous scripture of loss that read: ‘X Marks the Spot’. The flowers leaning against that wall, that is, the memorial image of a wall with flowers, somewhere else, before. But where is this spot moving now for it is surely moving? Anthony Vidler invites us to think of the courtroom within which such spaces have to be imagined if justice is to be done. Objects can be presented for speculation, just how did O. J. Simpson in a fin de siècle courtroom in California, inflate his hand to ensure the glove, in an unwitting and demonic inversion of Cinderella, did not fit the prince? But what of that other ineffable, sunless space? Indeed, as Vidler says: ‘The question of the exact position of the X that in common lore supposedly marks the most significant spot at the scene of the crime has more often than not been in doubt. Precise in terminology – and, of course in geometrical accuracy – the spot has been, so to speak on the move ….’21 This moving target reminds us that: ‘The poetics of crime and its revelation transform the geometrical space of rational detection into a knot of abyssal proportions.’22 And the courtroom becomes the performative space within which this vague space becomes intangible to those who most need to feel its materiality for the purposes of dispensing due justice: ‘Space, infiltrating and dispersing place … [has] … put the tangibility and thereby the veracity of courtroom exhibits into doubt. The crime takes place in space, which in turn renders its exact position unstable.’23 So unstable as to come down to the wire, literally. For at the point the judge of the first trial of the suspects in the murder of Damilola Taylor, Mr Justice Hooper, was asked to rule on the possibility of young, Mc-fit boys running to the point where their mobile phones said they were, 1.8 safe and innocent miles from the X that marked the spot, it was beyond his curiously antiquated street-wise mentality to incorporate a public park into their route of flight. Evoking Roger Bannister’s sub four-minute milestone from the 1950s he formalised their playful departure from the scene into a demur scenario from a town planner street atlas rather than the desire paths they

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traced across the sward that day. Acquittal has never been so spatially unforgiving to those who lost everything in that moment where location became locution: Not Guilty, and rightfully so, but for the wrong reasons. ‘But is not’, as Walter Benjamin asked, ‘every spot of our cities the scene of a crime?’24 Not least of all a certain absence from Lower Manhattan, was it not always already there? Do not all city sites invite us to pursue this ‘forensic aesthetic’. And before this opportunistic allegorical reading of those twin towers of theoretical generalisation, bodies and cities, gets out of hand, let me reiterate the question of interest which is what I am really talking about here. Walter Benjamin, writing about the work of Eugene Atget, argued that forensic photographs of crime scenes inherently produce a political response because they invite interpretation and analysis rather than aesthetic contemplation, forensic photography is intrinsically public.25 My question here, then, would be how this interest might be read backwards or forwards to the more common, quotidian, banal, that is, against the grain of psycho-analytics’ need for the child to be significant for you or me. This might be exemplified in the CCTV Remainder: everything that does not apparently need to be seen for its insignificance and yet was recorded. My reflections on enthusiasm here (as distinct from the preferred performative tropes of melancholy and mourning), might tell us something about the identification of the traumas of childhood caught between the binaries of pleasure and pain. Indeed, it is a mark of the suffocating irrelevance of psychoanalysis, just beyond its uptown constituency, that it can only tell us about childhood and trauma as trauma. The great Officer Krupke scene from West Side Story nails the banality of the therapist with such effervescent elegance it is surprising that being ‘disturbed on account of being deprived’ didn’t become an anthem for the dispossessed. My question in the face of the impossibility of doing anything other than capitalise on the fall of a very public child is: what happens to the experiences of childhood, which occur in and around these intense living conditions, that are not traumatic, given that those traumas that surely do occur are attended to by a growing body of analysts and theoreticians, sometimes useful sometimes opportunistic? As Adam Phillips reminds us: ‘This is not merely to reinstate the so-called innocence of childhood – after all what could be more traumatic, more wholly daunting than a happy childhood? – but to have acknowledged what might have happened to us as children, but that was neither lost (and therefore needed to be mourned) nor disturbing (and therefore needed to be reproduced).’26 You might say the everyday, lower case, unmarked, before the outing of the ‘Unmarked’. What we as adults might call the child’s ‘taken for granted’ childhood would not so much be beyond representation but simply not requiring of it (it would use the representation it needed at the time, and then relinquish it.) As Adam Phillips said, continuing this truly transgressive line of

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thought: ‘A lot of our childhood may be blank to recollection not merely because it is repressed but because it was to all intents and purposes blank at the time. The relatively untroubled periods of the child’s lived life are of no interest, interest is not required to make them experiences. It is one of the perils of so called ‘“child analysis’” that it can traumatise the child by foisting interest upon him or her, that is to say, making meaning out of those things that don’t need it.’27 In other words, are there ways to conceive of these tracts that do not fall back on the theatricalities of West Side Story-boarding, that spool backwards what the filmmaker Raul Ruiz would call Hollywood’s penchant for ‘Central Conflict Theory’? Towards the CCTV Remainder then and away from the naturalising of conflict. Indeed, it is psychoanalytics that have reduced the death of the child to its significance for psychoanalysis itself. And here too I am asking the death of a child to demonstrate something other than the event itself. As Lyndsey Stonebridge has said: ‘We react to the always untimely deaths of children by turning death into discourse and murder into morals … When a child is being killed there is always another watching in the wings.’28 In this sense we always murder our children twice. But what if we spool back from the ‘central conflict theory’ to the scene before the last, the penultimate scene in a CCTV life laid bare, to some images that are unforgettable to those who saw them. Walter Benjamin and Paul Virilio have reminded us of the speed that is our politics: trains, traffic, films and newspapers each use run to describe their various activities. But what of running for your life, that is because it is your life, which is quite distinct of course to running to save your life? When it was televised at the time of his murder, that CCTV still, from a very public last run by Damilola Taylor, became probably the best known hop, skip and jump known to the British media viewer (Figure 18). Ominously circled from the crowd at four points in his journey home, from the lift of Will Alsopp’s jolly Peckham Library, across a very public square until he disappeared from CCTV view at the very point where his life, as distinct to the commercial interests that installed the cameras, might have benefited from being exposed to view. As Giorgio Agamben has said: ‘An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them.’29 How could this enthusiasm be registered after what we know, in hindsight. Was it this excess, this Gazelle-like stotting, rather than the silver bomber jacket or trainers speculated upon in court, that attracted the interest of those for whom a debt repaid would always include the interest owing, for whom the question of capital took a morbid turn towards the blooded thought of arterial circulation. In this run we come to the inevitable tension of ‘the difference between dwelling in the interior and dealing with the exterior …’, the tension between the levels of fear and reassurance that we began with.30 Giorgio Agamben helps us to counter the facile presumption of an apparently

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exterior politics of engagement operating only at the cessation and negation of an interior intimacy when he says: ‘Every attempt to rethink the political state of the West must begin with the clear awareness that we no longer know anything of the classical distinction between zoe and bios, between private life and political existence, between [the hu]man as a simple living being at home in the house and [the hu]man’s political existence in the city.’31 If bios, the ‘qualified’ form of living proper to an individual or group has detained us, according to Agamben, since Aristotle and Plato, what of the zoe, the fact of living, what I called ‘a life’ earlier, common to all living beings whether they be animals, humans or gods? Here, in this very public image, the obverse of the exposure which becomes us in community betrays a child to the failure of representation. But it is not the failure of theatrical aesthetics here to capture a likeness that detains us, but rather the impossibility to see clearly in an architectural environment where seeing is everything. Here exposure is both the location of politics and simultaneously its abandonment, in the abandonment of the human, after a struggle without quarter. And here, in conclusion, lies our very modern problem. It is a problem that has fascinated the Catalan architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, from whom we might draw some relevant lessons concerning the imbrication of privacy and publicity. If the terms of this book have been to pose theatre between intimacy and engagement, then how might the fate of a child moving from outside towards inside be construed as the privileged signifier for the apparently dispossessed and underprivileged? Colomina traces the architectural complication in investing one’s faith in a domestic modernity that is continuously exposed by its genesis within a culture of mediality, display and voyeurism. The apparent break between a simplifying ‘exterior’ of threat (the street) and an interior of protection (the home) is complicated by the very modern manner of the imbrication of both within a mediatised frame. Outside Colomina says, explaining better than she could have known the situation of a child we have been considering here: ‘In a city where … reality … [has become] not the place itself but its displacement, in a place that was not a place because everything was fluid, to stop was to mask oneself, to cease to be real, to cease to have meaning. It was like “posing for a photograph” ….’32 Inside provides little respite for Colomina, and certainly not for the child we are considering in flight: ‘The organizing geometry of architecture slips from the perspectival cone of vision, from the humanist eye, to the camera angle. It is precisely in this slippage that modern architecture becomes modern by engaging with the media.’33 The window in this modern scene, from which neighbours might once have witnessed acts of murderous intent, no longer punctuates the wall as a hole but becomes the wall. Looking is now turned outwards but the proliferation of seeing is reciprocally, in this and other criminal instances on

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other estates, unable to create witnesses, only spectators: ‘Seeing for Le Corbusier, is the primordial activity in the house. The house is a device to see the world, a mechanism for viewing.’34 Certainly any civic sense is brought seriously into question here, and the romance of a ‘public’ to which one might appeal for help in solving crime is long since complicated by the dissolution of the venues available to collect, to assemble or to come together. As Colomina says: ‘The modern transformation of the house produces a space defined by walls of (moving) images. This is the space of the media, of publicity. To be inside this space is only to see. To be “outside” is to be in the image, to be seen, whether in the press photograph, a magazine, a movie, on television, [on CCTV record] or at your window. It no longer has much to do with a public space, in the traditional sense of a public forum ….’35 Here a vortex of figures of the exposed, within and without architecture, suggest that the inherent publicity intrinsic to all modern architecture is at one with the rhetorics of the prying press who will soon be swarming over it recording its latest losses. If a society’s ‘threshold of biological modernity is situated at the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society’s political strategies’, as Michel Foucault suggested, then this case study of a thoroughly modern murder provides a performative platform for these politics to be played out between interested parties.36 It was Damilola Taylor’s life, maybe even given the eloquent homages to him after his death, his saturated life, the life of a teenager in his prime, that confounded the common publicity of loss of the dispossessed. But if the opening controversy of this chapter is to be taken seriously, that the camp has urban affinities in the edge city and the slum, then the specific modern malaise of a saturated estate of imagery, too much seeing bearing too few witnesses, needs further elucidation before the concentration of housing, concrete casting, becomes the common concern. The parallax of performance being investigated here, the mutability of domestic interior and social exterior, had its antecedents in the emergence of the theatre in the city. The one was never possible without the other, and both came into being simultaneously. And two and a half millennia later the human laboratory, that was the last human venue, was still, even at the height of the state of emergency in Europe in the twentieth century, busy measuring the degree of discomfort of these two modes of alienation. Indeed, the architect of the Third Reich, Adolf Loos, had the following observation to make of this tension: ‘the theatre box exists at the intersection between claustrophobia and agoraphobia.’37 The modernist novel, though, had a more affirmative model to offer in a domestic parable of the interior, perhaps the parable of a modern ‘bare life’. Ulrich in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities takes a resolutely anti-analytic turn when he reflects on those things beyond where he lies: ‘Over his head hung the

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menacing proverb: ‘Tell me what your house is like and I’ll tell you who you are’, which he had often read in art journals. After intensive study of these journals he came to the conclusion that he preferred, after all, to take the architectural completion of his personality into his own hands.’38 A humanist coda to this sorry architectural narrative is in keeping with everything that went before. Six years after Damilola’s death it was reported that mistakes by government forensic scientists just ten days after the event had led to critical information for the prosecution of his case being overlooked.39 The UK Forensic Science Service had missed evidence of Damilola’s blood on the garments of two brothers, Ricky and Danny Preddie, who were eventually convicted of his manslaughter, two trials after the one discussed above. The existence of an expert forensic team had reassured the police that there was no connection between the brothers and the victim despite them being prime suspects in the case. The official report into this error of judgement was that ‘human error’ was to blame and that there was no ‘systematic failure’ to answer for. The systematic failure to move a spot of blood on a trainer from a ‘natural’ realm to an assembly of collective deliberation denied that collective, in this case predominantly made up of those from an east London estate, the opportunity to begin their lives again in the absence of their neighbour. A system of double-checking to right this wrong in future was recommended by the report’s authors and was costed at £55,000 a case. It was proposed that this figure should be adopted without ‘complaint as to cost’, predicting that such a figure on ‘a life’ in this part of deprived east London might be deemed exorbitant. It was also recommended that the expert forensic laboratories, perhaps the most human of human laboratories, should become subject to the secondary scrutiny of specialist teams. Experts were being invited to mimetically shadow experts. That each of these errors of judgement, impedimenta to justice, might have been avoided is common to any such human tragedy in the public eye. But in this case the mourning that ensued was the mourning of the inability of a criminal justice system to deliver an adequate representation of the facts of the matter in front of a jury. Six years earlier, this mourning of lost opportunities might have given way to that more apposite mourning of the life of a lost subject. What it might have meant for that subject, Damilola Taylor, to ‘take the architectural completion’ of his personality into his own hands, as Robert Musil suggested was possible for his man without content, is deeply ambiguous given the distribution of the sensible that denied Damilola Taylor the basic tools of his fledgeling trade. He had, after all, long-expressed a desire to become an architect.

10 Arrested Life

Nostalgia is the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition and denies the repetition’s capacity to form identity. Susan Stewart, On Longing The interest between acts and their articulation began early for me. In my first reading-test at school, at 11 years of age, I reached the bottom line of the Schonell Reading chart but mispronounced the word metamorphosis as metamor-phosis (Figure 19). I was sorry that I was sent back to my desk from the teacher’s side at this critical moment, the collapse of the theatrical, four words before the apparent glorious end, and before I had the chance to say my least favourite word, bibliography, and my favourite word: idiosyncracy. The idiosyncratic intention in this work, which evokes a theatre of intimacy and engagement while thinking and writing about other peoples performances, is to test the vocabulary available to me as an artist, while resisting the urge to make presumptuous links between performance and politics that simply cannot hold up to any serious scrutiny. In this chapter and the next, which as a twin set complete this section, I wish to explore the last of my unattended axioms: that our enquiries might recognise the priority of action in the present through critical reflection on the future and the past. Here the question of what ‘my’ past might have to do with nostalgia is set off in Chapter 11 by what ‘our’ futures might hold for us if we do not act in the present. That there might always be a surprise waiting for us in our apparent security that we have reached the end was brought home to me when the three small upper-case letters to the foot of the Schonell Reading Test were brought to my attention. Three years before this reading test was undertaken, when I barely read at all, my mother happened to be my teacher at the local school. I had written my news in a microscopic script, smaller still than that cruel P.T.O. at the foot of the chart, a feat of craft and discipline that only I could read. My mother had written on my exercise book in red ink: See Me, which was 218

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a beguiling imperative given that, as her child, I lived with her. I presented myself at her desk in the front of the class. I could see her but could she see me? I was retreating from view, and this was one of the first measures of departure. I was already aware of what the maestro of the miniature, Susan Stewart, means when she says: ‘Such experiments with the scale of writing as we find in micrographia … exaggerate the divergent relation between the abstract and the material nature of the sign. A reduction in dimensions does not reproduce a corresponding reduction in significance.’1 Indeed, I would propose here, according to this vector of meaning, the closer to the invisible the more the signification. I begin with anecdote if only to reinforce the essential ‘narrative’ impulse of nostalgic reconstruction. Through this process Susan Stewart suggests ‘the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being’, an authenticity that is only available to it as narrative: ‘Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as a narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack.’2 Thus, inhabiting terrain adjacent to René Girard’s mimetic compulsion, nostalgia is the desire for desire. In this reading, Stewart suggests nostalgia’s primary motif is the erasure of the gap between nature and culture: ‘… and hence a return to the utopia of biology and symbol united within the walled city of the maternal’.3 This small chapter evolves from this scriptural encounter in that citystate and continues my interest, in this part of the book, in that which resists representation and forms of reticent representation: things that don’t need representing, that cannot be represented, that are between and beyond representations, things that are too near, too far, too quick or too slow for representation and, perhaps most significantly, things that have deliberately been kept from representation. This impulse drew me in Part II to infants and other animals who remind us that human adult animals occupy an often predictable and less than dynamic range of scales that limits much thinking about performance to a predictable and less than dynamic range of scales. Theatre in the expanded field of performance laid out earlier might consider this amplification to include the possible registers of the infinitesimal at both its limits, of gigantism and miniaturism. Hölderlin answered his own question in this respect: ‘What are poets for? To present the world on an abbreviated scale.’4 This is naturally an anti-Aristotelian enterprise – Aristotle making clear in The Poetics what the appropriate size of an artwork is, neither too minute nor too immense. The scale being intimated in Aristotle is of course the scale of the first-person, able-bodied Athenian human-subject.

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But here I want to dwell on one example of many ‘barely there’ art manifestations in order to approach the disappearance of performance from view, if not from thought. I hope this materialist analysis might skirt and cross Peggy Phelan’s writing on the ontology of performance in fruitful ways. If, as Phelan says in Unmarked, ‘performance is the art form which most fully understands the generative possibilities of disappearance’, what if this is a double disappearance, a mimesis of an original ‘barely there’ state, what if presence and resistance to re-production were ghosted by the inherent insubstantiability of an object beyond scrutiny? As Susan Stewart says, ‘Ontology is not the point here so much as the necessity of exploring these relations either through the fantastic or the real.’5 I would simply add, why not both? The ‘natural fantastic’ perhaps. Thinking big, or small, does not in itself guarantee any special status to the enterprise: it simply reminds us of the ubiquity of middle-sized, averaged-out, human-centred performance discussion. The kind of discussion that has allowed some of us to get away with that banal, idealized and utterly unimaginable term ‘the body’ for far too long. Whose body are we talking about? I hope for your sake it is not mine. No, Susan Stewart has already warned us against ‘the poverty of any naïve materialism confusing physical scale with subjective or social importance’. But, that reservation understood, we might still acknowledge those who have recovered multifarious bodies for consideration against the size-blind grain. From Robert Hooke in 1665, whose first use of the microscope exposed the dialectic that ‘a flea, a mite and a gnat’ could be compared to such ‘greater and more beautiful works of nature’ as ‘a Horse, an Elephant or a Lyon’, to Martin Heidegger in his 1930s lecture series in which he assiduously avoided the larger, advanced and ‘intelligent’ species for ‘the poor of world’, the rock-bound lizard and crab and their respective senses of world-less-ness, a philosophy of scale has always been embedded in constructions of knowledge, epistemologies and their relations to species. It would be curious if there were not now a special regard for the microorganic. Indeed technology and its miniaturization are one of the defining novelties of modernity. In a corollary to this minimalist movement, the art critic Ralph Rugoff describes the twentieth century as an age when ‘expressive power in art was correlated with impressive size’. As Joe Kelleher pointed out in response to some images being shown to us by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck: ‘impressive’ is a word to be further fathomed in performance. From the Mexican Muralists to Abstract Expressionists and Earth Art, these visual art scales have been replicated by the gigantism of theatre and its spectacular imperative. Every generalization has its contradictions and none more so than this one. For instance, there is the counter-tradition of artists such as Marcel Duchamp whose concept of the ‘infra-thin’ – a term used to denote the almost immeasurable variation between two nearly identical things or experiences, the weighing of a shirt,

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for instance, before and after its day’s wearing – might be a place to begin a small history of modest modernity. From this promisingly tenuous opener, Duchamp once proposed a transformer that would recycle inconsequential expenditures of energy such as a giggle. But caution again, as Bachelard warned us, for fear of deceiving ourselves that: ‘The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.’6 Small, blood-sucking organisms play a significant part in these control mechanisms that fear reprisal from unwitting subjects. They would appear to disturb Gaston Bachelard’s contention that thinking scale operates in a single direction: ‘Our animalized oneirism, which is so powerful as regards large animals, has not recorded the doings and gestures of tiny animals.’7 The history of marking the previously hidden is galvanized by the Dutch scientist van Leuwenhoek who pioneered the development of the microscope in the seventeenth century. For my purposes here, it is significant that he chose to study fleas, and the microscope was, in all its earliest manifestations, known as the ‘flea-glass’. By the turn of the nineteenth century, rooms for viewing the previously unimaginable on film were being called ‘flea pits’. More recently the zoologist-baron Jacob von Uexküll conducted what he called ‘excursions into unknowable worlds’ by recounting the environment of Ixodes ricinus, commonly called the tick, a description that Giorgio Agamben describes as ‘a high point of modern antihumanism’: ‘This eyeless animal finds the way to her watchpost with the help of only her skin’s general sensitivity to light. The approach of her prey becomes apparent to this blind and deaf bandit only through her sense of smell. The odour of butyric acid, which emanates from the sebaceous follicles of all mammals, works on the tick that causes her to abandon her post and fall blindly downward toward her prey.’8 The tick is a blood-sucker but not a blood-lover; blood simply fulfils the exact liquid temperature required by the tick to suck, at which point she deposits her eggs and dies. Agamben summarizes these conditions of life: odour, temperature and skin type are the three precise conditions to which the tick unites in what Agamben describes as ‘an intense and passionate relationship’ unknown to man. And even when imprisoned from this relationship on a scientist’s desk, in a box for 18 years, it waits for it. An arrested life, without an apparent subject, Uexkull says – for this tick, time cannot exist. What is it waiting for without time or world, Agamben wonders? It is surely waiting to ‘come on’. If, as Bachelard said, ‘grandeur progresses in the world in proportion to the deepening of intimacy’, there is surely no more evocative image than William Blake’s early-nineteenth-century portrait of The Ghost of a Flea (Figure 20). This image bears out the Bachelardian tension of scales and plays nostalgia off against deleria: ‘Whereas the miniature represents closure, interiority, the domestic and the overly cultural, the gigantic represents infinity, exteriority, the public and overly natural.’9 Just returned

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from the grandest of grand tours, where it has been showing as part of the Blake retrospective in New York and elsewhere, this tiny, 20 cm × 16 cm image has for years drawn thousands across the Tate Gallery floor to peer into its lustrous depths. But in the 80 books of Blake scholarship that discuss this image, only one acknowledges its staged setting.10 If Susan Stewart is right that ‘the miniature becomes a stage on which we project, by means of association or intertextuality, a deliberately framed series of actions’, I too, like Derrida, am interested in ‘a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh’.11 Here of course there is the added pleasure of a double loss, as the tick that finally gets its break cannot exist except in the story that survives it. This image was for Blake part of a series of drawings entitled Visionary Heads, portrayals of the heads of figures, the supposed manifestations of historical persons seen during séances at the London home of his friend John Varley in the years 1819 and 1820. ‘The tempera painting of The Ghost of a Flea presumably originated from one of these séances but could have been done at a later date.’12 The inscription on the back of the painting reads: ‘The Vision of the spirit which inhabits the body of a Flea and which appeared to the Lte Mr Blake … The Vision first appeared to him in my presence and afterwards till he had finished this picture. A flea he said drew blood on this …’ and the rest is illegible. In his A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy of 1828, John Varley wrote: on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him [Blake] if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw: he instantly said ‘I see him now before me.’ I therefore gave him paper and pencil, with which he drew the portrait, of which a facsimile is given in this number. I felt convinced by the mode of proceeding that he had a real image before him, for he left off and began on another part of the paper, to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch, till he had closed it. During the time occupied in completing the drawing, the flea told him that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of such men, as were by nature blood thirsty to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size and form of insects; otherwise were he himself, for instance, the size of a horse, he would depopulate a great portion of the country. He added that if in attempting to leap from one island to another, he should fall into the sea, he could swim and should not be lost. This spirit afterward appeared to Blake, and afforded him a view of his whole figure; an engraving of which I shall give in this work.13 While Blake would appear to be humouring Varley’s credulous belief in the material presence of such visions, Joseph Burke, another contemporary

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present, has suggested the possibility that they may have been ‘genuine eidetic images of physiological origin’.14 But in pursuit of this material mental debate, what is Blake seeing before him? He would appear to be seeing the ghost of a flea, who is the ghosting of the rhetorical, melodramatic stage actor of the period, adjusting the scale of their work to the new demands of cavernous, immense theatrical space. The Drury Lane Theatre, for instance, reopened in 1812 after fire, had been developed by its architect Henry Holland into a vast stage and auditorium seating 3611 that disconcerted players and playgoers alike. Stage practice here grew to meet the demands of what one contemporary wit called ‘those covered Salisbury Plains’. On seeing Edmund Kean at Covent Garden in his first Shylock of 1814, Coleridge said it was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. In 1819, just prior to Blake’s séance at Varley’s house, Robert William Elliston had taken over the Drury Lane Theatre, a great actor of heroic comedy, his first hit being the melodrama The Cataract of the Ganges where the ‘real’ waterfall drew more money than the assembled talent of his illustrious company, which included Kean, Pope and Holland. Simultaneously at Covent Garden, William Charles Macready made his stage debut as Orestes. Less pursued by a mystical meteor, as suggested by art critics, and more arrested by sun-bright flashes of limelight in which his immense frame is further enlarged, here is illuminated the gorged predecessor of Artaud’s wildest imaginings of the plague, inviting us to consider a true ‘theatre of cruelty’, the real promise masked by contagion. ‘At this point’, as Artaud says in ‘Theatre and the Plague’: ‘theatre establishes itself. Theatre, that is to say that momentary pointlessness that drives men to useless acts without immediate profit.’15 Despite the ratcheting up of the performances that took place in them and the prices to witness them, none of these massive theatres broke even. The flea here might be standing in for an immense viral apparition carrying plague across the boards of history, the great exterminator of the years 542, 1346–1665 and 1880–1903. But we know, or at least those of us who have children and dogs with hair know, that beyond Blake’s anthropomorphic, dramatic vision, the flea is a small, laterally compressed holmetabolous insect. It is apterous. In other words, it has a complete metamorphosis and is flightless. Despite what we see in Blake’s image, it has no eyes. And in keeping with what we see here, it is a blood-sucking ectoparasite. But before you feel sorry for it, a flea can pull 160,000 times its own weight, can jump 150 times its own size, and can hop 30,000 times without stopping. Flea copulation lasts about three hours. It is in this Blakean ‘tableau’ that we become aware of the essential theatricality of all miniatures, borne out by the nativity crib and the dolls’ house. Susan Stewart, like a new-dance theorist of the 1970s, recognizes the potential for movement in this apparent stillness: ‘the state of the arrested life that we see in the tableau and in the fixity and exteriority of writing

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and print always bears the hesitation of a beginning, a hesitation that speaks the movement which is its contrary.’16 If the miniature is a ‘world of arrested time’, ‘The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination.’17 This manipulation is no more evident than in the staging of the flea circus for Susan Stewart: ‘a seemingly pure animation, a lifefrom-death in which the apparatuses of the circus appear to move of their own accord’. But is this so much a ‘life from death’ as ‘a life’ itself, an immanent life of performance? Here let us consider these disappeared lives, apparently too small for representation except by acts of proxy, from the perspective of an axiom from Part I that encourages the thick description of theatre and performance. And let us give that manifestation of absent lives a name: the Cardosa Flea Circus founded by Maria Fernanda Cardosa from Bogota. I was aware that this elusive company had been touring in Sydney, Paris and New York and were due in London, but they never arrived. This does not for a moment mean that I should not write about them, to describe them as thickly as Clifford Geertz once encouraged us to do in his anthropological writings, any more than from an apparently more material realm of theatre, the version of The Cherry Orchard that you thought was there, was of course never there. ‘It’ never came, something else did. I was at a party one Saturday in the late years of the twentieth century, a curious English riverside tradition where one very old University races another in a long slender boat, a massive torque-machine steered by a miniature cox in a cap too small, and I was introduced to Vanessa Redgrave, who had recently been ‘starring’ as Madame Ranavskaia in The Cherry Orchard at the National Theatre in London. But she all too rarely in reality was, she was often indisposed, in the curious parlance of theatre managements facing a potentially hostile crowd, and I found myself inverting a popular theatre greeting: ‘I thought your Cherry Orchard was wonderful, without you.’ And led by her mischievous eyes, we set off on a spirited riff on the nature of infirmity, disappearance and the immortality of the understudy. No, absence more forcefully invites us to speak about the nature of performance than the disappointingly literal presence of any actor could engender. The classic flea circus trope of the fleas escaping their masters and running rampant in the audience was being evoked on a global scale with the venue in London, just along the river from where I had met Vanessa Redgrave, claiming that the troupe had disappeared without trace. Lack now loaded onto loss, for I knew from others who had found this fragile ensemble that the opening runs: ‘Today is a very sad day for the Cardosa Flea Circus. Fearless Alfredo dove to his death. It is a great loss for the circus’. Loss too for the microscopic Mr and Mrs Magu who hold a marital cotton-ball lifting competition, Tini and Tiny walking the high-wire with

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balancing poles, Harry Fleadini the escapologist, and Brutus ‘the strongest flea on earth’. Naming here bears out the anthropocentric universe the miniature assumes. Here the nature/culture elision described earlier is further complicated by a moebian-like braiding of human and inhuman, in which the microscopic vision of the world confirms the daydream of microcosmic life. As Gaston Bachelard said of this history: ‘the first microscopic observations were legends about small objects, and when the objects were endowed with life, legends of life. Indeed one observer, still in the domain of naïveté saw human forms in ‘spermatazoic animals!’.18 And further inversions abound as, Susan Stewart points out, the evasion of blood-spilling by the lion tamer in the circus that has disappeared from ring-side view is inverted to become the blood-giving of the trainer in the flea circus. The infinity of the miniscule is here as threatening as the depths of the big cat’s jaws. The flea circuses I have seen are ones that I have heard, for they uniformly fill the absence of size with a surfeit of speech. Here the narratives of nostalgia in the miniature begin to multiply detail in a vertiginous verbality, a loquaciousness in the absence of imagery that reciprocally inverts the verbal reticence of the Societas Raffaello Sanzio lacunae discussed earlier. The flea circus begins to take on the character that Michel Foucault identified in the strange death of Victorian sex enveloped in proliferating discourses. This would seem to bear out Susan Stewart’s persuasive link between the titillation of the micrographic and the titillation of the pornographic. Here, at a much more modest ring-side, visual and tactile experiences are sundered; both are ‘compensatory to reality’ and both exaggerate ‘non-reciprocity and mastery’. This may account for the distinct unease one feels as a father taking children to these events. These discourses of replacement and compensation for what is lost to sight are often further complicated by their faux ‘exotic’ origin. Languages of Latin America, Eastern Europe or Asia are the common parlance of the flea circus, and each unleashes a torrent of post-colonial signifiers as the human enterprise of mastering the invisible and the ‘impossibly small’ fails and fails again to bring order under the regime of the eye. There is more than a trace of Homi Bhabha’s ‘sly civility’ at work in the etiquette and abandonment of the flea-ring. Susan Stewart says: ‘the miniature always tends towards tableau rather than toward narrative, toward silence and spatial boundaries rather than toward expository closure.’19 But as the peripatetic shadow of the stable dolls’ house, the itinerant flea circus came into being with the advent and advance of the railway and in turn its miniaturization in the ‘oo/ho’ scalemodel ubiquitous to the nineteenth-century nursery. Between the 1830s circus of the celebrated flea master Signo Bertolotto, who toured Europe, and the American Magazine’s 1920s pursuit of the travelling ‘Professor Hechler’s Trained Fleas’, the flea circus simultaneously traversed the taming of wilderness and nature.

