(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment

Abstract

In this article, postmodernism is defined as an extension and problematization of modernist questions to which the problem of subjectivity remains a central concern. The concept of subjectivity is considered a redundant category in much of postmodernist theory; however, this is not the case in contemporary drama, theatre and performance, as is demonstrated in analyses of the work of Howard Barker, Sarah Kane and Forced Entertainment.

The theoretical framework of this discussion is based on the work of Frankfurt School member Theodor W. Adorno who drew attention to the diminishing possibilities of subjective experience in late-capitalist (postmodern) society. For Adorno, resistance to the reification of the self in post-Auschwitz culture can only be found in an encounter with the aesthetic or, as is argued here, in an encounter with the distinctively theatrical. The examples of ‘new-expressionist’ theatre and performance discussed here engage with the crisis of subjectivity (a modernist trope) in a late-capitalist context, using aesthetic approaches which heighten the ‘damaged’ nature of the subject (Adorno). Subjectivity is articulated in a series of confrontations with outer and inner limitations, in experimental theatrical form, and in the particular immediacy of the performance event.

Notes

See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. by P. Foss, P. Patton, and P. Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).

Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’[1966], in The Structuralist Controversy. The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 247–72 (p. 271).

The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research was founded by Marxist German intellectuals in 1923. After World War II Adorno and Max Horkheimer rebuilt the institute and Adorno's work on sociology, music and mass culture provided important contributions to the revival of German intellectual life.

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), p. 120.

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), p. 34.

Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), p. 227.

Ibid., p. 232.

See Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity, trans. by David Midgley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. xii.

See Julia Kristeva, ‘Le sujet en procès’, in her Polylogue (Paris: Seuil, 1977). Reprinted as ‘The Subject in Process’, in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. by Patrick Ffrench and Roland-François Lack (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 133–78. Kristeva challenges the unitary and autonomous (male) subject of western thought with her model of subjectivity as an energetic and contradictory process of language.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 235.

David Ian Rabey employs the term ‘New Expressionism’ with reference to Howard Barker, David Rudkin, Caryl Churchill, and Timberlake Wertenbaker in whose work the subjective is the domain of powerful ‘active transformation’. See David Ian Rabey, English Drama since 1940 (London: Longman, 2003), p. 128. The description ‘neo-expressionist’ finds an earlier application in Baz Kershaw's characterization of certain alternative theatre groups that are ‘committed to the subjective as the determining domain of theatrical conventions’; see Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 178.

Howard Barker, Arguments for a Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 93.

See Chris Megson, ‘England Brings you Down at Last’, in Theatre of Catastrophe, ed. by Karoline Gritzner and David Ian Rabey (London: Oberon Books, 2006), pp. 124–35.

See Karoline Gritzner, ‘Catastrophic Sexualities in Howard Barker's Theatre of Transgression’, in Genealogies of Identity: Interdisciplinary Readings on Sex and Sexuality, ed. by Margaret Sönser Breen and Fiona Peters (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 95–106.

See Charles Lamb, The Theatre of Howard Barker, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2006), especially the chapter ‘Postmodernism and the Theatre’, pp. 24–42.

See Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).

Barker, Arguments, p. 59.

Howard Barker, Death, The One and the Art of Theatre (London: Routledge, 2005).

Adorno uses the term ‘forced reconciliation’ in his critique of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács' belief that art should offer an image of a resolution of class conflict and social contradiction that does not exist in present society. Adorno believes, in contrast, that such conflicts and contradictions enter the form of art and need to remain unresolved in order for art to retain a perspective of critique. More generally, Adorno uses the term to denote capitalism's ideological tendency to conceal and even falsely resolve the underlying antagonisms of its system. See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Aesthetics and Politics: Debates Between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, ed. and trans. by R. Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 177–95.

Barker, Arguments, p. 97.

Ibid., p. 144.

Ibid., pp. 147, 57.

Barker, Dead Hands (London: Oberon Books, 2004), p. 19.

Rainer Friedrich, ‘The Deconstructed Self in Artaud and Brecht: Negation of Subject and Antitotalitarianism’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 26 (1990), 282–97 (p. 283).

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), p. 76.

See Graham Saunders, ‘Love Me or Kill Me’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Aleks Sierz, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (Faber and Faber, 2001); Dan Rebellato, ‘Sarah Kane: An Appreciation’, New Theatre Quarterly XX.3 (1999), 280–81. There is a consensus that Kane's theatre is provocative, visceral and emotionally honest, and that its distinguishing experiential aesthetic disturbs habitual audience expectations and responses.

Sarah Kane, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 60.

Edward Bond, quoted in Saunders, ‘Love Me or Kill Me’, p. 25.

Saunders, ‘Love Me or Kill Me’, p. 156.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 22.

Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Tooth, The Palm’, in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime, ed. by Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 282–88 (p. 287).

Adorno applies the Marxist theory of reification to his analysis of the commercial mediation and instrumentalization of consciousness in the ‘culture industry’. Reification denotes the commodity character of art and the alienation of human relations. See‘The Culture Industry’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pp. 120–67.

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), p. 95.

In a revisionist article about postmodernism, Ihab Hassan states that the following categories pertain to the postmodernist style: ‘fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, anti-ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp’. See Ihab Hassan, ‘From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context’, Philosophy and Literature, 25.1 (2001), 1–13 (p. 1).

‘Not Even a Game Anymore’: The Theatre of Forced Entertainement, ed. by Judith Helmer and Florian Malzacher (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2004), p. 72.

Performance is here defined in the Derridean sense of an event as ‘an irreplaceable and irreversible empirical particular’. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 10.

See Tim Etchells in ‘Not Even A Game Anymore’, p. 88.

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 77.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xiv.

An Adornian analysis could also be carried out for playwrights such as Mark Ravenhill and Martin Crimp. Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking (1996), for example, seems to enact a negative dialectic between endorsing the freedom of consumer capitalism and implicitly rejecting that same freedom, although the play does not particularly centre on the tribulations of the self. Neither does Crimp's Attempts on Her Life (1997), which suggests an underlying radical absence of self amid a world of artificial media constructs that are in constant flux. Both Crimp and Ravenhill do not aestheticize the failure and possibilities of the subject to the extent of Barker and Kane.

Hassan, ‘From Postmodernism to Postmodernity’, p. 13.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 40.

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 238.