Towards a Minor
Theatre Towards a Minor
Theatre Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse
While cultural producers--fiery with revolutionary spirit, convinced of the possibility of exercising effective political agency, and committed to producing a radical, oppositional cultural praxis--may well proceed actively to make their own culture, unfortunately, as Marx would insist, "they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves" (1852, 595). It follows that any theorisation of an oppositional cultural praxis necessarily requires a determination of the material, social, and cultural conditions of existence and possibility that constrain and inform processes of contemporary artistic activity--specifically, in the case of this project, the production and reception of political theatre. It is through such a determination that Baz Kershaw, in his study of post-war alternative and community theatre in Britain, attempts to address the question of the potential efficacy of theatrical performance (1992, 1-11); "What if we pay more attention to the conditions of performance that are most likely to produce an efficacious result?" he asks (3). Clearly, however, when considering how effective a politicised theatrical event can be, we are dealing with a series of interconnected levels as objects of our inquiry--the conditions of theatrical performance, the conditions of cultural production more generally, and the wider political, social and material conditions--which, in turn, enable the formation of a series of active relations through which the theatrical event transmits its effects. Therefore, as Kershaw insists, "the crucial problems facing useful discussion of performance efficacy emanate not from the nature of theatre-in-itself but from theatre's relationship with the wider social order, in all of its discursive and institutional complexity" (2).
In attempting to grasp something of that complexity, Raymond Williams has suggested that the identification of certain activities as belonging to a process of cultural production involves a double specialisation:
[T]he distinguishable functions of cultural producers can never be understood in isolation from this general production and reproduction, in which all members of a society participate. At the same time this participation is socially and historically variable, to an extreme extent. Its minimum condition is possession and reproduction of a language and customs, and it is almost always in this sense effectively general. But then there are all the degrees of practical domination and subordination, between conquerors and conquered, between social classes, between the sexes, between adults and children. It is inevitable, within such relations of domination and subordination, that the activities of cultural producers become doubly specialized: to a particular kind of cultural work but also to specific attachments within the organized social system. (1981, 217; my emphasis)
This double specialisation of cultural producers and their products necessitates, for any project of critical reflection upon these practices, an elaboration of the social relations formed through each sense of specialisation; which we may, for the purpose of analysis, distinguish as the relations arising from the functional specialisation and those arising from the political specialisation (though, as I hope will become clear, the "functional" specialisation is at the same time political, as a form of organisation within the social order as a whole, or rather, as part of its division of labour; just as the "political" specialisation of a cultural practice may become a functional element of the organisation of its specified social formation considered as a whole, that is, where the practice operates as a vehicle of political recomposition). Given an historically determinate configuration of its conditions of possibility, the formation of a particular cultural form may be specified by the "functional" and "political" relations which it practically establishes.[1] Any attempt to determine the potential efficacy of a cultural practice which is articulated as a critical, politicised, and/or transformative activity--however varied in their posited aims, working methods, forms and sites of realisation, and intended and realised destinations such practices may be--can be successful, therefore, only to the extent that the active relations arising both from its functional and political specialisations are included within the appraisal.
I understand this task in terms of two, interrelated questions: (1) as far as the functional specialisation is concerned, what forms of politicised cultural production are possible?; (2) as far as the political specialisation is concerned, for whom is a particular project intended? It is clear that the further question of whose interests any particular project serves is pertinent to both of the above questions (particularly when we remember that the functional specialisation is a political one, as a part of the social organisation of political economy). Answering these questions involves establishing the conditions operative at the different levels of inquiry, the forms taken by the social processes enabled by those conditions, and the relations arising from their interaction. It demands: (1) an investigation into the current conditions of cultural production and the possible forms of existence of the theatrical event within those conditions (where the forms of existence are understood as different forms of the mediation of social relations);[2] and (2) a correlation of those forms with other kinds of social and political organisation, particularly with regard to contemporary organisational forms of oppositional social practice. In the first and second chapters, therefore, I will attempt to determine the nature of the forms of political organisation enabled by contemporary social processes. Their possible correlation with forms of the theatrical event, and consequently the relations between these forms and the contemporary organisation of cultural production more generally, I will attempt to elaborate in the third. If establishing the validity of a claim of political efficacy made for a theatrical practice partly depends upon determining the specific attachments which the organisation of that practice makes, how may we understand the nature of that to which the practice attaches itself--the formations of oppositional politics--and what are the social conditions that give rise to these forms?
