Performance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanism

Yana Meerzon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030414092
• eBook ISBN: 9783030414108
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book looks at the connection between contemporary theatre practices and cosmopolitanism, a philosophical condition of social behaviour based on our responsibility, respect, and healthy curiosity to the other. Advocating for cosmopolitanism has become a necessity in a world defined by global wars, mass migration, and rise of nationalism. Using empathy, affect, and telling personal stories of displacement through embodied encounter between the actor and their audience, performance arts can serve as a training ground for this social behavior. In the centre of this encounter is a new cosmopolitan: a person of divided origins and cultural heritage, someone who speaks many languages and claims different countries as their place of belonging. The book examines how European and North American theatres stage this divided subjectivity: both from within, the way we tell stories about ourselves to others, and from without, through the stories the others tell about us.

© The Author(s) 2020

Y. MeerzonPerformance, Subjectivity, Cosmopolitanismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41410-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided Self of a New Cosmopolitanism

Yana Meerzon¹

(1)

University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

Yana Meerzon

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

CosmopolitanismSubjectivityPerformanceEncounterDivided self

End Abstract

Today, as the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky argues, we have entered a new phase of Modernist culture: it is now characterized by the exigencies of hyper. ‘Hyper capitalism, hyperclass, hyper-power, hyper-terrorism, hyper-individualism, hypermarket, hypertext’ (Lipovetsky 2004, 155) are directly connected to the economic practices of late capitalism. Global wars, the information overload, the acceleration of time, and the malady of hyper-consumption all result in the processes of constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing subjectivity. ‘The hypermodern individual’—Lipovetsky writes—‘lives a life characterized by flexibility, adaptability, and a demand of continuous improvement, both in the work place and throughout his/her general life’ (153). For this individual, the global supermarket and the workplace have turned into places of worship.

Bojana Kunst arrives at similar conclusions, declaring, ‘contemporary society places great emphasis on creativity, imagination, and dynamism’, so that the only tangible product of late capitalism is ‘models of subjectivity’ (2015, 19). Kunst examines the role played by the performing arts in re-fashioning this subjectivity. In response to her own question of ‘how and what does art actually produce in contemporary capitalism?’ (17), Kunst suggests that the only commodity created by the performing arts is the artist at work (19).

Using these statements as a starting point, I seek in this book to analyse how this new subjectivity is constructed and staged in the theatres of hypermodernity. The focus and theoretical approaches in this book, however, differ from those of Kunst, who studies theatre and cultural performance, which reflects its own modes of production and is tightly connected to the material and economic conditions of labour. I am interested in individual artists, their craft, and the philosophical discourses that underlie this production of subjectivity. Specifically, I am drawn to those works that produce subjectivity as a reflection of one more exigency of the hyper: the new regimes of mobility (Schiller and Salazar 2013). They include mass migration, refuge and asylum seeking, political and self-imposed exile, economic migration, work-related travel, and tourism. However, instead of juxtaposing stasis as settlement and migration as movement in their relational perspectives, I see regimes of mobility as shaping the world of hypermodernity in the dimensions of simultaneity, relationality, and temporality and evoking the image of a new nomadism, which re-enforces non-belonging and produces anxiety in settled populations (Landry 2017, 26). Paradox and incongruity are the basis of this new nomadism, as it generates cosmopolitan cultural practices and consciousness and at the same time leads to neo-nationalism and false patriotism. New nomadism functions as a civic city, where diversities converge and interact (27). It also spawns questions of who can be considered a responsible citizen, as we increasingly witness more and more people declaring multiple cultural, linguistic, and civic affiliations. Marked by its cultural heterogeneity, the civic city serves as a model of the post-migrant society or new cosmopolitanism, emerging as an alternative scenario to the practices and mythologies of the nation state. At the centre of this construction is the hypermodern individual, someone perpetually on the move between work and leisure, rushed to produce and achieve, often switching languages and cultures, partners and values, driven by various commitments.