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Here the inanimate and the animate remind us of the toy and its unnervingly related verb: ‘to toy’ with something or someone. The diminution of scale inherent here endorses a nostalgic reverie of childhood where experience could once be manipulated without fear of contamination. As the architectural theorist Anthony Vidler says, ‘nostalgia for a fixed abode inevitably falls into the paradox of all nostalgia, that consciousness that, despite a yearning for concrete place and time, the object of desire is neither here nor there, present or absent, now or then … it is … caught in the irreversibility of time, and thus is fundamentally unsettled.’20 A natural history of performance that is proposed by way of conclusion to this book would come to the flea circus warily. The miniature is of course always a cultural product; it cannot by definition be of nature but rather is the engagement of a human eye working upon the physical world in a particular way. But this humanist limit should not consign the project to the margins. There is an inevitable scaling up and down of all performance, as witnessed from the distance that Walter Benjamin spoke about as the prerequisite for criticism to occur. The rock gigs of yesteryear, the Rolling Stones at Earls Court or Madison Square Garden, the Beatles at Shea Stadium, Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight are the most forceful reminder of this vector of distancing effects, which brings with it more or less alienation. As Jonathan Swift said in the words of Gulliver: ‘Nature hath adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all Objects proper for their view: they see with great exactness, but at no great distance.’21 But of course this distancing also allowed us to participate in the arena of our denim gods, and few of these events were witnessed without copious doses of pharmaceutical powder that did a grave disservice to the cause of proper proportion. Thus, in effect, all performance is miniaturized in degree, and thereby the transcendences offered by it occur, following Stewart, because of an erasure not a recognition of time. Performance is inherently nostalgic, its miniature aspect erasing not only labour but ‘causality and effect’. The raised seating of the audience to the performer beyond arm’s reach defines the present lived reality from which the object is always to be nostalgically distanced. And despite arguments of presence, on the contrary the giant stage-side screen, characterized by Philip Auslander in his book Liveness, where mediatized communion is at play, mirrors the screening magnitude of the looking glass in another age. Bachelard might have been describing an Edenic Woodstock when he wrote: ‘The botanist’s magnifying glass is youth recaptured. It gives him back the enlarging gaze of the child. With this glass in hand, he returns to the garden “where children see enlarged”.’22 All theatre is smaller than it was first envisaged to be, and the presence of opera glasses in some older auditoria is a reminder to re-establish the proximity and scale that one loses through the economy of far-away cheaper seating. This economic/phenomenological history of the visual frame may

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yet be conducive to scholarship beyond such works as Stephen Orgel’s study of spectacle and politics in The Illusion of Power and Herbert Blau’s philosophical reflections on the audience. This phenomenology of perception is rarely encountered, there often being a presumption that what we have seen is somehow restored to its original scale by theorization. This is borne out most markedly by a rash of theorizing of theatre as a ‘face-to-face’ encounter as discussed in the early methodological section of this book. While this work often draws ethical implications from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, it can do little to convince us that theatre really operates through this dimension. It is a certain clichéd presumption of humanness that foregrounds the face, when theatre itself, from distance, appears much more markedly as a play of surfaces in which ear, nose and eye give way to throat, limbs and torso before moving out towards ‘dispersed bodies’ and their relationship to ‘distributed things’. Georges Bataille wrote about this curiosity some years ago when, commenting on the peculiar forwardness of the mouth of the animal, what he referred to as the ‘prow of animals’, he said: ‘man does not have a simple architecture like beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins. He possibly starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of catching one’s attention.’23 If we were able to think performance with a sense of this contingency, to rethink the apparent relevance of features, a stronger sense of our complicating animality and in-humaness might pervade an otherwise continuing preference for the panoptical firstperson unified subject. The miniature dislocates us from our normal field of reference and jeopardizes our delusional status as the centred spectator of the Copernican space. Microminiature art takes everything I have said so far and hurls it into another more concentrated, sculptural dimension. The fashioning of slivers of human hair or baroque structures mounted on a grain of rice by Hagop Sandaldjian (1931–1990), like the flea circus but apparently more material, raises questions as to whether the work exists in anything but a mental landscape. Reality here begins to embrace an endless succession of orders of magnitude that lie beyond the individual viewpoint. Work of this kind invites us to consider the precariousness of being, our sense of dependency and, in turn, performance’s radically disabled qualities. Performance is always performance by proxy; there is always someone speaking for performance, in the name of performance. But what happens when one begins to speak not just, as I did earlier, for previously inanimate things, but for something that may not be there? In this category I have considered fleas, but also ghosts, deep-sea cephalopods that have never been witnessed alive, the performative disappearance of J. D. Salinger and, in another register, the disappeared of the military junta of Pinochet’s Chile. Beyond the collective these beings are marked out and then left unmarked for different reasons that the term ‘Unmarked’ only partly explains. They singly

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and collectively remind us of those to whom performance has not quite come, yet, the part of those who have no part. If the first natural historian, Pliny, was confused when he wrote: ‘fleas arise from the action of sunlight on filth’, I suggest we might conclude by looking again, not at the detritus below but the sun above, if only to blink through and think through the shadows it casts. As Artaud says: ‘In theatre, as in the plague, there is a kind of strange sun, an unusually bright light by which the difficult, even the impossible suddenly appears to be our natural medium.’24 It would be through this antithesis of the miniature, and the most ‘elevated conception’, as Georges Bataille described the sun, the most abstract of objects, that we might grasp the significance of scale in the two performances evoked above. The ‘horror emanating from a brilliant arc lamp’, the ghost that Blake painted, a form of contemporary painting that Bataille described as ‘the search for that which most ruptures the highest elevation, and for a blinding brilliance, has a share in the elaboration or decomposition of forms’.25 Between elaboration and decomposition, a high-noon tall tale. Midday, moment of the shortest shadow, for Nietzsche ‘end of the longest error, zenith of mankind’, where nostalgia meets deliria perhaps, a condition of arrested life.

11 The Democracy Machine

Behind every bureaucrat lurks an alchemical hot line to prehistory. Michael Taussig, Defacement1 I started this chapter on the day in 2004 that the President of the United States, George W. Bush, announced, fast on his re-election: ‘I have political capital and I am going to spend it.’ I am editing it for publication, two years later, on the day that his Secretary of State and architect of the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld, notorious for much else but also having acknowledged that ‘stuff happens’, has just resigned following sweeping democratic gains and the regaining of control of the US Senate and Congress. If two years is such a short time in politics, I wonder here to what extent the local, historically specific intimate details of my own early relationships (to money and objects as well as to people) can be recalled as the source of my political engagements in the present? Here memoir, memorial and memory are put into service, not in their common roles as vessels for the efficacy of performance practices, but rather as irritating interruptions to the more continuous blank state of an almost completely uneventful childhood. Of course there could be nothing sadder than a happy childhood, but to be born posthumously is always to recognise a certain anti-climax in ones own dénouements. With others I felt a certain disquiet as to what such presidential expenditure implied, what future it was to hold for those who had a real investment in those acts, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in the Middle East. Disregarding academic nervousness about binaries in an extreme world, if expenditure remains a minority privilege, is ‘saving’ that other economic act, by definition also privileged, of any relevance to this particular historical moment? My question in this concluding chapter to the third part of this book is: might saving become a minor resistance for those who are in a position to afford some interruption in the circulation of their theatre capital? 229

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I will explore these ideas through the context of the post-war drama, which in its early twenty-first-century manifestation I date from 9 April 2003. The event that marked that date was the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad, the moment that ‘civil’ fighting resumed in Iraq. Here, as Saddam Hussein’s cast body was swarmed over and beaten with shoes, an act of defacement took place that the anthropologist Michael Taussig might suggest arouses, from within the object itself, ‘a strange surplus of negative energy’, a just revelation of not just a secret, but a public secret. This is a secret shared by Iraqis and others unalike, the structuring order of civility and its violent other in Iraq at that time, that is ‘knowing what not to know’.2 It is surely these known knowns that are as significant as any of Donald Rumsfeld’s oft-quoted ‘knowns’ or Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s Lacanian interest in ‘unknown knowns’. The vehemence of blows to this figure was born in the revelation of this already known ‘secret truth’ and were borne with a certain precise civility in due regard for theatrical economy that would find its performative dénouement on Saddam Hussein’s arrival in court, when his translator said he said: ‘This is all theatre.’ It was, and is not. Two days before the mid-term US elections Saddam is sentenced to death by hanging, show and trial being two words with an uncomfortable pedigree in such proximity to political imperatives and timetables. So here I would like to draw upon Michael Taussig’s propositions concerning the public secret and the generative associations these ideas have with the earlier essays of the French social theorist Roger Caillois, whose work on ‘mimicry’ has been known in the theatre for some time but whose other political and theoretical writings of the 1930s and 1940s, on militant orthodoxy, secret treasures and the natural fantastic are currently less well known in a performance studies field strong on what Caillois himself would have called, ‘the melancholy of disenchantment’.3 I am interested here in unravelling something of the saving restraint, the protocol that protects the shoe-wielding Iraqi from the magic of touching the despised figure, the civil unrest that finds its expression in tension with a certain civility among a discrete people exposed to the world’s cameras. It was Roger Caillois who said of this civility, what he called l’honnêteté: ‘One must rediscover every clause of the compact governing the difficult management of human relationships, rediscover every rule of a secret, delicate syntax that was never formulated, but which centuries of use have made precise and hard.’4 In response to Caillois’s challenge I would like in this chapter to explore three forms of this ‘secret, delicate syntax’. The first through the means of memoir, the second through the moment of memorial, and the third through the matter of memory. I want to suggest, in brief, that a syntax such as l’honnêteté might be recovered and examined for how it operates performatively with regards to three temporal registers: the recognition and writing up of a past, soon (Civil Service); the realisation

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and practice of a gesture, now (Military Service); and the search for and rescue of a future, then (Secret Service).

Memoir: Civil Service One isolated individual cannot constitute the hinge between a tradition and an adventure. Roger Caillois5 I have (only) had one (real) job in my half-century. For six months from January to June 1976, I was a Clerical Assistant, Band A, in the Customs and Excise Office, Portcullis House, Southend-On-Sea, an estuary town in the south-east of England and described fondly by the historian Simon Schama (it was his childhood neighbourhood, too) in the opening paragraphs of Landscape and Memory as ‘that gloriously lurid seaside town … developed at the end of the last century as “the lungs of London” …’.6 I worked in the Collections Department on what was called the ‘time lag team’. My job was to calculate, from two primitive spreadsheets, the delay between goods liable for tax entering the country and the payments made on them by companies responsible for their import. Watched over by a Higher Executive Officer at room-end and by Executive Officers on each desk, my task was the defining Civil Service task. I was in ‘Collections’, an office that reflected the historic mission of the Civil Service since its inception well before becoming institutionalized and embedded in the colonial history of the British Empire. Both the terms ‘Civil Service’ and ‘civil servant’ first arose in India, which had been subjected since the Royal Charter of 1599 to ‘government’ by the franchise of the East India Company.7 Prior to the terms themselves, the essential functions of collection resided in the retinue of court servants, which for centuries before the Normans and prior to Empire had followed the Kings of England, acting as a treasury function for the crown. According to Peter Hennessy’s history of Whitehall: ‘money, its acquisition, recording and storage, was the inescapable fact which kept a small number of clerics in tow behind the Royal procession.’8 This ‘money’ was now my inescapable fact. Throughout this history the first part of the term, ‘civil’, has occupied an ambiguous linguistic territory. It is a weak word that only works in tension with its other, military. Although it continues to operate in wartime, it can only come into its own in the ‘absence of war’. It is an exception to the rule of its suspension in conflict. The term ‘civil’, as used in the title Civil Service, therefore, applies to those covenanted servants who do not belong to the army, navy or air force but to their peaceful underside. Civil Service now stands as a collective term for all the non-warlike branches of the public administrative service of the State, including diplomatic intercourse.

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Here civil shares something with the counter-intuitive concept of the political, as outlined by Carl Schmitt, that was drawn upon as the opening argumentative strategy of ‘friends and enemies’ in the opening chapter of this book. As Schmitt says: ‘One seldom finds a clear definition of the political. The word is most frequently used negatively in contrast to various other ideas.’9 This creates for me a welcome tension between those services that are civil, those that are military, and those that administer these arrangements and their negotiation through secret means, that is the ‘secret service’. It is the combination, the combined workings of these operatives, that I call, without being ironic, ‘the democracy machine’. This service includes at its extreme, and ham end, that species of exotica known as spies and double agents, but more engagingly for my purpose includes all those vested with servicing the secret. The secretary is the quotidian mediating figure of this exchange, charged as they are with confidentiality and yet somehow significant for the way in which the secret is somehow always given away. The lineage of this secretarial figure is pronounced and gendered, from Richard Nixon’s notorious contention that it was his secretary’s foot that, having slipped on the edit machine, was responsible for the all important 18-minute gap in the White House tape record, through to Steve Shainberg’s recent film of the inherent masochism of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s secretarial role doing James Spader’s S and M bidding. In the light of these secretarial practices, Michael Taussig’s formulation of ‘secrecy providing the real as the really made up’ becomes a useful link between this minor office job and the revelatory quality of performance. We were, in the marginalia of the scriptural democracy machine that was the ‘time lag team’, all by definition confidants of an ‘official secret’ having signed an ‘Act’ to even enter employment in this if not charmed, then discreet, circle. So from here on in this chapter, my revelation is technically illegal and implicates you, the reader, in a modest complicity if not criminality. We were, in my particular office, in the global business of tracking goods and ensuring due payment on them to the government and the country. We were, therefore and by definition, not only working secretly but also posthumously. The event had happened (import at a dock of the realm) and we were counting up the days between this event and recompense. The concept of ‘duty free’ was foreign to us – this was dutiful work. And every event was known to us only through its afterlife, that was, by definition, already underway by the time we came to it. There was no time lag less than a day, and at 100 days, if I recall correctly, the item line was removed from our soft jurisdiction to some harsher, higher office, that I once tried to find. In an up-scale, white-collar scenario worthy of Peter Currell-Brown’s picaresque novel of working-class anxiety, Smallcreep’s Day, the four floors of Portcullis House above me bore a remarkable resemblance to each of

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those below. Civil Service acquisitions had, in the interests of aesthetic betterment, adorned each corridor with a series of framed landscapes. It was not the weak and pallid illusion of a green and pleasant land that now stands out, but the manner in which each corridor mimicked the one below with the identical painting resting directly above its twin, its triplet, and so on through the vertical cross-section of the building. I surmised that while staff members were expected to move laterally through these corridors, they were not expected to move up or down them, rather unwittingly passing this multiple purchasing arrangement in the ascending and descending lifts. This was a pictorial mise-en-scène for work which was deeply implicated in a doubling sense of similarity – from spreadsheet training, the movement of materials shadowed in script, through to the mirroring hierarchies of identical personnel at each identical desk, office and floor level, from Southend-On-Sea to Sri Lanka. But what kind of similarity this stood for was beyond me. I returned to my floor, to my desk and to the gaze of my Higher Executive Officer, and from here on restricted myself to an avowedly local landscape and one that I was reminded I had no reason to question, given that I was here for the duration, which meant life. I was, in this return, mimicking Roger Caillois’s image of the organism in retreat from its environment, on recognising the pathology of space, realising with a shock of recognition that ‘nature is everywhere the same’.10 I asked my grandfather about this peculiarity, as he had experience of this strange, familiar nature. He shared with me a history that in its banality seemed to be at once deeply conservative and yet redolent with ambiguity, the orthodoxy of G. K. Chesterton mixed with the radical merits Slavoj Zˇ izˇek enjoys within the ‘perverse’ core of Christianity. The narrative took me from his East End London school at 15 years old, when he joined the Civil Service as an accounts clerk, to his retirement at 65 in 1960, at which point he was a Chief Executive Officer in the upper echelons of the Treasury. He worked almost continuously in the departments of the Civil Service that came to be called National Savings and for most of his latter years at No. 1 Prince’s Gate, London SW7. There is a quiet immortality about the British civil servant. My grandfather’s annual employment record can be found quite easily by looking for Bernard Rose Cody in the British Imperial Calendar for the years between 1920 and 1960. By 1962 his name has simply disappeared. The boss, Director of Establishment and Finance, one J. Hurst remains, but a certain A. G. Cramer, previously working as Senior Executive Officer, ranked beneath my grandfather has, by 1962, assumed his chair. And I am sure it was ‘his’ chair, though he was unprepossessing by instinct. ‘Savings’ might appear to those with capital now, in the general economy of expenditure, an almost incomprehensible and alien term, but back then in the United Kingdom, the orthodoxy of post-war recovery was spread through an encouragement to collect (stamps, tea-cards, coins), to

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horde (without being miserly), to prosper (in prudence). I recall vividly the weekly visit of the ‘Man from the Pru’ (The Prudential Assurance Company), who took money from my mother in return for a long future of deferred security. If my brief flirtation with a job was secured on the principle of past securities, my mother’s modest investments were predicated on the likliehood of future insecurities. Given that my father had died suddenly before I was born, and less than a year after my sister’s birth, leaving my mother no insurance and no assets except for the house they had built for themselves and a treasury of memories, I suspected that, like my own ‘posthumous’ status, born after my father’s death, this economy was itself a desperate act of recovery: after the event. My grandfather’s Civil Service was a modern establishment but umbilically linked to the colonial institution that lay at its origins, the East India Company. His name appears in a volume that as late as 1960 is still called The British Imperial Calendar and, despite the protestations included in the Calendar regarding the Civil Service commitment to equal pay for women, there is between its pages an enduring legacy of colonial roots. And this was not its only conservatism. In the year that I was born, 1956, the Imperial Calendar lists the ‘Board of Control (England and Wales) for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency’ at Saville Row, London W1. My grandfather’s only advice regarding work came to me from this very street when he encouraged me to invest a week’s wages in each year of my adult life in a new suit. Inflation has not condemned this sartorial guidance and I was grateful for it and followed its instruction scrupulously until children, and their own sartorial expectations, caught up with me. The Calendar throughout the 1950s has a ubiquitous advertisement on its inner pages. Gestetner Duplicators are described proudly as being ‘In Government Service Throughout the World’. One wonders how a colonial history of the copier might read: a post-colonial footnote to Hillel Schwarz’s history of the copy would materially respond to Homi Bhabha’s literary tracing of colonial discourse in his essay ‘Sly Civility’: ‘What is the image of authority if it is civility’s supplement and democracy’s despotic double? How is it exercised if … it must be read between the lines, within the interdictory borders of civility itself?’11 But the Gestetner and the ‘copycat’ office of my grandfather’s time, the carbon copy of the first time, recovered through a form of continuous repetition, makes repetition itself, not what is copied, the generator of a certain awe and power. And it is this economy that interests me with regard to the accumulations of saving and its implication in the performance of restored, that is, repeated, behaviours. Saving was not my grandfather’s idea but was his life. The first issue of National Savings Certificates followed shortly after his unnoticed arrival in the Civil Service and had taken place in the United Kingdom on 21 February 1916, covering the period to 31 March 1922. Certificates increased in value by the addition of one penny of interest for each completed

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month for each unit held. So a £2.00 certificate after 30 years would be worth £2.6s, an increase of six shillings. At school, by the 1960s we were being encouraged to save on behalf of the prosperity of post-war Britain. We had slim books that received 12 one-shilling stamps to make up a pound page, and these savings booklets were redeemable against certificates of denominations £1.00, £2.00, £5.00, and hard as such a sum was to imagine for someone like me, £10.00, in enchanting hues of pink, yellow, blue and green. I do recall a certain security with these booklets, having discovered a drawer full of Green Shield stamps that I suspected we were not meant to have in our dining room in the late 1950s. The potential expenditure embedded in these rogue books of lime green pages, the vast quantities of groceries that would have to have been purchased to generate them, and the awesome generative products available on their redemption (clearly visible and mulled over daily in the Green Shield Catalogue) filled me with a deep sense of foreboding. Saving, back then, seemed morally more defensible than spending, a parsimonious reticence long since lost. Indeed, the change in the industrial West, from a culture of being in credit (savings) to one of being in debt (credit), had been slowly underway during the late 1960s with the arrival of the first popularly available credit card operation in the United Kingdom, again based in Southend-On-Sea, in Marconi House, invitingly called Access. Now I come to write this, I realise I had worked there as well in the early days of the card’s distribution to credit-naïve households, so perhaps my extra-theatrical CV expands. I recall that the mission of ‘Collections’ there, was of a wholly different order and potential violence compared to that of the Government office into which I was temporarily to move. In this private sector Collections meant ‘getting’ it back, that is, the frighteners were put on by headed letter, with lots of random capitals and font expansions, and then the threat ratcheted up with the visit of bailiffs to any property that fell suspect because of non or overdue payment. Contrary to this apparent incivility, my grandfather’s latter years with the Civil Service were dedicated to perfecting that most civil of gambling options, the first Government issue of Premium Bonds. There had been many kinds of bonds released in the post-war years: Abbey Bonds, British National Life Single Premium Bonds, City of Westminster Property Bonds and the aggressively titled Crusader Single Premium Growth Equity Policy Bonds. But the Premium Bond was different in the public imagination and has since maintained its attraction to the public purse. The government had agreed through charter to use a random-number system to pick winning Premium Bonds from a monthly draw, thus rendering ownership of Bonds a form of sanctioned gambling. This sanctioning and endorsement was important for my grandfather as a devout Catholic and member of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. It afforded a respectability to investment in chance that has eluded casino culture and on-line gambling to this day.

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Premium Bonds in their earliest and simplest form cost a pound each and you could sell them back at any time to get your initial stake returned. Prizes were awarded each month. The top prize when I left the United Kingdom for the United States in 1979 was £100,000. It is at the time of writing £1,000,000. The top weekly prize in my childhood was £75,000, a sum that in the 1950s, when we became intimately connected with the draw, would have seemed wildly inflationary. At the time, my mother and father’s house, small but detached on a corner plot with a large garden near to the sea, had cost £1750 to build. To be respectable the prizes had to be seen to be won fairly (which simultaneously signalled the unfair promise of other forms of gambling) and this apparent truism posed some serious logistical problems for what was to all intents and purposes a pre-computing age. For this, my grandfather and his team were given the task of creating a mechanism that would ensure each single bond had an equal chance of winning. It was another, perhaps more mundane, but no less flawed form of democracy machine. They did this by constructing a mainframe computer called ERNIE programmed to print out random numbers (Figures 21 and 22). Unbeknown, and of little interest to me at the time, ERNIE stood for Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment but, perhaps more important for what was to follow, evoked the nomenclature of working-class Britain – a male name which has almost completely disappeared from birth registers only 40 years later. The bonds with these random numbers won prizes. There have been four ERNIEs since this time, each smaller and faster than the one it has replaced. But the first one, the one that was important for me, was larger than life-size. Whatever their scale, they each worked from the same apparently democratic principle, and still do. I asked my grandfather on several occasions to explain this principle to me, but on grounds of security he always found a reason to change the subject. Persistence paid off in the end, however, and around the time I was six or seven he said, sotto voce: ‘ERNIE is called ERNIE because the man inside operating the machine is called Ernie. He looks out for your numbers.’ The implications were serious. I knew that winners of jackpots were notified personally by someone called ‘Agent Million’, a mystery person whom I conflated with this hidden figure while fearing their imminent arrival at our door. As an employee of the Civil Service my grandfather was in a position to purchase earliest issue Premium Bonds that tested this principle of equality. His £100 block of bonds, a significant sum for our family, began with the number and letters 1ZK. Each Bond was duly entered in each monthly draw along with all others nationwide that had been bought up to that point. Between 1956 when the Premium Bonds were launched and 1961 when my grandfather retired, there were almost monthly appearances on our front door mat of the instantly recognisable brown windowed envelope in which

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winning news was posted to the ‘lucky’ recipient. The amounts were modest, many £25s, the lowest possible, though this did not mean for a moment unwelcome, and a smattering of £50s. But it was the regularity of the winnings that seemed embarrassing to me. I recall this episode as a ‘secret shared’. I suspected that something might be up, but I was bought off by a flow of modest percentages from the monthly haul that augmented my strictly limited pocket money. This was my first experience of what I later realised was the ‘open secret’, that is, something that is ostensibly a secret but which requires little effort or forensic penetration to discover. In this case the open secret is the inherent unreliability of the democracy machine, its built-in inability to function for the majority of all those who have been entered, and its failure to recompense those who have invested the same if not more than others. And by deduction, the flip-side of this open secret was, worryingly for me, the disproportionate generosity of our own mythological sign, 1ZK. This induced in me a regard for the method or process hidden from all but the initiated, in this case my grandfather and his team, the inventors of the democracy machine. This is a method which I suspect I now find in constant circulation in a certain theatrical economy of interpretation among initiates, who agree to know and by implication to fetishize what has long been known about the ghost in the theatre machine: that, despite all the grinding of gears and clattering of properties that makes up the theatrical artifice, there is still a human who is somewhere responsible in its hidden midst for its operations, someone who refuses to come out despite the indexing of the casts’ pointing gestures at curtain call to the dark recesses of the theatrical auditorium. My adult imagination, now, of my childhood imagination, then, in this form of memoir reveals some secrets that tell some truths. The public secret of this democracy machine was, I believed at the time and that is enough to go with here, generally known but could not be articulated. As they said in the gangster films that I enjoyed at the pier-head Ritz Cinema, I had literally to ‘Save It!’. For fear of what? Exposure? Financial loss? Nothing so palpable. Rather the fear was only of exposure of the secret itself, there was nothing for me outside this secret. The emperor’s new clothes option – Look he has nothing on! – was not an option for a boy without a father to back me up and a grandfather implicated in a confidence trick on a National scale. The sort of performance of civility this memoir suggests is the sort identified by Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man, the deeply conservative ‘not to be a burden to others’ kind of civility. If money was later to become my ‘inescapable fact’, here a more ambiguous economy was underway where civility was being built not from empirically based scepticism of some known, but rather, as Mick Taussig puts it, ‘from the “fact” of ambiguity as opposed to the facts that constitute it’.12 Here I was ‘sliding

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either side of the public secret’, learning what Taussig describes as the ‘play with revelation and concealment’. As for me, it was much more confusing than soothing. A child’s pleasure in revelation, telling it like it is, or as Taussig puts it ‘the spending of the secret’, can only operate if the child recognises the rule against telling.13 From my perspective, the point at which this civility operates expels the child from the animality tracked through the second part of this book, and separates them from their instinct to ‘reveal beautifully’. I could not tell it like it was, but was then destined from here on to tell it like it should be. Rhetoric replaced revelation and in this moment I went critical over creative. Taussig would leave us in neither camp, rather arguing for the child as a morally ambiguous entity ‘swaying between “raw instinct” and “the negation of the negation”’.14 The fabulist fact perhaps, a crossroads for performance where my childhood secret meets its just exposure? I recalled much of the above, at the time of the invasion of Iraq by UK and US troops in 2003, on being given some photographs by Krzysztof Wodiczko in which a series of wooden crates, about the size of the first ERNIE, appear to contain some larger than life figures (Figure 23). The uneasy obliteration of London’s equestrian statues, military figures from the Whitehall landscape, their defacement, and the general knowledge of what lay inside brought back for me in one unambiguous moment, the memoir of the democracy machine that I have laid out so far in this chapter. But these images also prompted in me the recognition of a memorial to a democracy machine that I write about below. Roger Caillois believed that ‘the values of a civilization must be forged outside the theatre of war’.15 But what if that theatre were the pervasive material and metaphor of our time? The writing of this book spans the conduct of the second Iraq war and the onset of civil hostilities. As a project it is thus embedded in a historical moment where ‘civility’ and ‘military’ are in a more ambiguous negotiation than the incommensurability of such terms might imply. An age of ‘civil war’ perhaps?

Memorial: Military Service The phrase ‘theatre of war’ has been tripping off strategists’ lips throughout this period as though it describes something self-evident and incontestable. But it might be worth pausing to consider the association between the two ends of the phrase before leaping into battle armed with a metaphor that is as likely to expose the irrationalities of violent action as to conceal them. In 1938, on the eve of war, Johan Huizinga quoted Herodotus speaking disapprovingly of the unwisdom of the Greeks, who: ‘solemnly announce their wars beforehand, then proceed to choose a fine level battlefield, finally repairing thither for mutual slaughter to the detriment of victors and vanquished alike. Far better, he says, to have their quarrels

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settled by envoys or heralds.’ If Herodotus questioned the ‘match’ like view of war where does that leave our sense of play? What might those who deal with the politics of representation have to contribute to analysis of how this clash of cultures is being staged? To even ask these questions is to risk the ire of those who believe cultural relativists should stay in their playgrounds while the front-line specialists have their say. Even Hans Blix, the weapons inspector leading the fruitless search for WMD at the time, was pejoratively described at the United Nations as arguing with all the balanced finesse that his doctorate demanded as though this rhetorical sophistication definitively weakened the potential relevance of any recommendations he might make. And the Member for Parliament for Hampstead and Highgate (and former actress) Glenda Jackson confirmed something we have long suspected on one throw-back, balmy, protest evening in London before the invasion of Iraq got underway. When it comes to matters of import, never mind war, the last people the English heed are theatre people and intellectuals. I would be tempted to add that if some people call theatre folk luvvies, and pacifist sceptics – duvvies, those of us who want to play and think must then be luvvie duvvies. But despite the fact nobody in the country, never mind in the government, was taking any notice of us in those late-winter/spring months of 2003 there had been an encouraging groundswell of resistance from exactly these people to the fast-flowing currents of US supplication. In a neat twist of the world cup cricketers’ dilemma, The Royal Shakespeare Company had written to the Guardian newspaper distancing their tour to Michigan from US foreign policy and there were impassioned and forceful statements from the theatre directors Peter Sellars and Peter Brook reported on widely in the press at that time. Meanwhile, regime change at the National Theatre and Old Vic reminded us, just when we needed to be reassured by our flag-ship theatrical institutions, that the show must go on (even if Kevin Spacey was going to have to curb his party-going with a prime minister who had become a leader at war for the sake of the repertory). These might appear to have been good times for those committed to committed art. A packed audience at the Camden Centre in London watched a 30-year-old film, US, protesting against the Vietnam War coupled with stirring anti-war speeches from the UK politician and father of the House of Commons, Tony Benn, and the event Going Public at the Tricycle Theatre organised by The Red Room provided an unusual platform for audience response to current issues. But the speed with which the Generals will wrap up the theatre’s best lines in the service of protecting us from the truth (a prize for the first sub-Beckettian quote) should remind us of the unholy alliance that has always existed between the conduct of war and the public rhetoric of performance. The art of making a gesture might never have been more timely, nor more jeopardised.