Contemporary Society and Social Change
At a certain point, a development of the forces of material production--which is at the same time a development of the forces of the working class--suspends capital itself.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse
If the object of our analysis is to be oppositional social formations, clearly the conceptual formulation of the relation between a social order and the social practices which struggle against it is of central importance. It has no doubt become clear, from my choice of methodological terminology so far, that I am primarily concerned with an analysis of the contemporary social order as a capitalist society, and with an elaboration of the contemporary possibilities inherent in the struggles of the working class as a vehicle of social transformation. To specify this project as one concerning their contemporary form, however, is to be immediately besieged with a host of theoretical difficulties--most notably manifested in my hesitation in pre-empting the formulation of the relation between the two by saying "a capitalist society, and therefore . . . the working class." Right at the beginning of his career, Marx produced a theoretical statement that was to profoundly transform the relation between theory and oppositional social practice in the modern era: "When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the existing world order, it is only declaring the secret of its own existence, for it is the actual dissolution of that order. . . . The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat" (1843-4, 256; 257). If this statement marks the birth of a Marxist theoretical discourse, it would seem that, over a hundred and fifty years later, we are witnessing its dissolution at the hands of a postmodernism whose social order is, all too clearly and persistently, capitalist--indeed, is "more" so than ever. The difficulties are located precisely within the form of the relation between the structure of the social order and the struggles seeking to transform it. A host of alternative discourses, in varying degrees fashioned from the fragments of Marxist theory, present themselves as adequate to the task of reformulation. Perhaps depending on the particular elements retained or discarded by their selective machinery of theoretical constitution, these theories valorise the poles of the "structure/struggle" relation in a variety of ways. The general consensus, however--from those usually grouped under the label "postmodern" (such as Baudrillard or Deleuze and Guattari), to the "post-Marxist" project of radical democracy (as formulated by Laclau and Mouffe), or the "post-Fordist" discourse of "new times" (initiated by the Communist Party of Great Britain itself)--appears to be that the necessary character of the relation between the abolition of capitalism and the working class as the agent of its dissolution is no longer tenable. As Stuart Hall, in enumerating the features of these "new times," suggests: "Some argue that, though Marx may have been wrong in his predictions about class as the motor of revolution, he was right--with a vengeance--about capital" (1991, 60).
In the course of developing a specification of the possible forms of contemporary oppositional social practice, I will attempt to re-establish the validity of the Marxist form of the relation structure/struggle. Its validity is predicated on two moments: firstly, that the struggles of the working class are oppositional (as against, for example, Baudrillard's insistence on their necessary and a priori incorporation into the smooth functioning of the social order); and secondly, that the dissolution of the social order necessarily lies with the working class (as against the post-Marxist insistence that the relation between the task [dissolution] and the social agent [the working class] is externally constructed). It is clear that the second moment requires that the logical deduction of society's capitalist character be confirmed by a narrative that explains how this specific form of society has and is coming into being. That is to say, part of our inquiry necessarily requires an account of the way in which society develops, and that the development of capitalism in relation to it be specified--in what precise, and historically determined sense, is contemporary society a capitalist society (and hence, in what ways is it not)? (This will be provided through an elaboration of the concept of the becoming total of bourgeois society, or the real subsumption of society under capital.) My account therefore requires the specification of a series of relations (some of which, depending on the context of the particular theoretical discourse that is being used, effectively become synonymous with one another): "subjectivity/domination"; "subjectivity/objectivity"; "history/subjectivity"; "production/society"; "relations of production/social relations"; "structure/struggle"; "social conditions/forms of struggle." I will be drawing on a variety of sources in order to arrive at a specification of those relations; some of which are complementary, others antagonistic or contradictory to one another. Each of them not only formulates the social relations listed above in different ways, but also produces an abstract configuration in which one or another of the relations is, more or less exclusively, prioritised. In analysing the interrelations between the theories, I hope to produce my own configuration of the interrelations between the various social relations which they attempt to comprehend--one that will be useful for the analysis of politicised cultural practice. Briefly, therefore, it may be worth formally mapping the way in which my understanding of these theories situates them in relation to one another, prior to the attempt towards a real elaboration of their relations in what follows.
