Towards a Minor Theatre

[T]he received categories of broad cultural description--"aristocratic" and "folk," "minority" and "popular," "educated" and "uneducated"--have to be related, as social products, to social transformations which have outdistanced them, or of which they were always a misrepresentation. . . . [T]he real dynamics of the socio-cultural process are most evident in the transformations of "popular," which moved not only along a trajectory from late forms of "folk" culture to new and partly self-organizing forms of urban popular culture, but also along a trajectory of extended--and finally massively extended--production of "popular" culture by the bourgeois market and by state educational and political systems. . . . It can then be said that while there is innovatory work in many forms of art and thought, the genuinely emergent has to be defined not only in specific terms but primarily in terms of contributions to alternatives to this dominant general system.

Raymond Williams, Culture

In the following, I will offer an attempt towards an interpretation of "popular theatre" within the social conditions and processes elaborated in the previous chapters. "Interpretation," Brian Massumi suggests, "consists in developing what is enveloped in the sign" (1992, 11). What of the sign "popular theatre"? As the adjective indicates, we are dealing with a particular qualitative potential of the theatrical event--a capacity to affect or be affected in a particular way, to release or submit to a particular force. What network of material processes are enveloped in the possible contemporary meanings of "popular theatre"? What lines of force, what social transformations, encounter one another?

Fredric Jameson's offer of a form of cultural politics based on the practice of "cognitive mapping" is presented as an attempt to fulfil Marx's demand to "do the impossible" within the contemporary conditions of cultural production:

[N]amely, to think this development [of postmodernism] positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgement. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. (1991, 47)

Jameson's "cognitive mapping" attempts to provide just such a type of thinking within a context where "critical distance" no longer appears to be available. Similarly, an understanding of capitalism as simultaneously the best and worst that has befallen us is consistently insisted upon in Deleuze and Guattari's account. Their thought, however, unlike Jameson's model, does not go by way of the dialectic--as Negri describes it: "ontology is posed against the dialectic and the possibility of ruling the relationship between social struggles and capitalist (social, productive, state) restructuration is taken away from power" (1992, 105).1 If "popular" culture contains, at least, two trajectories, then that which follows its production by the bourgeois market and its state does not necessarily succeed in interrupting--in restructuring--the line which follows the production of self-organising forms. In Jameson's account, the cultural field is governed by the hegemonic operations of postmodernism. In following Deleuze and Guattari's model, I hope to develop an interpretation that follows the forces and potentials capable of escape.

The usefulness of Deleuze and Guattari's project for the formulation of a mode of cultural politics lies in their elaboration of a political and materialist semiology. This semiology enables an elaboration of the possible functional connections between theoretical critique, aesthetic practice and political intervention, via the concept of the "assemblage" (agencement). The formulation of their semiology is based on the assertion that "semiotic fluxes are just as real as the material ones, and in a sense the material fluxes are just as semiotic as the semiotic machines" (Guattari 1975, 96). This leads them to delineate a "semiotic of intensities" based on a "non-," or "a-signifying" semiology that eludes structural representation. They propose the concept of the "assemblage" that (as a "collective assemblage of enunciation") articulates the different types of semiotics--symbolic, signifying, a-signifying--within a conjunction with material processes (a "machinic assemblage of bodies"); for the resultant assemblage, an "a-signifying diagrammatic line of escape has become possible" (101). Guattari suggests that:

The capacity of human societies to escape from alienations territorialized in the ego, the person, the family, the race, the exploitation of labour, distinctions of sex and so on depends on a conjunction between the semiotics of consciousness and those of de-territorializing machinisms. (98)

This notion of "deterritorializing machinisms" is central to Deleuze and Guattari's project, and constitutes, in part, their model of the development of the forces and relations of production. "Deterritorialization," as we have seen, is defined as the "schizophrenic" tendency of the capitalist mode of production; the tendency that Marx characterised by the ubiquitous phrase "All that is solid melts into air" (Marx and Engels 1848, 476). Within Deleuze and Guattari's scheme, the possibility of surpassing the capitalist mode of production lies in the acceleration of its processes of deterritorialization to the point at which capital is no longer able to recuperate them within the axiomatics of its restructuring reterritorializations. What is more, the processes of deterritorialization are responsible for the production of the flows of a-signifying signs. The proliferation of a-signifying flows exceeds capital's ability to control them within its current organization. What a radical praxis would need to do would be to grasp these processes of escape.

The usefulness of the concept of "assemblage" thereby becomes apparent. It allows us to grasp the different modalities of interaction--the connections, disjunctions and conjunctions--between the various "semiological" flows (material and semiotic signs differentiated into symbolic, signifying and a-signifying modes of encoding) according to the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization which permeate them. This enables us, as Guattari suggests, "to consider the non-signifying semiotic dimensions underlying, illuminating and deconstructing every discourse" (1975, 104).

An assemblage is constituted along two axes: one horizontal, the other vertical (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 85-91). The horizontal axis of the assemblage involves: (1) a form-substance of content (a regime of bodies--physical systems--described as a "machinic assemblage of bodies"); and (2) a form-substance of expression (a regime of signs--semiotic systems--described as a "collective assemblage of enunciation"). The formalisation of each exist in a relationship of "reciprocal presupposition" with one another. This maintains their functional independence and produces their interaction:

[T]he independence of the two lines is distributive, such that a segment of one always forms a relay with a segment of the other, slips into, introduces itself into the other. . . . What we must determine is not an origin but points of intervention or insertion in the framework of the reciprocal presupposition of the two forms. Both forms of content and forms of expression are inseparable from a movement of deterritorialization that carries them away. Both expression and content are more or less deterritorialized, according to the particular state of their form. . . . Sometimes the semiotic components are more deterritorialized than the material components, and sometimes the reverse. . . . In short, there are degrees of deterritorialization that quantify the respective forms and according to which contents and expression are conjugated, feed into each other, accelerate each other, or on the contrary become stabilized and perform a reterritorialization. . . . [T]he way an expression relates to a content is not by uncovering or representing it. Rather, forms of expression and forms of content communicate through a conjunction of their quanta of relative deterritorialization, each intervening, operating on the other. . . . On the second axis, what is compared or combined of the two aspects, what always inserts one into the other, are the sequenced or conjugated degrees of deterritorialization, and the operations of reterritorialization that stabilize the aggregate at a given moment. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 87-88)

The vertical axis of the assemblage, therefore, apprehends this system in motion. It involves: (1) movements of reterritorialization, in which the relations between the formalizations of content and expression are relatively stabilised; and (2) movements of deterritorialization, in which the formalizations of content and expression are carried away on a line of escape.

