Austerity and the Public Role of Drama

Performing Lives-in-Common

Victor Merriman

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030032593
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030032609
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book asks what, if any, public role drama might play under Project Austerity – an intensification phase of contemporary liberal political economy. It investigates the erosion of public life in liberal democracies, and critiques the attention economy of deficit culture, by which austerity erodes life-in-common in favour of narcissistic performances of life-in-public. It argues for a social order committed to human flourishing and deliberative democracy, as a counterweight to the political economy of austerity. It demonstrates, using examples from England, Ireland, Italy, and the USA, that drama and the academy pursue shared humane concerns; the one, a critical art form, the other, a social enabler of critical thought and progressive ideas. A need for dialogue with emergent forms of collective consciousness, new democratic practices and institutions, shapes a manifesto for critical performance, which invites universities and cultural workers to join other social actors in imaginingand enabling ethical lives-in-common.

Part INeo-liberalism’s Political and Moral Economic Project: The End of Public Life?

© The Author(s) 2019

Victor MerrimanAusterity and the Public Role of Dramahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03260-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Austerity and Drama’s Public Role

Victor Merriman¹

(1)

Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK

Victor Merriman

Abstract

This introductory chapter proposes that Drama is a public art form, and any erosion of the idea and practice of a public must, of necessity, alter the context in which Drama exists. The relationship between Drama’s fictional worlds and actual existing worlds is reciprocal, symbiotic, co-dependent, and, crucially, ethically grounded. Thus, any project in critical performance studies must account for overlapping material and symbolic worlds, experiences and perspectives, within evolving ethical frameworks. This is the general aim of this book, and this chapter summarises key concerns, providing a guide to rationale, structure, and chapter content.

Keywords

Liberal democracyLiberal political economyNeo-liberalisationAusterityDeficit Culture

End Abstract

This project began as an effort to understand what, if any, public role Drama—or Performance, conceived more broadly—might have, as Austerity redefined lived experiences and horizons of expectation across the Anglo-American world. As the literature on globalisation and neo-liberalisation shows, the processes in train in England, post-2010, are manifest widely across Western democracies. For this reason, my analysis references political and dramaturgical responses to Austerity from Ireland, Italy, and the United States of America, as well as cultural work from the Global South, a laboratory for neo-liberalisation, as it was, historically, for colonisation and Empire. The argument takes account of two emphases: one, historical; the other, processual. In the first case, I draw on Thomas A. Boylan and Timothy P. Foley’s (1992)¹ account of the centrality of laissez-faire political economy to the mid- to late-nineteenth-century project of liberal colonialism in Ireland, and David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s (1998)² critique of the liberal democratic state as essentially a pedagogical project, focused on limiting horizons of possibility, in order to discipline and shape those they regard as constituting the masses. In the latter, I draw on Neil Brenner, Jamie Peck, and Nik Theodore’s (2010)³ characterisation of ‘variegated,’ inconsistent, processes of ‘neo-liberalisation.’ The attempt to historicise neo-liberalism’s ancestry prior to the mid- to late-twentieth-century narrative sequence of Hayek, Friedman, Pinochet, Reagan, Thatcher, Wojtyla, and Yeltsin enables an emergent, self-styled ‘Post-Liberalism’ to be recognised as a further shading on a spectrum of Liberal political economy, that spans at least three centuries, and has been intimately involved in shaping the contemporary world.

By combining capital and coercion, successive liberalisms evolved and enforced normative ways of experiencing material life. By generating political consensus around civility and public life, and circulating fantasies of freedom, choice, and threat, for instance, liberalism’s symbolic order projects what is, in fact, a series of political and economic choices as an ineluctable existential norm. Those choices, typically glossed as ‘tough,’ as if in their making a stern price was exacted from those making them, are not defensible as measures taken in the public interest by public representatives. In fact, as Wendy Brown, Laurence McFalls and Mariella Pandolfi, and Philip Pettit, show, they are edicts enforced in the interests of elite groups by office holders who have recast themselves as political entrepreneurs, recklessly gambling with the working conditions, financial security, and, the very lives of those in whose interests the institutions of liberal democracy claim to act.