One way of organising those theories may be to use Marx's work as a reference point. Accordingly, we might distinguish between those that explicitly align themselves with a Marxist hermeneutic (Jameson, Marxism Today, Negri and the Italian "autonomists"), and those seeking to move "beyond" Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari). I am unsure of the efficacy of such a reference, however. On the one hand, for example, Deleuze insisted in an interview with Negri that "I think Félix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us" (Deleuze 1990b, 171). While it is true that in the majority of accounts this aspect of their work has been almost entirely neglected, nonetheless, Deleuze appears to qualify their relation to Marx such that a critical relation to capitalism, not class struggle, marks one as a Marxist: "You see, we think that any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed." Indeed, Negri's work itself, and the "autonomists" generally, by no means entertain a simple relation to the Marxist tradition; the advertisement for Negri's Marx Beyond Marx (1979), for example, describes it as part of an "'heretical' tendency in Marxist theory"--an image completed in the cover illustration of the book depicting "the Pope as Devil." On the other hand, however, Jameson locates his difference from Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxist position "in the content rather than the form of the assertions" (Jameson 1991, 331). The basic premises of their model of political organisation appear to be accepted, only with a caveat inserted--insisting on the centrality of "working-class experience" as the "mediation around which the equivalence of the coalition is to find its active cohesion" (331). The distinction between Laclau and Mouffe and the theorists of "new times" is even more imprecise; the front cover of the former's Hegemony & Socialist Strategy (1985) bears its recommendation as "a brilliant tour de force of scholarship and argument" by Marxism Today. I think we can probably take the dissolution of Marxism Today, the organ of the CPGB, and the renaming of the party itself as the "Democratic Left" (whose paper is now called New Times), as a marker for the completion of the process of becoming-postmodern which the "new times" discourse initiated.[3] While I will not be engaging directly with the new times theorists' analyses of contemporary political processes, the way in which the latter inform their models of cultural practice (which have been developed under the rubric of "cultural studies") will be approached through their understanding of popular culture under "postmodernism" This is also perhaps the moment at which to note that Laclau and Mouffe's work has developed almost entirely in relation to the Marxist tradition--Kautsky, Bernstein, Sorel, Plekhanhov, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci, Althusser, etc.--while any reference whatsoever to a single work by Marx himself is puzzlingly absent from their alleged demonstration of the necessity of a "post-Marxist" approach.
In order to arrive at a suitable definition of the contemporary possibilities for radical political practice, I intend to focus on a critique of Laclau and Mouffe's theorisations of political subjectivities and struggles, as elaborated in their project of "radical democracy." I will begin with a close reading of Laclau and Mouffe's theory in the first chapter, in order to isolate, in the second chapter, those elements of the processes and interrelations of contemporary society and its political struggles which I believe elude their model. My critique will be formulated in terms of the categories of autonomist Marxism. My own reading of Marx is almost entirely filtered through the latter's reformulation. This reading will constitute the framework through which I will develop the work of Deleuze and Guattari (specifically, the interrelations between their work and Negri's; particularly since Guattari and Negri have collaborated extensively, most notably in Guattari and Negri, Communists Like Us [1985]). It will also provide the framework for my attempt, in the third chapter, to engage Jameson's reworking of Adorno, in relation to the contemporary conditions of cultural production. The prominence of Laclau and Mouffe's theorisations of political subjectivity within the field of cultural studies--for example, their project underwrites the politicised theories of "performativity" of Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha--has tended towards an incorporation of the deficiencies of radical democracy's understanding of society and its development (most notably, as I have mentioned, the failure to engage with Marx himself, in preference for the Marxist tradition). Consequently, I believe that my mapping of these theories in relation to one another constitutes a particular intervention in the formulations of the relation between contemporary cultural and political theory, and will provide a useful framework for the theoretical elaboration of a contemporary form of political theatre.