The concept of assemblage, when applied to the analysis of popular cultural practice, allows us to apprehend its dynamism with respect to the changing relations of force between the competing powers internal to the capitalist mode of production--without, however, insisting upon the inevitable success of a "cultural dialectic" structuring the cultural field within which the assemblages operate. In order to trace the qualitative potentials enveloped within the sign of the "popular" within the changing conditions of social and cultural production, therefore, I shall offer a description of a series of "cultural assemblages" whose forms of expression have been identified as, in one way or another, "popular." Each assemblage, as I have suggested, contains two poles on its horizontal axis: a machinic assemblage of bodies and a collective assemblage of enunciation. The description of each assemblage, therefore, will involve a specification of each of its poles, and of the quanta of deterritorialization and operations of reterritorialization which cause them to interact. I have suggested that any analysis of the potential efficacy of a politicised cultural practice turns on a specification of the social relations formed through the functional and political specialisations which it practically establishes.2 Each sense of specialisation, in establishing a social relation between different materials of, on the one hand, expression, and on the other, content, may be said to form those materials in a particular way. That is, what I have called the political and functional specialisations refer to the specificity of the forms of content and forms of expression respectively (though, as I have consistently insisted of course, the political content functions and the functional expression is political). Within my model, the specificity of each assemblage refers to the articulation of its two aspects: the "political" content of its machinic assemblage of bodies and the "functional" expression of its collective assemblage of enunciation. The concept of the assemblage allows us to correlate the forms of social organisation and the forms of the theatrical event, with respect to the movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that permeate (and correlate) them within the changing conditions of social and cultural production.

Modernism and the Popular: The Culture Industry

It is with the rise of modernism that the "popular" begins to gain ascendancy as a primary point of reference for politicised theorisations of artistic activity. This is concurrent with a more general shift from "aesthetics" to "culture" as the categorical foundation of such accounts. "Popular" became what Laclau and Mouffe would call a "nodal point" within the discourses concerning cultural production under the conditions of "modernism"; each offering competing and complimentary articulations of what contribution art may make towards the wider struggles ensuing from the massive social upheavals involved in the restructuration of society taking place at the time. I am primarily concerned, therefore, with the way in which the popular was incorporated as part of a radical agenda of wider social transformation, rather than the reformist cultural ambitions of a figure like Romain Rolland (who was concerned more with a democratic renaissance of culture modelled on the ideals of the French, rather than communist, revolution).3 For my purposes, I believe it is possible to broadly delineate two central strands within the revolutionary theorisations of artistic production in this period--which, somewhat schematically, may be said to follow the two trajectories of the significance of "popular" that Williams outlines above.

The first, elaborated by the theorists of the Frankfurt school--primarily Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse--emphasises what Williams identifies as the "production of 'popular' culture by the bourgeois market and by state educational and political systems" (1981, 228); that is, the transformation of "popular" into "mass" culture. Through the ubiquity of the "culture industry," popular culture is figured as the site of the capture and taming of any revolutionary impulses the people might possess. As Adorno explains, the term "culture industry" was adopted in preference for "mass culture," so as to indicate a qualitative transformation in its social function effected through its subsumption of the "popular" under capitalist relations of production; that is:

[I]n order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its [the culture industry's] advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. . . . The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. (Adorno 1991, 85; my emphasis)

Having established the meaning of "mass culture" as the product of the forces mobilised and manipulated within the culture industry, we may refer to the particular configuration of relations that it produces within and between the physical and semiotic machines as the "mass assemblage." As we may recall, the specificity of capitalist semiosis resides in its operation on the basis of an axiomatic: on the one hand, the production of decoded, deterritorialized flows which it attempts to conjugate as a direct relation between abstract quantities (but which, nonetheless, are capable of "forging farther ahead" as "revolutionary connections" [Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 472; 473]); and on the other, an operation of reterritorialization which attempts to recode persons defined in terms of abstract quantities. If "mass" is the sign of the popular when it has been subsumed under the capitalist relations of production, then how does the semiotic of capitalist valorisation operate within the mass assemblage of the culture industry? What degrees of deterritorialization quantify its form of content and form of expression? How do its physical system (its machinic assemblage of bodies) and its semiotic system (its collective assemblage of enunciation) operate on one another? What degrees of deterritorialization does it conjugate, and what operations of reterritorialization does it produce?

As we have seen within the previous chapter, the reproduction of the workers within the capital relation did not restrict their consumption qualitatively, only quantitatively; that is, their objective existence as living labour capacities (the collective body of the work force) is reproduced via an axiomatic. By virtue of this axiomatic, capital and labour exist as separate entities, and the separation is the quality that defines the latter. It produces the autonomatisation of exchange value in money and capital and the autonomatisation of use value in the working class, which define the two spaces of formation of the opposed subjectivities of capital and living labour--each with its own processes of valorisation (Negri 1979 72; 93). The separation produces the possibility of the expansion of the self-valorisation of the working class. As Marx suggests:

[T]he worker's participation in the higher, even cultural satisfactions, the agitation for his own interests, newspaper subscriptions, attending lectures, educating his children, developing his taste etc., his only share of civilization which distinguishes him from the slave, is economically only possible by widening the sphere of his pleasures. (1857-8, 287)

In the previous chapter, I suggested that in order to ensure that the flows set free by capital's deterritorializing movement remain confined within the bounds of its own self-valorisation (i.e., within its axiomatic), capitalism requires a whole apparatus of regulation to prevent the decoded and axiomatized flows "from breaking loose at all edges of the social axiomatic" (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 258). Following Deleuze and Guattari's model, I suggested that this function of reterritorialization was principally effected by the modern state. In defining the culture industry as an organ of capitalist power designed to effect the subsumption of cultural processes exterior to its relations of production--that is, to effect the becoming total of bourgeois society--we can see that the culture industry fulfils a similar function. The mass assemblage, as the production of the popular "by the bourgeois market and by state educational and political systems," can therefore be defined as a model of social reterritorialization designed to contain and limit the potential escapes, made possible through capital's logic of separation, of the cultural self-valorisation of the working class.4

