Contents

Introduction:
Popular, Political, Postmodern
Contemporary Society and Social Change
Foundations of the Cultural Assemblages

Chapter One:
Structures and Struggles in the Discourse of Radical Democracy
The Constitution of Post-Marxist Society
The Working Class and the Vicissitudes of Crisis
Theorising Post-Marxist Struggles

Chapter Two:
The Working Class and the Semiotics of Capitalist Valorisation
Antagonistic Subjectivities and the Valorisation of Capital
The Practical Truth of Abstractions
The Semiotics of Capitalist Valorisation
The Constitution of Social Agents
Class Composition and Self-Valorisation

Chapter Three:
Assembling Minor(ity) Territories within the Flows of Capitalism
Modernism and the Popular: The Culture Industry
The Modernist Work of Art
Modernism and the Popular Assemblage
The Real Subsumption of Society
The Minor Assemblage: Community and Communication
The Becomings of Minor Theatre

Bibliography

Terence Smith, © 1997.
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Abstract

This thesis suggests that an assessment of the political efficacy of theatre may proceed through a specification of the conditions which make the event possible and of the forms of social relations which the event practically establishes.

Proceeding from this understanding, the first part of the thesis will engage with social and political theory in an attempt to specify the possible contemporary forms of political subjectivity, with particular emphasis on the relationship between the working class and capitalist society. It will proceed via a critique of Laclau and Mouffe's project of "radical democracy" which utilises a discursive model to comprehend the "structure/struggle" relation constitutive of society. The critique will suggest that a direct engagement with Marx's work identifies aspects of the structure/struggle relation and the forms of political subjectivity which Laclau and Mouffe's theory is unable to grasp. It will offer a reading of the model of capitalist semiotics developed by Deleuze and Guattari, and the concepts of political subjectivity developed by "autonomist" Marxism (principally Antonio Negri) in its place. It will propose a Marxian model of political practice that is responsive to the qualitative multiplicity of contemporary oppositional subjectivities.

The second part will attempt to extend this model of political subjectivity to the realm of cultural processes through a reappraisal of the political efficacy of "popular" theatre. It will provide a series of abstract, functional models ("assemblages"), each of which represent a particular form of the relation between theatre and society. What kind of audience does a practice select through its political attachments? How does it attempt to intervene in the organisation of those selected? What relations of power are formed through the different modalities of that interaction? In correlating a particular form of social organisation with forms of the theatrical event, within the changing conditions of social and cultural production (understood through the Marxian analytic of the progressive subsumption of society under capital), each "assemblage" provides a specification able to address the efficacy of the differing trajectories of the contested significance of the "popular." The thesis will attempt to define an assemblage that would potentially correlate the form of contemporary political subjectivity outlined in the first part with a version of a "popular" theatre suitable to (contest) postmodernism--what I will call a "minor theatre." The thesis will work towards a model of that practice