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From Aeschylus’s The Persians, the first extant Western drama, which featured as its harrowing opening scene Xerxes’s defeated return from war, to Sarah Kane’s Blasted, the staging of the consequences of fighting has never gone away. The scheduling of Henry V at the National Theatre to open Nick Hytner’s reign at the time of the invasion of Iraq was surely no coincidence. And even when plays are not overtly dealing with military issues, they can be received in renewed ways at times of portent such as these – even if these readings are notoriously prone to misconceptions. During the last Gulf conflict I encountered a student who believed Edward Bond’s The Bundle – a beautiful meditation on protection of the young – was about a playground fight. But there can be no previous war when a medium invented for the articulation of the fragility of democracy has had quite so complicated a relationship with a populous disenfranchised by its Prime Minister’s moral crusade. This long-term distancing of drama from its historic mission has been further speeded by two very recent forces. One, the rapid and wholly illusory democratisation of the subject matter of television media and two, the vapid dramatisations inherent in celebrity and sport. The revolution has already happened and Peter Bazalgette and Endemol, those who brought Europeans the television programme Big Brother, led it. The proliferation of reality TV has apparently witnessed the eruption of an audience once sedated by a medium. You and I would appear to have broken out from the confines of our living rooms to the better-publicised confines of the fly-on-the-wall documentary. Whether we see ourselves reflected back through the gurning of Jade (in Big Brother and then inevitably Celebrity Big Brother) or the pratfalls of Jackass, we know we are no longer only being dramatised through soaps that seem, compared with what has now befallen us, as dramatically sophisticated as Classical drama once appeared to others. Whether it is our gardens under strategic threat from Groundforce, our dress sense by makeover fashionistas such as Trinny and Suzanna, or our love of singing in the bath in television shows such as Operatunity, it is most surely ‘our’ gestures that are ricocheting back to us uncannily emptied of their sense of self, ourselves, and somehow morphed into everyone else’s. We see people doing something that looks strangely familiar and that might be because we used to do some of these things ourselves without recourse to the television. Now we cannot think about moving house, relocating to France, bedding down some bulbs, whipping up an omelette, auditioning for a West End musical, or just arseing around, without one eye on the screen to see how we might already have done it better, somewhere else, just before. Just like they used to say on the children’s programme Blue Peter: ‘Now here’s one I made earlier’. The trouble is of course the one made earlier always looked inedible and manufactured, not the least bit as appetising as the creative culinary disorder it replaced in the dénouement of the programme.

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The abnegation of our right to make a gesture has also been willingly substituted by celebrities and sports stars all too happy to make theirs. In the fascinating banality of their lives and affairs, they seem to be simultaneously as distant from our daily existence as one could imagine while being responsible for our salvation from the drudgery of the everyday. The cleric in the nineteenth-century rural villages must have once witnessed the belief we vest in them being paid to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the chapel. It is no surprise to see the BBC building on this sense of theatricality and our willing investment in these holy relics by repeating their tag line from last year to sell this year’s Football Association Cup: ‘Great Drama from the BBC’. But it is not. The simple nightly facts speak for themselves. Acres of fumbling foreplay, with all too occasional intensities, wrapped up in a never-ending stream of manufactured narratives, to turn prosaic characters into heroes and villains. And the loss of the celebrated presenter Des Lynam’s arched irony, distancing himself from the paucity of the fare on offer while apparently fronting it up, has seen BBC coverage drowning in the earnest defence of the indefensible. This is not great Drama in the same sense that Play For Today was in the hands of David Mercer, or The Office and Marion and Geoff were in the following decades, and certainly not in the sense that Xerxes’s impassioned plea for a hearing from his defeated people, the Persians, confounded all the laws of triumphalist drama of his classical age. It is synthetic and circular with very little progress other than remorseless déjà vu. OK, so I support a North London side called Spurs and this condition of weary anomie may simply describe the ineffectiveness of my team to do more than repeat its annual underachievement. But I suspect I am not alone in recognising the reciprocal loss of motivation and agency I feel the more I witness something that I thought was already mine sold back to me for a premium. It has been said by Giorgio Agamben, that at the very moment we have lost our gestures we have become obsessed by them. We should not ignore this just because it comes from a culture that has always valued the demonstrative. I would simply qualify the observation by saying that at the very moment we have lost our gestures, we have become obsessed by everyone else’s. On the Stop the War march through Piccadilly on that crisp day in 2003 it was the mass that did not so much speak or stand for something, but move, and in that flow there was a reassuring security that we would not be singled out for special attention. There was a refreshing sublimation of ego even down to the collusive snail’s pace at which we all walked as though to ensure the majority of us would miss the egos on the stage in Hyde Park, an experience that seemed somehow at odds with the collective generosity and equality of what had gone before. But there is a more worrying side to this sacrifice of personal identity. While the march marched there were surprisingly few flourishes or

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individual gestures that would have contradicted the argument here. There were rather too many manufactured banners formatted for our ease of protest by the Daily Mirror newspaper, a propensity to lacklustre singing and sloganeering and a reticence to be seen swimming against the tide. The occasional exceptions to this prove my rule, not least of all, the woman pinning detailed cardboard signs up around Trafalgar Square deconstructing the global situation in felt-tip-pen letters. This is hardly surprising given how long it is since we first gave up the simplest of stage gestures that marked us out from the crowd scene or chorus. At age four we would always break ranks to wave at our parents from within this or that school play, nativity scene or concert. By seven we never will, threatened by the increasingly youthful professionalism of the school system to conform to the banal fallacy that an audience of parents cannot simultaneously recognise their child, the dramatic role their child is playing and the relationship between these two quite different things. It is this kind of pathological need for theatrical illusion that delivers up to us the theatre, and the politics, we deserve. And as we flowed past Admiralty Arch, with Buckingham Palace in the distance, the sure knowledge that the Queen had long wrapped up that particular warmest of gestures on behalf of an adoring audience was little democratic solace for this republican. As the troops were waved on their way from Portsmouth and Plymouth, photographs captured one of the few gestures of war that has any generally recognisable human currency. For from that point on, in a war of tense briefings and digital replays, all human contact is, and has to be, lost. In the place of this wave the theatre of war draws on its own stylised conventions, familiar mise-en-scène and set-piece stagings that have the circular logic of sport, albeit a blood sport, without the progressive understanding and knowledge of drama. None of this will feature the body of those acting on our behalf because it is likely to be recognised as a body, choking in disbelief at the plagiarised script they have been offered with all too predictable gags. They will not even be corpsing for their Country if the current explosive ratings hold up for another year in the amorphous ‘war against terror’. What we might call the great gesture rip-off will proliferate before it can be countered by the recently gesture-impaired. Antonin Artaud, who knew something about what it was like to lose not just one identity, but two, and Oscar Wilde might have had something to say about that, he spoke about these lost gestures when he said in The Theatre and Its Double: ‘Theatre can reinstruct those who have forgotten the communicative power or magic mimicry of gesture, because a gesture contains its own energy, and there are still human beings in theatre to reveal the power of these gestures.’ But in keeping with the politically reticent tone of this book, I am not sure if theatre has, for a very long time, if ever, been the first place to look for something this important to us.

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Reclaiming the right to performance begins with our responsibility and circumscribed freedom to draw back those gestures that have most recently been out on loan from those with whom we have vested them for safe keeping and occasional exaggeration. These celebrities and sports stars, singers and reality-show survivors have been for a while our performance proxies, acting on our behalf, speaking on our behalf while we took a break from the front line of public scrutiny, members of a society, citizens with civic senses. When we say ‘Not in my name’, our words cannot be heard too clearly because we gave up any right to speak in our own name some time ago. We have been negligent with the very identity that bore our right to speak up, our sovereign right to say what we mean, to act on our own behalf. These are the words and actions that should form our civic centre. We have handed our passports of performance over to a class of identity carpetbaggers who have travelled far and wide on them for quite long enough. The FBI is doing its damnedest to get on top of the paperwork, but the small matter of finding anything like a photo-fit of these missing identities, that is, anything but laughably way off the mark, is proving elusive so far. Some gestures might appear irrelevant to our ability to speak up about the current state of play and might be the last thing we want back anyway: robotic and occasionally unpredictable lower limbs (Michael Jackson), synthetic distress at overexposure (Catherine Zeta-Jones), exaggerated shock at beating nearest rivals at award ceremonies (Nicole Kidman), sliding forward on your knees at the conclusion of things (Gareth Gates), doffing your cap (Justin Timberlake), athletic leaps (Busted), shaking your hair uncontrollably (Avril Lavigne). The loss of capital of the gestures of each of these fading names, in the few short years between the time of their first writing and their reading, is one measure of their reduced, and always further reducing circumstances. Other no less transient figures might appear to remind us, sometimes diluted but still forceful, of the richness of gestural evocation where thriving cultures meet: complex hand curls (the whole cast of Bombay Dreams), hip hop meets Kathakali (Sister India), inflated protestations of injustice (Paolo de Canio), turning circles to a Spirit in the Sky that you are happy to see return in a new guise (Gareth Gates again), the failure to accomplish cool street gestures (Ali G) and expose redneck sentiment by conducting a Rodeo singalong (Borat). But before you know it these apparently trivial or aesthetic moves have become more significant ones being used against your better judgement and determining that play is now the sole province of the State: a protective arm around the shoulders of a child (Saddam Hussein) a strangely fixed look of insouciance (George W. Bush), a propensity to air-axe and juggle balls under pressure (Tony Blair), waving a vial of talcum powder or cocaine around your head as though it proves a significant scientific point

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(Colin Powell) or, for all those students currently in search of internet essays that will cover for their own happy abuse of the last semester, the audacious plagiarism of Ibrahim al-Marashi in the Government Dossier on Iraq (British Intelligence). To argue that this last flourish had ‘no bearing on the findings of the research’, as the British government spokesperson for the Prime Minister did at the time, was to underestimate woefully the propriety the State must establish with the wider populous in their arguments for violent, retributive action. OK, so we have all cheated in our time, but it is unlikely anything other than a little of our originality died as a consequence of our copying. We might, however, expect our ‘Intelligence’ services to do better than parrot the spelling mistakes of a ten-year-old academic paper. Reclaiming the right to performance, to our own gestures, might be the first act in a genuinely political drama. It is not so much that we are now Homo Ludens, the man who is because he plays in Johan Huizinga’s phrase, but Homo Ludens-Station, the man, and it is a man, who is because he is Play-Station. Our playfulness has finally disappeared into two swollen digits, fantastically responsive to the screen war and only able to confirm mission accomplished through the screen of the fighter cockpit. Between these two obscene gestures, literally off-scene, there are a myriad other uses for our hands that we should now be recalling before it is too late. The first one might be to wave the current cast off the world political stage unless they begin to hear the disaffection of their audience, the second to applaud those who, like Glenda Jackson, really have shown that theatre people who think have a part to play. Within this voluntarism of resistance, on the larger scale, I would wish in the following coda to return to the spirit of the opening of this chapter and evoke the local resistances that Roger Caillois reminds us of in his ambitious miniaturism: ‘Small codes of work, civility and etiquette shape one’s mind and teach it to resist the temptations of crudeness. Against the natural advantages of violence, ruse, and money, they establish another prestige that cannot be fully defeated by brutality, fraud or wealth. They are what make possible every kind of glory. They make possible the existence of goods that cannot be obtained by means of money or lies, nor by fate or power.’16

Memory: Secret Service Truth is not a matter of exposure, which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it. Walter Benjamin17 I have before me a photograph. I am being shown something by my grandfather in front of high gates (Figure 24). I have a secret that my mother, in

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the white hat, and my sister, in the other hat, do not know yet. And I am staging this interest, at odds with the secret that is discomforting me, for the sake of my grandmother in the two-tone hat, and for the Leica in front of me. My uncle, in RAF uniform and peaked hat, is both in and out of the picture. I also appear to be watched (through my grandfather’s doubled over back) by a woman in the rear of the photograph who is ‘not meant to be there’ but would appear to be waiting her turn. So, I am preoccupied. I remember neither the Palace nor the medal being shown to me (the Imperial Service Order), though I have that in front of me now as I write, but I do recall the embodiment and embarrassment of that state of formalised disarray that my posture barely hints at, as though it were yesterday. My discomfort takes me back to a moment of recognition and in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s preferred word, realisation, one that my grandfather had worked for 50 years to establish, a certain kind of sustained performance of repetition, restored behaviour and recovery of daily gestures that used to be called a career in the Civil Service. Shortly after this royal episode was over, and I had recomposed myself, a lorry arrived outside our house and from it was wheeled a petrol-driven lawn mower, the second material recognition of half a century’s commitment to this durational endeavour, a life’s work. The ‘lure’ of the space in the photograph, in Roger Caillois’s term, is that of my realisation of myself in vertiginous space. No longer the origin of a coordinated system, for which I earlier used the term family, at the heart of that family, but now rather one surface among many, at the gates of the future, now past. I am, for the first time, conscious of the dispossession of privilege at precisely that moment that my family most (unusually for them) aspire to it. I am discomforted and, as Caillois says in describing this lure of space, this organism, that is, me, ‘no longer knows what to do with itself’. Here the space, like the creeping negative of my mother’s hat, will eventually take my place, and I am left as Caillois says of other mimetic animals: ‘similar, not similar to anything in particular, but simply similar’.18 My grandfather’s mimicry of a social order of which he had no original part, born into a family of ten in Leytonstone in East London, is an assimilation to space that is inevitably accompanied by a diminished sense of personality and vitality. As Caillois points out: ‘It is noteworthy that among the mimetic species, the phenomenon occurs only in a single direction: the animal mimics plant life (whether leaf, flower or thorn) and hides or gives up those physiological functions linking it to its environment. Life withdraws to a lesser state.’19 For some, another word for this is ‘retirement’. The top hat and tails are as alien to my grandfather as wings to a giraffe. This of course is the opposite of saying that he has no style. It is a form of self-abandonment, which Caillois sees as instinctive to all species, a form of diminished existence that locates these actions within an economy of performance. But what kind of economy is this? It is perhaps not

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so much to do with such an in-currency word as economy, but perhaps more to do with an underused accounting, a peculiar form of saving: treasure. According to Caillois, treasure is a form of ‘unproductive work’ and as such is to be distinguished from ‘unproductive expenditure’. The secrecy of treasure, what remains secret, is not ‘access’ or ‘imitation’ but ‘collective achievement’. My grandfather invited my sister and me to participate in this collective endeavour in the very moment that he retired from, and lost, his own collective agency. By the sea meeting river that Simon Schama describes in Landscape and Memory, ‘the low gull swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water’,20 we walk along the beach. Here my grandfather helps us to dig a hole half a metre by half a metre square to a depth of half a metre, and then, on careful consideration of the tide and the one or two holiday-makers sitting forlornly near the water’s edge, helps us dig down to a metre, for secrecy’s sake. A treasure of course cannot be something made for exhibition and this would appear to make performance not treasure, un-treasured. But there is an exhibitionism, as well as a secretive streak in the treasure hunter and hoarder, who always has a taste for the elites of initiation – those who are ‘allowed to see’. There is, after all, something of the theatrical within the impulse of hide and seek, recovery and display to a select number who are in the know. If the collective treasure is civilisation, as Caillois once suggested, then the child is required to overcome personal and private treasures which are, by definition, secret, in order to reach his or her ‘collective effervescence’, a state of civility. But performance in and around the moment of revelation provides the peculiarly human machine with the continuing ability to play with this vector of appearance. Performance, and within that broad term theatre particularly, continues to treasure a life caught between these opaque transparencies of the revealed secret to those who wish to know. Caillois sees this moment as strictly finite and limited: ‘Muted and dim for the adult, the word “treasure” speaks eloquently to the child, and sparkles before his eyes with the most glowing power. These syllables, which age, experience and reflection soon render unusable, shine in childhood with a splendour equalling the riches they represent.’21 My own treasure was, like all others, constituted by privileged objects, a shabby but exotic boiled-sweet tin holding a small, chipped but precious bus, a tube with tarnished pennies in it, a tin wrapper wrapped around a headless soldier and a bright new three-penny bit. These objects are, following Caillois’s taxonomy, not rare, but coinage of another realm, not beautiful but brilliant. The key to the pleasure in these effects is not just owning these artefacts. These items are treasure because our pleasure in them comes, as Caillois says, secretarially, in their administration. And of course the privilege of the objects thus assembled must be met by the

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privilege of the hiding place to which they are secreted. The revelation of these objects to friends and family is the gauge of the confidence of one child in another, for after the admiration shown to these precious objects, comes the necessity of the maintenance of the secret and the necessity of keeping the treasure where it has always lain. Here, Caillois suggests, the dependency of the child on the adult becomes, through initiation, the freedom of the child from others as well as the child’s subsequent binding to trusted others in a reconfigured relation of maturity. But the revelation of my treasure was interrupted and circumscribed, and this neat binding of departure and maturation that Caillois outlines somehow unravelled and only found its equilibrium after a decade of disrepair, in performance. I never revealed this treasure to anyone but my sister, who after all had a half-stake in it (though I have not revealed the nature of her objects), knew its whereabouts and would be by my side at the opening of the ground that covered it.22 So I could not have revealed it to her. Maybe she to me? And my grandfather, who drew me into this conspiracy against the adult world, a bountiful mirror image of the other conspiracy that caused me such economic unease, was himself always present at the point and moment of revelation. He was thus never able to escape my centrifugal need as the sole initiate and initiator. He already understudied for my father, and in his bounty he replaced my discomforted sense of self with his own deeply civil, pacifist presence. I was not similar to him, or my father, or for that matter my mother, who brought me up without ever knowing where this treasure was, but just similar. He was my only initiate and remains so many years now after his death, which is why it is in his hallway that I choose to return to finish this book. Since Georges Bataille wrote his seminal essay ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ in the early 1930s, performance has often been theorised as something to do with the economy of production over conservation, the melancholy of loss over the enchantment of reservation.23 For me, and I suspect for some artists, performance has more to do with the revealing reticence of saving and treasure as I have outlined them above. Peggy Phelan might be right when she says, ‘Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance’, but premature when she continues, ‘It saves nothing it only spends.’24 For this reason I would like to place these terms somewhere between the two translations of Marcel Mauss’s words for the economy of exchange: ‘donation’ and ‘gift’, that have become so prevalent in the ethnography of performance. Placing them there releases their tension, for economy and treasure cannot coexist, the one dispels the grounds and conditions of the other, they are incommensurable currencies. As Roger Caillois says: ‘Far removed from economic concepts is the concept of treasure. It is their precise negation. It belongs to the realm of the magical. It invokes an inalienable opulence, not symbols of conventional exchange.’25 What is more, for Caillois treasure can no longer belong to the

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social world: ‘They have nothing to do with law or custom. They are the fruit of an inexplicable larceny or of a sacrilegious pact.’26 I have been trying in this chapter, and the third part of this book, to bring together that inexplicable larceny, acts of criminal activity within the private and public sphere, and from these two dimensions track the emergence of the child of the second part of the book, who leaves the realm of those who were terrified but does not necessarily, mistaking the everyday for the festival, join the order of those who feel they have to terrify. In an economy, characterised at the outset by a president’s global expenditure, what Georges Bataille once called an inverse ‘universal meanness’, I have been looking here for profane performances that can agitate between the sacred respect of the first mode of writing in the first part of this chapter and the civil transgressions of the second. Here a memoir becomes a memorial and both are marked by memory. I am, like Roger Caillois, wondering here where a ‘collective effervescence’ might come from, if not through an economy of expenditure, perhaps a performance of reserve? And I am still looking for the treasure that was reburied, for a final time around my tenth birthday, in a concrete tomb, a metre beneath the surface, at the foot of the esplanade wall, on a beach in Chalkwell running down to ‘the old man himself’, where a million sandy species have died in a ‘first and fatal intimacy’.

Part IV In the Event of Extinction: Natural History & Its Ends

When the curtain fell at last it was an act of mercy. Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

Introduction Man has said what he has to say. He should rest now. But refuses, and though he has entered into his ‘survivor’ phase, he fidgets as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career. E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born If the intimate acts of humans and other animals were staged in Part II of this book, and the engagements once described by the term ‘society’ were refigured in Part III in a series of reflections upon community, collective and democracy, then it remains, in this last part of this work, for nature and its historical ruin to be reconsidered on behalf of performance, seeking a politics without appeal to nature’s sly solutions. But if humans and their society are chimera, nature is surely a spectre so ghostly as to confound any nervous system from approaching it with confidence. On the one hand nature can be quite readily described. When at a garden party at Buckingham Palace in London to mark the centenary of the National Trust in the United Kingdom, a representative of the Trust in the Lake District was introduced to the Queen, she responded in an accent worthy of Helen Mirren: ‘Oh, you mean hills and things’. Like other apparently orthodox institutions considered in this work for their perverse core, this one, though wealthier than most, still retains a radical dimension. We would perhaps all associate hills with the nature of the Lake District, but the inclusion of ‘things’ expands the presumed nature of this particular collective instantaneously. On the other hand, nature is surely only relevant as a category when the specific conditions it is being asked to answer to are explicit. I am writing 249

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this paragraph at a desk in the isolated farming region of the Drôme in the south of France, in a valley called Truinas, notable for being the home of the great poet of ‘nature’, André du Bouchet. Works of the earth and sky such as Dans La Chaleur Vacante and Ou Le Soleil are for many French people (as well as devotees of du Bouchet such as Albert Giacometti and Paul Auster) as evocative a rendering of a material nature as they might wish to imagine.1 Truinas lies on the fringe of the Côtes du Rhône vineyards, where the term terroir has a very specific claim to passionate loyalties and continuity of familial traditions. Réserve de Chasse signs are pinned to trees to alert anyone with a gun that, in the hunting season, they are respectfully expected to refrain from their habit – the remainder to these private reserves are fair game. This ‘nature’ of animal engagement is conducted by a wholly different class to that in Britain, commonly the working and lower-middle class; since the enclosing of land and aristocratic estates in Britain, hunting has always been reserved for an elite. Indeed, a second perverse royal anecdote comes to mind to bear this class distinction out. On a visit to my former University employer in west London, a rather more modest male member of the Windsors asked me what I was doing. I explained that my work over the last five years had been in the local estates, Alton East and West. The visiting royal raised an appreciative eyebrow and dropping his voice to an unappealing whisper asked: ‘Shooting good?’ I was saved by the etiquette and remorseless rhythm of royal line passing from commenting on how apposite was this princely awareness of gun crime in one of west London’s livelier small arms strongholds. I am clearly not going to be able to define nature sensibly here, and nor do I need to. What I do need to do if I am going to conclude this study of politics and performance is untether assumptions about politics that derive from misconceptions about nature, just as in resisting the allure of the political I had to extract presumptions about society, context and environment from the performance mix. If political theatre has in my book not begun to exist, this simply mirrors a state of play, beyond nature, where for Bruno Latour political ecology has not yet begun to exist.2 This is precisely not a book about ‘ecological theatre’ because of the conceptual blind-spots such a proposition would have to tolerate. There is no more point in throwing ecology at theatre and hoping for the best, than there is in prematurely binding theatre and the political or social issues and performance without addressing the serious problems of their more substantial relations. The problems of defining adequately nature, above, is replaced below with the more modest project of putting the term ‘nature’ to work in particular conjunctions with the task of further expanding collectives as the goal. Here politics, what Bruno Latour describes as ‘the progressive composition of the common world’ becomes a shared reinvention of public life that includes theatre, but does not foreground performance in a matrix of

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equivalent practices. Monographs that centre on theatre, companies and individuals are essential but they do need to be plugged back into this wider scene by readers for whom the attractions of the aesthetic may, quite rightly, be the potential for eliding politics as much as sustaining them. There is no presumption here that specialism is not being used widely in this way and wholly creatively to innovative ends. But the exercise in this case has been to explore between the same two covers, in other words, in the same space, the comparative project of competing deliberations to attention to allow for their relative urgency to be estimated. In the light of the above, two versions of the same story might be proposed by way of conclusion. The first, in a spirit of contradiction, traces the natural-historical possibilities of theatre by examining a ‘natural history’ of performance. That is, the way in which the binding of these two apparently oxymoronic terms have always, well before the suggestions proposed here concerning the expansion of the collective, been central to the most interesting writing on theatre and performance. The second, would be to follow Adi Ophir’s example and suggest ways in which a historical sense of nature’s end might energise and frame our discourses, discussions and disagreements regarding performance now, in the time that remains. A messianic postscript gives some hope. These two more or less theoretical narratives, the first genealogical, the second teleological, have their counterparts in the field of performance, as do all those reflected upon so far. Indeed, they emerge in reverse from those practices that shadow with their physical perspectives any quick solutions one might be tempted to secure prematurely from what is on offer. If the early part of this work was part-ghosted by the theatre work of the Sheffield-based Forced Entertainment, and the middle given material measure by Cesena-based Societas Raffaello Sanzio, then this conclusion continues a series of engagements with the Chicago-based performance company Goat Island, beginning with their 1990s work, The Sea and Poison in Nottingham, and a fortuitous discussion at a theatre-café table with Karen Christopher about the origins of their name for a proposed book on animals and theatre. There was no goat on Goat Island, and the island was called Goose Island, and hence the first obstacle that made that largely imagined book unworkable and gave rise to this one. Just as this book was being completed in 2006 the group’s director Lin Hixson announced, in a form of epistle to the company and then their audiences, the nature of their ending. After 22 years of collective practice this recognition and generous embrace of an end allows us to cast back from a future date of ending, the opportunity for an engagement with some last things, some reflections on late work amidst the clamour of the new. The announcement by Goat Island was of course not the first aesthetic auto-destructive act, it joins an eminent lineage of self-imposed artistic closures. Gustave Metzger, who also accompanied many of the discussions

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that gave rise to this book with his presence, was some time ago an apogée of such dissimulations. But given the commitment by Goat Island to a fiercely material, and ecological, understanding of repair and its significance, to acknowledge an end, an irreparable condition by definition, exposed the last work to a different kind of attention. The announcement by Lin Hixson, on 4 June 2006 characteristically linked finality with formality: ‘We want to provide an example of ending, of lastness … We have thus derived a directive for our new piece concerning lastness, which we place alongside the other concerns of the piece.’3 Hixson and her company were not alone. William Forsythe, just two years before, had ‘closed’ his corps Ballet Frankfurt on the withdrawal of significant funding from the local Frankfurt authorities and there were florid e-mail paens circulated from the company declaring the wider significance of such an ending, for the city, for Europe, for ballet itself. And at one point it appeared as though the common writing of death, the last will and testament, would protect Forsythe’s work from reproduction by others less able after he was unavailable to protect its finely honed lineaments.4 But the Goat Island announcement was of a different order. Growing as it did from a legacy of work that had, with unusual sensitivity, concerned itself most rigorously with a spare choreography of rehabilitation, rescue and recovery, of an overtly politicised and yet never political aesthetic treatment of a dominant, hegemonic super power in an age of retreat and right-wing retrenchment, there was a sense in which the announcement of this ending of an aesthetic and pedagogic adventure of the most exhilarating kind was materially bound to the manner of other closures to come. The implication that an essentially aesthetic announcement has wider implications than its immediate impact within a relatively enclosed community of audiences will take some explaining in what follows, but first the complimentary history of The Sea and Poison, a natural-historical understanding of performance needs to be recovered from within the more common social-political critique of contemporary practices.