Insofar as the culture industry's subsumption of cultural processes external to its relations of production is achieved through the latter's commodification, it initially appears that the form of expression of the mass assemblage--the commodity form of culture--has, as its function, the realization of the value contained in its cultural products: "The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. . . . Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through" (Adorno 1991, 86). As Adorno goes on to suggest, however:

This qualitative shift is so great that it calls forth entirely new phenomena. Ultimately, the culture industry no longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests from which it originated. These interests have become objectified in its ideology and have even made themselves independent of the compulsion to sell the cultural commodities which must be swallowed anyway. The culture industry turns into public relations, the manufacturing of "goodwill" per se, without regard for particular firms or saleable objects. Brought to bear is a general uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so that each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement. (86)

The form of expression of the mass assemblage, rather than the commodity-form, is the advertisement-form.5 The axiomatic of the commodity-form produced a direct relation between use value and exchange value. The advertisement-form, on the other hand, produces a relation between "image value" and exchange value. The semiotic system of the mass assemblage has, as its material of expression, the deterritorialized aesthetic semblance of authentic works of art. Its formalisation proceeds to reterritorialize aesthetic semblance as the commercial "sheen" lent to products (Adorno 1991, 53). The advertisement, therefore, may be understood as the form of the social relation produced through the assemblage's functional specialisation.6 The encoding which its relation necessarily implies, however, as a reterritorialization, is a meaning imposed on meaningless. The reterritorialization of aesthetic semblance as image value (the reintroduction of code fragments) is directly based on the axiomatic of capitalist valorisation which establishes the cultural product as exchange value--as (meaningless) commodity. The reterritorialization (advertising image) of what has already been decoded and axiomatized (the commodity) explains the appearance of what might be called the "pseudo-diversity" of the assemblage's form of expression: the differences belie their essential homogeneity, once use value has been eliminated.7

Unlike the commodity-form, whose function is the valorisation of capital through an axiomatizing conjunction, the function of the form of expression of the mass assemblage is social control, effected through an adaptation to the modes of behaviour reified in its images (reterritorialization). The image values of the semiotic system of the mass assemblage are "the values which decide human behaviour" (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 28). Their assimilation by the culture industry's consumers is not, however, due to some kind of inherent passivity on the latter's part. Adaptation is the condition of existence demanded by an administered society:

Mass culture is a kind of training for life when things have gone wrong. The schema of mass culture now prevails as a canon of synthetically produced modes of behaviour. The following which mass culture can still count on even where tedium and deception seems almost calculated to provoke the consumers is held together by the hope that the voice of the monopoly will tell them as they wait in line precisely what is expected of them if they want to be clothed and fed. . . . People give their approval to mass culture because they know or suspect that this is where they are taught the mores they will surely need as their passport in a monopolized life. This passport is only valid if paid for in blood, with the surrender of life as a whole and the impassioned obedience to a hated compulsion. This is why mass culture proves so irresistible and not because of the supposed "stultification" of the masses which is promoted by their enemies and lamented by their philanthropic friends. (Adorno 1991, 78-9; 80)

The collective assemblage of enunciation of mass culture may be understood as a regime of signs of domination. It produces a "script" of order-words, in which the qualitative details of any particular image dissolve before the identical meaning encoded within their formulaic repetitiveness--the homogeneous self-identity of their image value, or their capacity to effect controlling reterritorializations:

The dream industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people. . . . In the dreams of those in charge of mummifying the world mass culture represents a priestly hieroglyphic script which addresses its images to those who have been subjugated not in order that they might be enjoyed but only that they be read. The authentic images of the film screen as well as the inauthentic ones encountered in hit melodies and the well-worn written phrase appear so rigidly and so frequently that they are no longer perceived in their own right but only as repetitions whose perpetual sameness always expresses an identical meaning. . . . [T]he secret doctrine which is communicated here is the message of capital. . . . The new context into which these pre-prepared images enter as so many letters is always that of the command. The viewer is required constantly to translate the images back into writing. The exercise of obedience inheres in the fact of translation itself as soon as it takes place automatically. . . . It articulates every phenomenon right down to the subtlest nuance according to a simplistic two-term logic of "dos" and "don'ts," and by virtue of this reduction of everything alien and unintelligible it overtakes the customers. (Adorno 1991, 80; 81)

The deterritorialization of cultural products effected by their subsumption/

commodification by the culture industry is accompanied by their reterritorialization as image values, which, insofar as they are understood as "passwords" necessary for survival within an administered society, are functional to social control.

The French word for "slogan" or "password"--Mot d'ordre--in its literal translation as "word of order" or "order-word" effectively conveys the functionality of the formulas of mass culture to social control/command (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 75-110). "Order-words" are understood by Deleuze and Guattari to be expressions, immanent to language, whose "expressed" are acts that produce an "incorporeal transformation" of the bodies to which they are attributed:

Bodies have an age, they mature and grow old; but majority, retirement, any given age category, are incorporeal transformations that are immediately attributed to bodies in particular societies. "You are no longer a child": this statement concerns an incorporeal transformation, even if it applies to bodies and inserts itself into their actions and passions. The incorporeal transformation is recognisable by its instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation produces. (1980, 81)

The mass assemblage's form of expression (the advertising image values of control, or its order-words) and its form of content (what we will come to call the "masses" of mass culture) interact within a feed-back loop of a market accommodation to the consumers (supply) that fulfil the needs which it creates in the first place (demand); all that ever circulates, however, is "baby-food."8 It is within this circuit that the collective assemblage of enunciation of mass culture (the regime of signs of domination, or the set of all its order-words/pass-words) intervenes within the machinic assemblage of bodies (the collective body of the work force, or the "masses"), such that the latter is organised according to the former's reterritorializations. This involves the segmentation of the collective body of living labour according to the hierarchical values that are attributed to it by the "script" of order-words circulated through the advertising images:

Marked differentiations such as those of A or B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organization charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda. How formalized the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. . . . The details are interchangeable. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 123; 125)

In order to prevent its escape from capital's axiomatic (through its construction of revolutionary connections), therefore, the deterritorialized subjectivity of living labour is, within the mass assemblage of the culture industry, separated, divided, and reterritorialized. The culture industry's collective assemblage of enunciation attempts to determine "subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their shifting distributions within discourse" (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 80). The mass assemblage produces what Deleuze and Guattari would refer to as a series of "subjugated groups" (1972). Their identities (reterritorializations) have been imposed on them (through incorporeal transformations) by an overpowering form of expression (advertising image values). As a subjugated group, their "subsequent actions are made to conform to those prescribed by [their] assigned category" (Massumi 1992, 55). As Adorno suggests:

