HM Online 2020: Performance and Political Economy
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About this Event
Interest in the political economy of art has surged in recent years. For researchers in theatre and performance studies, the turn to matters like the commodity form, labour process, and workplace struggle has been especially pronounced. And yet, the proliferation of scholarship on performance and political economy reveals a striking lack of shared understanding, let alone a consensus, as to what key Marxist categories like value or labour actually mean and how they can be applied to study theatre and performance. Likewise, what a cultural form like theatre even has to offer a Marxist critique of political economy is also extraordinarily uncertain. This panel, thus, asks what Marxism might learn from theatre when theatre is examined as a place of work. Each of the papers on this panel considers what light theatre might throw on important debates relating to political economy, focusing on categories including abstract labour, character and service.
Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, ‘The organisational logic of “Character”’
In ‘The New Spirit of Capitalism’, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello chart the emergence of neo-management, characterised by the dispensation of hierarchies, and a reorientation towards work organised on the basis of ‘networks’ or ‘projects’. Boltanski and Chiapello trace these new models of management as part of a response to widespread dissatisfaction from workers, and demands for authenticity and freedom emerging in the aftermath of 1968. Peter Flemming, similarly, argues that businesses have increasingly turned towards a discourse of authenticity as part of attempts to ‘‘solve the problem of self-alienation’ and reconcile employees to the ‘unpleasant reality of work’. I argue that the emergence of these discourses results in the increasing adoption of theatrical metaphors and framings within management literature, which looks towards the stage and the management of theatrical labour as a result of this preoccupation with the integration of employees' authentic character or personality into the workplace. I compare dominant forms of management within theatre (and actor training specifically) to these new discourses of management, to argue that ‘character’ emerges as a key organising logic in both.
Shane Boyle, “In Service to Capital”
In the vast and growing scholarship on the vast and growing service sector, the performing arts play a starring role. Be it as a metaphor or a model, performance seems to have a special capacity to illuminate the world in which a majority of workers globally now earns their wage. This talk historicises the contemporary vogue for pitching service as a kind of performance, situating this descriptive trend within a longer tradition of political economy, from classical economists like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill to the marginal utility theorists W.S. Jevons and Alfred Marshall, all of whom referred to theatre when examining service. By returning to Karl Marx’s own writing on theatre and service, I contend that the fact service today is increasingly organized along capitalist lines is not evidence we have entered a new phase of capitalism, let alone a kind of post-capitalism. Like theater, service under capitalism has always been potentially subject to the law of value.
Martin Young, “Backstage Labour”
The theatre, with its clear division between the brightly lit stage and the concealed backstage, has frequently provided writers with a metaphorical model for the structure of bourgeois society in which visible spectacle obscures and yet relies on the ‘hidden abode’ of production. By the same token, iconoclastic performance scholars have disparaged the traditional theatre by comparing its organisational logics to those of a factory. In both these articulations, the unseen backstage worker has correspondingly stood in for the industrial proletariat. Stage crew register as the concrete counterbalance to theatre’s illusions and, unlike actors, are understood to be practical and non-representational. It is in this capacity that they are drafted in to represent the ideal proletarian labourer. This discursive maneuver reinforces conventional and normative conceptions of what, and who, a worker is, and I suggest that this structure of thought, in which one worker can serve metonymically as a representative of the whole heterogenous working class, relies ultimately on the abstraction of labour. Critical scholarship which engages with the ambivalent semiotics of workers in the theatre can therefore provide useful terms for interrogating how we talk about work and workers in capitalist society.
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