Foundations of the Cultural Assemblages
First, what is popular? The key to an understanding of the cultural history of the last two hundred years is the contested significance of that word. . . . We have all learned, on the pulse, the material realities of that long capitalist appropriation of the popular, and its scarcely less disturbing indifferences to the genuinely different. But we are in a very strange and perhaps hopeful situation.
Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism
Having established the mechanisms and potential efficacy of contemporary working-class political subjectivity in the first and second chapters, I will then proceed to analyse the ways in which that definition may be able to be articulated with a model of "politicised" theatrical practice. As we shall see, my model of political subjectivity derives its coherence from two concepts developed within the tradition of autonomist Marxism--"class composition" and "self-valorisation"--which describe the constitutive and expressive dimensions of what I will refer to as an antagonistic social subjectivity: the ontology of living labour. As used within the autonomist Marxist theorisations, these concepts do not specifically refer to the processes of cultural production. I believe that the value and significance of this thesis derives from its elaboration of those concepts towards a reappraisal of the potential efficacy of "popular" theatre as a mode of politicised cultural production.
A theatrical praxis that aims "to be both oppositional and popular," Baz Kershaw reminds us, "places performance on a knife edge between resistance to, and incorporation into, the status quo" (1992, 8). According to the dynamics of "postmodernism," however, as the "cultural logic" of contemporary society, even Kershaw's formulation of the precarious existence of the popular would appear to be no longer available. Postmodernism signals the disarmament and reabsorption by the dominant system of "local countercultural forms of cultural resistance" (Jameson 1991, 49). Within Jameson's account of "postmodernism," through its subsumption by the culture industries of late capitalism, or the "administered society," the popular becomes the "populist" incorporation of commercial culture into high art. This heralds the definitive extinction of the "pre-capitalist enclaves" of the people's own forms of expression, and of the possibility of "old-fashioned ideological critique" (46). It is clear that Jameson's account is heavily indebted to the formulations of the political potential of artistic activity developed by the Frankfurt school. Adorno's work in particular is an obvious precursor. Marx suggests that the development of the organic system of bourgeois society towards a "totality" involves a process of "subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks" (1857-8, 278). Antonio Negri refers to this process as the "real subsumption of society under capital" (1989). It is within this dynamic that we may understand the Frankfurt school's analyses of the "culture industries." They are an organ developed by capital for the subsumption of cultural processes which were exterior to its relations of production. Similarly, within his analysis of the contemporary conditions of cultural production, Jameson understands "postmodernism" as a situation in which the culture industries dominate the cultural field, exercising an effective "hegemony" over residual and emergent oppositional practices:
In this sense postmodernism is "merely" a cultural dominant. To describe it in terms of cultural hegemony is not to suggest some massive and uniform cultural homogeneity of the social field but very precisely to imply its coexistence with other resistant and heterogeneous forces which it has a vocation to subdue and incorporate. (159)
In their attempt to grasp such mechanisms of domination, however, the Frankfurt school's analyses tended to loose sight of what was for Marx as essential compliment to the analysis of the development of the real subsumption of society under capital (or what I will refer to as the "becoming total of bourgeois society"): the identification of a revolutionary subjectivity developed by this system, which forms the "prerequisite for a classless society" (1857-8, 159).[4] The loss of this subjective moment may be said to be responsible for much of the pathos and what has, rather superficially, been referred to as the overriding pessimism or "gloomy prognostications" of the Frankfurt accounts (Bennett 1986, xi). Despite the persuasiveness of many aspects of Jameson's account, the similar absence of an adequate theory of proletarian subjectivity which it perpetuates does not allow it to formulate a mode of oppositional, popular theatre, as an expression of the proletariat of "postmodern" capitalism, that is not necessarily destined to be subsumed, a priori, under the organs of bourgeois society. Similarly, in their analyses of postmodernism under the aegis of "new times," the cultural studies theorists understand the cultural field to be structured by a "cultural dialectic" in which a hegemonic struggle is waged (Hall 1981). Although such a theorisation does seem to involve an identification of the potential of forms cultural practice developed by contemporary oppositional political subjectivities, it is not from a perspective that is able to demonstrate the ways in which those oppositional cultural forms may be able to "escape" the postmodern dialectic. I will suggest that this is because their understanding of the nature of political subjectivity is, in its essentials, coextensive with that developed by Laclau and Mouffe. In developing my understanding of political subjectivity through the autonomist concepts of class composition and self-valorisation, I hope to resolve this problem and, through a reappraisal of the Frankfurt-Jameson theorisations of the postmodern culture industries in the light of that model of subjectivity, to reassert the validity and potential efficacy of "popular" theatre.