They become a collective through the adaptation to an over-mastering arbitrary power. The terror for which the people of every land are being prepared glares ever more threateningly from the rigid features of these culture-masks: in every peal of laughter we hear the menacing voice of extortion and the comic types are legible signs which represent the contorted bodies of revolutionaries. Participation in mass culture itself stands under the sign of terror. . . . If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for making them into masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit. (1991, 82; 92)

The assemblage's formalisation of content is one of capital's attempts to integrate the autonomous collective body of living labour within its organic composition (Adorno 1951, 229-230). While the form of expression of the mass assemblage is the advertising-form, its form of content may be said to be the subjugated-mass-form. Each exists in a state of reciprocal presupposition with the other, and the overall social function of the assemblage is to stabilise, through reterritorialization, the degrees of deterritorialization that permeate them.

The Modernist Work of Art

The mass assemblage of the culture industry may be said to accomplish the becoming-real of the abstraction "culture." Through its subsumption of "free time" under the commodity form of culture produced by a specifically capitalist mode of cultural production, the culture industry renders the abstract category of "culture" true in practice:

Today aesthetic barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralized. To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men's senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 131)

Needless to say, this development abolishes the work of art's critical potential--its capacity for self-negation--insofar as the truth content of the authentic work of art was produced through "the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity" (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 131; my emphasis):

Whereas in the real world all particulars are fungible, art protests against fungibility by holding up images of what reality itself might look like, if it were emancipated from the patterns of identification imposed on it. By the same token, art--the imago of the unexchangeable--verges on ideology because it makes us believe there are things in the world that are not for exchange. On behalf of the unexchangeable, art must awaken a critical consciousness toward the world of exchangeable things. (Adorno 1970, 122-3)

Under the conditions of the realisation of the abstraction--the subsumption of free time under mass culture--the cultural product no longer fails to achieve self-identity: it is the realisation of the self-identity of culture as exchange value. It thereby becomes false. The commodity form of culture demonstrates to what extent the concept of "culture" itself is a product of social transformations tending towards "postmodernism."9

Since my analysis of the different types of "cultural assemblages" locates the processes of production of popular culture within the Marxian analytic of the progressive subsumption of society under capital, it is clear that the mass assemblage's capacity to subsume "external" cultural practices is a constant feature of the cultural field as long as the becoming total of bourgeois society is not yet complete (and, insofar as the processes of self-valorisation of the working class are autonomous, even then it assumes a function of attempted "internal" incorporation). It is this capacity to subsume what Williams would term "residual" cultural forms that the original Frankfurt theorisations had in mind when defining the culture industry (particularly since, in tending to see the subjectivity of living labour as wholly dominated by the organic composition of capital, the question of "emergent" forms, arising from the autonomous self-valorisation of the working class, could not even be raised). It is for this reason that, although as a social product the category of the "culture industry" relates more directly to the social transformations of our present "postmodernism," I have chosen to situate it within the cultural conditions described as "modernism."10 Within Adorno's aesthetic theory, the valorised model of politicised artistic production is to be located in the autonomous works of high art which are "tendentially eliminated by the culture industry" (1991, 86). Accordingly, "art may, as Hegel speculated it would, soon enter the age of its demise" (1970, 5). Insofar as the "popular," interpreted as "mass culture," functions as a negative nodal point within Adorno's theorisations of the political potential of artistic activity, any further consideration of his aesthetics falls outside of the parameters of my investigation.

In a similar way, Jameson's account of postmodernism is a mediation on the possibilities for a critical aesthetic practice once the conditions of possibility of autonomous art have been eliminated. His narrative of the changing conditions of cultural production is one governed by the tendential subsumption of cultural forms that were external to capitalist relations of production. Within this narrative, the "popular" would appear to figure as an archaic residue that has yet to be eliminated; it is a form of expression located within "pre-capitalist enclaves" (1991, 46):

It would seem essential to distinguish the emergent forms of a new commercial culture--beginning with advertisements and spreading on to formal packaging of all kinds, from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic commodities such as television shows (the "logo") and best-sellers and films--from the older kinds of folk and genuinely "popular" culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from the mid-nineteenth century on, has gradually been colonised and extinguished by commodification and the market system. (63)

In defining the meaning of "popular" that is produced by the culture industry as "mass," I have been reserving the category of "popular" itself as a description of the second trajectory which Williams outlines: that which moved "from late forms of 'folk' culture to new and partly self-organizing forms of urban popular culture" (1981, 228). Within Jameson's narrative, the "popular" (as the form of expression produced along the second trajectory), insofar as it is effectively equated with "folk," does not even enter as a category of his analysis. The meaning of the sign of the popular within that narrative appears to leap directly from "folk" to "mass." I will suggest, however, that we may glimpse a possible definition by following Jameson's account of "modernism" (1991, 297-313).

At the beginning of his section entitled "Notes Toward a Theory of the Modern" (302-313), Jameson suggests that the "'classics' of the modern can certainly be postmodernized." It is not without coincidence for my own project that one of the primary examples he gives of such a "rewriting" is that of Deleuze and Guattari's book on Kafka (1975):

Deleuze's Kafka is certainly a postmodern Kafka, a Kafka of ethnicity and microgroups, very much a Third World and dialect minority Kafka in tune with postmodern politics and the "new social movements." (1991, 303)

It is somewhat surprising to find, in light of this framing of Deleuze's reading as a quintessentially postmodern one, that Jameson's own reading of Kafka, from which he extrapolates the conditions of possibility of the modernist work of art, is virtually identical to the former. Their difference lies in the social transformations which they understand Kafka's work to relate to: it is the difference between the formal and the real subsumption of society under capital. Jameson sees the eruption in Kafka's works of an "archaic, older legal bureaucracy associated with the Empire's political structure" into the "boredom of organized modernity" (308) as evidence that its conditions of possibility are to be located in uneven and combined development; that is, the existence of the residual, as-yet-unsubsumed which is able to be counterposed to the emergent forms and processes of rational administration:

