On Dialectics

On a chilly autumn morning, atop the roof of Toynbee Studios in London, artist Poppy Jackson was straddling the gable above the courtyard. There was a sense of dominance, as Jackson powerfully exerted her presence on the building. At the same time, the apex of the institution itself was penetrating her shivering body; Jackson appeared to be at the mercy of its late-nineteenth-century architecture and surrounding environment. During Site (2015), her piece for SPILL Festival of Performance, Jackson merged with the building, her legs following its contours on either side of the roof, yet her naked flesh also stood out against the cold brickwork. When viewed from the exterior courtyard along with a small crowd of onlookers Site presented itself as a public event, but when peered at through a small window on the second floor interior, the personal and private became more prevalent. What becomes immediately apparent when considering the experience of viewing Site is that Jackson’s body, the building she sat on and the city she looked out over were not discrete elements of a fixed structure but were part of a relational and contradictory process, which was itself constituted of various social, political and biological processes. Site not only raises important questions about gender, the body and their relation to space, but also points towards how a performance might function dialectically, where its thematic content and cultural context must be considered in relation to each other. Dialectics is a radical compromise; a form of analysis that examines the world in terms of processes, contradictions and relations; a methodology that relentlessly thinks of all things in terms of other things.

On Dialectics provides a platform for articles, performative essays and artists’ pages that focus on such interrelations, and offers space to reflect on how dialectical methods can be applied in theatre and performance theory and practice. Fredric Jameson speaks of various ways ‘to stage the dialectic’ (2009: 3), while Bertell Ollman writes of ‘the dance of the dialectic’ (2003), but what exactly is the relationship between performance and dialectics? This issue asks how a theory of flux and contradiction might be particularly vital to the study of the contemporary performance industry in an era of global socio-economic instability. When thinking of alternatives to neoliberalism in the sphere of cultural production, why might scholars and practitioners recuperate a praxis that places fracture and antagonism at its very heart? How might the playful and dialogic engagement that dialectics promotes speak to the creation, process and experience of contemporary cultural activity? Is performance inherently dialectical, or is dialectics inherently performative?

A key starting point for this issue of Performance Research is the tendency in theatre and performance studies to look across disciplines and utilize scholars from fields such as philosophy, geography or political theory, whose working methods are intrinsically dialectical (e.g. Karl Marx, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Henri Lefebvre, C. L. R. James). As fruitful as this turn can be, there is a danger of not fully engaging with the cultural, politico-ontological and phenomenological implications of these dialectical methodologies. Steps have been taken towards attending to such implications while bringing dialectics into the field, both by edited collections that read dialectical philosophers alongside performance – such as Adorno and Performance (Daddario and Gritzner 2014) and Žižek and Performance (Chow and Mangold 2014) – and by scholars who engage with dialectics and performance directly (e.g. David Barnett 2013; Peter Boenisch 2015; Dave Calvert 2016; Jen Harvie 2005; Eric Lott 1993; Alan Read 1993; Rebecca Schneider 1997). On Dialectics seeks to expand this existing body of work, by using dialectics as a lens to examine a broad range of performance forms, and takes such work a step further by making dialectics the focus of critical enquiry.

We will now consider in more detail two examples of recent work on dialectics and performance to which this issue responds: Slavoj Žižek’s dialectical materialism and the use of dialectics to explore representations of racial identity. These two areas, while drawing out some key concerns of the issue, also reflect the editors’ diverse (and sometimes contrastingly positioned) approaches to performance analysis, demonstrating how dialectics has influenced not only the issue’s content, but its form.

Turning to Žižek’s dialectical materialism, for example, may be one way of teasing out connections between dialectics and performance. Studies of theatre and performance that draw on Žižekian (and by proxy Hegelian) dialectical thought not only identify specific contradictory tensions at work in specific contexts, but are often attentive to the precise stakes of such tensions. Crucially, they examine how such contradictory tensions may in fact be constitutive of the situation under examination, rather than functioning as a restrictive analytical deadlock.

This may be exemplified by recourse to a well-known passage from The Phenomenology of Spirit, frequently cited by Žižek: ‘the being of Spirit is a bone’ (Hegel 1976 [1807]: 208). If we try to locate precisely what is dialectical about this brief statement, it raises a crucial theoretical question: is it simply intended to be a contradiction, a contrast between immaterial Spirit and material bone?