My research has involved the exploration of economic and related bureaucratic structures, in their everyday operation as shapers of what might be styled the ‘world of work,’ or—a favoured neo-liberal trope—‘the real world.’ It has also engaged with, to adapt Fredric Jameson, the cultural logic of such structures, the symbolic repertoires and mediated practices which have redesigned Western polities away from grand redistributive state institutions and projects, post-1945, towards a world of individualism, anxious and bombastic to the point of narcissism. Bombastic narcissism registers across narratives of racial and gender supremacy, and even oppression narratives. Anxiety issues from the bureaucratic management tool of European capitalism’s political economy: the ledger of profit and loss. Where Liberal and social democratic systems accounted for credit and debit, neo-liberalism records only the latter, to the extent that we live, day to day, in a Deficit Culture, essential to enforcing—while obscuring—a rapacious model of political economy.

One important imperative for the arguments that follow here is that, axiomatically, Drama is a public art form, and any erosion of the idea and practice of a public must, of necessity, alter the context in which Drama exists. Historically adept at reading and interpreting stage worlds, scholarship in performance studies is increasingly alert to the need to include in its hermeneutic tasks a nuanced account of the actual worlds in which audiences, performers, and other theatre artists are shaped. Jen Harvie’s Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism⁴ is a leading example of this turn. It is also axiomatic that the relationship between Drama’s fictional worlds and actual existing worlds is reciprocal, symbiotic, co-dependent, and, crucially, ethically grounded. Thus, any project in critical performance studies must account for overlapping material and symbolic worlds, experiences and perspectives, within evolving ethical frameworks. This is the general aim of this book, and this chapter introduces the reader to the argument, summarising key concerns, providing a guide to structure, and chapter content.

Austerity and the Public Role of Drama is organised in eight chapters: Chap. 1 (Introduction), Chap. 8 (Conclusion), and the remaining chapters divided in two substantive parts—Part I titled ‘Neo-liberalism’s Political and Moral Economic Project: The End of Public Life?’ (Chaps. 2 and 3) and Part II titled ‘Performance, the Academy, and the Politics of Austerity’ (Chaps. 4, 5, 6, and 7). Part I explores ideas of a public and the role of official dramaturgy in the governance of public life. Chapter 2, titled ‘The Public World: An Idea Under Pressure,’ argues that ideas of a public, including popular concepts of public life, property, and service, have underpinned the institutions, policies, and practices of national democratic states since the consolidation of liberal culture in the late-eighteenth century. Accordingly, the importance of ideas of the public in shaping lived experiences of democracy cannot be overstated. This is why, as these ideas have come under pressure in recent decades, Brown (2015),⁵ McFalls and Pandolfi (2012),⁶ and Pettit (2014)⁷ insist on the fundamental threat posed to democratic government by their erosion. What is at stake, as Brown, in particular, argues, is not only the existence of socio-political practices by means of which a public sphere, public realm, public man or woman, or public intellectual has been constituted, sustained, and evolved, but the very capacity to imagine them. The critiques produced by Brown, McFalls and Pandolfi, and Pettit, grapple—as Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, Michael Rustin, and others did in the Kilburn Manifesto⁸ (2013)—with neo-liberalism. As a result, this chapter seeks to synthesise influential critical perspectives on neo-liberalism’s corrosion of Liberalism’s signature governmentality, the organising assumptions of the national democratic state. A review of culture and the liberal state project identifies a liberal spectrum, including classical liberalism (Lloyd and Thomas 1998), neo-liberalism (Brenner et al. 2010; Brown 2015), and post-liberalism, bifurcated in radical (McFalls and Pandolfi 2012) and conservative (Goodhart 2014⁹; Milbank and Pabst 2016)¹⁰ analyses.

Chapter 3, titled ‘Drama in Public Worlds,’ addresses the displacement of public acts by performative acts in the neo-liberalisation of everyday life: a hegemonic project which produces, variously and relentlessly, the conditions explored in Chap. 2. The goal is to expose both the primacy, in neo-liberal thought-worlds, of homo œconomicus (Brown 2015) and the central role played by narrative consistency and social performance in establishing and sustaining that primacy by means of the trope, There Is No Alternative (TINA). Examples of the deployment of performance tropes in the service of the neo-liberal na...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Neo-liberalism’s Political and Moral Economic Project: The End of Public Life?
• Part II. Performance, the Academy, and the Politics of Austerity
• Back Matter