It is then, in Kafka as elsewhere, the peculiar overlap of future and past, in this case, the resistance of archaic feudal structures to irresistible modernizing tendencies--of tendential organization and the residual survival of the not yet "modern" in some other sense--that is the condition of possibility for high modernism as such, and for its production of aesthetic forms and messages that may no longer have anything to do with the unevenness from which it alone springs. (309)

Within the Marxian analytic which I have been utilising, the conditions of possibility of high modernism, as elaborated by Jameson, may be described as the formal subsumption of society under capital. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, while suggesting that "there is a mutual penetration of two bureaucracies, that of the past and that of the future," go on to insist that "we're still at this stage today" (1975, 75). This is because, rather than defining the two as residual and emergent respectively, they define them as two poles of a perfectly modern functionalism: "archaisms with a contemporary function and neoformations." Deleuze and Guattari read what Jameson understands as "residual" as a "neoterritoriality," produced by the reterritorializing pole of capitalism's social axiomatic (1972, 257). This would suggest that it is capable of operating under the real subsumption of society (within which, according to Jameson's formulation, it would necessarily be swept away).

Despite this difference of interpretation between them, the important insight to be gained from Jameson's analysis is that what is described as "modernism" has, as its conditions of possibility, the uneven and combined development of capitalist society, or the formal subsumption of society under capital. This is a situation in which the relation between society and capitalist production is one of exteriority. The exteriority enables a relative autonomy of the cultural realm. "Postmodernism," therefore, may be described as a situation in which the former's unevenness and incomplete subsumption under capital is finally overcome. "Postmodernism" describes society's real subsumption:

[T]he postmodern must be characterized as a situation in which the survival, the residue, the holdover, the archaic, has finally been swept away without a trace. . . . Everything is now organized and planned; nature has been triumphantly blotted out, along with peasants, petit-bourgeois commerce, handicraft, feudal aristocracies and imperial bureaucracies. Ours is a more homogeneously modernized condition . . . . Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete. (Jameson 1991, 309-10; ix)

If, as I have suggested it may, Jameson's account potentially offers us a glimpse of the "popular" through the category of the "modernist," the abolition of the latter's conditions of possibility would appear to similarly abolish the second trajectory of "popular." While this is partly true, I will suggest that, through Jameson's identification of the conditions of possibility of modernism, were we to define the specificity of the configuration of relations which may be said to produce a "popular assemblage" within those conditions, then their abolition will nonetheless indicate a direction in which to pursue the continuation of the trajectory of self-organising forms of popular culture--along which the "popular" assemblage is superseded by that of the "minor."

Modernism and the Popular Assemblage

Following the second trajectory of transformations of the popular which Williams describes, we encounter--through the theorisations of figures such as Brecht, Piscator, and Gramsci--an understanding of popular culture as a dynamic site of intervention in which "the people," understood either as the industrial working class or as a wider counter-hegemonic bloc within which the working class acts as leader, are able to develop an understanding of the world that is freed from the distortions engendered by the dominant cultural hegemony. The "popular," here, figures as a site in which the "folk," as the constellation of modes of artistic production inherited from the "pre-industrial, pre-urban, pre-literate world" (Williams 1976, 137), is reconstituted according to "a demand for an entirely new art of theatrical representation" adequate to the changed situation in which "the people" find themselves in (Brecht 1940, 156). "Popular culture" within this strand is a reconstruction that aims to contribute to current social struggles, fashioned through the reappropriation of the people's traditional forms of expression:

"Popular" means intelligible to the broad masses, taking over their own forms of expression and enriching them / adopting and consolidating their standpoint / representing the most progressive section of the people in such a way that it can take over the leadership: thus intelligible to other sections too / linking with tradition and carrying it further / handing on the achievements of the section now leading to the section of the people that is struggling for the lead. (Brecht 1938, 108)

How, therefore, may we describe the functional and political specialisations which the "popular assemblage" establishes? What materials are articulated within its form of expression? How is its regime of bodies organised? According to what movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization do the two interact? Since, unlike the mass assemblage, the popular assemblage is a model of oppositional cultural production, how do its conditions of possibility inform and constrain its potential political efficacy?; and in what possible form may the assemblage reconstitute itself once those conditions no longer obtain?

The reason that I consider Jameson's analysis of the conditions of possibility of high modernism to be adequate to what I will be defining as the popular assemblage is that virtually all of the revolutionary models of theatrical practice, within the first half of this century, that utilised the "popular" as a positive nodal point involved, in varying degrees, its articulation with a modernist aesthetic. In identifying my object of investigation as revolutionary theorisations, as I have already indicated, the reformist practices, which attempted to produce a unification across the social divides effected by the various social relations of domination (the line of popular theatre which extends from Rousseau, through Wagner and Rolland, to their more contemporary liberal inheritors), have been excluded from my considerations (although, of course, this does not mean that the theorisations produced along that line have not had, again in varying degrees, considerable influence on practices which do fall within my field of investigation). More problematic, perhaps, might be the consideration of a movement such as the Proletkult of post-revolutionary Russia. Despite the involvement and support of both Meyerhold and Eisenstein, as Bradby and McCormick suggest, its groups "were relatively unadventurous in their methods" (1978, 46).11

I do not, however, raise these issues in order to solve them, by providing a model that is so abstracted from the differences within the functional and political specialisations which those practices produce, that it is able to unify all the configurations of "popular theatre" which existed within the period under a general formula; but rather, in marking what I am excluding, to achieve precisely the opposite. I am attempting to produce a model that, while remaining at a relatively abstract level, is nonetheless capable of enabling an assessment of the potential political efficacy of theatrical practices that share the social relations which constitute the model. By focusing on the social relations that are actively produced in common by a delineated set of practices, I hope to identify a specific configuration of processes and limits that may serve as reference points for an interpretation of the contemporary possibilities for a political, popular theatre.