DESTINATION NATURE There are long precedents for neither being marked nor unmarked in the manner of Goat Island’s most enigmatic choreographic passages. When Brian Saner, a long-moving member of the company, works as he always does between the floor, unlikely elevation and the caring manipulation of objects (almost always wooden objects), he accompanies these choreographic passages with apparently winsome stories and sometimes popular songs. I like the way that all the members of the company move together in the spaces where I have seen their work, in a gymnasium in Reading, in a warehouse in Chicago, in a school assembly hall in Nottingham, at Battersea Arts Centre and the Chelsea Theatre in London, but I am drawn

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to Brian’s movement more than others, perhaps for the model it offers of an intimate act of repair and recovery conveyed upon an object that then is enticed into performing itself for us. There is nothing didactic in this show whatsoever, but the far-fetched sense of a proxy performance proposed earlier seems closer in this theatre company than any other I have witnessed. I think this is something to do with the precise manner in which the company question among themselves, over relatively extended periods of project development, the legitimacy of prevailing claims to our attention and then skew these preoccupations towards apparently naturalised objects, issues and ideas that, in movements that are neither seismic nor semiotic but rather seamless, are stitched back into the fabric of our senses of the world. It is this seamless effect, stitched from materials that by all accounts should not be patched together, that allows a Goat Island event to oscillate between the two imaginary poles of the natural and historical so effortfully (Figure 25). There is labour and it is palpable, it is unlikely that a tall, well-built man could defy gravity otherwise, but the entry of Brian Saner to a collective that once called themselves dancers is effected not by expanding the terms on which that most rigid of categories once relied, but rather exposing those terms themselves to some careful thought to establish how they already accommodate a diversity of practices. To imagine that this distribution of the sensible is any less fiercely policed than that discussed earlier would be naïve. But the ‘stitch’ that I once saw Brian Saner suffer in a breathless moment of recovery, following a particularly energetic klaxon accompanied work-out in The Sea and Poison, might be the acidic clue to how the nature of these seams have been exposed through history. The chameleon participates in the same expanded collective, the camouflage culture, that the actor once might have been expected to inherit on behalf of the human, but has more recently passed to the pedestrian dancer and the contact-improviser (among whom I would number the dancers of Goat Island). This passing, sly civility, going-native movement, renders the outsider visible to the host culture, marked in a nature in which the characteristics of this hybrid state are most interesting at their interface and horizon with the objects and architectural limits where they are interrupted and discontinued. And there is, it must be admitted, a long history to defences against this dissembling, an abbreviated version of which I wish to recount here. It would be neat to mimic the common classical origin of thinking theatre as well as practising it, indeed Aristotle in The Poetics did what he could to reinforce the structures of formal dramatic experience against these duplicitous impulses. But with due respect to this classical origin a ‘Natural History of Performance’ rather takes its bearings from the scripturally enigmatic, sixth-century BC Phrygian slave and fabulist, Aesop, whose nuanced renderings of chameleon cultures provide a far more fluid terrain of animal-becomings than Aristotle’s de Natura could muster. It is

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this hybrid tradition of human-animal narrative that I wish to foreground here, as it is this ignoble, sampling tradition of ‘mixing it’ that connects a founding moment for a contrary theatre theory with a contemporary practice such as that of Goat Island. Of course Aesop is widely considered to be a mythic conflation of a number of figures whose doubtful pedigree has assured his dismissal in the apparently innocent, child-zone fakelore of populist tales. But whether it is Goat Island’s parable-like ending to The Sea and Poison, with a hundred florescent orange frogs emptied onto the floor after the creation of a human fountain, or Romeo Castellucci’s more literal homage in his threatening animal-filled production of Aesop, or Forced Entertainment’s ragged resort to botched animal-heads when things get slow, or Aphra Behn’s limpid eighteenth-century translations of Aesop’s tales, this Phrygian’s influence, methods and serious transgressiveness would appear to be attractive to those whose oeuvre demands serious dramatic attention. In the case of Aphra Behn, it is symptomatic that these animal-translations are never written about alongside her dramatic works, despite how much they say about her affinities as a spy from the English world of dissembling espionage and class-passing. Could it be their overt moralities sit uneasily alongside the quixotic identity-morphing that has attracted us to Behn in the first place? I notice that the collected works of Aphra Behn in the British Library rare books and manuscripts room do not include her brilliant ‘Life of Aesop’, on the grounds that it is, according to her editor, of ‘spurious provenance’, a sure bastard sign that we should take very careful notice of it and what it might mean for the rest of her, and our, theatrical work. Three centuries after Aesop, Aristotle’s philosophy of theatre might as well admit that catharsis is possible because the human is the only animal that weeps. Despite crocodile tears and laughing hyenas, the two modes of theatrical responsiveness are distinctly human, and as markings of that responsiveness have occluded those more bestial senses common to Aesop. Hegel’s aesthetics were also careful to exclude these baser senses from the appreciation of the arts, namely the sensualities of smell and touch. But the applause that greets performance, always, and the booing or braying, sometimes, the ‘racket that theatre authorises’, are both framed within this apparently instinctive behaviour that recalcitrantly returns performance to its ‘natural’ roots at the moment it might imagine it has escaped the indignities of its exposure for the apparent cultural formality of its curtaincall closure. For the ancients, so the early moderns. Harold Bloom, and the John Madden film Shakespeare in Love, have quite recently, and problematically, reasserted the ‘invention’ of the human by Shakespeare (a claim wholly borne out by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscar acceptance speech for her role in that film discussed earlier). As Shakespeare scholars have been at pains to

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point out in recent post-colonial criticism of the genre, to have presumed that the cultural vision of Shakespeare’s works is that of a white (as opposed to barbarian) male human (as opposed to animal) of early modern England is on one level self-evident, but questions immediately arise from the premise. Shakespeare gets interesting textually where the humanist, centred subject of Harold Bloom’s Shakespearean world-view becomes the site and caesura for the erosion of man/animal, male/female and male/ barbarian boundaries through hybrid metaphors in plays such as Troilus and Cressida. Each of these dramatic renegotiations of human-animal limits prepares for the collapse of man/animal boundaries that then leads to the descent and madness of King Lear and the inversion of the chain of being in the later plays. The architecture of Shakespearian London is, in its own right, obviously revealing of these animal-human borderlands, with bearbaiting and the Globe theatre uneasy neighbours contesting a vision of human-animal relations. The names of the bears themselves bear-out the human-animal analogy. In the Elizabethan pantheon Harry Hunks, George Stone, Little Bess of Bromley and Ned of Canterbury were stars in their day. For Jeremy Collier the loose morality of the English Restoration stage broke down the ‘distinctions between man and beasts’. In A Short View of Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, even to pretend to be an animal for purposes of ritual or entertainment was unacceptable. William Prynne declared it immoral to dress as a beast on the stage because to do so obliterated ‘man’s glorious image’. Many moralists shared his objection to animal disguises, and in the early seventeenth century the hobby-horse seems largely to have disappeared from the Morris Dance in England for related reasons. Other ways of humans dressing as animals became uncommon in Britain in the immediate years that followed, until these crossdressings were revived by folklorists in Padstow and artists such as Oleg Kulik thought them worthy of recovery in post-dramatic times. Throughout this period in England, between the 1500s and 1800s it was through animal analogies, as a comment on human nature, that the concept of criminality was devised and developed. Children and women were ‘near animal state’ while the mad and vagrants were treated as beasts. This collusion of rhetorics comes down to the 1980s footballground disasters in England, the most brutal elisions between humans and other animals evident from the populist press prior to the burnings at Bradford City and suffocation of spectators at Hillsborough, Sheffield. As I encouraged earlier, walk down the caged link at Arsenal, in North London, between the underground station and the old ground for a reminder of those recent days. Or listen to Neil Acourt, one of the alleged murderers of Londoner Stephen Lawrence interviewed on the television, equating his brother’s brute-racism with the public perception of he and his thuggish friends as animals for another riff on the same depressing theme.

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As Harriet Ritvo has shown in her seminal work on the historical animal, The Animal Estate, as early as the 1830s the English Humane Society had begun to claim kindness to animals as a national trait and began to associate cruelty to animals with ‘foreigners’ especially those from southern Catholic countries.5 Books were recognised as didactic instruments for children for the first time and the role of the animal to improve and instruct rather than entertain was figured. Kindness to animals began to become a code for a full and responsible acceptance of the obligations of society, where cruelty to creatures was identified with deviance. The need for compassion was equated with the need for discipline. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was a late Victorian offshoot of its animal precursor, the RSPCA, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and aimed to impose moral discipline within the family at the same time that it safeguarded the well-being of children. The rhetoric of ‘animal protection’ simultaneously stigmatised a large section of the Victorian public. If trivial acts of individual defiance threatened the social order, organized animal combats, where crowds gathered to enjoy the mayhem and to gamble on the outcome, are considered by Harriet Ritvo as powerful and premeditated challenges to it. It is in this context that the taming of the wild, from the ‘menagerie movement’ to Wombwell’s spectacular liondisplays (which John Stokes has set in their performance context and were discussed as part of the chapter ‘Ring Side’) and subsequently onto the Victorian stage itself with equestrianism and circus, needs to be placed. Again as with the Shakespearian period, the delinquent escapes this history with the Victorian fascination with hybrids which explicitly violated natural categories, perhaps an expression of the desire to triumph over obstacles mounted by nature. Equally, the propensity for big-game hunting and taxidermy became two related means of dominance over nature, the killing, and then the stuffing, of the other. The modern period is brimming with rather loosely defined and unmaterialised, ‘animal becomings’, after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s anti-Oedipal theory announced a more nuanced set of possible relations between human and animal in keeping with the post-structuralist hybridisation of disciplines and the break-down of boundaries between previously distinct fields. But such easy dialectical becomings also lose sight of the essentially material, species-specific history of these relations as a parallax of performance that I propose here. Josef Beuys, most obviously, working with wolves in I Like America & America Likes Me, but also performance artists such as Rose English and equestrianism, Rachel Rosenthal and pets, Sophie Calle and taxidermy, Olivier Perrier with farm animals in Herisson, are working alongside and within a culture dominated already by the anthropomorphic, and the animatronic, in Doctor Dolittle, Beauty and the Beast, Cats, The Lion King and Spamalot. The effortless animation of a despised and

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much derided luncheon-meat by Monty Python, and its later musical elevation to box-office success, is one of the unlikelier expansions of the collective to include really fatty things during the first decade of the twenty-first century. This short history of the natures of cultural practice dovetail more recently with specific theatrical natural histories against which contemporary performances, such as The Sea and Poison, might be considered practised counterparts. Recent work by Una Chaudhuri on animals, Nicholas Ridout on theatrical problems such as human-animal embarrassment, David Williams on natural magnitude (the sky), Baz Kershaw on ecology, and a broad front of scholars working on species-related questions from cyborgs to ‘human chimera’ might suggest a certain topicality in what has gone before.6 But let me here trace a longer natural history, through a number of theatre writings for which I hold a special regard, in which the genesis of this problematic concerning the human-centric understanding of performance has been an abiding presence and problem. This section maintains an interest in politics of nature as distinct from something as instrumental as political ecology, but also, importantly, it has drawn its impetus from natural nudges and historical hints in recent theatre studies. Richard Southern in The Seven Ages of Theatre, written in 1962, revisioned what a history of theatre might be, breaking with the remorseless tradition of heavy-handed periodisation and classification in his predecessors’ work and, in a projection of ‘new historiography’ before its time, interrogating conceptual movements and historical ruptures in the apparently seamless baton-passing of Western conceptions of theatre history. Richard Southern’s work was concerned with practice and contemporary practice at that, his Seven Ages was a study of ‘forms’ of theatre to provide historical information upon which the planning of new theatres ‘could proceed with understanding’.7 In this audacious and now much neglected work, Southern was bringing us as closely as possible ‘to the problem of what theatre really is’. To paraphrase the former US President Bill Clinton at the height of the Monica Lewinsky affair, it all depends of course on what ‘is’ means and that ‘really’ might not hold up to too much scrutiny in an age of doubt. But these reservations do not detain me. What engaged me when I read this book, the first book about theatre that I had come across, was that the nature of theatre was perceived by Southern to be a ‘problem’. There was an inkling, a hunch, that the self-satisfaction of what passed as theatre might in fact be open to criticism, that there was work to be done on making it make more sense in order that it might become more sensual in architectural spaces more worthy of it. There was more. Not only was theatre a problem but there was an ‘essential’ quality to it that had to be there in the first place for it to ‘be’: ‘… the essential thing to which everything in theatre finally boils down is the performance of the living player … In the end we can lose so much of

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the technical refinements, but we cannot take away the centre of it all, the living player … and his one indispensable technical adjunct – his costume.’ It is a mark of the ‘accretions’ of theatre, undisturbed in England by 1956 ‘and all that’, that Peter Brook was also to have to ‘strip away’ in his work The Empty Space, that Southern feels the need to boil down, finally, essentially, in the end, to find at the centre of everything: the living player. And then to cop out of this simplicity by moving us back out to that second skin of clothing. But what if one paused for a moment with Southern’s zero point before moving out again, not in deference to a certain fascination and fetishisation of ‘the body’ in late twentieth-century criticism, but to dwell as this book has done on a nature of becoming that does not begin with donning the garb of disguise, but asks what the nature of ‘being’ is that is at the heart of theatre. This is an ontological question but only in preparation for asking what it inevitably, if performance is underway, becomes between the organic and the inorganic. Richard Southern himself understood the significance of this animal extract from man and its importance for theatre acts when, as the opening ‘phase’ of The Seven Ages of Theatre, he figured the costumed player through the acts of ‘The Bavarian Wild Man’ on the Eve of St Nicholas Day (6 December). Masked and emerging from the snowy woods: ‘The wild man wears voluminous distorting costumes of animal skins, and heavy concealing headdresses with horns or antlers … Now can we properly call this “theatre”? Can we decide even that the origins of theatre lie here?’8 Well, yes and no. Performance has, since Southern’s time, expanded the field quite comfortably to include acts that disconcert the confines of theatre traditions mistakenly associated with stage and auditoria, while at the same time alerting us to the fallaciousness of ‘origins’, seeking rather inoperativeness, interruptions, continuities, moments and ruptures. While Southern is keen to leave dates behind for ‘phases’, there remains the residue of the historian who sought the security of ‘starts’. The wild-man exhibits a quality of improvisation for Southern which links him with one of the ‘essential elements of theatre’, the animal: ‘This is not the place to trace the significance of this animal element back to see where it came from for that would take us certainly out of the realms of theatre, but we may trace it forward and we shall find it can take on a significance so great as to become the very centre of certain performances – and it would not be too curious to see its survival even today in the fantastic horse of the pantomime.’9 Since this was written theatre anthropology has done much to trace where such dynamics come from. I would not want to trace this ‘animal element’ forward to locate it at the centre of performances now, studies of Sophie Calle, Oleg Kulik and Zingarro will do that work, but rather I have begun to lay out in what has gone before why Southern was being too modest in his claims in the first place, and to argue the centrality of the elemental animal and the animal element for all

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performances, and to suggest that there may be no performance without such an awareness of the horizon of human being in its continuous negotiation with animality. Let’s stay with the player’s passion for a moment before turning our heads to their situation in space. In one of the most intellectually invigorating and funny books written about theatre in the last two decades, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, Joseph Roach explores the nature of the actor’s art with the new historiographical frames of reference hinted at by Richard Southern. Seeking to understand acting within its own historical specificity, and terms of reference, Roach knows that the nature of ‘nature’ is key, that to aspire to a ‘naturalism’ would of course depend on what the contemporary sense of that naturalism might be. As he says: ‘Foucault points out that the word biology did not come into existence – that life as we think of it could not exist as a mental category until the early nineteenth century. If nature as we define it did not exist in the eighteenth century, the theatre historian is bound to ask what Garrick’s critics actually meant when they described his acting as natural.’10 There is little point, following Michel Foucault, in looking back on previous acts through the lens of now, but first establishing then mobilising the lens available to the acts under scrutiny that were active then. Paul Feyerabend, the philosopher of science, had conducted this work brilliantly in his study of Galileo’s Copernican revolution in Against Method, tracing the specific problems of seeing through the telescopes of the early 1600s to establish the significance of rhetoric, vernacular and propaganda to his already confirmed theories. Like Michel Foucault and Paul Feyerabend, Joseph Roach recognises the significance of discontinuities, ruptures and contradictions for knowledge formation. The point of history would not be to gloss over these ‘anomalies’ as he describes them, but to reveal them for what they in turn have to say about the subject in hand: ‘Any paradigm has anomalies – facts which refuse to fit the theory. As a group of practitioners in any field continues its investigations, anomalies tend to proliferate.’11 I am interested in Roach’s use of the word ‘anomaly’ here. He does not take it further but I would like to reflect on its implications, both for what Roach is talking about, a science of acting, and for my own argument about the significance of these natural histories of theatre. It is a word that I have been using throughout this book which has a passing, similar sound to ‘animal’, but a different root with an associated and suggestive array of meanings. The noun ‘anomaly’ refers to an irregularity of condition or behaviour, that is, the condition pertaining to a subject but also, importantly, to a context as well – that is to say, an ‘exceptional circumstance’. It is a word which usefully positions the irregularity of supposedly rational paradigms but also for me points to the act of theatre itself, that is, the anomalous nature of theatre, its uncomfortable and dissimilar irregularities which, like the ‘anomic’, are not concerned

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with the governing law nor with obeying that law. This is what I described in Theatre & Everyday Life as theatre’s ability to question official views of reality. This is not to say that theatre is ‘abnormal’, anomaly has nothing to do with abnormality as it does not perpetuate the myth of what the normal might be, as distinct to the pathological. Indeed, as Georges Canguillhem, a writer who influenced the work of Michel Foucault very deeply, showed in his work The Normal and the Pathological, a history of medicine that accepted uncritically a bond between sickness and pathology, and health and normality, was an inversion of the reality. Canguillhem attacked the assumption that disease was a deviation from a ‘fixed norm’ against which all malfunction was to be judged: ‘Normality begins with the living being, and with that being comes diversity … Diversity does not signify sickness.’12 Canguillhem showed how normality was activity and flexibility, while illness was the state to be defined by stable norms and unchanging values. The far-reaching significance of this inversion for theatre cannot be understated and I attempted to estimate its legacy in the opening of this work, where I sought to reorientate the discussion of what constituted the perverse core of performance studies: its apparent allergy to the spectre of a centre in a celebration of the margin which, lacking critical force, surrendered that margin to a certain conformism. Suffice to say here that the anomalies that have tended to proliferate for the field that practitioners in theatre have investigated have always been about their need to lose themselves, to go beyond limits, to question the very forms (bodily, psychic, spiritual) that the conventions of cultural expression offer while at the same time maintaining the credibility of self, the unity of the actor’s identity, the individuation of the performer from the ensemble and, most importantly, to stay on the human side of the far side. Those who step over, Antonin Artaud is one, are figured as pathological – in fact they are anomalous and closer to the normativity of a healthy theatre, that is, a theatre of flourishing diversity where the condition for erring and drifting is not accidental but its fundamental form – just as Canguillhem said it was – ‘essential to life’. This is what I am referring to when I evoke a vital theatre.13 A theatre that, like the root of the word ‘animal’ itself (anima) is imbued with a vitally extended breath, the breath of ‘a life’. There is a very specific and problematic history to this ‘vitalist’ tradition which, as Joseph Roach has shown, infuses the very nature of performance. It is not a term to wield innocently, but neither is it a term to lose for the sake of rationalist argument. As Roach summarises: In received opinion, animal or active spirits accounted for all the functions now allotted to the nerves, motor and sensory … fire in the heart causes vital heat, turns blood from a thick purple ooze to a volatile

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scarlet, and yields vital spirits …some of the vital spirits then rise into the brain and there, by a final mysterious process called exhalation are transformed into animal spirits. In substance animal spirits resemble wind and fire, more subtle than matter, more material than soul. They reside in the ventricles of the brain and from there communicate down the core of the spinal chord, permeating the porous, twig-like extensions of nerves, penetrating the body, working its muscles, literally animating it, commanding it to life and motion.14 The ecstatic poetry of this system was under siege throughout the eighteenth century with the development of biological and zoological classificatory systems. In urging the philosophical knowledge of the passions of the actor, Charles Macklin encouraged the distinction of: ‘genus, species and individual characteristics, like dogs, fowl, apples, plums and the like’,15 while Johann Jakob Engel in 1785 proposed a science of expressive gesture modelled on the Linnaean system of botanical classification.16 But as Roach points out, ‘something vital was missing’ from the human machine of the eighteenth century: ‘Outside the exalted system-building of philosophers … naïve vitalism never abdicated its reign over common sense: flesh just seemed to have a life of its own.’17 What is interesting about this search for a model of mind and body that would account for innate vitality was the shift that Denis Diderot recognised, from mechanism to sensibility, foreshadowing in nineteenth-century science, the development of ‘life’ as a mental category. The sophistication of the terms of debate are traced by Joseph Roach, the tension between sensibility and sentiment and their relations to sensation and the emergence of Diderot’s third term, ‘emotionality’, in the light of his vitalist materialism: ‘Diderot synthesised the vitalistic and mechanistic explorations of the actor’s body’.18 This intertwining of emotional stimulus, sensation and moral response in Diderot seems complex and modern when compared with some of the easy divides between subjectivity, mystery and rationality offered in contemporary reflections on the art of acting. Imprisoned in Vincennes in 1749, Diderot annotated his copy of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle as though to mark the pedigree of his thought within a naturalhistorical tradition that I have been laying out here. We will return to the founder of secular theories of acting at the end of this book, to ensure that the pervasive catholicity of the foregoing is touched by the inaugural secularism of performance study. So far so illuminating, but also orthodox. What is obvious about this brief ‘natural history’ is that it is very unnatural, it leaves unexposed and unexamined precisely the same ‘dark ages’ that theatre historians are used to noting but can do little about, ellipses in the histories of performance that Western orthodox theatre histories currently work within. Whether these are historical, that curious elision from Plautus to street-performance

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in the medieval period, or geographical, the continued difficulty of recovering anything other than the traditions of other cultures precluding their right to a contemporary sensibility, the test of a natural history of performance might be the degree to which it precisely is able to re-orientate these general, occidental preoccupations, by attending to more local, specific conditions of production beyond these routines. Take, for instance the example set by the eighth-century Iraqi literary scholar, Al-Jahiz, in his monumental work Book of Living Things. This encyclopaedic work of the medieval Arabo-Islamic world provides Daniel HellerRoazen with a surprisingly modern account of the ‘lesser animal’ for his study on speech-loss, Echolalias. The lesser animal, as you might expect from what has gone before is of course the human, and this work has a good deal to say about human and animal performance and a braid of zoological, juridical and philosophical questions of the time that arise from them. This is a compendium from within the classical Arabic literary tradition that moves well beyond the occidental preoccupations above. Al-Jahiz was a great admirer of animals, that was not unusual, their abilities and wonders were commonly written about in the eighth century. But, unlike Aristotle, it is the precision of the comparison with human animals that makes most interesting reading here. Animals are ‘flawless’ while man is, by implication, deeply flawed. But irrespective of the discipline and education that human animals endure, al-Jahiz is in no doubt as to their inability to accomplish spontaneously that which animals achieve ‘naturally’. In turn, for al-Jahiz and for Heller-Roazen, man therefore ‘remains the lesser animal among living beings’.19 Doing less in this instance, in a book of this nature, is an invitation to think in what ways this might mean more. Animals are unable, because perfect, to do failure: ‘Man is made in such a way that when he accomplishes an act that is difficult to carry out, he has the ability to do one that is less difficult.’20 This is a power of performance, Al-Jahiz says, that God has granted to man and man alone. There is no such possibility nor ‘performance capability’ for animals, the performance of the easier act is beyond them. This is why they were trusted to work in circuses, and this is why the funny act with the little dog that bypasses the hoop and runs round the side, while its pack exerts themselves flying through the air, is so haunting. This lesser act has required by definition more, not less training against the animal’s exemplary instincts. Birds could not be Beatles because while melodic, harmonious and rhythmic, they are not able to sing a lesser song. It is only because they were able to put Yellow Submarine on the same album as other divinely inspirational tracks such as Eleanor Rigby that The Beatles marked themselves out as aesthetic creatures. The distribution of the sensible discussed earlier cannot even get going without this simple, rather minor fact being acknowledged. Daniel Heller-Roazen summarises from Al-Jahiz the wider implications of

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this human disappointment: ‘Al-Jahiz suggested that the essence of human action lies in this possibility of reduction; however small or great, a human act owes its consistency to its capacity to be less than itself. It follows that one cannot understand any work of man on its own. To grasp a human action as such, one must look to the shadows of the more minor acts it inevitably projects around it: to those unaccomplished acts that are less than it and that could always have been performed in its stead, or, alternately, to those unaccomplished acts with respect to which it itself is less than it could have been.’21 The implications of this observation for the study of speech, with its defining qualities of disappearance and disruption, are clear. Speech theories have always been conducted with due regard for the disorders that make speech what it is. But here the study of such minor acts takes on a far wider significance. Theatre and performance practices, if not their theories, have both been playing off this revealing paradox for at least a century and longer. Just as Roman Jakobsen asked in the 1940s what it meant for infants to do less than speak, so the pedestrian dance movement of the 1970s gestured towards what it was to less than dance, to walk, to fall, to turn, to sit.22 Indeed, the history of psychoanalysis, as HellerRoazen suggests, might have been different had Freud’s first published writing, On Aphasia and the break-down of the language apparatus of 1891, not been excluded from the standard edition of Freud’s work after his death. And amidst the clamorous spectacle of mega-musicals imitating not life, but cinema, one cannot help reflect on the apparently lost cause of pedestrian dance’s reticence, Roland Barthes’ Neutral or indeed Lars Von Trier’s appeal to stripped-back cinematic rhetoric in his Dogme manifesto and Matthew Goulish’s celebration of the ordinary. Theatre is the venue where the recollection of the lesser animal, as the lesser animal, makes conscious and subjectivizes its participants as actively limited. Heller-Roazen quotes a startling passage from Franz Kafka, an aphorism that illuminates the relationship between such recollection and lesser acts: ‘I can swim just like the others. Only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten the former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, being able to swim is of no help to me; and so, after all, I cannot swim.’23 Though lesser, as a non-swimmer, by the end of this paradox, Kafka’s unidentified narrator is better for it, conscious of a lesser time when unable to swim subtracts from her current status as a swimmer among others. The infernal memory of theatre that simultaneously undoes itself as it seeks to build itself is not far from this unswum swimmer.

NATURAL HISTORY I call upon the tropes, idioms and discourses of natural history for the hinge that they form with the methods espoused in the first part of this

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book, the thirteen axioms that I proposed for a science of appearance and have been working through in the preceding case studies. Natural history is remarkable for its sensitivity to place, its foregrounding of observation within context, its partiality to pedestrian forms of local knowledge, its emphasis on collection rather than classification, its resistance to the closet of scholarship overwhelming the force of the field, its inherently amateur status and its valuing of enthusiasm and auto-didacticism. So here I wish to recover that practice as an expansive paradigm, with possibilities for performance, before I address it critically as the obface of that sociology of theatre that I inadvisably called at the outset of this project showciology. The first question that we might ask in recovering the paradigm of natural history is what is remotely natural about history? As Walter Benjamin said, ‘No historical category without natural substance; no natural substance without its historical filter.’24 Of course, as Benjamin was aware, and worked against, in history, time refers to social change, in nature, time is marked by cyclical repetition. His writing occurred some years after Darwin’s theory of evolution had broken this binary, arguing that nature had a historical course. What was posed as a critique of theology in the hands of social evolutionists had swiftly become a bolstering of aggressive capitalist modes and apologias for capitalism and imperialism. In characteristically dialectical terms, and in resistance to these expansionist politics, Benjamin drew his conception of natural history from his colleague Theodor Adorno: ‘the moments of nature and history do not disappear into each other, but break simultaneously out of each other and cross each other in such a way that what is natural emerges as a sign for history, and history where it appears most historical appears as a sign of nature.’25 Historical approaches to this apparent conundrum with regard to performance could pose the following questions from what has gone before: why is it ‘natural’ that Gwyneth Paltrow should cry out but not shed tears; what drew Aphra Behn to restoring the name of Aesop in the Restoration through translation; what difference did the rationalisation of meteorology have on the conception of the nineteenth-century stage-storm and how to create it with sheet-metal; what is the nature that naturalism portrayed at the turn of the century in London; what is the avant-garde attraction of insects; why has the rhetoric of the chameleon, from the unmarked to the sly civility of the hybrid become the post-colonial political lingua franca of the post-millennium moment? In each case ‘natural history’ could be appealed to as an allegorical mode of enquiry, a metaphoric vehicle for discussion, and a historical reference point with concrete implications for what constitutes the categories under discussion. Compared with Martin Heidegger’s premise that ‘historicity’ is the ‘nature’ of being, the following conclusion contests the parallax relationship of two apparently opposed concepts, nature and history provides a criticism of the other and of the reality each is supposed to identify.

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But Heidegger is not without significance here. The overrated split between practice and theory in theatre-thinking can be sutured through Heidegger’s own natural-mechanical evocation of the way in which we perceive the approach of two cars. As Heidegger said: ‘we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us to all sensations are the things themselves.’ My first car was a Volkswagen, my second a Mercedes, my third, beyond Heidegger’s Germanist industrial sensibilities, a Volvo diesel. Heidegger is right, but the cultural specificity of the knowledge needed to separate the three sounds appeals to my sense of historicity. The things themselves are immediate and instant but only in history. Now when I hear the Volkswagen, I look to see whether it was my Karmann Ghia, perhaps restored from its dilapidated state, when I hear the Mercedes I wonder if it is the family we gave it to who will pass. And hearing both, from the bio-leather luxury of an eco-sensitive Scandinavian motor, and knowing their age, reminds me that neither is doing much for the environment. This is not far from Goethe’s proposition of ‘ur phenomena’: ‘The highest thing would be to grasp that everything factual is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the fundamental law of chromatics. One would never search for anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the theory.’26 Walter Benjamin shifted Goethe’s conception of ‘ur phenomena’ from nature into history. The following continues this move, and in evoking Heidegger’s thoroughly technological and implicitly urban example reinforces the relevance of a natural history to the metropolis and to new nature. In following Marx, Lukàcs and Adorno, Benjamin recognised that ‘second nature’ was alienated and reified subjectivity, that there was a world created by humans who did not recognise it as their own. Here Benjamin meant not just industrial technology but the entire world of matter including human beings as it had been transformed by technology.27 This new nature dates from the industrial revolution and follows the first nature of millions of years of development. So here a conception of natural history is, like the phrase that best described Benjamin as ‘a botanist of the asphalt’, drawn on to attest to the city and the future as it implicitly carries the freight of the country and the past. In evoking the anomalous nature of animals, the first chapters of this book simultaneously distance this project from romantic notions of eco-theatre while reasserting the overtly political challenges of animal rights and their relations with human rites. In evoking actors and ‘other anomalies’ it seeks to reforge the interspecies relationship between humans and other animals that is at the heart of becoming other, at the root of mimesis. In his work, which derives its key theoretical coordinates from Benjamin’s conception of natural history, Michael Taussig in Mimesis and Alterity poses the problematic place of the mimetic faculty between the natural and the cultural. For Taussig the mimetic faculty is ‘the nature that culture uses to

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create second nature.’28 For Taussig mimesis cannot be outside history, nor history outside the mimetic faculty. Questioning the prevalent theses of construction that posits nature as a ‘social construction’, Taussig dialectically questions the equally debilitating reduction of history to nature. In this scenario, like my notion of performance working across the hyphen between natural-history, Taussig notes: ‘mimesis chaotically jostles for elbow room in this force field of necessary contradiction and illusion, providing the glimpse of the opportunity to dismantle that second nature and reconstruct other worlds …’.29 Here Taussig’s focus is the play of primitivism within the mimetic faculty, figured through the ‘first contact’ mimicry that occurs between the crew of Darwin and Fitzroy’s Beagle and the native people of Tierra del Fuego. This is a political space where the distinction between the original and the copy has become blurred: ‘…mimesis as fact and as epistemic moment can be understood as redolent with the trace of that space between, a colonial space par excellence, a windswept Fuegian space where mankind bottoms out into fairy tale metamorphoses with children and animals, so mimesis becomes an enactment not merely of an original but by an original.’30 There is no denying that civilisation in this scenario takes measure of its difference through its reflection in primitives, but for me the sites for study are those metamorphoses with children and animals which, though by no means universal, and always geographically distinct, still appeal to my enquiry into the anomalous as escaping some of the entrapments of the enculturation of the adult. Any natural-history of performance would be tested through the locating of performance practices not just with regard to related species of work, for instance the American avant-garde, or European music theatre, but across species, for the first time treating the complex milieu in which a longrunning musical such as Cats might be considered within the same ecosystem as a one-off performance by Societas Raffaelo Sanzio of Giulio Cesare. The metropolitan cultural milieu, whether London, New York or Sydney in the early twenty-first century seems well able to sustain such apparently diverse performance forms and what is more they share a certain regard from their respective audiences. These audiences, like the theatre they engage with, are ‘becoming’ in the sense in which they move fluidly from one form of performance to another with little respect for the presumed boundaries of taste that have consigned one theatre act to one side, and another theatre act to the other. As Gary Larson, a cartoonist with a very keen sense of the arcana of the natural, might imply, this may be because they are both within mediatised culture on the ‘far side’. I was once at a performance of Candide at the Royal National Theatre in London. I bumped into a colleague who asked me whether I was there to see the first night of the Quebeçoise director Robert Lepage’s new work which he was producing. When I said ‘no, that’s for me tomorrow night’, he suggested I must be the only person in London experi-

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encing those two events back to back, one from the depths of the National Theatre’s repertory, the other from the depths of the Atlantic avant-garde. But I suspect there are many others who make unlikely links between apparently diverse performance forms. Of course my brief descriptions are mundane and misleading, Bernstein’s work turns out to be truly formally challenging where Robert Lepage’s is lyrically conventional in its cinematic mimicry, familiar and therefore consoling in a very un-avant-garde way. The purpose here has been to bring practices previously consigned to different habitats into the same world for consideration, and thus to illuminate some of their contradictions. I may defer the decision as to where in the critical chain-of-being Cats and Giulio Cesare are, but suffice to say here, I have little sympathy for the presumption that one of them is as intellectually challenging as pond-life. Joseph Roach said of David Garrick’s day: ‘…Romanticism, Naturalism and Darwinism had yet to proclaim that we have more in common with the scum on the pond than with the statue in the park.’31 Well, in this book the landscape, as at Chiswick House, the Palladian folly built by Lord Burlington close to my home in London, should panoramically enclose both the aesthetic and the aquatic and reinforce their amphibious relations. Ecologies of performance that are written without due notice of this complexity of theatre are, it seems to me, missing the opportunity to respond to that most challenging aspect of the natural historian’s method, the resistance to classify prior to building a picture of the complexity of the field, and, more importantly, avoiding the challenge that the teeming nature of theatre in all its diversity presents to analysis. Like those historians, the case studies of performance proposed in the second and third parts of this book will seem somewhat limited to anyone familiar with the geography-sweeping spectacle of post-colonial criticism, principally exploring, as they do, practices which have occurred in an area of perhaps no more than five square-miles (about the size of the natural historian Gilbert White’s beloved Selborne in Hampshire) during the half-life of one of its inhabitants at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. I am, with this apparent localisation in mind, principally interested here in posing a counter-tradition for consideration alongside my opening scientific methodology, just prior to biology and usurped, formalised and exiled by biology, that of natural history. I would follow here the simple but effective distinction of Marston Bates which was first published in 1950 and was republished in 1990 as a classic in its field: ‘The explanation of the living process is one thing; the exploration of the diversity of living things is another: and the latter may well be taken as the objective of natural history itself.’ I am interested in foregrounding this diversity as distinct from singular detail for ethical, political and aesthetic reasons. I am not so interested in the vector of recent research, particularly in the field of theatre

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anthropology, on the one hand celebrating difference while constructing a totalising connectedness to all theatre. What is at stake for there to be connections inter-culturally between theatres? I would suggest a reverse validation with colonial appeals to the tradition of the other. In search of pre-expressive behaviours, extra-daily dimensions of the performing body, the multitude of different locations and contexts from which work of great detail and merit has arisen have been subsumed into vague and rather picturesque backdrops, exotic tromp-l’oeil to the enquiry of real significance, that is, an enquiry into performance. But here the techné that reveals itself somehow obscures like a chiaroscuro the ground from which it arose. Here the cartel that is the culture of performance pedagogy is able to absorb a set of techniques, appropriate and appropriately translate them to home interests without necessarily having to take them on board (if such a marine metaphor does not sink the colonial import of what I am trying to convey), the implications of certain acts in certain places. So while biology serves, like psychoanalysis and semiotics, the very real need for detail, it, like both, would seem to miss the wooden performance taking place among the trees. Marston Bates is aware of this in his defence of ‘Natural History’ as an unsung and unpopular paradigm when he remarks: ‘How did all these different things come about; what forces governed their evolution; what forces maintain their numbers and determine their survival or extinction; what are their relations to each other and to the physical environment in which they live?’ These are concerns which strike me as being as urgent and contemporary, genealogical questions grounded in causes and effects. They are for Marston Bates: ‘the problems of natural history, problems that concern us ourselves as animals and that concern us even more as originators of this thing we call civilisation, which is, after all, merely a rather special sort of animal community’.32 But the degree of specialness is important to me here for it would seem to me that in this specialness appears the mimetic behaviour, what Jean Marie Pradier in talking about the actor/ designer/singer described as a ‘restored and restoring animal-man’, what Richard Schechner describes as the facility for ‘restoring behaviour’, what Michael Taussig after Walter Benjamin evokes as the mimetic faculty of ‘second nature’. All communities, animal and human, exhibit mimetic behaviours but only in human society are they banalised, reduced and emptied of their potential power, meaning and worth with quite such insouciant ease.

