Re-Turning to The Show

Abstract

The contemporary moment, if we are to intervene in and radically change the current social and economic system, demands that we return to, rearticulate, reimagine and redefine concepts, goals, desires and relations. Returning to performance works that continue to haunt us, that have left us with the feeling that something has not been articulated about their importance, might help us rearticulate our relation to the world, to others, our place in and the function of current systems. In this article, I return to Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On and specifically to its first presentation in 2001– a time when a great deal of participatory work began to be made – to offer a different articulation to those offered so far. Drawing on the thinking of Wendy Brown, Gilbert Simondon, Jeremy Gilbert and John Protevi, I examine the work's economy of relations, its consequent production of the social and the potential that emerged from it. I focus my attention on the sociality produced in a specific moment in this presentation and the role of repetition in it. I suggest that, in that moment, a ‘disequilbrium’ caused by the work's dramaturgy resulted in a shift in the system of the work which afforded the spectators’ repetitive intervention in it and allowed for the work's potential to emerge. Using Simondon's theory of individuation (2005) and Gilbert's (2014) articulation of it, I argue that the work's production of sociality created a space of decision, affect and creative possibility, that enabled practices of thinking, relation and action, that any democratic institution should be informed by, enable and repeat. I suggest that it is such practices that constitute what I define as ethical encounters. While The Show is not conventionally considered to be a participatory or socially engaged work, I maintain that it achieves some of the claimed or intended, but often not delivered work of contemporary participatory performance.

Notes

¹ This article, which discusses the production of the social in Jérôme Bel's The Show Must Go On in relation to the theatre as a space and to neoliberalism, might be seen as a companion piece to my 2014 article in Performance Research, in which I discuss the production of the social in Tino Sehgal's These Associations in relation to the museum and neoliberalism. Together, these two articles contribute to a larger argument regarding what constitutes social engagement and the role and potential of performance in the contemporary neoliberal moment (examined in Paramana 2015).

² As I do not have the space here to nuance the term, I will briefly mention that the evolution of neoliberalism is contested. Some suggest that it was initially a theory and ideology with roots in the eighteenth century (in the thinking of classical liberal theorists like John Locke, Adam Smith and James Mill, who emphasized the importance of the individual, her freedom and happiness, and of free markets); that it turned policy at the end of the 1960s with Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, the fathers of neoliberalism; and that from the late 1970s onwards, the neoliberal ideas were ‘transformed into a political-economic programme’ (Gauthier et al. 2013:14). Others argue that neoliberalism is a governing rationality that did not evolve from liberalism in the manner articulated by Gauthier et al., but that it was a ‘reprogramming’ of liberalism: that unlike the latter, which considered the human a homo oeconomicus in the sphere of the market, neoliberalism considers, treats and expects the human to be homo oeconomicus in all spheres of life, for they are all treated as markets (Brown 2015).

³ For example, Etchells 2004, Hohenadel 2005, Lepecki 2006, Bauer 2008 and Mackrell 2015 to name a few.

⁴ I believe that Bel's work and the relations it produces are most constructively read through the lens of economy because the term reveals most strikingly the function of elements within his work (the work's economy of time, representation, movement and relations), the work's production of economies of thought, relation and encounter, but also how the work is complicit, resists or reveals the economies in which it is embedded: the theatre, contemporary dance and neoliberal capitalist economies. (This is an argument that is further developed in Paramana 2015.)

⁵ For a brief overview, see Paramana 2014.

⁶ According to Gilbert, affect is a dimension of experience which is at once physical and psychological, a domain of varying intensities which are not fully articulated, individuated and represented in consciousness; ‘emotion’ might be understood as what we experience once we have identified an affective shift and represented it to ourselves as something which can be named and which can be understood as happening to us internally as individuals. (Gilbert 2014: 144–5)

⁷ At the time of writing (5 July 2015), it is this subordination of politics and ethics to economy that was protested against in Greece through a referendum.

⁸ In the museum one can visit and look at the artwork as a singular spectator and at any time during its opening hours.