The delineation of practices that I hope to analyse through the concept of the popular assemblage is partly described by the presence of a "modernist" element in their forms of expression. There is, however, one, by no means unimportant, exception: Gramsci. While he does suggest, insofar as the development of a proletarian culture may involve the destruction of bourgeois culture ("to destroy spiritual hierarchies, prejudices, idols and ossified traditions . . . not to be afraid of innovations and audacities"), that in the "field of culture, the Futurists are revolutionaries" (1985, 51), nonetheless his use of the "popular" does not involve its articulation with a modernist aesthetic. What it does involve is the sense of an active reconstruction, under the sign of the "national-popular," of the inherited forms of expression that we may collect under the sign of "folk," which is not at a great formal distance from that effected by the modernist projects. Furthermore, in understanding the creation of the national-popular as a process operating according to the principle of hegemony, the reconstruction shares its conditions of possibility--uneven and combined development--with those identified by Jameson as pertaining to modernism. Although the specific materials articulated together by the form of expression of Gramsci's project may not necessarily be commensurate with those of the modernist's, I believe that they all share a common social function. Therefore, they may be considered together through the concept of the popular assemblage.

Whereas the overriding function of the mass assemblage's advertisement-form of expression is social control, that of the form of expression of the popular assemblage is social struggle. In his opening declaration of the aims of the Proletarisches Theater in 1920, Piscator insisted upon the "Subordination of all artistic aims to the revolutionary goal: conscious emphasis on, and cultivation of, the idea of class struggle" (1980, 45). The general function of "social struggle" is effected through a series of specific functions operating within variable configurations determined by the particular tactics pursued--agitation, de-mystification, identification, celebration, propaganda, pedagogics, iconoclasm, etc. In each particular actualisation of the popular assemblage's semiotic system, therefore, these functions are embodied in a variety of formed materials (the assemblage's substances of expression); shock brigades, living newspapers, mass chants, mass fetes, cabaret, cinematic or theatrical montage and slide projections, satirical revues, etc. These functional elements, however, in any given project, may be said to tend towards either one of two poles of the general function: the production of political alliance and the production of oppositional antagonism.

In specifying the popular assemblage as a model derived from the modernist projects, we may identify within its semiotic system two distinct flows of materials of expression: on the one hand, the experimental techniques of "high" modernism, deterritorialized from the neoterritorial locations of the dissident-bourgeois avant garde and reterritorialized in a relationship of "commitment" towards oppositional social forces (in other words, from the "small-scale" circulation within the community of artists of the bohemian café societies of dada or Italian futurism to the "large-scale" circulation within the masses of the working-men's clubs of the Blue Blouse);12 on the other, the traditional techniques of "folk" and "amateur" theatre, which--although containing degrees of deterritorialization arising from their decontextualisation produced through the tendential annihilation of their social bases by capitalism's primitive accumulation--nonetheless were, strictly speaking, subject to an overcoding performed through their "reconstruction." The general form of expression of the popular assemblage, therefore, can be described as a relation formed between tradition and experiment: on the one hand, the relatively territorialised traditional forms tending towards the political alliance pole by virtue of their accessibility and assumed common familiarity; and on the other, the deterritorialized modernist forms tending towards the oppositional antagonism pole by virtue of the critical capacities which they contain (defamiliarisation, gestic or grotesque expressiveness, montage or epic organisation). Piscator's play Revue Roter Rummel (1924), commissioned by the Communist Party of Germany as part of that year's election campaign, provides a suitable example of the new forms of expression produced through an articulation between the two kinds of technique:

[It] established a new form of people's theatre, one which performed both its didactic and its galvanising functions more effectively. This was achieved by combining the mass appeal of music hall "turns" with the techniques that had formerly been associated mostly with political cabaret, playing to minority audiences, in such clubs as Le Cabaret Voltaire or Die Elf Scharfrichter. (Bradby and McCormick 1978, 70)

As the references made above to "mass," "masses," and "large-scale" may suggest, it initially appears that the material of content of the popular assemblage is identical to that of the mass assemblage. Since I have suggested that the concept of the "culture industry" is valid for the cultural conditions both of modernism and postmodernism, however, it is clear that the content pole of the popular assemblage, insofar as it is formed within the conditions of uneven and combined development only, requires further specification.

As we have seen, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the expression and content of any assemblage are always "more or less deterritorialized, according to the particular state of their form" (1980, 87). As a machinic assemblage of bodies, the content pole of the popular assemblage is partially constituted by the living labour capacities produced by the capitalist relations of production; the displaced populations of industrial society--displaced, that is, not necessarily geographically (though the process is often coextensive with such a migration, voluntary or otherwise), but displaced in the sense of communities expropriated from their conditions of production/reproduction. This expropriation produces the separation of "the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature," such that "a mediated source of subsistence, a source purely dependent on social relations," i.e., wage labour, comes to replace "the very earth itself as the ground on which society stands" (Marx 1857-8, 489; 276-7). This displacement, therefore, constitutes a flow of deterritorialization emerging from the formal subsumption of society under capital.

This formal subsumption, though, is characterised by the existence of external relations between capitalist production and society. The material of content of the popular assemblage--or the flows of bodies entering its machinic assemblage--within these conditions, therefore, are not exclusively constituted by the deterritorialized flow of living labour capacity. If we look to the list of archaisms swept away by postmodernism, of course, it is the peasants that are missing from my description; indeed, considering that in Russia in 1913, "the industrial proletariat made up only about 1.41 per cent of the population, the overwhelming majority being peasant" (Stourac and McCreery 1986, 9-10), the analysis certainly needs amending. In short, the popular refers to "the people," not exclusively the working class. It is clear, therefore, that although it is only Gramsci who explicitly uses the term in his theorisations, we may define "hegemony" as the mode of formalisation of the content pole of the assemblage. The political alliance pole of the social function of the semiotic system of the popular assemblage intervenes in its physical system in order to bind the bodies within relations of hegemony. Insofar as this model allows us to diagrammatise, for example, the functional elements of Piscator's theatrical practice (who, we will recall, insisted on the principle of class struggle), it is important to stress that by "hegemony," I refer to the classical Marxist, rather than the postmodern discourse theory, version; hegemony is necessarily rooted in one of the "fundamental" social classes--bourgeoisie or proletariat.13

Since this formalisation of content does not act exclusively on deterritorialized flows, the quanta of relative deterritorialization available to the articulation of content and expression within the popular assemblage contains a relative limit--that described by the degree of territorialization of the bodies constituting the regime. If we define this relative limit as a constituent factor of the popular assemblage, and hegemony as the mode of its formalisation of content, then we may say that its functioning is dependant upon what Jameson terms "the residual survival of the not yet 'modern'" (1991, 309). While these "un-subsumed" collective bodies are, of course, permeated with degrees of deterritorialization proper to themselves (to conceive of them otherwise would be to fetishise their segmentarity organisation, effectively denying the existence of the micropolitical flows which feed them), nonetheless, it is only when they are fully subsumed under the capital relation that their conditions of existence are internally constituted within the deterritorializing/reterritorializing operations of capitalism. It is only then that deterritorialization becomes an inherent principle of the bodies' reproduction.