The reformulation that I am proposing involves locating the process of production of popular culture within the Marxian analytic of the progressive subsumption of labour under capital; a process whose dynamism is directed by the development of the forces and relations of production. While this analytic is partly incorporated within culture studies' framework, it fails to account for the qualitative mutations which the field undergoes during this development--it remains an analysis of the mechanisms of cultural production within the civil society of formal subsumption (the process prior to the real subsumption). Within the Adornian schemes, the rise in socialisation which the development produces is accompanied by the progressive unfolding of a dialectic between culture and administration (Adorno 1991, 93-113); yet, since this theory lacks an articulation of the potentials embodied within a revolutionary subjectivity, there appears to be no way out of the progressive immanence of control--as we detect in the sometimes despairing tones of Jameson's similarly objectivist account. In Adorno's scheme, administration destroys the possibility of the subjective moment:
Administration, however, is not simply imposed upon the supposedly productive human being from without. It multiplies within this person himself. That a particular situation in time brings forth those subjects intended for it is to be taken very literally. Nor are those who produce culture secure before the "increasingly organic composition of mankind." (Adorno 1991, 106)
While this analysis does grasp aspects of the real processes involved in real subsumption, or the formation of an "administered society," nonetheless, it appears to forget Marx's sustained insistence that the capital-labour relation is a deeply antagonistic one, and that capital's "antithetical character can never be abolished through quiet metamorphosis" (1857-8, 159). If we displace the analysis onto the terrain of the antagonism between collective capital and the collective workers (the opposed and antagonistic subjectivities of capital and living labour), we are able to identify a line of escape. Central to this displacement will be the critical "inversion," effected by autonomist Marxism, of Marx's concept of the "organic composition of capital"--which is inverted as the "class composition" of the subjectivity of living labour.
My reformulation, in attempting to extend the autonomist concepts of class composition and self-valorisation to the cultural field, will attempt to instigate what might be called a "becoming-minor" of our understanding of popular theatre. This will involve the development of the concept of "minor theatre" as a contemporary "postmodern" alternative to "popular theatre." I draw the term from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Within their work, however, "minor theatre" refers not quite to an avant-garde aesthetic, since they reject the term, but something pretty close to it (Deleuze 1979). When I offer a process of "becoming-minor," I mean to suggest a reformulation in which the practice of the popular is able to gain the experimental processes that Deleuze and Guattari identify, while simultaneously recasting Deleuze and Guattari's theorisations within a context that allows their project to become politically viable. Their theorisations of the examples which they offer do not seem to account for the contextuality of the artistic event. Where are these productions taking place? Who is in the audience? Do they, as Adorno might suggest, "roll about secretly in a monstrous hall, a fact which they do not themselves notice" (1991, 102)--which is to ask, what is their relationship to the modern culture industries? I believe that one way to avoid the danger that what Deleuze and Guattari promote as a radical cultural praxis may be part of the culture industry is to resituate it within the practice of popular theatre.