This appears to be the case on the first reading given the opposition between the two, but why then is it not ‘Spirit is the opposite of a bone’? Rather, Žižek reads this moment in Hegel as opening up a self-reflexive gap in subjectivity; it is not that the immaterial ‘really is’ material, but that the discord between them coincides with the very notion of subject (Žižek 1989: 207). In other words, when reading that ‘Spirit is a bone’, ‘what we first take for our “subjective” reaction to it – the sense of failure, incompatibility, discord – defines the “thing itself”’ (Žižek 2008: 139). This theoretical speculation has immediate implications for how performance is created and studied, particularly regarding how the experience of spectating is accounted for. Peter Boenisch, for instance, has recently employed Žižek’s conception of subjectivity in his analysis of Guy Cassiers’ work, noting how experiential reflexive loops are created where the spectator ‘watches themselves watching’, and thereby the very drama of their own subjective engagement is staged (2014: 58). This argument allows Boenisch to suggest that theatre can be a ‘central political force as a public art and as a sociocultural medium within the digital and global economy of the twenty-first century’ (2014: 52). Similarly, Linda Taylor draws on Žižek’s dialectical formation of subjectivity to analyze the work of Forced Entertainment. She argues that their dramaturgical structures ‘invite recognition of how, as spectators, our own desire and enjoyment are problematically embroiled in a process of “meaning making” which is in itself embedded in our neoliberal culture’ (2014: 128). Crucial to each of these examples of performance analysis is that they seek to explore the functioning of artworks not simply through what they successfully represent in terms of content, but through what they unsettle via formal modes of presentation.

Žižek’s reading of Hegel has also inspired visual artists such as Andrew Cozzens and Garfield Benjamin to create concrete renditions and critiques of his theoretical elaborations.¹ These artists make clear that the subjective discord that emerges is constitutive, in that it occupies a contradictory a priori position where it both shapes and is shaped by empirical experience. As Boenisch outlines, in the context of theatre and performance studies, such dialectical methods are able to ‘challenge the prevailing critical focus on the work, the artist and the (semiotic and/or phenomenal) performance event’ (2014: 48). This shift in focus emphasizes the relational aspects of performance, opening up for critique connections between artistic practice and hegemonic ideological formations within a neoliberal context.

It is fruitful to consider Boenisch’s claim alongside work that utilizes dialectics as a method of thinking through such ideological formations of political and social identity. Representations of race in performance, for example, have been perceptively interrogated through Paul Gilroy’s writing on transatlantic musical performance (1993). Gilroy turns to Hegel’s master/slave dialectic to transform it into a critical tool for analyzing modernity. Such a perspective ‘sees the intimate association of modernity and slavery as a fundamental conceptual issue’ and can foreground experiences of ‘brutality and terror’ (54). As well as creating a dialectical methodology, Gilroy locates dialectics within the texts and musical performances he examines, discussing the significance of their antiphonal structure and the processes through which they pose utopic possibilities.

Fred Moten (2003) has taken Gilroy’s work further, while returning to some of the same points of reference, such as an analysis of the poetry of Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones). Gilroy, for instance, claims that Baraka’s poem ‘Hegel’ (1963) evidences a ‘difficult and deeply ambivalent relationship to [Hegel’s] work’ (1993:54). Meanwhile Moten, discussing ‘BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS’ (1964), locates in Baraka’s writing ‘the sound of a belief in the dialectic’, which he describes as ‘a powerful strain in the African American tradition that desperately holds to utopian (re)visions of Enlightenment formulations of universality and freedom’ (2003:96). Moten positions Baraka’s poem as engaging in an ambivalent desire to reclaim or repurpose ‘the dialectic’ – as a particular totalizing European philosophical system – for use in discussions of non-Eurocentric subject positions and histories. Moten, however, explores how the failure or lack of this dialectic introduces an alternative movement, a ‘refusal of closure’ (85), which opens up a fractured space: an ‘epistemological break’ or ‘sexual cut’ (32). Out of this space emerges a critique of the propositions ‘encoded in the philosophical instrument that sounds your death and birth and death and birth’ (96). Moten takes the dialectical move of reading a particular version of dialectics through the aesthetics of black radical musical performance; transforming, cutting and breaking as he goes.

As well as rethinking the centrality of certain philosophical approaches, Dwight Conquergood (2000) has employed dialectics to address exclusionary processes at work within theatre and performance studies as a discipline. In an article that attempts to reposition nineteenth-century practices of elocution within a wider context ‘of racial tension and class struggle’ (326), Conquergood employs Lott’s work on the dialectical affective relationship (‘love and theft’) between nineteenth-century white working-class audiences and blackface minstrelsy in the United States. Conquergood demonstrates how elocution sits in ‘dialectical tension’ with blackface minstrelsy as ‘the performativity of whiteness naturalized’ (331). E. Patrick Johnson (2010), framing Conquergood’s attendance to certain histories of literature, theatre and performance that fail ‘to acknowledge the coexistence of subaltern voices’ (3), has argued such methods place pressure on the academy ‘to recognize the material, intellectual and aesthetic matrix that is black theatre and performance’ (4). These approaches speak to Moten’s ‘refusal of closure’ (2003:3), and demonstrate how theatre and performance studies can utilize dialectical approaches on both structural and analytical levels to fracture exclusionary practices within scholarly research.²