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This book has been in part about those things that become a matter of politics through performance. But what happens when those things end, when the open, the coming community, the expanded collective become

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closed? Theatre’s ‘go dark’ but what if they were to ‘stay dark’. If theatre has a natural history one might think of it as a dialectical one, a ‘birth to presence’ in one philosopher’s words, ‘emergent appearance’ in another, a ‘becoming’ in yet another. Theatre is the intimation of a becoming other than oneself, and becoming oneself of course, but also an interruptive device that instigates the disruption of the continuity of our engagements. This parallax process of performance is always public, in the sense that it is witnessed, initiating an ethics of association, and is always placed in the specific relations it engages with the logics of a site through the duration of the event. Holding these foregrounds and distances simultaneously no longer requires special pleading among theatre thinkers and practitioners. What does deserve just one more argument is the potential finality of this exchange, that is, not the end of Nature, but extinction itself as the ultimate undialectical event for the author and the actor. So, a closer look at the hyphen between the natural-historical along which performance ferries back and forth in its second nature of mimesis might alert us to the distances involved between culturally mediated concerns about such limit-situations and experiences of them. These are not all dead ends. The beauty of Jerry Killick’s final soliloquy at the close of Forced Entertainment’s troubling production The World In Pictures, in which he imagines for the audience their own disappearance in 100 years, the disappearance of any memory of them in 200 years, the disappearance of the theatre in 1000 years and the disappearance of the city in 10,000 years, is coda-ed by a hopeful epitaph. Smiling wryly, he reminds us that the last two hours in our company has been a pleasure and wishes us a good-night.33 In Theatre & Everyday Life I undertook a survey of the first human venue, the everyday, and demonstrated how theatre had become removed from the everyday in return for its privilege as a cultural artefact. The status of theatre often rested on the maintenance of these distances rather than their recognition. In the second part of that book I wrote about the relations between the given and the created, pointing out that beneath the depths of the everyday lay an even more threatening remainder to cultural production, the natural, which if admitted might overwhelm all the coordinates of what performance might be considered to be. When I said inundation, I did mean drowning, but not quite in the spirit that the philosopher Adi Ophir means when he says: ‘The planet of the drowning is our planet.’34 I was fearful of that inundation myself and I did not take this further at the time, but returned to it in this book in general, and in Amsterdam in particular, in the hope that the two books when placed side by side might be seen to be of related species, and that both will be seen to bear relation with a fecund contemporary environment of thought and practice exploring questions of cultural practice within ‘new nature’, ecologies of performance, animals in culture and history, evolutionary ethics, and neo-human hybridities. Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement therefore, as I said at the outset, might act as a prequel to the book written before it rather than a

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sequel. This chronological reversal, a convenient way of acknowledging that curious realisation that one has discovered the meaning of what one writes towards the end of that process, shares something with George Lucas’s reverse logic in the Star Wars saga where ‘two’ comes before one. The second thing this book shares with Star Wars, from a different direction, is a means by which to conceive the limits to the human in performance. This book sought to track this unnatural history and the implications for humans and other animals in the dissembling of personhood in contemporary cultural practice. This might have appeared somewhat metaphorical in places, but it does have a material history that joins the Lascaux caves to the Hollywood hills. In The Phantom Menace, which opened in Britain on the day I began writing this book, the concepts of acting and effects (FX) had effectively become conflated as a number of the supporting cast were non-human. As Peter Bradshaw pointed out at the time in his review of Lucas’s film for the London edition of The Guardian, this used to mean: ‘some tiny or limbless unfortunate sweating in a hairy costume in the film studios at Shepperton and then in the traditional Lucas/Spielberg manner, being chillingly excluded from the film’s promotional material lest their real presence damage the picturesque illusion’.35 It occurred to me when reading the review that this human animal past, the phenomenology of costuming that links the early 1970s Star Wars with its medieval skin-acts’ counterparts, was about to be irrevocably ruptured from the ‘electronic present’. Where the performer’s aspiration to be other once naturally invited it into the realm of the animal, now in mastered and manipulated film that animal has taken on a different life of its own, no longer moored in the harbour of humanity but docked in the digital. In this not wholly dystopian moment I thought it might be worth pausing to recover the lineage of actor-animal relations in performance before one side of that natural contract becomes the experimental space for appropriating the other side. As with cloning, the digital re-mastering of filmcreatures is bound by its logic to include humans, returning film to its roots in the zoopraxiscope of Eduard Muybridge’s horses and the early animation of human figures. Now a real actor need only be the template for the digitally animated version. This was most prominently the case in The Phantom Menace with Jar Jar Binks, a creature with eyes out on stalks and a ‘good nature’. Peter Bradshaw takes note of the way he says things like, ‘We’s a goin’ home’ and ‘Me’s a scaaaaared!’. Jar Jar is supposed to be black: or rather he is a kind of interplanetary, convenient Lucas-films-variant on black. With his comic subordinate status, he is the foil to the pretty Wasp heroes: the Queen and the Jedis. Jar Jar is an old-fashioned token black, a real eye-rolling ‘yessuh massa’ character to boot, with everything but the actual pigment. The debate over Jar Jar’s pedigree, and the provocation to race it entails, is read as a one-way human street between an oppressed and an oppressor. But it has not been read in the other direction, for how this issue of race is

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naturally bound up with other questions of identity that place Jar Jar closer to creature than to human. We read the controversy as one of identity politics unmooring the anthropomorphism of that claim from the responsibility to read the creature in its own terms. Our human-centric systems of knowledge expect us to deliver human-centric outcomes to controversies of this kind. They cannot fathom what an animal epistemology, or perhaps in this case, an inter-planetary epistemology might offer. The sagacity in this saga might be one of the unforeseen spin-offs of a very millennial mania. We write human-histories of fields of practice because we are human, but, as Michel Foucault has shown, this apparently natural human-centric relationship to the construction of knowledge, epistemology, is itself a construction of relatively recent origin. The eclipse of multifarious naturalhistories by a discipline called ‘biology’ is one vector of the professionalisation of knowledge and the reclassification of the order of things according to enlightenment ideals of rationality and systematic elegance. But when it comes to theatre, according to popular lore, ‘the most human of the arts’, this elegance has eclipsed the delinquent way in which performance conducts its business. As I have reiterated throughout, semiotics and psychoanalysis are two disciplines that seemed to hold some promise for understanding performance but are inherently context-phobic. They expertly reveal layers within while maintaining the illusion of a ‘body of work’ identifiable and isolatable from the host culture without. This may be unfortunate for those who wish to understand more about the potential and possibilities of performance as distinct from what they already achieve, but it is not surprising. Disciplines have worked hard to rid themselves of the amateur status of the natural historian and any form of lay analysis is treated with contempt by those vested with holding the borders of disciplines prey to incursion from the everyday. Just check out the late hour and back-room location of so many evening classes in car mechanics and cookery for how these quotidian knowledges are perceived by mainstream education. The history of psychoanalysis itself, ferociously defended by Freud as a lay form of analysis, is itself ironically a victim of the professional medicalisation of illness. With the eruption of the audience, ironically led through the televisual obsession with the docu-soap and ‘quarantine scenarios’ at the turn of the millennium, comes a certain renewed expectation, dormant since the enlightenment, that the lay-man or woman will recognise themselves and their surroundings in the transmission of knowledge.

THE LAST HUMAN VENUE So, if the axioms played out in the foregoing chapters have had any purchase on the conditions within which performance operates, the following concluding claims might not be too far-fetched. Nature and those things

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once consigned to it are now in the process of being drawn towards the collective for consideration as to the extent to which they are matters of fact, to be appreciated, or matters of concern to be acted upon. Meanwhile those activities and claims, formerly categorised within embracing portmanteau terms such as ‘society’, ‘context’ and ‘environment’ are simply described, as endeavours, tasks to be realised, repeatedly performed and acted upon anew. The intimacy of singular individuals hovers between this new nature of things, and that old call to engagement in a space called community-in the-making. It was this arrangement to which I wanted to give the name: the last human venue. In that venue the soft humanism of political theatre has given way to a slower, but harder politics of performance that traces the associations of the social and interrupts the continuity of inequalities, suffering and loss. Theatre in this venue is one among a number of machines that register and measure the strangeness of the human in their animal company and stage the excitements, disappointments and saturated senses of a life coming to an awareness of the intimacies of itself and its engagement with others. The significance of the last human venue, theatre in the age of urban modernity, is that it was the first theatre to understand itself as an ‘epochal theatre’, with a sense of the present, but also for the first time a sense of its newness was braided with a vivid sense of its ending. The whole point of the venue was the way in which its time did not correspond with ‘its times’.36 The relativist excuses of postmodern fragmentation cannot account for the simple fact that: ‘In the present time, the end of the world appears as a common horizon of the whole world that determines a common future for this era.’37 The oeuvre of Goat Island since their work more than a decade ago on The Sea and Poison would appear to trace this common horizon through their working methods. The simultaneous production in London of The End of Reality by Richard Maxwell, and The World in Pictures by Forced Entertainment in the Fall of 2006, announced through quite different aesthetics, yet strangely comparable atmospheres, a not disconnected sense of epochal finality. This sense of an ending could not only have been because my own project was nearing a conclusion (though such confusions about the apparent symmetry between ones own rhythms of work and others should never be wholly discounted). Such an end, as Heidegger was aware, would not be signified as an ‘event’, rather a certain acceptance of finitude, an anticipation of it, as Goat Island and Jerry Killick have done, and not a completion of it.38 It is this finitude that Adi Ophir describes as ‘laying a common ground’. The difference between these endings and those of other eras is the degree to which they are no longer eschatological beliefs but predicted on the commonly available proliferating data of pollution and global warming, they are scientific truths. There is no messianic quality to the evening news but a rather prosaic adaptation to circumstance for the neo-human now wedded to a catalytic converter here

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a low-carbon emission freezer there. Inconvenience has now become the key register of a certain future discomfort. Extinction is available in (at least) three relatively accessible and welldocumented contemporary modes: by nuclear accident or endeavour, by ecological disrepair and by the ratcheting up of mass exterminations common to genocides of the last century. Each has their own time and, apparently, site of conduct. But as Adi Ophir makes clear, however they operate, they would appear to converge at ‘an end’. It is perhaps a petty solace to speculate whether it is performance or thinking that is extinguished first, just before this end, but such thought certainly sharpens the tired debate regarding the relationship between practice and theory. If, as Adi Ophir says: ‘The end is a being without witness,’39 then it is that witless witness-less condition that marks the end as one from which performance will be a relatively early casualty. In this sense it is quite the opposite of the saturated space of the witnessing of the end of all performances. The late loss of witnesses reminds us that each of the modes of extinction are measurable, and are being measured, in the present era. There are attempts to measure nuclear proliferation, ecological disaster and the historical repetition of genocides as so many varieties of act and accident. And it is, perhaps inevitable that the arts are corralled in this end to play the siren warning: ‘If there are still poetry, science and thinking, they should sound to us as the music played on board the Titanic would have sounded had the passengers only known how to see the iceberg.’40 The last human venue was the place where the position of the human animal in relation to such an end became measurable in each of these regards. All understandings retained a sense of this distance, with an eye to an end and an awareness of those conditions that were not yet evident which would necessitate the appearance of such an end. We can, in Adi Ophir’s affirmative prose, always estimate this distance through thinking and lengthen this distance, from or to an end, not only through acting, but through action. The time that remains in this scenario would appear to be one of hope therefore. Having begun to measure these distances, having begun to act in the interests of their lengthening, the last human venue would appear to be a venue with a purpose, even if that purpose is still not political but finally at one with politics. If the word ‘venue’ in its original French form meant ‘a coming’, then this place would appear to be the assembly of those before any second coming, any messianic or metaphysical aspiration to transcend the materiality of the threat of an ending. But the venue was also, in its earliest use, the laying of a legal action, where a jury might be assembled to hear a trial. This was the scene of a real or supposed action, or event, and a place of disputation. And this venue was only latterly, as late as the 1960s perhaps, described as the site of a theatrical performance. The recollection of the trial is a welcome reminder not just of the manner in which the human laboratory tested its objects and subjects, but also

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measured these against the judgement of an assembly drawn from the lay community, a jury of peers. It would be their expansive collective feel, their commitment to understanding, their excitement in the proceedings and their willingness to restart their deliberations that would be models of action worth setting against the expertise of the professional, however apparently lucid the exposition of the brief that professional had been hired to defend.

THE FRANCISCAN MODEL My grandfather spent his retirement from the Civil Service in acts of mowing, neighbourhood charity and prayer. In this he was at least parthuman, for as Cioran once said: ‘Man certainly began praying long before he knew how to speak, for the pangs he must have suffered upon leaving animality, upon denying it, could not have been endured without grunts and groans, prefigurations, premonitory signs of prayer.’41 He had two religious icons in his hallway, one a large, dark, portrait of St Christopher carrying a small child with a halo across a torrential river. The lustrous depths of the painting were unfathomable from below, but helpfully my grandfather had cut three characters from the newspaper, ‘Mr.’, and stuck them with glue over the St. on the brass title plate. The excommunication, or demotion of Christofero by the Vatican, from saint to secular, had galvanised in my grandfather some seriously contrary hagiography of this child-bearing commoner. Beneath the painting on a small hall-table stood a foot-high plaster statue of St Francis. In his customary brown habit, hooded and encircled with white birds, with creatures at his sandaled feet, this half-religious, half-secular hybrid stood as a reminder to the possibility of being marginal without being heretic, revolutionary without being nihilistic, spiritual and ecological.42 The Franciscans were more concerned with what ‘lay beyond’ than the holiness, or not, of the towns, especially caring for the well-being of those new immigrants from that beyond, a lay society that Jacques le Goff describes as becoming increasingly active in religious life between 1250 and 1300 in Umbria.43 These lay movements read the bible in the vernacular and actively distinguished between ‘aperta’, those narratives accessible to all, and ‘profunda’, those dogmatic statements reserved for the clergy.44 My grandfather liked him for all this, but especially because he didn’t like the privacy of confession. From the twelfth century, the collective act of lay confession common to St Francis, and the assembled distribution of penance, became for the first time a private act of whispering into the ear of a priest. I suspect this incarcerated, over-occupied chamber, reminded my grandfather too much of other ghosts in the machine for which he was responsible, other public secrets that he would have just preferred to have

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been public knowledge. Francis was not a miracle-maker, rather the liver of an exemplary life. Indeed the showy virtue of miracle enactments was for the first time, through Francis, subordinated to an everyday engagement with suffering and loss, repair and reaffirmation. Instead of these miracles, Francis was marked by a certain performance prosaicness, he ‘stood out from his companions as a minstrel, a jongleur.’45 He was the first Christian to carry the stigmata, but was so embarrassed by them that he began to travel by donkey covering himself in his characteristically modest robes. He was also unusual for the number of women he knew and his choice to keep their constant company. Franciscanism is the forebear of the early modern revolution in the rendition of animality, without that movement, artists would have continued to be as unfaithful to the portrayal of the animal as they had been since the cave. San Francisco was there, in the happy hallway of my grandfather’s home, because of his affirmation of joy against the morose ‘accedia’ in sadness of his monkish forebears, self-obsessing and dedicated to their tears. He was, of course, quickly followed by the reassertion of masochistic Christianity that characterised the Catholicism I left for theatre. I was attracted to this statue and what it appeared to stand for during a strange time at school when my writing became too small to read. Francis, too, rejected bibliographies and books whose materialism was risking the secular, chivalrous culture of the oral troubadours. 46 Books, by contrast, were luxury items for possession rather than distribution. And of course, above all, his was a pedestrian movement, breaking with the isolation of monasticism, for whom the poor meant the poor. Francis loved the family not in some contemporary, banal binary tension with the individual, but in its more radical unsettling of the ‘Order’. And in an age that paid no attention to children, minors were central to his wandering world, he was, for my grandfather at least, the coming community. Francis’s hands were crossed, not in prayer, but as though pulled in opposite directions by the animals around them, like a straightjacket across his habit. He was humanised by being less than he once was, a plaster castoff, the loss of some fingers to the birds, so the direction of this ambidextrous coming and going was difficult to ascertain. His destination would appear to have been neither nature nor culture, there was no destination in that hallway, but the threshold of a human venue where premature endings could always begin again for those who arrived too late, the posthumous ones.

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Postscript

Much has been written about the first human beings: someone ought to have a go at writing about the two last. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

The paradox of the actor We have the enthusiasm of the Parisians for theatre in the eighteenth century to thank for the first secular rendering of the art of the actor. The dialogue to which Diderot gave the title Paradoxe sur le Comedien has reached an impasse when one of the antagonists, named Second, proposes to the other, First, that they might test their theory, developed at length and on foot, and repair to the theatre. This interruption to the abstractions of conversation, this diversion from the path of speculation to encounter evidence, is a feint, a gesture towards theatrical practice destined to return us to the prose of the world. Diderot, the storyteller looking on, describes what happens: ‘Our two interlocutors went to the playhouse, but as there were no places to be had they turned off to the Tuileries. They walked for some time in silence.’1 In fact they are muttering to themselves, and Diderot insists he can only report on ‘the ideas of the man with the paradox’. We either have to assume here that Diderot is hard on the heels of First as he walks to the Tuileries with Second, or, as one might have suspected that First speaks for him and Diderot parrots these words because they are his. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe makes play with this dilemma about which he says ‘nothing allows us to decide’.2 The question being considered here is: ‘Who states the paradox? What is the subject of a paradox?’ The paradox for Diderot, or First, or both, was of course: ‘Do not people talk in society of a man being a great actor? They do not mean by that that he feels, but that he excels in simulating, though he feels nothing ….’3 Diderot, or First, would have been reassured by that Oscar-winning occasion reflected upon earlier when Gwyneth Paltrow cried out in that 277

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memorable, expressive way, but did not shed tears. In this career-defining performance the essence of the emotion has well and truly been subtracted from the accidental that might mar its clarity. It is not that Gwyneth is unfeeling, it is just, as Diderot explained, that her feelings are not ours and strangely do not even appear to be her own. Judie Dench, beaten, utterly passive in the audience, unblinking in the face of the Academy cameras, makes that quite clear. The repetitions of the mirror phase, in Gwyneth’s case played out in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, replace the natural history of loss that first gave rise to them. Here, in the strictly policed 40 seconds of past intimacies, 40 years of future engagements are signed and sealed.

The parallax of the performer The dilemma for Diderot, at once First and Narrator who is not First, is the true parallax of the performer for these are ‘incompatible places’.4 It is this revealing antimony that like others in this book gives us the irreducible gap from which a conclusion might arise.5 This parallax, between the two incompatible subjects of Narrator and First, is marked by an act of enunciation with no part, and no place, and this parallax comes about because it is a paradox that is being enunciated. As Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe puts it more philosophically: ‘…would not the enunciation of a paradox involve, beyond what it has the power to control, a paradox of enunciation?’6 If a paradox is an equivalence of contraries, then a parallax is the desistance of similarities. It is not so much a question of the difference between this and that, but rather, as Gemma reminded us in Tropicana at the beginning of this book, the minimal difference between this and this. These contraries share a resistance to the dialectical operation for, in parallax, both are equally without resolution. If this is the parallax of the performer, then the paradox of the actor is more accurately the ‘absence or suppression of any property’, the caesura marked earlier by the workings of the anthropological machine to activate a propriety, any property, for the human. It is therefore not just the disappointing man, the underachieving human that marks the actor – that would, in the end, be rather dull. Rather, this paradox would suggest that the performing man and woman must be a ‘man and woman without qualities’, somebody who is literally beside themselves, their part played by those who have no part. It is nature that has given this sense of nothing to the human, simply, what Lacoue-Labarthe calls: ‘a perpetual movement of presentation’.7 This gift, our birthright, is the gift to be improper on every occasion. That is our potential for politics. This vertigo ceases for Diderot with a decision, a decision concerned with affects, that is, when one becomes subject to affects, pre-eminently through performance, one becomes subject. When possessed with oneself through affects, the subjectless mimetic actor, who is by definition active, becomes

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the uncontrolled and unmanageable subject of a passive mimesis. It is the decisions that are potential within mimesis that Diderot perceives to be the potential politics of the mimetic act. Theatre in this sense might not in itself be political, but it is the decisive art of the indecisive human, the lesser animal. The parallax of the performer is the promise that they fail to keep, the paradox of the actor is the promise that is beyond them. If as Nietzsche said, the human is the animal that can promise, then a divine commitment, a promise of repair to Mary and Martha, whose brother’s body was irreparable, might be a last opportunity to consider these human limits.

The Lazarus affect This paradox of the actor must have come from somewhere. When Diderot was the age of my children, growing up in Langres on a limestone promontory in north-east France, at odds with his cutler family and his local Jesuit college, he would have been a regular visitor to the Cathedral at the top of town, Saint Mammès, just 100 metres from the gabled house in Place Chambeau where he lived. In the far North West chapel of that cathedral was a sixteenth century stone-relief depicting the raising of Lazarus from the dead (Figure 26). Lazarus, now, still, stands on his tomb, a solid stagelike platform, and is surrounded by a large audience of onlookers. The witnesses to this miracle are clearly divided down the middle and separated by an angel that delimits the horizon of the work. To the right as you look up are the disciples, all 12 of them, apparently bored with the apparition before them. They have clearly seen this kind of thing before. To the left are a symmetrical group of locals, but they are not bored. They are astonished and exclaim their amazement at the act with their hands to their faces and their jaws dropped. This fear is founded in the fetid, the stink of Lazarus is a mortal reminder of the temporal limits of the flesh.8 The age-old signification of the ennui of the professional and the affective enthusiasm of the lay community is obvious. Diderot might have had confirmed, in this depiction, a cloying sense that Langres and its limits could not hold him, and the capital called. But he took with him from this cathedral, to the Tuileries in Paris, a memory of the paradox of the performer, who having been granted ‘a life’ would generate concentration and distraction in equal measure. This is the Lazarus affect, the hopeful feeling that follows a theatrical effect that you know to be true.9 The Lazarus affect reminds us that the last human venue, unlike the irreparable world, has always been a place where you are given the chance to begin again, to recall how intimate an engagement could be and how truly political such reticent acts could become. This is the truth of the banal miracle that is performance – the redeeming paradox of an opening night in a dark theatre. That Lazarus has lost his hand to an accident of history suggests the care we might take now with our future gestures.

Notes Preface 1 Rebecca Schneider, ‘What I Can’t Recall’, in A Performance Cosmology, eds. Judie Christie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 113.

Introduction 1 Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005. 2 Largely, but not quite. See Joe Kelleher, ‘Human Stuff’ in Contemporary Theatres in Europe, ed. Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 21–33 for a contemporary account of performance by an exemplary watcher that was published just as this volume was submitted for publication. 3 For this and other references to measurement see: David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Gestures of Ethical Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. xvii. 4 See Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, p. 29. 5 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, London: Verso, 1992. 6 See Ridout (2006), Simon Bayly (2001), Joe Kelleher (2006), David Williams (2006), Adrian Kear (2005) and Adrian Heathfield (2004) respectively for the shared conversations that propelled the arguments here. 7 Richard Schechner in interview with Richard Gough, ‘Towards Tomorrow?’ in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Judie Christie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt, London: Routledge, 2006, p. 235. 8 See Bruno Latour, Reassembling The Social, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 for the framing text for this expansion of the collective. 9 Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, London: Pluto Press, 1979. 10 See Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals. Trans. Rela Mazali and Havi Carel, New York: Zone, 2005. 11 As this text was nearing completion James Thompson and Richard Schechner edited an excellent edition of The Drama Review (48, 3 (T183), Fall, 2004) the contents of which provide further evidence for the arguments here. The editors’ introduction: ‘Why “Social Theatre”?’ includes the energetic voluntarism inherent to the field: ‘by creating a theatre of, by, and with silenced, marginalized and oppressed peoples, social theatre workers assert that we all can experience performance in a broader and deeper way than before’ (p. 16). But the italic on ‘all’ is telling, its forceful font can only reveal the gap between the evidence of such practices within and the limits of those practices elsewhere. This book seeks to demonstrate why that ‘all’, as previously examined in Theatre & Everyday Life (Read, 1993) is more elusive than the signifier suggests. 12 Giorgio Agamben, L’Aporto, L’uomo e l’animale, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001, especially ‘Macchina anthropological’, pp. 38–43. 13 Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. This book was completed before the publication of Stage Fright, but having read an early manuscript of the Introduction 280

Notes to pages 8–15 281 for Cambridge University Press I am trusting that the original proposed title of ‘the undoing of theatre’ still relates to the central arguments of the published volume. Other work in this field includes that of Goulish (2000), Kear (2005) and for an early analysis, see Read (1993), pp. 53–4. Doreen Massey, ‘The Strangers beyond the Gates’, in ‘On Civility’, ed. Alan Read, Performance Research, 9:4, December 2004, London: Taylor & Francis, 2004, pp. 116–22; also Rustom Bharucha, filmed in conversation with Alan Read, Roehampton University, London, UK, 3 October 1997. Ridout, Stage Fright, p. 67. See ‘Claiming kin: An experiment in genealogical research’, in Jackie Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 171–99. Madeline Bunting, ‘Yours, mine and ours’, The Guardian, London Edition, G2 Section, p. 8, 18 May 2007. Adam Phillips, Side Effects, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006. See Eleanor Kaufman, ‘Why the Family is Beautiful (Lacan Against Badiou)’, Diacritics, 32:3–4, Fall/Winter 2002, pp. 135–51. The palpable limitations of recent work by Guillermo Gómez Pe~ na, Orlan and Station House Opera in three wholly different genres is not so much the point, each is as perfect as it can be, rather the presumption in critical writing that there is something inherently radical in each of these artists’ work is deeply conservative. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 11–13. Isabelle Stengers, in Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, A History of Chemistry, trans. Deborah van Dam, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 257. Ibid., p. 257. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 1–7. Gabriel Rockhill’s ‘Introduction’, in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum, 2005, p. 1. Ibid., p. 12. Ridout, Stage Fright, pp. 158–9. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans, Peter Connor et al, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Ophir, The Order of Evils, pp. 579–626. E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998, p. 45.

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Part I On the social life of theatre: towards a science of appearance 1

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This study is situated between two key texts both by Bruno Latour: Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004), which is drawn upon in the latter part of the book, and Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005) that provides the framework for the following chapter. The ‘infrastructural imagination’ is a term I have heard Shannon Jackson use in other contexts and I adopt it here as a mark of interest in her developing project.