We must remember, of course, that not all travellers and travelling are created equal. In this book I make a fundamental distinction between the so-called jet-setters as privileged travellers, whose status in the power-geometry of global mobility is defined by their wealth and power (Massey 2014, 62), and refugees and asylum seekers, whose movement across the space-time continuum is forced and precarious. As a Western academic who travels on a Canadian passport conveniently approved and acknowledged by the international community, I admit that my work is marked by my privileged position and freedom of movement. It was not always like that: my own journey of immigration was marked by various anxieties, hard work, and personal sacrifice. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to recognize my privilege as a hypermodern individual. By the same token, this book is a study of theatre performances made by and addressed to hypermodern individuals like myself, who possess the financial, legal, and linguistic means to access them. Like Marilena Zaroulia, who examines ‘the relation between the so-called European “refugee crisis” and the multiple meanings and performances of excess’ (2018, 181), I analyse performative representations of migration aimed at ‘those of us who have not had a direct experience of forced displacement’ and whose meaning therefore ‘exceeds us’ (181). The major question I seek to answer is: what values can the performing arts offer a hypermodern nomad? Indeed, what’s Hecuba to him or her? For Bojana Kunst, the answer is clear: our assumption that art can have some political and/or social impact is invalid (2015, 20); the only function it can fulfil is to become a repository of philosophical observations and emotional experiences. I concur with this statement but take her position further in this book, arguing that watching a theatre performance live and experiencing it as an embodied practice can foster self-reflection: it can create an epiphany, a fortuitous philosophical moment of self-recognition. The cosmopolitan spectator is obliged to contemplate their position as a privileged subject and encouraged to step outside the historical moment in which they live. In this post-Brechtian gesture of alienating self from self, cosmopolitan theatre can impose a moment of recognition. Not only can it make a person of privilege suddenly recognize the other within themselves; it can incite them to take the first step towards an ethical dialogue with the other outside the self. In making these suggestions, however utopian they may sound, I follow, on the one hand, Zygmunt Bauman, who advocates dialogue as the only way to overcome the indifference, if not animosity, that late capitalism produces towards strangers (2016, 2017), and, on the other hand, Erika Fischer-Lichte, who has already suggested that the transformative power of performance can involve spectators in an active loop of aesthetic and affective experiences, which invokes questions of ethics and sets in motion the mechanisms for one’s encounter with oneself (2008, 40–52). In her more recent work, Fischer-Lichte distinguishes between three modes of this transformative aesthetics , such as ‘the aesthetics of impact, of autonomy and of reception’ (2018, 18), which ‘transform the viewer into an emotional, feeling subject and, in this respect, is comparable to the empathy aesthetics of the eighteenth century’ (16). Transformative aesthetics is based on the act of somatic and emotional encounter between the stage and the audience; it envisions a viewer in a state of ‘permanent activity’ (11), energetically and creatively involved in the act of receiving or co-constructing the work of art (13). Building further on this theory, I examine the performative logic of the encounter as a relational activity (Bourriaud 1998) and the rhizomatic stillness of multiple selves. By focusing on the fundamental elements of the theatre performance, such as language, body, and time/space, I seek to theorize the performative mechanisms involved in conceptualizing, constructing, and performing the new cosmopolitanism. The objective is to create a map of the artistic strategies and philosophical preoccupations that inform the work of the many artists whose practices and sensibilities are clearly cosmopolitan. The underlying theme of this book is the notion of the divided self, whereas the analyses presented are shaped by the focus on motion.

The Cosmopolitan Subjectivity of the Divided Self

The concept of self as we know it today goes back to the Renaissance and the work of Petrarch, who ‘by reading the ancient writers had to experience his own being as a unique and autonomous self which he could objectify, act upon, and compare to other such autonomous selves’ (Melton 1998, 68). In this process, Petrarch recognized the Western subject’s tendency to ‘general[ly] turn inward’ as ‘a reaction to the knowledge that human beings were no longer one with the cosmos’ (68). This reading of the self as a unique entity marked the philosophical thought of the Enlightenment and the Romantic worldview of the Sturm und Drang writers, who proposed an idealized model of the self-willed tragic character ready for self-sacrifice. Nietzsche’s philosophical nihilism radically changed the concept of self, which is now recognized as something invented and projected by the onlooker onto the subject. This led to the notion of the reading self as something constructed through language and as an act of memory that ‘provides the continuity which allows a sense of identity’ (73). Today we often define the sense of self through the act of encounter—an action that emphasizes the relational nature of the self as self and the self as other—so that a cosmopolitan subject often emerges as someone in the process of being re-fractured and redefined. As Peter Boenisch suggests, ‘today subjectivity is not supported as an expression of “authentic self” or “ideological misrecognition”’; it asserts ‘a subjective position of formal self-reflexivity that always maintains a distance from itself and thereby can never become identical with itself’ (2003, 112). Constructed relationally through a theatre performance, in which information and energy are exchanged between artist and viewers, cosmopolitan subjectivity can be revealed (a) historically through the relation of the self to personal memory and forgetting and to the collective history of a nation; (b) socially in the relation of the self to society, as seen in identity politics—the self as other and the self as part of a group; (c) philosophically and ethically, as the responsibility of the self to oneself and to the other; and (d) as an aesthetic activity, constructed through the relation of the self to the self through arts. Cosmopolitan theatre utilizes devices of relational dramaturgy (Boenisch 2014; Pewny et al. 2014) to bring about an encounter between the spectator and the work of art, thereby confronting its audiences with resurfacing national, cultural, and ideological traditions and requiring our ‘radical relation to our histories, subjectivities and identities’ (Boenisch 2003, 128).

The encounter—both as a dramaturgical device on stage and as a gesture of theoretical conceptualization—serves as this study’s central metaphor and facilitates discussion of the complex workings of cosmopolitan theatre. I use the notion of encounter to speak of the live theatrical work as a social, performative, philosophical, and aesthetic event, when several independent subjects come together to form new environments for intellectual, emotional, and affectual collaborations. In its social dimensions, the encounter can take place at a border-crossing, in a zone of economic exchange or a (military) conflict, and as a gesture of creating a place for dialogue or an imagined community (Anderson 1991). In its philosophical dimensions, it can be an experience itself or ‘the passage and departure toward the other’ (Derrida 2001, 103). As a performative category, the encounter can serve as a collision of conflictual forces which takes place between (1) agents of action in the dramatic world, s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Setting the Stage: Performing the Divided Self of a New Cosmopolitanism
• Part I. Encounters in Language
• Part II. Encounters in Body
• Part III. Encounters in Time, Space, and History
• Back Matter