The conditions of possibility of the popular assemblage are co-extensive with those of high modernism (as defined by Jameson). If we define postmodernism as the cultural conditions obtaining within the real subsumption of society under capital, then it would be correct to assert that the "popular," in the specific sense of the definition offered above, is no longer available within contemporary social conditions. The assemblage of popular theatre operated within a terrain characterised by the formal subsumption. I propose that the question of the possibility of constructing a contemporary form of popular theatre may be approached through the question of the possible form of existence of an assemblage able to operate within-and-against-and-beyond the society of real subsumption. This is the question of the possibility of the assemblage of minor theatre. As we may recall, Deleuze and Guattari locate the possibility of moving beyond capitalism in the acceleration of its movements of deterritorialization. Since, under the conditions described as the real subsumption of society under capital, capitalism no longer has an exterior, the reproduction processes of the bodies we have been considering come to be entirely subsumed under the capital relation. As the cultural conditions of the popular assemblage mutate, therefore, so too does the body of the "people": their collective quanta of deterritorialization increase and have the potential to "feed into" one another (producing "revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic" [Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 473]). In order to propose the concept of the minor assemblage, therefore, we need to follow that possibility of a line of escape: the possible continuation of the trajectory of the "popular."

The Real Subsumption of Society

As I have already suggested, the real subsumption of society under capital eliminates capitalism's uneven and combined development, and absorbs the entire society into its interior; henceforward, capitalism has no exterior. If previously my critique of Laclau and Mouffe was levelled at their theorisation of the forms of political subjectivity and struggle (the hegemony-form of politics), we now have sufficient grounds to interrogate it in terms of its own conditions of validity--the existence of uneven and combined development within the social conditions described as the real subsumption of society under capital.

Although this process was anticipated by Marx, both in the Grundrisse (1857-8), and in the formerly "unpublished" chapter of volume one of Capital (1867, 943-1084), it only really began to receive critical attention with Mario Tronti's development of the concept of the "social factory":

The more capitalist development advances, that is to say the more the production of relative surplus value penetrates everywhere, the more the circuit production--distribution--exchange--consumption inevitably develops; that is to say that the relationship between capitalist production and bourgeois society, between the factory and society, between society and the state, become more and more organic. At the highest level of capitalist development social relations become moments of the relations of production, and the whole society becomes an articulation of production. In short, all of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over all of society. (Tronti 1962, 20)14

Another way to describe this process would be to speak in terms of the organic composition of capital incorporating all of society. As we have seen in the previous chapter, however, the subjectivity of living labour, existing as the working-class composition, is a permanent antagonistic presence within capital's midst:

Society appears to us as capital's society. It is through this passage that all social conditions are subsumed by capital, that is, they become part of its "organic composition." . . . Capital's expansion seems to be a power expressing itself, but it is, instead, a hostile relation which has to be resolved each time. (Negri 1979, 114; 116)

Capital's "antithetical character," as Marx writes, "can never be abolished through quiet metamorphosis" (1857-8, 159). Under the real subsumption of society, therefore, the class composition achieves social dimensions. Negri suggests that within this development:

The subject, the subjects, the ontological relationship and the persistence of the antagonism, all form part of the immediate phenomenology of human experience, and they do not require foundations which go beyond experience. Experience, however--and in particular, the experience which concerns collective subjectivities--is something dynamic. Consequently, . . . it is obvious than when one refers to "points of view"--that is, to changing purposes--subjects manifest themselves as "mechanisms." (Alternatively--to express it in terms used by Guattari, following Foucault--the subjects will manifest themselves as agencements.) (1989, 127-8)

As I suggested in the introduction, it is through the concept of the "assemblage" (agencement) that I am attempting to extend the autonomist concepts of class composition and self-valorisation to analyse the potential political efficacy of contemporary cultural practice. The point of conceptual contact registered in the above quotation should therefore have productive effects for that attempt.

With the process of real subsumption, Michael Hardt (who has worked closely with Negri) identifies a shift in the social mechanisms of control from a Foucauldian "disciplinary diagrammatics" to a diagrammatics functional to what Deleuze has called "societies of control" (Deleuze 1992a). Hardt suggests that:

The diagram of control, however, is not orientated toward position and identity, but rather toward mobility and anonymity. It functions on the basis of "the whatever," the flexible and mobile performance of contingent identities, and thus its assemblages or institutions are elaborated primarily through repetition and the production of simulacra. (1995, 36)

In light of my analysis of the culture industry's functioning via a repetitious production of control through its flow of image values, I will suggest the "mass assemblage" insofar as under real subsumption it no longer has "exterior" cultural processes to incorporate, fulfils the definition which Hardt gives above of an assemblage of a society of control. In connecting my analysis, through Negri's point of conceptual contact, to my discussion of political subjectivity in the previous chapters, we may redefine the mass assemblage as "the practice of the production of subjectivity which emanates from capital" (Negri 1989, 132). The attempted segmentation of the collective body of living labour by the mass assemblage's "script" of order-words circulated through the advertising images, corresponds to what Negri refers to as:

[T]he establishment by capital of hierarchical values [which] increasingly represents a deficit of reality: here the capitalist project no longer mystifies a reality but, observed closely, substitutes mystification for reality and thereby accentuates the emptiness of the world. It also scrapes away the verisimilitude of ideology. The semiotic of hierarchy and its values is a very abstract moment. . . . It is a function of command, an articulation of absurd but efficient signifiers. Here the production of subjectivity has become the production of the inhuman. This nazi aspect of capitalist ideology in the period of the socialized worker cannot be underestimated. (1989, 136)

I defined the mass assemblage's formalisation of content as one of capital's attempts toward the integration of the autonomous collective body of living labour within its organic composition. At that point, I referenced Adorno's concept of the "increasingly organic composition of mankind," from which, it may be recalled, he insisted that "those who produce culture" were not secure (1991, 106).15 In light of the developments produced by the real subsumption of society under capital, the full force of Adorno's deficit of a theorisation of revolutionary subjectivity may be grasped. In following the autonomist tradition, however, we may be able to produce a far more optimistic picture.