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19

20 21 22 23

Alan Read, Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993/1995. Zˇizˇek, The Parallax View, p. 17. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 334. Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 35. G. K. Chesterton quoted by Zˇizˇek, ibid., p. 35. The question of ephemerality and its discursive limits for performance study are simultaneously being engaged by Susan Melrose and Rebecca Schneider. This paragraph situates performances within a matrix of ideas presented in Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, London: Verso, 2005b, especially the final chapter ‘Politics as Truth Procedure’, pp. 141–52. Janelle Reinelt raised this concern with my reading of the politics of margin and centre in a personal editorial communication. The subsequent interpretation I undertake is my responsibility alone. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 27. Ibid., p. 28. Vito Acconci: ‘I’ve talked about coming in from the side, and coming up from underneath, and clinging on like a leech. I’d welcome the chance sometime, the risk of having to start from the center; then I’d have to make my own center, I wouldn’t have the luxury of reacting’, in Diagrams/Dialogues in Public Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, p. 175. Richard Sennett, keynote address to the international symposium Civic Centre, Reclaiming the Right to Performance, London School of Economics, Saturday 12 April 2003, see ‘On Civility’, Performance Research, 9:4, 2004. See the exemplary issue of Performance Research edited by Ric Allsopp, Emil Hrvatin and Goran Sergej Pristas, ‘On Form/Yet To Come’, Performance Research, 10:2, June 2005, especially Bojana Kunst, ‘Yet to Come; Discontents of the Common History’, pp. 38–46, and Aldo Milohnic, ‘Direct Action and Radical Performance’, pp. 47–58. ‘The street is the stage’ in Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 45–93. See Allsopp editorial to Performance Research, ‘On Form’: ‘the question of form – of how, where, with whom and for whom performance takes place, becomes visible or manifests itself as a point of resistance or a moment of slippage or connectivity – seems to be as immediate and pressing as ever’ (2005), p. 1. See the excellent summary of these debates in Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 29–53, and for three other refreshingly partial perspectives, see Jill Dolan, Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practise, Activism and Performance, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001, Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, and Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis, Drama/Theatre/Performance, London: Routledge, 2004. See Bernard Williams, The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. See ‘Lay Theatre’ in Read, Theatre & Everyday Life, pp. 23–57. See Simon Bayly, ‘What State Am I In?’, in Kelleher and Ridout (2006), pp. 206–7. There are some excellent books on political theatre including Baz Kershaw’s The Radical In Performance: From Brecht to Baudrillard, London: Routledge,

Notes to pages 28–33 283

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36

37

38 39 40 41

42 43

1997; and more recent work by Sonja Kuftinek, Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater, Southern Illinois University Press, 2003; and Helen Gilbert, Sightlines: Race, Gender and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre, Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1998. See Dominic Johnson’s exhaustively researched PhD Thesis, Touching The Dead, Courtauld Institute, University of London, 2007. See Ridout, Stage Fright, pp. 3–4. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwarb, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 67. Ibid., p. 67 See the excellent issue of The Drama Review, and the more problematic introduction to it: ‘Why ‘Social Theatre?’, James Thompson and Richard Schechner, 48:3 (T183), Fall 2004, pp. 15–16. Philippe Descola, in The Society of Nature, trans. Nora Scott, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. xiii. See Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance, London: Routledge, 1999; and Ales Erjavec, Postmodernism and the Postcolonial Condition, Politicized Art Under Late Socialism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Alan Read, Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday, London: Routledge, 2000a, pp. 1–4, and pp. 321–9. Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 6. See Robert Shaughnessy, The Shakespeare Effect, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. See my review of The Turning World in Contemporary Theatre Review, 16:4, November 2006, pp. 511–12. Lucy Neal and Rose de Wend Fenton, The Turning World, London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2005. I take the methodological implications of the anecdotal very seriously, see Theatre & Everyday Life, p. 27, as does Jackie Bratton, New Readings, pp. 95–132. Sally Banes, Scales of Theatre panel, Performance Studies international, Mainz, Germany, 2001, unpublished paper presented as part of panel. Also see my review of the ‘missed Sultan’s elephant’, in Contemporary Theatre Review, 16:4, November 2006, pp. 522–3. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 170. Here I invert the durational arguments central to Theatre & Everyday Life, the well-contradicted presumption that being there (‘in the community’) for longer was inherently ‘better’. I am grateful to students over the last decade who have pointed out the ageist presumption in this kind of worthy rhetorical tactic and the specious presenteeism it implies. See Janelle Reinelt, ‘Foreword’, in Contemporary Theatres in Europe, ed. Kelleher and Ridout, London: Routledge, 2006. See Simon Bayly, ‘What State am I In’, in Kelleher and Ridout, Contemporary Theatres, p. 201; and Janelle Reinelt ‘Foreword’, ibid., p. xvii. See Gary Hill, ‘Remarks on Colour’, video installation, 1994, Tate Modern, London. Peter Hallward, ‘The Singular and the Specific: Recent French Philosophy’, Radical Philosophy, 99, January/February 2000, p. 8, and subsequently developed at length in Absolutely Postcolonial (2001). Ibid., p. 8. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge, 1993; and for an extended and excellent discussion of the

284 Notes to pages 33–48

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72

significance of this work for the performance studies field, see: Shannon Jackson, ‘Theatricality’s proper objects: genealogies of performance and gender theory’, in Theatricality, ed. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 186–213. Hallward, ‘The Singular and the Specific’, p. 9. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. See Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, London: The Athlone Press, 1993, pp. 1–42. See Jason Barker, Alain Badiou, London: Pluto Press, 2001. See Hallward, ‘The Singular and the Specific’. See Latour, Reassembling the Social. Philippe Descola, In the Society of Nature, trans. Nora Scott, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 260. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 10. See George Monbiot, ‘A million road deaths every year?’, The Guardian newspaper, London edition, Tuesday 15 May 2007, p. 25 main section. Ibid., p. 25. Figures from Monbiot’s article might be treated with caution but cannot be discounted. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 7. See Badiou, Metapolitics, pp. 141–2. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 21. Badiou, Metapolitics, p. 244. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 244. Ibid., p. 246. Brilliant work by Andrew Sofer on the stage prop and Marvin Carlson on theatre ghosts, by Una Chaudhuri and Nicholas Ridout on animals, by David Williams on the elements and Adrian Heathfield on the distribution of love, by Mike Pearson on extreme climatic conditions, by Heike Roms on epidemics and ‘foot and mouth’, and Susan Melrose on the index of a handkerchief in a photograph of Stanislavski, testifies to a long commitment to recognising and realising in accounts the complex relationship between ‘entities, beings, objects and things’ that makes up any decent theatre account. See Sofer (2003); Carlson (2003); Una Chaudhuri, ed. The Drama Review, (forthcoming, 2007); Ridout (2006); Read (2000b); Williams, Heathfield, Melrose, Pearson and Roms, all in Judie Christie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt (eds), A Performance Cosmology, London: Routledge, 2006. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, London: Verso, 2001. Ibid., p. 16 Ibid., p. 16. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 124. See Ophir, The Order of Evils. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind Krauss and Dennis Hollier, New York, Columbia University Press, 2005, pp. 125–6. The two interesting but rather constructed characteristics that define Ridout’s complementary twin-set. See Ridout, Stage Fright, p. 4.

Notes to pages 49–62 285 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81

82

83

84 85

86 87 88

89 90 91

92 93 94

Barthes, The Neutral, p. 126. See Judith Butler’s quotation on rear dust sleeve, hardback edition of Ophir, The Order of Evils. Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 133. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 160. Jon Erikson, ‘Defining political performance with Foucault and Habermas’, in Davies and Postlewait, Theatricality, p. 183. If I did not believe this, I would have continued only to make the theatre I began with: The Overcoat (1984), Multiple Angel (1985), The Cone Gatherers (1986), see Theatre & Everyday Life (1993/1995). See the genealogy of these events in the Acknowledgements section of this book. Isabelle Stengers, in Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Isabelle Stengers, A History of Chemistry, trans. Deborah van Dam, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 265. Since seeing Let The Water Run Its Course at the ICA, London, in the 1980s, I am here referring to a number of works including Emmanuelle Enchanted, The Travels and Bloody Mess. This is a culpable view given my complicit rôle as a member of the Forced Entertainment Board between 1991 and 1997. This afterlife was born out when, days after writing this, Tony Blair, UK Prime Minister at the time of writing, made the surprise and retroactive announcement that after years of decommissioning the United Kingdom would return to nuclear power to escape the carbon-dependent economy and I suspect the wind-power lobby. I am happy to recognise Forced Entertainment’s futurology if not their topicality. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 192. Herbert Blau, The Impossible Theatre, New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 96; and see Rustom Bharucha, ‘Reclaiming the right to performance’, Performance Research, ‘On Civility’, 10:4, 2004. Ophir, The Order of Evils, p. 11. Ibid., p. 422. See the baroque inconsistencies, embarrassments and reversals on the vexed topic of the ‘performing village’ for a warning about haste and speed in performance politics: Standing Conference of University Drama Departments UK (SCUDD) web noticeboard ad infinitum. Ridout, ‘Make believe’, in Kelleher and Ridout, Contemporary Theatres, p. 185. Photo documentation is held by Tate Modern, London, and was on display as part of The Body, gallery installation during 2005. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex, London: Routledge, 1997; Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2003; Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead, New York, Columbia University Press, 1996. See Frank Furedi, Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right, London: Continuum, 2005. Richard Schechner, Public Domain. New York: Avon, 1969, p. 198. See Stephen J. Bottoms, Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement, Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2004; Bonnie Marranca, Theatre Writings, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987; Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

286 Notes to pages 62–82 95

96

97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

See Christie, Gough and Watt, A Performance Cosmology as fulsome evidence of this practice, especially the chronology of the Centre’s endeavours modestly titled ‘A Family Album’, pp. 290–317. See Susan Melrose, ‘Constitutive ambiguities: Writing professional or expert performance practices, and the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris’, in Kelleher and Ridout, Contemporary Theatres, pp. 120–35. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 41. Certainly when judged by Philip Auslander in a (somewhat theatrical) court of law constituted in a key performance research event of 2004, my proposition regarding performance studies’ unwarranted melancholia was unanimously supported by a jury of 12 ‘good’ men and women. See Phelan, Unmarked, pp. 152–63. E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born. Trans. Richard Howard, New York: Arcade, 1998b. Ophir, The Order of Evils, p. 219. Ibid., p. 315. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 422. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey, London: Penguin, 2003, pp. 239–64. With the honourable exception of an excellent conference, ‘Theaters of Life’, curated by Peggy Phelan for Performance Studies international at NYU in New York, 11–14 April 2002. See Read, Theatre & Everyday Life. See ibid. Faisal Devji, Landscape of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, London: Hurst, 2005. Abu Theeb, quoted in Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, ‘We don’t need al Qaida’, The Guardian Newspaper, London edition, 27 October 2005, G2, p. 15. Ahmad and AT-Tirmindhi, quoted in Faisal Devji, Landscape of the Jihad, p. 110. Ibid., p. 120. Tim Etchells, Certain Fragments, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 9. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 10. Claire MacDonald, ‘On Form: Yet To Come’, Performance Research, 10:2, June 2005, p. 155. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 13. Ophir, The Order of Evils, pp. 15–19.

Part II On performance as such & on human performance in particular Chapter 1

The anthropological machine

1 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as such and on the Language of Man’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 62–74.

Notes to pages 83–107 287 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24

Zˇizˇek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, pp. 132–3. Zˇizˇek, The Parallax View, pp. 34–5. Phelan, Unmarked, p. 146. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, pp. xviii–xix. Brook, The Empty Space, p. 9. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, London: Penguin, 2000, p. 439. Gilles Deleuze, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999a, p. 230. Brook, The Empty Space, p. 17; Phelan, Unmarked, p. 146. Adrian Kear, ‘Think Pig’, contribution to ‘Anthropological Machine’ seminar directed by Simon Bayly which took place as part of Towards Tomorrow?, thirtieth anniversary conference at Centre for Performance Research, Aberystwyth, April 2005. See ‘The Suspended Susbstantive’, Leland de La Durantaye, Diacritics, 33.2:3–9, Summer 2003, p. 6. Giorgio Agamben, translated and paraphrased by Durantaye, ibid. Ibid. p. 22. Una Chaudhuri, ‘Zoo Stories’, in Theorizing Practice, ed. W. B. Worthen and P. Holland, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 136–50. Ridout, Stage Fright. Ibid. pp. 96–128. See Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004, p. xiii, on which this passage and its historical evidence is based. Ibid. p. 229. I am grateful to Ann Maclarnon for drawing my attention to her extensive laboratory work on this, see her findings published in collaboration with Gwen Hewitt, ‘Increased Breathing Control: Another Factor in the Evolution of Human Language’, Evolutionary Anthropology, 13, 2004, pp. 181–97. Ibid. p. 185. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, p. 36; henceforth Man and Animal. Agamben, Man and Animal, pp. 37–8. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, p. 126. Ibid. p. 166.

Chapter 2

Nature table

1 I am indebted to the educational innovator and Commedia del Arté specialist John Rudlin for first talking about this term in this way during some excruciatingly embarrassing circus sessions at Exeter University in the 1970s. 2 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene i, 419. 3 Adolf Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, trans. Hella Czech, London: Faber & Faber, 1949, p. 11. 4 Michel Tournier, The Erl King, London: Methuen, 1983, p. 84. 5 Amotz and Avishag Zahavi, The Handicap Principle, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 8. 6 Ibid. p. xiv. 7 Ibid. p. 91. 8 Richard Schechner, quoted in David Williams, ‘The Right Horse-The Animal Eye’, Performance Research, ‘On Animals’, ed. Alan Read, 5:2, Summer 2000, p. 35.

288 Notes to pages 108–111 9 Phelan, Unmarked, pp. 6–7. 10 See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 591. 11 Herbert Blau, Nothing In Itself: Complexions of Fashion, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999, p. 26. 12 See Alexander Nehamas, ‘Not Rocket Science’, London Review of Books, 22:12, 22 June 2000, p. 26. 13 Dave Hickey, in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, ed. Bill Beckley, New York: Allworth Press, 1998, pp. 22–3. When I sat in the Old Bailey Courts of Justice, Number Two, in the early 1980s listening to the moral majoritarian Mary Whitehouse’s solicitor making legal arguments about the depravity of Howard Brenton’s ‘Druid fucking’ Roman soldier in his National Theatre play The Romans in Britain, I thought at least they had attended the same play as I had, they noticed something was going on beyond the high-flown rhetorics wheeled out in the play’s defence that this anal rape was an image of the British occupation of Northern Ireland. Poor Howard Brenton and Michael Bogdanov his director, I could see them below me being kebabed on the skewer of freedom of expression marinated in metaphor, that most piquant of desensitizing juices. 14 See Jay, Downcast Eyes: ‘ocularcentrism aroused a widely shared distrust. Bergson’s critique of the spatialization of time, Bataille’s celebration of the blinding sun and the acephalic body, Breton’s ultimate disenchantment with the savage eye, Sartre’s depiction of the sadomasochism of the “look”, Merleau-Ponty’s diminished faith in a new ontology of vision, Lacan’s disparagement of the ego produced by the mirror stage, Althusser’s appropriation of Lacan for a Marxist theory of ideology, Foucault’s strictures against the medical gaze and panoptic surveillance, Debord’s critique of the society of the spectacle, Barthes’s linkage of photography and death, Metz’s excoriation of the scopic regime of the cinema, Derrida’s double reading of the specular tradition of philosophy and the white mythology, Irigaray’s outrage at the priveleging of the visual in patriarchy, Levinas’s claim that ethics is thwarted by a visually based ontology, and Lyotard’s identification of postmodernism with the sublime foreclosure of the visual – all these evince, to put it mildly, a palpable loss of confidence in the hitherto “noblest of the senses”.’ 15 Blau, Nothing In Itself, p. 9. 16 Alan Bleakley, ‘Nothing Useful’, unpublished manuscript, p. 2. 17 Alphonso Lingis, ‘Bestiality’, in Peter Steeves (ed.), Animal Others, New York University Press, 1999. 18 Ibid., p. 38. Those of you reading this who know me better than others will recall that I sometimes talk indistinctly, not only when I don’t know what I am talking about, but when I have mouth ulcers, a monthly cycle of species interdependency which are perhaps due to an imbalance in those anaerobic bacteria. My grandmother was quite sure that these were visited upon me for lying, a wonderful Catholic disposition to guilt-transfer as she corterised the stigmata with a Lent-purple acid. I prefer to take the Nietzschean line learnt from the lion happily covered with ticks and flies: ‘What are my parasites to me? May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that’ (ibid., p. 38). 19 Bleakley, ‘Nothing Useful’, pp. 9–10. 20 See Adrian Kear, ‘Parasites’, Parallax, 7:2, pp. 31–46. 21 Zahavi and Zahavi, The Handicap Principle, p. 15. 22 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes / by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1977, p. 50.

Notes to pages 111–123 289 23 See Michel Serres, ‘Panoptic Theory’, in Thomas M. Kavanagh (ed.), The Limits of Theory, Stanford: California University Press, 1989, pp. 45–6, quoted in Jay, Downcast Eyes, p. 593. 24 Jacques Cousteau, The Ocean World, New York: Abrams, 1998, pp. 147–8. 25 James Hillman discussing Adolf Portmann’s work in ‘The Practice of Beauty’, in Beckley, Uncontrollable Beauty, p. 269. 26 Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997, p. 94 27 Quoted in Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, p. xvi. 28 Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, p. 25. 29 Ibid., p. 34. 30 Ibid., p. 35. 31 Ibid., p. 210. 32 Ibid., p. 170. 33 Eugene Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, (1971), quoted in Karen Wonders, Habitat Dioramas: Illusions of Wilderness in Museums of Natural History, Uppsala: University of Uppsala, 1993, p. 176. 34 Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, p. 17. 35 See Peter Wollen, in Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995, p. 9. 36 See Nehamas, ‘Not Rocket Science’, p. 24. 37 Ibid., p. 26. 38 Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993, p. 57. 39 Hickey, Air Guitar, p. 169. 40 Hickey, ‘Enter the Dragon’, in Beckley, Uncontrollable Beauty, p. 16. 41 Ibid., p. 47. 42 Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, p. 70. 43 Ibid., pp. 106–7. 44 Ibid., p. 178. 45 Quoted in Jeremy Gilbert Rolf, ‘Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime’, in Beckley, Uncontrollable Beauty, p. 49. 46 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and S. D. Lavine, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, p. 42. 47 See Jay, Downcast Eyes, pp. 556–7. 48 Blau, Nothing in Itself, p. 20.

Chapter 3

Stage play

1 Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 133. 2 Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 37. 3 As Emmanuel Levinas says in Totality and Infinity: ‘To approach the Other in discourse is to welcome …’, quoted in Derrida, ibid., p. 34. 4 Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, London: Verso, 2006, p. 34. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 24.

290 Notes to pages 124–139 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

Lingis, The Imperative, p. 133. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 136. See Schechner, The Future of Ritual, pp. 24 and 43. See report from The New York Graphic, quoted in W. H. Preece, The Phonograph, London: Stereoscopic Company, 1878, p. 18 (British Library Cat. 8704 ee4). Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978, pp. 149–50. See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976, p. 42. Ibid., p. 42. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, p. 178. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Duino Elegies’, in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, New York: Harper & Row, 1982, pp. 192–7.

Chapter 4

Ring-side

1 See Robert Foley and Elizabeth Cruwys, ‘Dental Anthropology, Problems and Perspectives’, in Teeth and Anthropology, BAR International Series 291, 1986, Oxford. BL: YK 1989.b.476. 2 Tim Radford, The Guardian Newspaper, London, Friday 7 April 2000, p. 17. 3 Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those who have Nothing in Common, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995, p. 105. 4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1988, pp. 244–7. 5 John Stokes, ‘“Lion Griefs”: The Wild Animal Act as Theatre’, New Theatre Quarterly, 20:2, May 2004, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 151. 6 Ibid., p. 152. 7 Ibid. 8 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, London: Routledge, 1993. 9 Paul Bouissac, ‘Poetics in the Lion’s Den: The Circus Act as a Text’, Modern Language Notes, 86, 1971, pp. 845–57. 10 Ibid., p. 854. 11 Quoted in The London Stage 1660–1800, Part 1, 1660–1700, ed. W. V. Lennep, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963, pp. 498–9. 12 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 28. 13 Ibid. 14 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge: 1993, pp. 99–100. 15 Quoted in ibid., p. 85. 16 Jacques Lacan, quoted in ibid., p. 90. 17 Bouissac, ‘Poetics in the Lion’s Den’, p. 857. 18 Steeves, Animal Others, p. 143. 19 Jimmy Chipperfield: My Wild Life, London: Macmillan, 1975, p. 53. 20 Steeves, Animal Others, p. 137. 21 Jacques Derrida, ‘La Parole Soufflée’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 176.

Notes to pages 140–157 291 22 V. Gotovtsev, ‘Merry Evenings at the Art Theatre’, in The Soviet Circus, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967, p. 212. 23 C. Stanislavski, G. Martin et al., Discipline or Corruption, London: Fact and Fiction, 1966, pp. 400–1. 24 Constantin Stanislavski, My Life in Art, trans J. J. Robbins, Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1924, pp. 3–4. 25 Stanislavski, My Life in Art, pp. 4–5. 26 Jerzy Grotowski (1997), quoted in Jean-Marie Pradier, in Read, Performance Research, ‘On Animals’, p. 228. 27 ‘Calling Creatures by their True Names’: Erica Fudge, in At The Borders of the Human, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999 – now Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 91–2. 28 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 29–30. 29 Randy Newman, ‘Short People’, from the album Little Criminals, 1977, copyright Hightree Music, BMI. 30 Published in Sub-Stance, No 15, translated by Anne Knap and Michel Benamou. 31 Ibid., p. 105. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., p. 108. 34 Ibid., p. 109. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 110.

Chapter 5

Redeemed Night

1 See ‘Letter to Florens Christian Rang’, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bulock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 387–90. 2 Ibid. p. 389. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, Evanston, NJ: Northwestern University Press, 2001, p. 29. 7 Ibid., p. 122. 8 Edmund Leach, ‘Humanity and Animality’, in The Essential Edmund Leach, vol. 1, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, p. 6. 9 See Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Becoming Animal’, A Thousand Plateaus. 10 See Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson, H. Lyn Miles, Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals, New York: Suny Series in Philosophy and Biology, 1996, for a detailed discussion of these themes from which the following analyses are drawn. 11 Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, London: New Left Books, 1979, p. 448. 12 See Julia Emberley, Venus and Furs: The Cultural Politics of Fur, London: I. B. Tauris, 1998, for an exceptional study of the cultural, historical and ethical issues concerned with fur, its trade and circulation. 13 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968, p. 78. 14 Ibid, pp. 78–9.

Chapter 6

Infant enthusiasm

1 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Standard Works, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995, vol. 7, p. 253.

292 Notes to pages 158–170 2 The following analysis of enthusiasm owes a debt to Ann Taves’ (1999) work on trances and visions. 3 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, London: Verso, 1993, p. 4. 4 Ibid., p. 47. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 48. 7 Ibid., p. 52. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 53. 10 Ibid. 11 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1989, p. 257. 12 Michel Foucault, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 3. 13 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 92. 14 See Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, and his forthcoming book with Joe Kelleher on the work of Societas Raffaello Sanzio to be published by Routledge in 2007. 15 Peter Fenves, Arresting Language, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001, p. 3. 16 Ibid., p. 4. 17 Ibid., p. 101. 18 Ibid., p. 102. 19 Ibid., p. 104. 20 Ibid., p. 123. 21 Quoted in Daniel Heller-Roazen, Echolalias, New York: Zone Books, 2005, p. 228. 22 Ibid., p. 229. 23 Rebecca Schneider, ‘What I Can’t Recall’, in Christie, Gough and Watt, A Performance Cosmology, pp. 113–16. 24 Heller-Roazen, Echolalias, p. 230. 25 See Epitaph, ed. Romeo Castellucci, Milan: Ubulibri, 2003. 26 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New York: Semiotexte, p. 22. 27 Throughout the 11-part peripatetic three-year odyssey of Tragedia Endogonidia, (2002–5) of which I attended nine separate city events, I promised the company written responses to their work. These few words are scant return for their continuous commitment to dialogue and friendship. For more breadth, see Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout’s forthcoming work with, and on, The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, London: Routledge, 2007. 28 William Shakespeare, Othello, Act iv, Scene i, line 51. 29 For an exemplary account of these curtain-calls, see Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, pp. 161–8. 30 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History, trans. Liz Heron, London: Verso, 1993, p. 48. 31 Ibid., p. 52. 32 Agamben, Means Without Ends, p. 92. 33 See Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright; Kelleher and Ridout, Contemporary Theatres in Europe. 34 Quoted in Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, p. 33. 35 Edmund Burke, Essays, London: Drama Works X, p. 153. My thanks to Sophie Nield for bringing this work to my attention. 36 Quoted in Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose, London: Verso, 2000, p. 17.

Notes to pages 171–197 293 37 38 39 40

See Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils, p. 531. Ibid., p. 547. Ibid., p. 550. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, New York: Zone Books, 1999, p. 121. 41 Ibid., p. 133.

Part III Chapter 7

On the part of those who have no part The distribution of the sensible

1 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Verso, 2005. 2 See Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, p. 227. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 144. 4 See Adrian Kear, Theatre and Event, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, forthcoming. 5 From Gabriel Rockhill’s introduction to Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, Trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum, 2004, p. 9. 6 See Andrew Parker’s ‘Introduction’ to Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, pp. xviii–xix, and Rancière, p. 11. 7 Ibid., p. 47. 8 Ibid., p. 58. 9 Rancière, quoted in Peter Hallward, ‘Staging Equality’, New Left Review 37, Jan/Feb 2006, p. 117. 10 Ibid., p. 110. 11 See Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, ‘Introduction’ by Gabriel Rockhill, p. 1. 12 As invited by Amnesty International, at PSi, Performing Human Rights, Queen Mary, University of London, June 2006. 13 Performing Human Rights, Amnesty International. 14 Peggy Phelan, ‘Preface’, in Etchells, Certain Fragments, p. 10. 15 Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, p. 224. 16 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, p. 33. 17 Ibid., p. 225. 18 Ibid., p. 226. 19 Ibid.

Chapter 8

Recalling the collective

1 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993, p. 196. 2 The question of how one might bibliographically footnote the speech of a ‘thing’, barely audible above the rhetorical human shouting as the murmur of a complex condition, remains unresolved. 3 See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, p. 9. 4 Ibid., p. 69. 5 And in the ‘falling man’ from reality to fiction in Don De Lillo, we share a stock image of the opening of the twenty-first century whose singularity became the defining moment for a collective of grief, if not a community that became unable to operate. 6 Nancy, The Birth To Presence, p. 1.

294 Notes to pages 198–209 7 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. xxxvii. 8 Ibid., p xxxix. 9 Ibid., p. 3. 10 Ibid., p. 19. 11 Ibid., p. 19. 12 Ibid., p. 28. 13 Ibid., p. 60. 14 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 69. 15 Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, ed. Stuart Kendall, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, New York: Zone, 2005, p. 16. 16 Ibid., pp. 31–46. 17 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Richard Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1989, p. 19. 18 Liane Lefaivre and Ingeborg de Roode, Aldo van Eyck: the Playgrounds and the City, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2002, written to coincide with the exhibition ‘Design for children. Playgrounds by Aldo van Eyck, furniture and toys’ in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NL, 15 June–8 September 2002. 19 Walter Abish, ‘The English Garden’, In the Future Perfect, London: Faber & Faber, 1984, p. 1. 20 See F. Strauven, Aldo Van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity, Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura, 1968, p. 162 for a detailed discussion off this site that this interpretation is based on. 21 Henri A. van der Zee, The Hunger Winter, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p. 78. 22 Ibid., p. 209. 23 See Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 40. 24 Michel Serres makes this visual conundrum and interpretation of it the starting point for his work in The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson, Michigan: University of Michigan, 1995. 25 I am grateful to Florence Read who in the middle of her geography revision pointed this out to me.

Chapter 9

Forensic display

1 See Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Most Uncanny Thing’, in The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albbert, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 2. 2 Ibid. p. 3. 3 Ibid. 4 Le Corbusier in Oeuvre Complete, Basel: Birkhauser, 1999, vol. V, p. 191. 5 See other chapters in this section for material from this five-year Arts and Humanities Research Council funded work. Also the web site: www.publickoffice.com 6 Agamben, Means without Ends, p. 42. 7 Ibid. 8 Beatriz Colomina describing Square du Docteur Blanche, Paris-Auteuil, Privacy and Publicity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p. 4. 9 Ibid.

Notes to pages 210–221 295 10 I am grateful to Rebecca Groves who took a critical interest in this work and provided me with an introduction to the Romerstadt and its history. 11 Laura Mulvey, ‘Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home’, Visual and Other Pleasures, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, p. 69. 12 Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, in Selected Writings, p. 78. 13 Ibid. 14 Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, p. 5. 15 Ibid. p. 14. 16 See Nick Kaye, Site Specific Art, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 51. 17 Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, p. 6. 18 Ibid. p. 326. 19 Anthony Vidler, Catalogue, p. 45. 20 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, op cit. p. 172. 21 Anthony Vidler, ‘X Marks the Spot’ in Warped Space, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. 22 Ibid., 128. 23 Ibid., p. 124. 24 ‘But is not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime?’ Walter Benjamin’s Short History of the Photograph p. 62, quoted by Ralph Rugoff, ‘More Than Meets The Eye’, in Scene of the Crime, Cambridge, MA: Published in association with the MIT Press, 1997, p. 59. 25 ‘Vectors of Melancholy’, Peter Wollen, in Ralph Rugoff, Scene of the Crime, p. 28. 26 Adam Phillips, ‘Childood Again’, in New Formations, ed. Christine Clegg et al., 42, Winter 2001, pp. 13–17. 27 Ibid. 28 Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘Grammatical Infanticide’, in ibid. 29 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 53. 30 Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, p. 33. 31 Agamben, Means Without Ends. 32 Ibid., p. 26. 33 Ibid., p. 335. 34 Ibid., p. 7. 35 Ibid., p. 7. 36 Quoted in Agamben, Homer Sacer, p. 3. 37 Agamben, Means Without Ends, p. 238. 38 Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, London: Methuen, 1993, pp. 16–17, Colomina, Means Without Ends, p. 41. 39 See ‘Experts missed Damilola clues’, Rachel Williams, in The Guardian newspaper, London edition, main section, Saturday 19 May 2007, p. 6.

Chapter 10

Arrested life

1 Susan Stewart, On Longing, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993/2001, p. 43. 2 Ibid., p. 23. 3 Ibid. 4 Hölderlin, quoted in Fenves, Arresting Language, p. 6. 5 Ibid., p. 110. 6 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968, p. 165. 7 Ibid., p. 164.

296 Notes to pages 221–245 8 Uexkull, quoted in Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, p. 46. 9 Stewart, On Longing, p. 70. 10 The sketches for the tempera exist in the Blake-Varley Sketchbook of 1819. There Martin Butlin, the Blake authority, says, ‘The tempera … is much more dramatic than the drawing showing the flea striding across what looks like a stage with a night sky illuminated by stars and a falling meteor behind.’ From Martin Butlin, The Blake-Varley Sketchbook of 1819, London: Heinemann, 1969. 11 Derrida, quoted in Phelan, Unmarked, p. 13. 12 Martin Butlin, The Blake-Varley Sketchbook of 1819, London: Heinemann, 1969, p. 20. 13 John Varley, A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy, London: Longman, 1828, p. xi. 14 Ibid., p. 12. 15 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, London: Caldar & Boyars, 1968. 16 Stewart, On Longing, p. 54; and Mary Fulkerson,’In the Midst of Standing Still’, in Theatre Papers, ed. Peter Hulton, Dartington: Dartington College of Arts, 1976. 17 Stewart, On Longing, p. 61. 18 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 156. 19 Stewart, On Longing, p. xviii. 20 See Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. 21 Quoted in Stewart, On Longing, p. 45. 22 Ibid., p. 157. 23 Georges Bataille, ‘The Mouth’, in Visions of Excess, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 59. 24 Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, p. 21. 25 Bataille, ‘The Mouth’, p. 58.