My definition of "minor theatre" will be an attempt to grasp cultural praxis as a moment that contributes to the class composition--as what Negri terms a process of "self-valorization" or the expression of a "constituent power"--and thereby as the development of lines of escape from the domination by capital. Negri suggests that the further development of the forces and relations of production under real subsumption operates according to a "logic of separation" whereby the two social subjectivities--living labour and capital--are increasingly separate and increasingly antagonistic (1979). I shall define the practice of minor theatre as a vehicle of this separation; as an attempt to elude capital's cultural dialectic and follow a line of escape, building a "constitutive power [through] . . . the organ of the subversive minority" (Negri 1992, 105). This suggests that the dynamic of the forces and relations of production is not always one of assured conquest of the former by the latter. As Negri insists, "the continuities are nothing other than discontinuities or ruptures which have been dominated" (80). Rather than analysing the field of popular culture according to variations in the relationships of hegemony structured according to a cultural dialectic, I will attempt to reformulate the dynamics of popular praxis according to the model of development between the forces and relations utilised by Deleuze and Guattari in their project Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-1980). This provides the context both for their development of the concept of "minor literature" elaborated in their book on Kafka (1975), and for Deleuze's appreciation of Carmelo Bene's "minor theatre" (1979). I shall attempt to reformulate that concept in terms of a popular theatrical practice.
It is through my development of the concept of "minor theatre" that I hope to be able to extend the autonomist Marxist concepts of class composition and self-valorisation to the field of cultural politics. I will be using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "assemblage" in order to effect this extension. As we shall see, the assemblage is defined in terms of two axes: a vertical one whose poles are constituted by movements of "deterritorialization" and "reterritorialization"; and a horizontal one, whose poles are described as the "content" and "expression" of the assemblage. If class composition and self-valorisation describe, respectively, the constitutive and expressive dimensions of the ontology of living labour, then it is the horizontal axis of the assemblage that apprehends these dimensions. The vertical axis apprehends the processes of their interaction. Against the reading which views Deleuze and Guattari's work as a now outdated romanticism, my framing of it in terms of autonomist Marxism's Marxian analytic stresses this project as one of "political philosophy" (Deleuze 1990b, 170). I believe that by applying Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual framework to a concrete social context, the apparently abstract valorization of "difference" which it involves may be realised, in an efficacious manner, through the actual event of theatre. In short, it provides the means for reformulating the "popular" as minor--as an answer to the question of the possible forms, and potential efficacy, of politicised cultural production within the social conditions described as "postmodernism."
[Notes]
[1] In order to distinguish between the two senses of my use of the word "form" here--form indicating a particular relation which the practice establishes (i.e., a particular theatrical event "includes" a series of forms depending on the functional, political, etc., relations it produces), and form indicating the specificity of the resultant practice (i.e., the "type" of event considered as a whole)--in the final chapter I will use the Deleuze/Guattarian concept of an "assemblage" (agencement) when I am referring to a "form" in the second sense of the word (the configuration of relations). Raymond Williams uses the series of terms "general forms/modes/genres/types/artistic forms to approach this problem. This shift has many useful methodological effects (some of which I will outline in my discussion of the concept). Not least among them, it stresses the active nature of the relations that it includes--i.e., that a cultural form, considered as a cultural practice, is always processual; it is always within a process of formation/deformation/reformation. This, of course, has its most direct relevance for artistic forms whose reception is simultaneously their production, each unfolding through time--e.g., theatre. In a similar way, when I will come to use the concept of value, it is always as a process of valorisation; or the State within a process of the statification of society; or the cultural forms produced by the culture industries as a process of cultural subsumption.
[2] On artistic forms as mediations of social relations, see Raymond Williams, Culture (1981) 24-5. In the following two chapters, the concept of "form" will receive considerable attention vis-à-vis economic and political forms as mediations of social relations. It is on the basis of this work that, in the third chapter, I will be developing Williams' brief elaboration of applications of this kind of understanding to artistic forms. Williams lists the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno as examples of this kind of approach in the study of culture.
[3] I should correct this account by saying that, strictly speaking, the CPGB has split into the Democratic Left and another group who have retained the CPGB name.
[4] While this quote, from the beginning of the Grundrisse (1857-8), actually refers to the development of material forces and relations of production, throughout the rest of the book Marx makes it clear that this development is inextricable from the production of a revolutionary, antagonistic subjectivity, personified in what he calls the "social individual" (705).