With such existing work in mind, this issue of Performance Research examines a range of approaches to dialectics, from analyses that locate dialectical processes or patterns in their object of study, to records of performance practice whose working method is self-reflexively dialectical. Several articles examine the dialectic at work in the space of performance, indirectly attending to Jameson’s reiteration of Lefebvre’s call for a focus on space to ‘equip this thought mode … for greater effectiveness in a contemporary situation characterized by globalization and an essentially spatial economics as well as politics’ (2009: 66). Michal Kobialka engages with Lefebvre directly, alongside Herbert Marcuse, to consider how spatial dialectics reveals contradictions both in and of space, articulating aspects of a current political global ‘disquiet’. Building on Lefebvre, Katie Beswick utilizes Edward Soja to develop a reading of a ‘trialectical cusp’ in SPID Theatre Company’s production 23176, a community-based site-specific performance both set and performed on a council estate. Cecilie Sachs Olsen introduces a dialectical approach to urban space, which she terms ‘materiality of performance’, using this to reflect on the practice of zURBS, a socially engaged research collective that attempts to ‘re-imagine the urban through imaginative and creative processes’.³

Also exploring the intersection between material and imagined space, Campbell Edinborough contemplates a performance from his own practice, an audio walk that reworks Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1940), to consider how the experience of participating in the walk may create Benjaminian dialectical images that ‘hold opposing realities in dialogue’. Adele Senior and Simon Kelly reread accounts of ‘charismatic space’ generated by Marina Abramović’s performances, in order to reflect on the dialectical processes at work in such space, relating to power and domination between performer and spectator. Meanwhile, Arabella Stanger explores choreography as a mode of thinking through the dialectical relationship between space and time. Reading David Harvey alongside Michel Foucault, she considers how Foucault’s heterotopia is a dialectical and choreographic concept, and uses this to contemplate the possibilities and dangers of bringing utopia ‘down to earth’.

Another group of contributors reflect on the dialectical processes at work within identity formation in performance. Kee-Yoon Nahm employs Judith Butler’s writing on performativity to locate a dialectical process at work in Mabou Mines’ DollHouse (2003), a performance that employs identity stereotypes in order to critique or undermine those stereotypes. Michael Sakamoto reflects on his own butoh-inspired choreographic practice in the dance theatre piece, Soil (2012), and its use of ‘dialectical embodiment’ to explore dancers’ transnational identities via differing and sometimes contradictory physical practices. Drawing on Adorno and Žižek, Eve Wedderburn explores how the violence within martial arts training is rendered invisible when these practices are integrated into actor training, questioning whether an ‘insensitivity to violence’ may inflect how training actors relate to their own practice.

Both David Barnett and Michael Shane Boyle start from Bertolt Brecht’s dialectical conception of theatre. Barnett addresses the lasting influence of Brecht’s engagement with dialectics on post-Brechtian dramatists, both through his thinking around dialectics as related to Marxism and his attempts to integrate dialectics into theatrical presentation. Boyle takes up Brecht’s call for theatrical innovation to examine how innovation is invoked in a neoliberal performance context. He examines the connection between innovation and ‘creative destruction’, particularly the framing of postdramatic performance as a creative destruction, or disruption, of theatre forms.

Finally, many of the papers are linked by their use of dialectical methodologies in the formal aspects of their writing. Sachs Olsen’s piece, for example, is formatted as a ‘dual essay’ presented in two interconnected halves, in which she discusses dialogic aspects of materiality: practice and representation. In the artists’ pages, Gary Anderson has split himself in two in a dialogue between anarchist-artist Gary and unionist Gary, to explore the tensions and contradictions involved in university union organization (including that between sensuousness and boredom) through a rewriting of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. Daniel Oliver explores ‘dyspraxic dialectics’ through a reiteration of his performance Weird Séance, which invites the reader to have their eyes moved and confused across two pages that replay and distort Oliver’s performance piece.

Returning briefly to Jackson, as she sits on the roof of Toynbee Studios: why might a dialectical reading of such a performance be productive? If Jackson’s Site indeed ‘straddles the personal and political’ (Gardner 2015: n.p.), then such a performance invites modes of analysis able to draw simultaneously on divergent, often contradictory conceptual lenses. When addressing a performance that involves both discrete encounters and a public event, what might the limit be, say, of starting from a psychoanalytical reading, or a reading of gender? What concrete social, political and cultural frameworks does this spectacle render visible? What if contradiction is not a critical limitation but a productive inconsistency? The dance of the dialectic continues.

Notes

1 For more information about the artists’ works and how they relate to Žižekian theory see (Holland and Jones 2015).

2 This concern over exclusions in theatre and performance studies has also recently been raised by Paige McGinley (2015) in an unpublished presentation at the American Society for Theatre Research, ‘Rehearsing Nonviolence: Towards a Theatre History of the Civil Rights Movement’, which discussed the widely unacknowledged extent to which the formation of performance studies as a discipline was influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and the new understanding of social performance led to by the Movement’s protests.

3 http://zurbs.org/wp/biographyintro/theoretically, accessed 15 January 2016.