Chapter 11

The democracy machine

1 Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labour of the Negative, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 233. 2 Ibid., p. 2. 3 See Roger Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism, ed. and trans. Catherine Franck, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 4 See ibid., p. 242. 5 Ibid., p. 249. 6 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, London: Fontana Press, 1996, p. 4. 7 See Peter Hennessy, Whitehall, London: Pimlico, 2001, pp. 17–51, for a comprehensive account of the origins of the Civil Service that I draw upon here. 8 Ibid., p. 18. 9 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 20. 10 Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism, p. 103. 11 Homi Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, in The Location of Culture, p. 96. 12 Taussig, Defacement, p. 107. 13 Ibid., p. 269. 14 Ibid. 15 Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism. 16 Ibid., p. 247. 17 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, quoted in Taussig, Defacement, p. 30. 18 Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism, p. 100. 19 Ibid. p. 101.

Notes to pages 246–265 297 20 Schama, Landscape and Memory, p. 3. 21 Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism, p. 254. 22 I am grateful to my sister Teresa, for sharing her recollection of this annual ceremony with me. 23 Georges Bataille, ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, in Visions of Excess, pp. 116–29. 24 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 148. 25 Caillois, The Edge of Surrealism, p. 259. 26 Ibid., p. 260.

Part IV

In the event of extinction: natural history & its ends

1 André du Bouchet, Dans la Chaleur Vacante, Paris: Gallimard, 2000. 2 Latour, Politics of Nature, p. 2. 3 ‘Goat Island: A New Performance (Work in Progress)’ company programme note for Sacred Season, Chelsea Theatre, London, September 2006. 4 I am indebted to Rebecca Groves who took time from her own work to introduce me to the practices of Ballet Frankfurt, but who is not responsible for my reading of the significance of their end. 5 See Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, for the source and substance of these arguments. 6 See Chaudhuri, ‘Zoo Stories’; Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright; David Williams, ‘Writing [After] the Event’; and Baz Kershaw, ‘Radical Energy in the Ecologies of Performance’. 7 Richard Southern, The Seven Ages of Theatre, London: Faber, 1973, pp. 1–3. 8 Ibid., pp. 1–5. 9 Ibid., p. 30. 10 Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985, p. 14. 11 Ibid. 12 Georges Canguillhem, Vital Realist, New York: Zone Books, 2000, p. 16. 13 For other views on ‘vital theatre’, see Lyndsay Anderson, ‘Vital Theatre’, in Never Apologise, ed. Paul Ryan, London: Plexus, 2004; and Dan Reballato, in 1956 and All That, London: Routledge 2000. 14 Roach, Cities of the Dead, p. 39. 15 Ibid., p. 71. 16 Ibid., p. 76. 17 Ibid., p. 93. 18 Ibid., p. 117. 19 See Heller-Roazen, Echolalias, p. 131. 20 Al-Jahiz, quoted in Heller-Roazen, ibid., p. 131. 21 Ibid. p. 132. 22 The fine work of Mary Fulkerson, Steve Paxton and Rosemary Butcher forms just one lineage of this lesser history. 23 Franz Kafka, quoted by Heller-Roazen, Echolalias, p. 146. 24 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, p. 59. 25 Ibid., p. 59. 26 Quoted by George Simmel, in Goethe, Leipzig: Klinkhardt 1913, pp. 56–7. 27 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 60.

298 Notes to pages 266–279 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, London: Routledge, 1993, p. xiii. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 79. Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion, p. 59. Marston Bates, The Nature of Natural History, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990, p. 8. The last night of the London run of The World in Pictures, Forced Entertainment, Riverside Studios, London, Saturday 18 November 2006. Ophir, The Order of Evils, p. 625. The Guardian, London Edition, Friday, 16 July 1999, pp. 6–7. See Ophir, The Order of Evils, p. 615. See ibid., p. 619. See ibid., p. 620. Ibid., p. 624. Ibid., p. 625. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, p. 169. See Jacques Le Goff, Saint Francis of Assisi, trans. Christine Rhone, London: Routledge, 2004. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 61.

Postscript 1 Translation as in Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, ed. Christopher Fynsk, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989, p. 249. 2 Ibid., p. 250. 3 Quoted in Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 110. 4 See Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, p. 250. 5 See Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s review of Kojin Karatani’s Transcritique, ‘The Parallax View’, New Left Review, 25, January 2004, pp. 121–34, and the book that developed from that piece, namely The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 6 Ibid., p. 251. 7 Ibid., p. 259. Nature has given man nothing but the ‘aptitude’ for presenting. 8 I am grateful to David Bradby whose new testament reading, with a keen eye to the olfactory, was far more alert than my own. 9 See the exemplary essay by Jody Enders, ‘Performing miracles: Mimesis of Valenciennes’, in Theatricality, ed. Tracy Davies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 40–64.

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300 Select Bibliography Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 2001). Bataille, Georges. The Cradle of Humanity, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (New York: Zone, 2005). Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Baudrillard, Jean. The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996). Bayly, Simon and Lisa Baraitser. ‘Now and then: Psychotherapy and the rehearsal process’, in Adrian Kear and Patrick Campbell, eds, Psychoanalysis and Performance (London: Routledge, 2001). Beck, Julian. The Life of the Theatre (San Francisco: City Lights, 1972). Beckley, Bill, ed. Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (New York: Allworth Press, 1998). Benjamin, W. Selected Writings Vols. 1–4, ed. Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Bennett, Alan. Writing Home (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences (London: Routledge, 1990). Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (London: Verso, 1983). Bewes, T. Reification (London: Verso, 2002). Bhabha, H. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice (London: Athlone Press, 2000). Blau, Herbert. The Impossible Theater (New York: Collier Books, 1965). Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982). Blau, Herbert. Nothing In Itself: Complexions of Fashion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Blackburn, S. Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Bloch, Ernst. Traces, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (London: Pluto Press, 1979). Borden, Iain,. et al., eds. The Unknown City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Bratton, Jackie. New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Brecht, Bertolt. Poems 1913–1956, trans. Edith Anderson et al. (London: Methuen, 1976). Brecht, Bertolt. The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (Methuen: London, 1978). Bretall, R (ed.) A Kierkegaard Anthology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). Brook, Peter. The Empty Space (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1969). Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Bull, J. Stage Right (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994). Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech (London: Routledge, 1997). Caillois, Roger. Man and the Sacred, trans. Meyer Barash (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001a). Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001b). Caillois, Roger. The Edge of Surrealism, ed. Claudine Frank, trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

Select Bibliography 301 Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1996). Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2003). Castellucci, Romeo. Epitaph (Milan: Ubulibri, 2003). Chaudhuri, Una. ‘Zoo Stories’, in Worthen, W. B., and Holland P., eds. Theorizing Practice (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 136–50). Christie, Judie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt, eds. A Performance Cosmology (London: Routledge, 2006). Cioran, E. M. On The Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Cioran, E. M. Anathemas and Admirations, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1998a). Cioran, E. M. The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Arcade, 1998b). Coetzee, J. M. The Lives of Animals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Cohen, Anthony. The Symbolic Construction of Community (London: Routledge, 1989). Colomina, Beatriz. Sexuality and Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Colomina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Cooke, Lynne. Wollen, Peter, eds. Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995). Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre (London: Peregrine, 1984). Daston, Lorraine, ed. Things That Talk (New York: Zone Books, 2004). Davis, Tracey and Thomas Postlewait, eds. Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983). De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2, trans. Timothy Tomasik (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Deleuze, G. Essays Critical and Clinical (London: Verso, 1998). Deleuze, G. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone, 2002). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1987). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. Anti-Oedipus (London: Continuum, 2004). Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Derrida, Jacques. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Desmond, Jane. Staging Tourism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Devji, Faisal. Landscape of the Jihad (London: Hurst, 2005). Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend (London: Penguin, 1995). Dolan, Jill. Geographies of Learning (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). Düttman, Alexander. Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition (London: Verso, 2000). Emberley, Julia. Venus and Furs: the Cultural Politics of Fur (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998). Etchells, Tim. Certain Fragments (London: Routledge, 2001). Fenton, R. and L. Neal. The Turning World: Stories from the London International Festival of Theatre (London: Gulbenkian Foundation, 2005). Fenves, Peter. Arresting Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).

302 Select Bibliography Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Foucault, Michel. Society Must be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2003). Fudge, Erica. At the Borders of the Human (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). Gell, A. The Art of Anthropology (London: Athlone, 1999). Giannachi, Gabriella and Stewart, Nigel, eds. Performing Nature (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005). Gibson, James. The Perception of the Visual World (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1950). Girard, René. To Double Business Bound (London: Routledge, 1978). Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: Athlone, 1995). Girard, René. Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Mercer (London: Continuum, 2003). Goat Island. School Book 2 (Chicago: School of the Art Institute, 2002). Goff, Jacques le. Saint Francis of Assisi, trans. Christine Rhone (London: Routledge, 2004). Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). Goulish, Matthew. 39 Microlectures (London: Routledge, 2000). Grenier, Roger. The Difficulty of Being a Dog, trans. Alice Kaplan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000). Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Hallward, P. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Hallward, P. ‘Staging Equality’, in New Left Review, ed. Susan Watkins, 37, Jan/Feb 2006, pp. 109–29. Harraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (London: Free Association Books, 1991). Harrison, Stephan, et al. Patterned Ground (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). Heathfield, A. Live: Art and Performance (London: Tate Publishing, 2004). Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Heller-Roazen, Daniel. Echolalias (New York: Zone Books, 2005). Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993). Hickey, Dave. Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997). Houellebecq, Michel. Atomised, trans. Frank Wynne (London: Vintage, 2001). Houellebecq, Michel. Platform, trans. Frank Wynne (London: William Heinemann, 2002). Houellebecq, Michel. The Possibility of an Island, trans. Gavin Bowd (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005). Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories (London: Routledge, 1995). Jackson, Shannon. Lines of Activity (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001). Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). James, Wendy. The Ceremonial Animal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001).

Select Bibliography 303 Kafka, Franz. Amerika (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Kaplan, Alice, ed. Yale French Studies: Everyday Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Karp. Ivan and S. D. Lavine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1991). Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art (London: Routledge, 2000). Kear, Adrian. ‘Troublesome Amateurs’, in Richard Gough and Nicholas Ridout, eds, ‘On Theatre’, Performance Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, April 2005, pp. 26–46. Kelleher, Joe. ‘Human Stuff’, in Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, eds, Contemporary Theatres in Europe (London: Routledge 2006). Kelleher, Joe and Nicholas Ridout, eds. Contemporary Theatres in Europe (London: Routledge, 2006). Kershaw, Baz. ‘Radical Energy in the Ecologies of performance’, in Goran Sergej Prïstasˇ, eds, Frakcija, No. 28/29, summer 2003, pp. 7–13. Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael. Gestures of Ethical Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). Klossowski, P. Nietzsche & The Vicious Circle (London: Athlone, 2000). Kojève, A. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969). Kojève, A. Outline of a Phenomenology of Right, trans. Bryan-Paul Frost and Robert Howe, ed. B.P. Frost (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Kristeva, J. Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1986). Laclau, E. On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Typography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995a). Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. The Subject of Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995b). Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Latour, Bruno. Aramis or The Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Le Corbusier. The Modulor, trans. Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock (London: Faber & Faber, 1961). Lefaivre, Lianne and Ingeborg de Roode, eds. Aldo van Eyck: The Playgrounds and the City (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2002). Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Lefort, Claude. Writing The Political Test, trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. The Waste Books, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000). Lingis, Alphonso. The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Lingis, Alphonso. Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of Clifornia Press, 2000). Lingis, Alphonso. Foreign Bodies (London: Routledge, 1994). Lingis, Alphonso. Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press, 2004). Lutterbie, John. ‘Performance in the Proximity of Silence’, in Claire MacDonald, ed., ‘On Silence’, Performance Research, Vol. 4, No. 3, Winter 1999, pp. 12–16.

304 Select Bibliography Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington, Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Athlone Press, 1993). MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals (London: Duckworth, 1999). Malabou, C. The Future of Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005). Marion, Jean-Luc. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berrraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002a). Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002b). Marion, Jean-Luc. The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K.A.Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Marranca, Bonnie. Ecologies of Theatre (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990). McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else (London: Routledge, 2001). Melrose, Susan. ‘Who Knows – and who cares – about performance mastery [?]’, in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Judie Christie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt (London: Routledge, 2006). Merleau-Ponty, M. Nature (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). Mitchell, Robert, Nicholas Thompson and Lyn Miles, eds. Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes and Animals (New York: SUNY Series in Philosophy and Biology, 1996). Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees (London: Verso, 2005). Murray, T., ed. Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 1997). Musil, Robert. The Man Without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaisner (London: Picador, 1982). Nancy, J. L. The Birth To Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). Nancy, J. L. Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Nancy, J. L. The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Negri, A. Subversive Spinoza (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). Nehamas, Alexander. ‘Not Rocket Science’, London Review of Books, Vol. 22, No. 12, 22 June 2000. Nelson, Victoria. The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Netz, Reviel. Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Nietzsche, F. The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956). Nietzsche, F. Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Nietzsche, F. The Anti Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Ondaatje, Michael. In The Skin of a Lion (London: Secker & Warburg, 1987). Ophir, A. The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals, trans. Rela Mazali and Havi Carel (New York: Zone, 2005). Panagia, Davide. The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

Select Bibliography 305 Pearson, Mike. ‘Marking Time’, in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Judie Christie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt (London: Routledge, 2006). Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993). Phelan, Peggy. ‘Playing Dead In Stone’, in Elin Diamond. Performance and Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1996). Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex (London: Routledge, 1997). Phillips, Adam. ‘Children Again’, in New Formations, ed. Christine Clegg et al., No. 42, Winter 2001, pp. 13–17. Plato. The Republic, trans. H. D. P. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). Porter, R. London, A Social History (London: Penguin, 1994). Portmann, Adolf. Animal Forms and Patterns: A Study of Appearance in Animals, trans. Hella Czech (London: Faber & Faber, 1948). Raban, Jonathan. Soft City (London: Harvill, 1974). Rai, Milan. 7/7 The London Bombings (London: Pluto Press, 2006). Rancière, Jacques. On The Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1995). Rancière, J. The Philosopher and his Poor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003a). Rancière, J. Short Voyages to the Land of the People, trans. James Swenson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003b). Rancière, Jacques. The Flesh of Words, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). Rancière, J. The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. and Intro. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2005). Rancière, Jacques. Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006). Rapport, Nigel. I Am Dynamite (London: Routledge, 2003). Ravenhill, Mark. Product (London: Methuen, 2006). Read, Alan. Theatre & Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993/1995). Read, Alan, ed. Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday (London: Routledge, 2000a). Read, Alan. ed. ‘On Animals’, Performance Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, winter 2000b. Read, Alan. ‘The Placebo Of Performance’, in Psychoanalysis and Performance, ed. Patrick Campbell and Adrian Kear (London: Routledge, 2001). Read, Alan, ed. ‘On Civility’, Performance Research, Vol. 9, No. 4, December 2004. Read, Alan. ‘Return to Sender’, in Curating the Local, ed. Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro (Torres Vedras: Transforma, 2005). Rée, J. I See A Voice: A Philosophical History (London: Flamingo, 2000). Reinelt, Janelle. ‘Foreword’ to Joe Kelleher and Nicholas Ridout, Contemporary Theatres in Europe (London: Routledge, 2006). Richardson, J. The Annals of London (London: Cassel, 2001). Ridout, Nicholas. Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Roach, Joseph. The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985). Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Rokem, Freddie. ‘Witnessing the Witness’, in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Judie Christie et al., (London: Routledge, 2006). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Rugoff, Ralph. Scene of the Crime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). Sandford, Mariellen. Happenings and Other Acts (London: Routledge, 1995). Sassen, S. Globalization and its Discontents (New York: The New Press, 1998).

306 Select Bibliography Schama, S. Landscape and Memory (London: Fontana Press, 1996). Schatzki, Theodore. The Site of the Social (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). Schechner, Richard. Public Domain (New York: Avon Books, 1969). Schechner, Richard. The Future of Ritual (London: Routledge, 1993). Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies (London: Routledge, 2002). Schechner, Richard and Gough, Richard. ‘Towards Tomorrow? Restoring Disciplinary Limits and Rehearsals in Time?’, in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Judie Christie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt (London: Routledge, 2006). Schelling, F. Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Schmitt, C. The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996). Sebald, W. G. On The Natural History of Destruction (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003). Seel, M. Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). Sennett, Richard. Flesh and Stone (London: Faber & Faber, 1994). Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 2002). Serres, Michel. Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995a). Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995b). Shepherdson, Charles. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2000). Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996). Sofer, Andrew. The Stage Life of Props (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2003). Soper, Kate. What is Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Southern, Richard. The Seven Ages of the Theatre (London: Faber & Faber, 1977). Spinoza. Ethics, trans. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1978). Starobinski, J. Action and Reaction, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone, 2003). Steeves, H. Peter, ed. Animal Others (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). Stewart, Susan. On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993/2001). Stokes, John. ‘“Lion Griefs”: The Wild Animal Act as Theatre’, in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. XX, Part 2, May 2004, pp. 138–54. Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992). Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity (London: Routledge, 1993). Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labour of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances and Visions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Vaz-Pinheiro, Gabriela, ed. and trans. Curating the Local (Torres Vedras: Transforma, 2005). Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Virilio, Paul. Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 2000). Weiss, F., ed. Hegel: The Essential Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). Whitehead, A. N. Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978). Wickstrom, Maurya. Performing Consumers (London: Routledge, 2006).

Select Bibliography 307 Williams, David. ‘The Right Horse, The Animal Eye’, in Alan Read ed. ‘On Animals’, Performance Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, Summer 2000, pp. 29–40. Williams, David. ‘Writing [After] the Event: Notes on Appearance, Passage and Hope’, in A Performance Cosmology, ed. Judie Christie, Richard Gough and Daniel Watt (London: Routledge, 2006). Williams, Heathcote. The Speakers (London: Hutchinson, 1976). Williams, Raymond. Keywords (London: Fontana, 1981). Wolfe, Cary, ed. Zoontologies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003a). Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003b). Zahavi, Amotz and Avishag. The Handicap Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001). Zˇ izˇek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

Index

Aardman 4, 59; and Wallace and Gromit 59; and loss 59–60 abandonment 215; self 245 Aberfan 194 Abish, Walter 203 Abramovic, ´ Marina 19, 121 absolute 170, 176 Access 235 accident x, 19, 273; circus 137; and substance 170 Acconci, Vito 20 Acourt, Neil 255 Acquinas, Thomas 89 actors 7, 49, 259–260, 277; animal psychology 140; and audiences 37, 47; and Augusto Boal 44; and Bruno Latour 41; and cephalopods 111; and extinction 269; and fleas 223; grown up 166; ham 211; indisposed 224; looking at 169; luvvies 239; Moscow Art Theatre 139; and octopus 112; pathology 164, 260 Act Up 20 adieu 124 Adorno, Theodor 4, 59; and natural history 264 adult 147–148, 170, 213; and treasure 246 Aeschylus 240 Aesop 93, 126, 169, 253–4, 264; Fables 2 aesthetic xi, 1, 12, 176, 187, 252, 272; forensic 213; Hegel’s 254; origin 207; as politics 63; and sense perceptions 177, site-specific 207 affect 2, 63, 102–19, 144, 278; enthusiasm 158; excitation 70; fatal 176; and performance 69; and universals 84 affirmation 6, 45, 63, 143, 177, 273 Afghanistan 229

Agamben, Giorgio xi, 79, 94, 168–9, 176, 207; anthropological machine 8, 77, 82–101, 147; bare life xi, 84, 180, 209; concentration camp 90; and gestures 214, 241; and infancy 159–60; and Linnaeus 92; tick 221; zoe and bios 215 Agent Million 236 agoraphobia 205, 216 AIDS 60 Al Qaeda 71 alienation 25, 216 Al-Jahiz 262 allegorical 7 Allsopp, Will 214 Althusser, Louis 176, 210 Alton East and West 208, 250 altruism 110, 116 amateur 264 amnesia 23, 163 Amnesty International 180 Amsterdam 202, 269 anecdote 142; and anthropomorphism 147; event and context 142; and nostalgia 219 animal rights 90 animality 120; and humiliations 140; and prayer 274; and spirituality 140 animals 1, 133; aversion 153; being, becoming, playing 148; epistemology 271; and infants 7; kindness to 256; naming 89, 132, 141, 147; and performance 89 animism 151–2 anomalies 85, 150; definition of 259–60 anomalous 8, 104, 150, 160, 168; and circus 133; and Gwyneth Paltrow 126 Anthrax 190; and Tom Cruise 191 308

Index 309 anthropocentric 225 anthropology 7, 268; and multiple metaphysics 7, 45 anthropomorphism 23, 93, 108, 146, 147, 151, 223, 271 anti-theatrical prejudice 8, 33 anxiety 61; of exposure 92 apartheid 18 appearance 1, 8, 79, 175, 184–5, 186, 246; capacity for 179; mistrust of 115; and parallax 16; philosophy of 21; seeming truth 108 applause 131, 148, 179; muted 142 Arafat, Yassar 95 arbitrary 143, 190 Archangel Michael 99 architecture xi; creature-like 208; ham actor 211; mimetic 208; as event 211 archive 60 Archua 37 Arden, John 6 Arendt, Hannah 8, 66, 180 Aristotle 35, 130, 166, 215, 219–20, 253, 254, 262 Arnatt, Keith 60 Arsenal 95, 255 art 145; ahistorical 145; relational 145 Artangel 53 Artaud, Antonin 58, 139, 207, 223, 242 Arts Admin 62 asbestos 193 Ashbery, John 203 as if 48, 89 Askey, Arthur 150 assembly 194 astrology 23 Atget, Eugene 213 Athey, Ron 19 audiences 7, 28, 33, 34, 144, 166, 252; and bedtime reading 145; booing 254; condescension 198; decomposition 179; engaged 207; eruption of 271; forgetting 163; involvement 182; and lion act 135; and performers 63; spatial arrangements 178

auditorium 49, 64 Auslander, Philip 33, 226; and liveness 84; and intimacy 121 Auschwitz 162, 171–2 Auschwitz 161–4, 171 Auster, Paul 250 automata 166, 169 avant garde 2, 18, 19, 181; and insects 264 Avian Flu 72 axioms of showciology (1) 24, 82, 93, 113, 147, (2) 35, 150, (3) 37, 121, 165, (4) 40, 110, (5) 43, 102, (6) 44, 187, (7) 47, 116, 133, (8) 48, 121, (9) 51, 224, (10) 53, 218, (11) 54, 146; (12) 58, 207, (13) 67, 133, 202; summary of 76–7 azza 76, 86, 110 Bacci, Roberto 183 Bachelard, Gaston 153–6, 211, 221, 225, 226 Backtruppen 187 Bacon, Francis 141 Badiou, Alain 18, 35, 64, 84, 176; and ethics 47; logic of site 176 Baghdad 5, 230 Balanids 115 Bali 5, 43, 182 Balme, Christopher 62 Banes, Sally 32, 62 Bannerman, Helen 137 Bannister, Roger 212 barbed wire 81–2, 90–1 Barbican 75, 91 Barcelona 208 bare life xi, 86 Barthes, Roland 47, 48, 111, 145, 202, 263 Bataille, Georges 24, 109, 199, 200, 227, 228, 247, 248 Bates, Marston 267–8 Bayly, Simon 27, 32 Bayreuth 121 Bazalgette, Peter 240 beach 246–8 bear-baiting 255 Beatles, The 262 beauty 105, 116; by contrast 209 Beck, Julian 68 Beckett Estate 183

310 Index Beckett, Samuel 4, 66, 88, 108; Not I 183; Waiting for Godot 183 becoming 2; animal 120, 149, 256 begin again 6, 14, 56, 156, 171, 177, 275, 279 Behn, Aphra 2, 254, 264 Beirut 153 belief 6, 18, 130 Bellmer, Hans 143 Benjamin, Walter vi, 59, 82, 115, 145, 153, 160, 166, 170, 181, 210, 226, 244, 264, 265, 268; and botanist of asphalt 208, 265; and scene of crime 213; and speed 214 Benn, Tony 239 Bennett, Susan 122 Bentham, Jeremy 212 Bergson, Henri 192 Berlin, Irving 15 Berthonneau, Christophe 4 bestiality 154 Bethlehem 120 betrayal 121, 147 Beuys, Josef 256 bewildered 131, 138, 148 Bhabha, Homi 114–15, 136–7, 225 Bharucha, Rustom 8, 24, 31, 66 Billy Smart’s Circus 23 Binks, Jar Jar 270 bio-politics 8, 68 birds 262, 275 Birmingham Repertory Theatre 56 birthday 142 bison 200 Black Mountain College 62 Blair, Tony 95, 211, 243 Blake, William 65; The Ghost of A Flea 65, 221–4 Blanchot, Maurice 3 Blau, Herbert 109, 119, 122, 227 Blix, Hans 239 Bloch, Ernst 102, 132 Bloom, Harold 93, 254 Blue Peter 240 Boal, Augusto 7, 52; and joker 37; method 51; and politics 25; Theatre of the Oppressed 7, 44 Boer War 91 Bogart, Humphrey 151 Bogdanov, Michael 183 Bombay Dreams 243

Bond, Edward 240 boredom 26 border 21, 88 Bottoms, Steve 62 Bouchet, André du 250 Bouffes du Nord 62 Bouissac, Paul 135 Bourriaud, Nicholas 34 Bradshaw, Peter 270 Brains 87 Bratton, Jackie 9 breath 1, 131, 260; unbroken 92 Brecht, Bertolt 1, 27, 48, 115, 143, 158, 166 Brenton, Howard 183; The Romans in Britain 183 Brith Gof 189 British Imperial Calendar 233 British Medical Association 73 Brook, Peter 27, 45, 62, 85, 103, 239, 258; and Peggy Phelan 85 Brown, Capability 15 Bryson, Norman 118 Buber, Martin 203 Buckingham Palace 245, 249 Builders’ Association 61 Bulger, Jamie 153 Burden, Chris 19 Burke, Edmund 170 Burke, Joseph 222–3 burkha 35 Bush, George W. 95, 229, 243 Busted 243 Butler, Judith 9, 50, 57; and Angler Fish 115; at the circus 134; merely cultural 63, 210; and naming 141 Cage, John 17, 108 Caillois, Roger 230, 244–5 Calle, Sophie 54, 256; Exquisite Pain 54, 55 Camden Centre 239 camouflage 107, 137; culture 107, 253 Cana 129 Canguillhem, Georges 260 Canio, Paulo de 243 capital 229 Cardosa, Maria Fernanda 224 caretaker 104, 123, 148, 211

Index 311 Caribbean Reef Squid 109 Carlson, Marvin 60, 62, 83 Cash, Johnny 93 Cast Courts 97 Castellers 102 Castellucci, Claudia 164 Castellucci, Romeo 91, 164, 171, 195, 254; Epitaph 165 catholic 18, 50, 235 Cats 256, 267 cattle 120 cave 21, 101, 195, 200–1, 206, 275 CCTV 209; remainder 213 ceiling 193–5 celebrity 197; in sport 240–4 cement 193–5; as matter of fact 193; as matter of concern 193–4 censor 178, 207 censorship 11–12, 176–86; good 183 centre 12, 20 Centre for Performance Research 62 cephalopods 109, 227 ceramic tile 34 Certeau, Michel de 210 Chaudhuri, Una 89, 257 Chekhov, Anton 54 Chelsea Theatre 19 chemistry 11, 53 Chesterton, G. K. 18, 233 childhood 1, 7, 93, 120, 145, 167, 213, 246; blank 214, 229; happy 213, 229 children 113, 139, 150, 156, 164, 209, 225, 275; and animals 256; and anomalous 150; and anthropomorphism 148–9; and Societas Raffaello Sanzio 161–72 Chipperfield, Jimmy 138 Chipperfield, Richard 138 Chirac, Jacques 95 Chiswick House 267 Choo, Jimmie 126 Christian 121, 148 Christian iconography 19; and live art 19; stigmata 275 Christopher, Karen 251 Chuckles 132 Churchill, Caryl 103, Far Away 104 Cibber, Colley 136 Cioran, E. M. 14, 66, 157, 249; and being born 66; and prayer 274

circus 132–44, 256, 262; entrances and exits 142 Cirque du Soleil 4 Cité Karl Marx 210 Civil Service 231–8; history 231 civility 230, 244 Clinton, Bill 257 clown 55, 132, 141–2 clowning 4, 142; propriety 134 Coca Cola 188 Cody, Bernard Rose 233–8, 244–8, 274–5 Colditz 142 collective xi, 7, 11, 41, 47, 177, 187, 188; definition 43–4; effervescence 246; and live art 19; and recalcitrance 195 Colletivo di Palma 92 Collier, Jeremy 108, 136, 255 Colomina, Beatriz 210, 215 Comedie Française 138 commitment 25 community 13, 175, 187, 196–9; definition of 199; inoperative 13; lay 279; and theatre 33–4 concern 1 concrete 207, 209; casting 209; tomb 248 conflict 7 Conrad, Joseph 137 conservative 12 contemporary 54 context 32, 34, 41, 45, 72, 142 Cooke, Sam 93 cooperation 111 copy 98 corner 211 Corsario 164 Cornish School 62 correfoc 208 Corrie, Rachel 74, 94 cosmopolitan 178 court 212, 230 Cousteau, Jacques 111 crab 150, 220 creaturely life vi, 145 crib 129–30 Crimp, Martin 187 crocodile tears 254 cryptic culture 108 Currell-Brown, Peter 232

312 Index curtain 66, 67, 249; call 167, 254 Cusa, Nicholas de 170 cybrids 2

125, 162,

Daily Dialogues 53 Daily Mirror 242 Damilola Taylor 211, 214–17 Dartington College of Arts 62 Darwin, Charles 107, 264; and conflict 202 Das Arts 62 Daston, Lorraine 152 death 12, 59; camp 201; of a child 214; and meat 152; and performance studies 61; as such 86 Debord, Guy 116 Deep Sea Angler Fish 115; and gender trouble 115 Deer Park 61 Degas, Edgar 36, 144 Dekker, Maurits 204 Deleuze, Gilles 87, 90, 149, 150, 192, 256 democracy 122, 185; machine 229–48 Dench, Judie 278 Derrida, Jacques 50, 139, 203; and ghosts 222 Descola, Philippe 30, 37 description 37–40, 51; thick 38 deus ex machina 162 Devji, Faisal 71 Dickens, Charles 86; Our Mutual Friend 86–7 Diderot 261, 277 disability 104 disappearance 5, 12, 43, 59, 269 disappointment 1, 4 discipline 6, 11, 16, 23–4, 70, 271; and conflict 7; in distress 63 discomfort 28 disinterest 49, 207 Desperate Optimists 61 dignity 94 display 104, 112 dissensus 179, 186 dissonance 17, 43, 144, 179 distribution of the sensible 12–13, 181, 217, 253

Docklands 208 Doctor Dolittle 256 Dodd, Ken 52 Dolan, Jill 55 donkey 127, 275 Don Quixote 25 drama xi, 240, 241; perfect 170; post-war 230 dramatic sense vi dramatic twist 2, 202 Drury Lane Theatre 223 Dresden 153 Drôme 250 Duchamp, Marcel 220 Dunblane 148 Durantyre, Leland de la 88–9 Dylan, Bob 226 East India Company 136 ecology xi Edgar, David 38; Playing With Fire 38–9, 47; Wreckers 39 Edison, Thomas 128 elements xi Elevator Repair Service 61 Elsinore 35 Elvis 93 emancipation 18, 180 embarrassment 26, 169, 172 Emberley 153–4 empty space 27, 45, 65 Endemol 240 ending 251–2 engagement xi, 70, 188; public xi English, Rose 256 enthusiasm 50, 157–72, 208, 213, 277 epilepsy 166 epiphany 125 equality 177 Erikson, Jon 51 Erjavec, Ales 30 ERNIE 236–8 Etchells, Tim 74, 184 ether 45 ethics 1, 45, 69, 73; of association xi, 15, 82, 166, 269; and jihad 72 ethology 23 Evening Standard 72 everyday 16, 69, 85, 122, 158, 241, 269, 271, 275 evil 56–7

Index 313 excitable 4 exemplary exception 21 exhaustion 14; political 22 expenditure 229, 247 explanation 37 exposure 198 exterminating machine 143 extinction 268–71, 273 Eyck, Aldo van 202 eyes 120, 123, 147 FA Cup 241 face 2, 36, 123, 143, 153; transplantation 2 face to face 5, 36, 134, 166, 227 facts 1, 23, 190 faith 18; and theatricality 18 falling man 196–7, 200 family 8–11, 85, 245, 275; Antigone 10; blended 9; privacy 9; theory 10; values 9 fauna 146, 149–52 fear 61, 146–9 Fenves, Peter 161 Festa, Angelica 108 Feyerabend, Paul 259 fiasco 5 Fields, W. C. 103, 134 Fiennes, Ralph 103 Finnegan, Michael 6 fire 142, 223 Firman, James 181 first human venue 200, 269 Fitzherbert, Elizabeth 97 flea 221–8 flea circus 31, 224–6; and language 225 flock 121 flora 146 Florence 8, 97–101, 117, 120–31, 145–6, 164–5, 178 flounder 109 foot and mouth 71, 104, 134 Forced Entertainment xi, 17, 49, 74, 175, 251; Bloody Mess 17, 54–5, 197; and botched animal-heads 254; and contemporary 54; Exquisite Pain 54; and naming 61; The World in Pictures 196, 200, 269, 272 forgetting 175

Forsythe, William 252 Foster, Hal 6 Foucault, Michel 8, 12, 25, 68, 90, 113, 133, 216, 225, 259; and bio-politics 68; and exceptions 160; The Order of Things 67; and panopticism 110 Franco B. 19, 69 Frank, Anne 204 friends 26; and enemies 26–7 Freud, Sigmund 47, 143, 146, 149, 154, 157, 178, 263; and conflict 202; and ethics 47; heimlich 211; and humiliation 140; lay analysis 271; and Roman ruins 198 frogs 254 Fudge, Erica 141 fur 147, 152–6; and desire 153; and symbolic power 154 G, Ali 243 Galileo 259 Garrick, David 259, 267 Gates, Gareth 243 Gatti, Armand 189 Geertz, Clifford 224 gender 69 Gennep, Arnold Van 154 genomics 2 Gervais, Ricky 91, The Office 241 Gestetner 234 ghosts 35–6, 59, 222, 227, 237, 249, 274 Gibson, James 109 Gielgud, John 117 giggle 221 Girard, René 18, 219 Glaxo Smith Kline 23 Glendenning, Hugo 175 Globe Theatre 255 goat 149 Goat Island xi, 17, 49, 251–4, 272; The Sea and Poison 252–3, 272 Godotnia 4 good xi; and Alain Badiou 47; censorship 183; definition of 56–57; sufficient goods 7, 49, 57; theatre 14, 47, 69 goodbye 148

314 Index goodnight 148, 269 Gough, Richard 6 Goulish, Matthew 263 Goya, Francisco 206 graffiti 100 Gramsci, Antonio 187 Green Shield Stamps 235 Greenblatt, Stephen 118 Griffiths, Trevor 187 Grotowski, Jerzy 58, 139; and organic lineage 140; Towards a Poor Theatre 58, 67 Groundforce 240 Guantanamo Bay 90, 182 Guattari, Félix 149, 256 Guidi, Chiara 8, 164 Guys and Dolls 29 Gyllenhaal, Maggie 232 Hallward, Peter 31 ham 5 Hamlet 35, 60, 81, 83, 91 handicap principle 106 hands 120, 244, 275, 279; and toothache 143 Harvey, William 130 Hashmi, Safdar 56 Hassan, Margaret 94 head 116 Heidegger, Martin 3, 138, 139, 220, 272; and Volkswagen 264–5 Heller-Roazen, Daniel 262 Helms, Jesse 108, 109 Hermione 8, 132, 143, 144, 164–5, 167 Herod 122 Herodotus 238 Heron, Patrick 59 Het Werkteater 187 Hewitt, Gwen 92 Hickey, Dave 114–16 Hicks, Gill 46 hide and seek 143, 166 Highbury 95 Highsmith, Patricia 109 Hill, Gary 32 Hillesun, Etty 204 Hirst, Damien 100 historical ontology 46 historical-site ontology 46 Hitchens, Christopher 52, 113

Hixson, Lin 251 Hodgson Burnett, Francis 152 Hölderlin, Friedrich 3, 161, 162, 196 Holland, Henry 223 Holst, Gustav 130 home 210 homo academicus 94 homo lingua 92 homo ludens 93, 244 homo multiplex 180 homo performans 92, 93 homo rhetorica 92 homo sapiens 4, 93 homo shakespearians 92 Hooke, Robert 220 hope 273 horses 132, 200, 220 hospitality 123 Houellebecq, Michel 2, 90 Huizinga, Johan 155, 238 human 1–5; being 8; ceremony 83; condition 6; contact 242; dependency 4; disappointment 263; error 217; as interruptive animal 201; as performing animal 82; ruin 90; as stranger 200; venue 172; as waste 201 human animal relations xi, 8, 81, 101, 147; at Arsenal 95; border 88; barbed wire 82; cave painting 21; in circus 133, 139; comic 201; and criminality 255; defining of performance 259; display 104; distinctions 1; and humiliations 140; infancy 158; and irritability 132; language 168; in Nativity 125; octopus 112–13; recognition 153; and representation 197; in sculpture 99; seduction 125; in sepulchre 98; in Shakespeare 255; speech 128; symbiosis 110; tears 149, 278 human laboratory 2–5, 13, 16, 19, 70, 216, 217 Hunks, Harry 255 hunting 250 Hussain, Hasib 184 Hussein, Saddam 230, 243 hybrids 15, 114–15, 155, 254, 256, 274 Hytner, Nicholas 240

Index 315 Ibsen, Heinrich 4, 54, 69; A Doll’s House 4 identity politics 9, 69, 87 images 1, 45, 143, 165, 182, 214, 238; afterlife 165; and metaphor 153; as walls 211, 216 imagination 7; dramatic 15 immanence 43 impedimenta 5, 38, 195, 197, 217 impotential 4 inconvenience 272–3 indifference 25, 44–5, 143 indifferents 50, 158 ineptness 26 infancy 93; and history 159–60 infant 7, 148, 158–64 infrastructural imagination 15 inhuman 9, 85, 172, 192 inoperative community xi Institute of Contemporary Arts London 50, 53 instrumentality 27–8, 53, 109, 118; and IRA 71; and Al Qaeda 71 International Federation for Theatre Research xiii interruption 161, 176, 177, 178 195, 247, 269; of distribution of sensible 181 intimacy xi, 1, 70, 185, 215; fatal 248; subversive 19 intimate acts xi invisible 219; and signification 219 Iraq 229, 239 Irish Republican Army 71 irritable 21, 132, 186 Israel 182 Jackass 240 Jackson, Glenda 239 Jackson, Michael 243 Jamal, Abdullah 184 James, Wendy 92 James, William 15 Jay, Martin 109 jihab 35 jihad 71–3 Johnson, Dominic 18 Jonas, Hans 84, 100, 147 juggling 104

Kafka, Franz 263 Kane, Sarah 240 Kansas 5 Kant, Immanuel 93, 162, 207 Karmann Ghia 265 Kassovitz, Mathieu 196 Kaye, Nick 211 Kean, Edmund 223 Kear, Adrian 110 Keidan, Lois 62 Kelleher, Joe 51, 220 Kershaw, Baz 30, 257 Kidman, Nicole 243 kidnap 146 Killick, Jerry 196, 269, 272 King, William 135 kinship 9 Klai´c, Dragan 31 Klee, Paul 76 Kroetz, Franz Xavier 108 Kubrick, Stanley 180 Kuftinek, Sonja 33 Kulik, Oleg 255 Kunst, Bojana 22 Kushner, Tony 192 laboratory 2, 14, 23, 195; and animal 89 labour 2, 26, 30, 153, 253 Lacan, Jacques 10, 124; and Little Black Sambo 137; and visible 108, 109 lack 64, 94, 180, 224 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 277 Lady Penelope 87 Lake District 249 Landa, Manuel de 192 Langres 279 language 83 larceny 248 Larson, Gary 266 Lascaux 21, 200, 270 last human venue xi, 1–3, 13, 172, 196, 200–1, 216, 273, 279; definition of 271–2 Latour, Bruno xi, 15, 23, 32, 37, 189–96, 250; and description 38; and plasma 45; project 50; purpose 273; and social 41; We Have Never Been Modern 41, 72; and well-written 47 Lavigne, Avril 243

316 Index law 3; jihadist 9; of live arts 3 Lawrence, Stephen 153, 255 lay theatre 26, 38, 181 Lazarus 279 Le Corbusier 114, 180, 202, 208–9, 212, 216 Lefaivre, Liane 202 Lehmann, Hans-Thies 35 Libeskind, Daniel 98 Lepage, Robert 266–7 Les Miserables 52 Lesnes Knight 100, 136 less 13 lesser animal 195, 262–3 Levinas, Emmanuel 36, 109, 118–19, 124, 134, 227 Lewinsky, Monica 257 Lewis, C. S. 145, 146 Lewis, Martin 66 Liberty 180 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 277 life 7, 68–70; a life 7, 65, 68–70, 97, 100; actors’ 166; as affect 69; arrested 27, 221; as community 199; Damilola Taylor’s 216; digital 270; of flesh 261; historical 145; and interpretation 145; lesser 245; and living player 258; potential 89; Richard Lowdon’s 186; Riderhood’s 86; running for 214; saturated 216; as such 86; and theatre 59; ticks 221; value of 217 likeness 101 limbo 183–4 limelight 64 liminal 127, 154 Lingis, Alphonso 105, 110, 116, 120, 124, 126, 133, 189 Linnaeus 92, 149, 169 lions 135; act 225 lips 183; Tim Etchells’s 183 Little Black Sambo 137 Littlejohn, Richard 108 Live Aid 180 live art 39, 62 liveness 59 Lloyd Webber, Andrew 52 lo and behold 5 local 31

London 9, 70 London International Festival of Theatre 31, 53, 103 London School of Economics 50 Lone Twin 61, 175 Loos, Adolf 216 loss 35 Lowdon, Richard 175, 184, 185, 186 Lucas, George 270 lullabye 146 Lulu 135 Lynam, Desmond 241 Lyotard, Jean-François 34, 63, 64–5; The Tooth, the Palm 142 MacDonald, Claire 181 Macklin, Charles 261 Maclarnon, Ann 92 Macready, William Charles 223 Madden, John 254 Madonna 33 Madrid Atocha 75 Malevich, Kasmir 114 Malone, Bugsy 148 Mamet, David 68 manger 129 Manson, Marilyn 52 maphorian 128–9 Mapplethorpe, Robert 66, 107, 108 margin 12; and politics 19 Marion, Jean-Luc 18 Marranca, Bonnie 62, 104 martyrs 9, 72–4, 99, 175, 184 Marx Brothers 143 Marx, Karl 9, 169, 190, 265; and conflict 202; and ethics 47; Grundrisse 143; and Randy Newman 26 Massey, Doreen 8, 21 Matcham, Frank 37; Lyric Hammersmith 39 Matta-Clark, Gordon 3 Mauss, Marcel 247 Maxwell, Ian 24 Maxwell, Richard 4, 187, 75; Drummer Wanted 187; The End of Reality 187, 272; Good Samaritan 187; House 4 McKenzie, Jon 44; Perform Or Else 44, 46, 61 McQueen, Alexander 116

Index 317 measurement 3–4, 123; of extinction 273; and injustice 19 meat 152 melancholia 157 melancholic xi Meltdown 53 memento mori 204 memento vivere 204 memoir 229 memorial 204, 212, 229; tectonic 204 memory 7, 229 menagerie 148 Menezes, Charles de 94 Mercer, David 241 meteorology 264 Metzger, Gustave 251 midday 228 midnight 146 Miles, Lyn 151–2 military 231 Miliband, David 178 Milohnic, Aldo 22 mime 139 mimesis 178, 199, 266; and Plato 178 Minghella, Anthony 109 minimal difference 17, 101 minor acts 263 Mirren, Helen 249 Mitchell, Robert 151–2 Mitman, Greg 152 Modulor 208 Moebius Band 64, 95 MoMart 59 Monbiot, George 42 monuments 205 Moody, Frank 98 Moore, Michael 52 Moray Eel 113 morning 155–6 Morph 59 Morris, Desmond 108 Morris, Johnny 108 Morrison, Toni 137 Mothercare 146 Mother Theresa 52 Mr Cohn 180 Mud 134 Musil, Robert 109, 205, 216 Muybridge, Eduard 270

naivete 14 Nancy, Jean-Luc xi, 133, 188, inoperative community 13, 189 natality 66 National Art Library London 97 National Front 183 National Theatre London 38, 54, 104, 183, 192, 224, 239, 266 National Trust 249 natural fantastic 220 natural historian 14, 228 nature 3, 14, 41, 77, 145 191, 249–63; end of 251; and Katherine Hepburn 151; and nostalgia 219; theatre and performance 15 natural history 115; of domination 185; of performance 253–68 natural incidents 1 naturalism 2, 259–60 nature table 114–15; resonance and wonder 118; uncanny 118 Neel, Alice 107 Nehamus, Alexander 108, 116 Neitz, Revel 91 neohuman 2 neuroptics 57, 108 New Delhi 56 Newman, Randy vi, 26; Short People 142; The Beehive State 5 Nicholson, Jack 126 Nielson, Anthony 152 Nietzsche, Friedrich vi, 52, 176, 207, 228, 279; and anthropomorphism 151; and dynamite 175 night 145; opening 279; redeemed 145 Ninagawa, Yukio 81 Ninasam 63 Niro, Robert de 150; crab-like 150 Nixon, Richard 232 North Peckham Estate 205 Northwestern 63 nostalgia 23, 218 nuclear 73 objects xi, 3, 5, 47, 87, 185; and automata 169–70; and Brian Saner 252; and commodity fetishism 190; fuzzy 192; and nostalgia 219; and recalcitrance 38; as treasure 247; as witnesses 118

318 Index octopus 112 Oedipus 84 Oida, Yoshi 103 Old Bailey 183 Old Vic 239 Olivier, Laurence 117 On The Boards 62 ontology 11–12, 87; historical 12; of morals 11, 50; of performance 107 Open 88 open secret 237 Operation Rescue 66 Ophir, Adi 7, 14, 48, 66, 67, 75–6, 269, 272; and evil 56–57, 171; Israel and Palestine 25, 50; The Order of Evils 66 optimism 66 oratory 2 order 16, 19 Orgel, Stephen 227 O’Reilly, Kira 19 ornamental 111 orthodoxy 18 Osbournes 9 Osmonds 9 Padstow 255 Palace Theatre, Westcliff-On-Sea 37 Palestine 182 Paltrow, Gwyneth 126, 254, 264, 277 pandemic 72 paradox 277 parallax 3, 164; definition of 16–17; and performance 56, 216; of the performer 278; between politics and ethics 16; between practice and theory 179 Park, Nick 59 Parker, Andrew 178 Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer 220 parliament of performance 12 Parr, Albert Eide 115 part xi, 82, 142; and partless 180 performance 1–3, 189; anomalous 104; as anthropological machine 82, 96, 151; apparatus 144; as arbitrary art 190; arrested 158; barely there 12, 220–8; and child 124–5, 147–8; civility 237; cross-species 266–7; definition of 34; ecologies 267; enforced 211;

ethics 123–4; ethnography 247; homeopathic 182, 185; human ontology 192; imperative of 92, 120, 124–6, 130; impressive 220; inoperative 187; and jihad 72–3; and language 83; naming 159, 169; natural history of 253–68; no-purpose 116; parasite 110; pitch 175; to politicise 16–19, 21, 27, 34, 252; and politics 6, 35; power 134; precarious 102; primordial 88; as process 41; prodigious 103, 105, 111; production of subject 144; profane 248; propriety 103–4; proxy 191; remainder to 45; of reserve 248; in retreat 200; as scene of appearance 185; seamless 253; as such 21, 82, 85; and theatre 55; and treasure 247; unaddressed 104; and unforgettable 204–5; wooden 268; yet to come 228 performance studies 6–7, 11, 29; and annexation 64; anti-theatrical 62; the body 68; as brand 55; conflict-less 202; and disappearance 12; anti-discipline 24; experiencing and explaining 158; extinction theory 61; a life 69; melancholy 36, 65, 157; morbidity of 60; and neuroptics 57; practice and theory 43; and radical particularity 30; remainder 85; social 22; and theatre 61; unmarked 186; and unrepresentable 177; and visibility politics 179 performative 44, 204; disincorporation 182; process 177; Puritan 108 Perrier, Olivier 256 personal narrative xi Pfizer 138 Phelan, Peggy 11, 247; on disappearance 220; family 11; on Angelica Festa 66; Mourning Sex 157; and Peter Brook 85; and Richard Schechner 55; Unmarked 11, 46, 84, 107; and witness 74, 184

Index 319 phenomenology 11, 45, 63, 97, 153, 270; of appearance 11; of perception 227 Phillips, Adam 213 philosophy 50, 77, 107, 134, 149; of process 188; theatre-wise 176 phrenology 23 Pinter, Harold 108 plagiarism 242, 244 plague 223 plasma 45; and the Open 88 Platform 187 Plato 21, 35, 108, 122, 162, 195, 206; fear of poets 22, fear of sailors 205; 178; Laws 179; mimesis 120 play 118, 155 playground 106, 202–6 pleasure 2 Pliny 228 polemic 27–9, 49 political 4, 7, 21–3; definition of 26; and pseudo-activity 18; and theatre 26–9 political efficacy xi, 5, 18 political theatre xi politics xi, 1; abundant 13; and aesthetics 12; and bodily practices 68; border 21; definition of 25–6, 177; improper 278; of nature 250; of performance xi, 58; and progress 192; of science x; and speed 214; of theatre 6, 11; visibility 107 pollution 272 poor 12, 179, 275; and road deaths 42 Porter, Jimmy 5 Portmann, Adolf 105, 112, 113, 114, 117 post-human 2 posthumous 140, 181, 229, 234, 275; responsibility 183 potential 89, 154 Powell, Colin 189, 244 practice 102, 257 Pradier, Jean-Marie 88, 268 precarious 102, 118, 227 pre-fab 23 Preddie, Ricky and Danny 217 Premium Bonds 235–7

Prescott, John 178 presence 70 primordial 15, 178, 197 Priority One 46 promise 1, 279; broken 177 prop 190 proxy performance 11, 100, 227, 243, 253 Prynne, William 255 PS122 New York 63 psychoanalysis 35, 45, 74, 94, 155, 213, 271; and children 214; and trauma 70 psychological 7 Public Art Development Trust 53 public secret 202, 230–8 queen

242, 249

radical inclusion 181 radically particular 30–1 Radiolarians 106 Rancière, Jacques xi, 12, 122, 173; On The Shores of Politics 21; the distribution of the sensible 77, 175–86 Rang, Florens 145, 146 Ravenhill, Mark 55; Product 55, 175 Read, Alan 15; Architecturally Speaking 31; Theatre & Everyday Life 15, 22, 26, 36, 45, 65, 67, 69, 85, 260, 269 Read, Teresa 245, 247 Read, Veronica 193, 244, 247 real 150 Real 55 Reagan, Ronald 66 reality TV 240–4 recall 16, 188–206 Redgrave, Vanessa 224 regard 109, 118 Reinelt, Janelle xiii, 32, 62 relational 34, 163, 184; works of art 145 religion 6 remedial 4, 8, 23 repair 252 repertory 1 representation 11, 142, 177, 239; resistance to 11, 105, 219; reticent 206

320 Index resonance 118 retard 22 reticent 21 revelation 238 Rich, Christopher 136 Richardson, Ralph 117 Ridout, Nicholas 9, 12, 26, 51, 55, 59, 257; and animals 89–90 Rilke 88, 131, 169 risk 106, 147, 192 Rist, Piplotti 66 Ritvo, Harriet 136, 255–6 Ritz Cinema 237 Roach, Joseph 60, 259 road deaths 42–3, 196 Road To Nowhere 40 Robinson, Beryl 8, 97 Rolling Stones 226 Rose Theatre 66 Rosenthal, Rachel 256 Rosetti, Christina 130 Roode, Ingeborg de 202 Roubicek, Bruno 55 Royal de Luxe 32 Royal Shakespeare Company 239 Rugoff, Ralph 220 Ruiz, Raul 214 Rummel, Rudolph 171 Rumsfeld, Donald 229, 230 Sadlers Wells 161 sagacity 271 Salamonsky, Albert 139 Salinger, J. D. 227 Sancho Panza 25 Sandaldjian, Hagop 227 Sandt, Townes van 89 Saner, Brian 252 Sarajevo 153 Sarkozy, Nicolas 9 saturated 180; identity 180; imagery 181 Saville Row 234 saving 229–38 scale 37, 219 Scarry, Elaine 116 Schama, Simon 231, 246 Schechner, Richard 6, 29, 68, 88, 268; and animals 107; and enforced performance 211; and ethology 88; and Peggy

Phelan 55; and playing 127; and professional theatre 62 Schmitt, Carl 29, 232 Schnabel, Julien 114 Schneider, Rebecca xi, 121–2, 163 Schonell Reading Test 218 Schumacher, Michael 42 Schwarz, Hillel 234 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 118, 141 scopophilia 57 Searle, John 161 Sebald, W. G. 203 secret 244–5 secretary 232 secret service 232 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 245 seeing 105, 114, 215; and octopus 112; and tactility 110, 118 self 1 self-evident 1 Sellars, Peter 239 semiotics 63, 109, 143, 271 Sennett, Richard 20; and intimacy 20; and margin 20; The Fall of Public Man 20 sentient 2, 5, 77, 93 Serres, Michel 111, 189 Shainberg, Steven 232 Shakespeare in Love 126, 254 Shakespeare Studies 54 Shakespeare, William 2, 223; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 104, 127; and breath 93; and Gwyneth Paltrow 126, 254; invention of human 254; Othello 167; The Tempest 2; Troilus and Cressida 255 shame 172 Shank, Theodor 62 Shaw, George Bernard 51 sheep 121–3 shepherd 121, 122, 149 Shepherd, Simon 55 show trial 230 showciology 22, 35; as affirmation 63; and appearance 40; and death 66; and decisiveness 65; definition of 31, 40; and judgement 56; and natural history 264; and

Index 321 non-human 46; priorities 53; purpose 55; and social 43; and sociology 46; summary of axioms 76–7; and visual 175 Shunt 81–3, 278 Sidique Khan, Mohammad 184 Siegfried and Roy 67 signals 106, 112 Sightsavers 57 silence 17, 103 similar 233 Singleton, Brian xiii singular 13, 162, 179, 182; and specific 32–36; and anomalous 150 singularity 3 Sitges 102 Sky Masterson 29 sleep 145–56; as saturated 146 slum 205, 216 Smith, Jack 28 Smithson, Robert 66 social 6–7, 27, 29; definition of 40 Societas Raffaello Sanzio x, 17, 49, 51, 52, 90, 105, 157–72, 225, 251; Aesop 166, 254; Amleto 91, 95; Buchettino 168; and echolalias 160; Genesi: from the museum of sleep 161–4; and gesture 161; Giulio Cesare 167, 169, 195, 267; Il Combattimento 167; La prova di un altro mundo 164; Tragedia Endogonidia 51, 166; and unthinkable 163 society 15, 41; community in the wake of 199 sociology 46 Sophocles 84, 161 Southend-On-Sea 231, 235 Southern, Richard 257 space 202; abandoned 202; and crime 212; lure of 245 Spacey, Kevin 239 Spader, James 232 Spam 257 spatial analysis 31 species 2, 87; and bio-politics 68; and extinction 133 specific 13, 33 specified 33 spectaculars 71, 175

spectator 63, 144, 207, 216, 227 speech 134, 263; echolalias 160; and flea circus 225; by proxy 148, 190, 194, 195–196 Spurs 241 strict 134 Sri Lanka 233 stage death 200 stage-door 125 stage fighting 91 stage-fright 164 stage-struck 48 Stanivlaski, Konstantin 68, 139; as ring-master 139 Star Wars 270 state of emergency 69, 160, 166, 208, 211, 216 St Christopher 274 Steeves, Peter 138 Stengers, Isabelle 11, 53 Stewart, Susan 218–23 stick insect 109 stitch 253 Stokes, John 133, 256 Stonebridge, Lyndsey 214 Stone, Jonathan 36 Stop the War March 241–2 Stoppard, Tom 66 St Francis of Assisi 51, 274; and lay community 274 St Mammès Cathedral 279 St Paul 47 Strauven, Francis 204 street 210 subaltern 20 suffering 2, 12, 30, 53, 56, 82, 205 suicide 21, 182 suicide bomber 55, 65, 73–4, 75, 180, 181, 184; propriety 184 sun 228 Sun 95 superfluous evil 7, 25, 48, 201; and sufficient goods 49; and theatre 69–70 surfaces 37, 227 swarm 162 Swift, Jonathan 226 taciturn 145 tact 102 Tanweer, Shehzad

184

322 Index Tarde, Gabriel 15 taste 116 Tate Britain 65, 222 Tate Modern 50 Taussig, Michael 147–8, 229, 230, 237, 265 tax 231 taxidermy 256 Taylor, Damilola 153 technique 164 teeth 132; Billie Whitelaw’s 183; and Stanislavski 140 Temple, Shirley 148 territory 11 Ten Cate, Ritsaart 62 tense 64 terroir 250 testes 118; Ofsted inspector’s 117–18; birds’ 118 Thatcher, Margaret 15 theatre 2–5, 65; accidental 46; and agoraphobia 216; anthropology 88; as anthropological machine 8; apolitical 28; appearance 5; arbitrary 143; bad 46; birth of 200; and the book 165; calling 48; capital 229; and circus 142; and compensation 60; dark 269, 279; definition of 26; and ecology 250; energetic 144; entertainment and efficacy 51; environmental 189; epochal 272; extinction 14, 77; gigantic 219–20; good 122; and good choice 48; and good faith 30; and hagiography 157; as hinge 210; imperative 49; and indifference 143; instrumentality 27; and intimacy 121–2; as last human venue 196; as live art 71; liveness 48; machine 26, 43, 83, 92, 171, 178, 182, 199, 237; and Mary Whitehouse 183–4; measuring effectiveness 143; as metaphor 58, 71; miniature 219–28; monographs 251; ontology 5; parallax 16; performance and

their relations 27–8, 55; and political 44, 53; politics 30, 187; premature politics 52; as a problem 257; of pugnaciousness 49, 202; Saddam Hussein 230; scale 226; Social 29, 206; society 21; space 144; street 208; superfluous 49; thinking 5, 31, 104; and Tourette’s Syndrome 161; universals 83–4; vital 260; vitality 49; vocabulary 63; vocation 68; of war 238–44; witness 175; what it is 257 Theatre Bazi 90 Theatre Museum London 51 theatre studies 29; and classification 115; loss of community 198; and natural-historical 251–263; and radical particularity 31; and the specific 33 theatricality 3, 26, 63, 142, 171; and Charles Dickens 87; of miniatures 223; and seeing 105; of the unthinkable 163 theatrocracy 178, 206 Theeb, Abu 72 theory 30 things 3; and hills 249 Thompson, Nicholas 151–2 Thompson, James 29 Tiblisi 63 tiger 132–3; Arnie 138, 141; Baiting of the Tiger 135; economy 133; feet 134; and Little Black Sambo 137; and Stanislavski 140; Sumatran 188, 191; Tipoo’s 136 tightrope 144 Timberlake, Justin 243 Tisch 63 toothache 143 touch 118–19 Tournier, Michel 105 toy 226–7 training 134; and taming 134–5 transgression 12, 18 transparency 4 trauma 7, 213

Index 323 Traumatology 70 treasure 246–8 Tricycle Theatre 239 Trier, Lars Von 263 Tropicana 83, 96, 101, 278 Truffaut, François 210 Truinas 250 truth 33; to character 33; and saying 130 Tschumi, Bernard 211 Tsunami 67 Tumnus 147 Turner, Victor 18, 127, 129 Uexküll, Jacob von 192, 221 unaddressed 104, 112 underachievement 4 understanding 102, 134 unforgettable 163, 203 university 75, 224, 250 unmarked 107, 213, 227 unswum swimmer 263 unwitting 202; memorial 205 Vanbrugh, John 136 Varley, John 222 venue 273; definition of 273, and trial 273–4 victim 50 Victoria & Albert Museum 97, 136 Vidler, Anthony 226 Virilio, Paul 166–7, 214 Virgin Mary 50, 129 virtuality 2 visibility 107 voice 117; John Gielgud 117; unamplified 142 Waiting for Godot 183 Walker Arts Centre 62 Wallis, Mick 55 walnut 99 Walser, Robert 141 wardrobe 155–6 Warhol, Andy 66 Warner, Marina 129

wave 123–4, 242 weak examples xi, 38, 176, 231 Weapons of Mass Destruction 239 Welfare State International 187 what if 48, 166 White, Gilbert 267 white goods 192; cross-cast 192 Whitehead, Alfred North 188, 192 Whitehouse, Mary 108, 183 wild-man 258 Wilde, Oscar 242 Williams, Bernard 25 Williams, David 107, 257 Williams, Serena and Venus 106 Williams, Raymond 209 window 215 witness 5, 44, 63, 74, 118, 172, 175, 181–2, 216, 273 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 32 wonder 118 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 238 Wooster Group 61; Brace Up! 61; Hamlet 121 writing 51, 75; cephalopod 113; micrographic 218–219; as political test 53 wrongs xi, 182 X

212; marks the spot

212

Yates, Richard 67, 249 Young At Heart 39 Young Vic Theatre 103 Zahavi, Amotz and Avishag 106 Zeta-Jones, Catherine 243 Zippo’s Circus 143 Zingarro 258 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj 16, 82, 230, 233; and Christianity 18; and pseudo-activity 17–18; and the Universal 84 zoomorphism 147, 151–2 zoopraxiscope 270 Zsa Zsa Gabor 157