As we have seen, since subjects manifest themselves as "mechanisms," or rather, assemblages under real subsumption, the mass assemblage within those conditions may be considered as a capitalistic subject. Furthermore, since we are specifically concerned with identifying the mechanisms, or assemblages, through which the ontology of living labour, in its constitutive (the class composition) and expressive (its self-valorisation) dimensions, that is, constituted and expressed at a social level, may be able to antagonistically oppose the operations of the semiotic of hierarchy produced by the capitalistic subject described as the mass assemblage, we must be able to define a cultural assemblage, as an antagonistic alternative to the "mass," capable of producing "a semiotic for the antagonistic production of subjectivity . . . from the proletarian point of view" (Negri 1992, 139; my emphasis). Now, it has to be admitted, it sounds like quite a task. I will suggest that the purpose of this thesis has been to attempt to accumulate, by way of its movements through the realms of political, economic, cultural and semiotic theory, sufficient materials to begin to address that task. As an antagonistic alternative to the "mass," I have been working towards the "minor."

The Minor Assemblage: Community and Communication

[T]he innovations of what is called Modernism have become the new but fixed forms of our present moment. If we are to break out of the non-historical fixity of post-modernism, then we must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition which may address itself not to this by now exploitable because quite inhuman rewriting of the past but, for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again.

Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism

The concept of the assemblage, I initially suggested, allowed us to correlate the forms of social organisation and the forms of the theatrical event, with respect the movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization which permeate them, within the changing conditions of cultural production. We have the contemporary conditions: real subsumption, or a society of control. We have the form of oppositional subjectivity: self-valorisation within the class composition. We even have traced the movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization which are forcefully manifested in, or imposed upon that subjectivity.

All that we are missing, therefore, is the actual (or even potential) theatre. How to produce the (theatrical) event? As Guattari and Negri remind me, "One always returns to the same point, that of production--production of useful goods, production of communication and of social solidarity, production of aesthetic universes, production of freedom" (1985,124). Antonio Negri suggests that for capital's production of subjectivity:

What is fundamental is to block the political expression of the productive forces--to study them in order to dominate them. In short, with regard to the revolution of the productive forces . . . it is essential to disrupt their socialisation and to expropriate their autonomy (or in other words, their vibrant ability to communicate which gives rise to productive cooperation). (1989, 132)

Autonomy and cooperation, community and communication, self-expression: they are what capitalistic subjectivity studies about us, what it doesn't like about us. Therefore, a good place to start. What I would like to suggest, is that, in the past few decades, a form of theatre has begun to develop which not only displays many of these processes and qualities, but indicates the actual trajectory followed, beyond the modernist experiments, of the self-organizing forms of popular theatre:

In the twenties and thirties the organisation of most political theatre groups was closely linked with that of the political parties and thus a certain type of theatre was produced: mass spectacles or small fighting review shows, both tending to simplify the issues and eliminate ambiguities. Today the organisational structures of most political theatre are radically different. Most groups start as non-aligned co-operative ventures with a strong emphasis on internal democracy within the group. Even the most passionately committed work is more wary of direct party alignment, more concerned with community issues and with developing an alternative theatre as a valid channel of communication that can criticise and outflank the hermetic barrage of images presented by the mass media for our passive consumption. (Bradby and McCormick 1978, 161)

The historical distance of my present moment from the time at which the above distinction was made, however, does not make a solution quite so easy; what stands between the two, with somewhat of a squeeze of precise dating of course, is postmodernism. Although Jameson's account is clearly susceptible to a similar criticism to that levelled at Adorno, nonetheless, it does remind us of the virtual annihilation in the eighties of the flourishing popular theatre movements of the late-sixties and seventies. If, according to John McGrath's suggestive image, following Mao in the seventies, "the revolutionary [moved] . . . like a fish, moving among the people as fish through the sea," then following Thatcher in the eighties, "the sea of Britain," was ceremoniously poisoned--"with the purpose of asphyxiating socialism" (1990, 1-2). Of course, as McGrath goes on to show in the rest of his book on that period, The Bone Won't Break, Thatcherism's project was not entirely successful. What I do not think he emphasized strongly enough, though, is that the same period, and beyond, is associated with the rise of might be termed "minor" theatres with correlations to that with which I began my discussion of political subjectivity: the "new social movements." I concluded the discussion, of course, with a Marxian model of the multiplicity of self-valorisation.

How might this multiplicity be correlated with a form of the theatrical event described as "minor"? Somewhat schematically I will suggest that the overriding function of a minor assemblage would be constituted by two poles--much as that of the popular was: at one pole, what might be called a community-form of expression, whose function would be constituted as self-valorisation; at the other, a communication-form of expression, whose function would be the recomposition of connections--"multivalent engagements of all social forces" (Guattari and Negri 1985, 123)--in the face of their segregation by the semiotic of hierarchy of the mass assemblage. The organisation of these functions would be termed the general form of expression of the minor assemblage: the autonomy-form.

The Becomings of Minor Theatre

Pierre: . . . It's nothing like a theatre. More like a machine. It's a form of power like the steam engine. I just have to apply it.

Caryl Churchill, Softcops

Brecht suggested that "Besides being popular there is such a thing as becoming popular" (1938, 112)--a comment which stresses that the "popular" nature of a project is an historically variable quality. When Deleuze identifies a process of "becoming-minoritarian" within Carmelo Bene's theatre, however, he has something rather different in mind (Deleuze 1979).

"Becoming" is a highly valorised concept in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. It is a process that operates on the content of an assemblage: its physical system, or its machinic assemblage of bodies. It involves the interaction of a-signifying flows as an intensive, affective operation of deterritorialization: "in a becoming, one is deterritorialized" (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 291). Furthermore, becoming is directly linked to the concept of minor, since "There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian" (106). I initially suggested that the concept of the "assemblage" allowed us to differentiate between modalities of interaction between flows, according to the movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization which permeate them. "Becoming-minoritarian" therefore indicates a particular type of interaction that is produced between the bodies--the content pole--of the assemblage. Its particularity may be defined by its power to promote deterritorialization.

If "becoming-minoritarian" is described as a function of deterritorialization, it follows that the "major" is the effect of a stabilising reterritorialization, or of the inhibition of movements of deterritorialization. "Major" is a reterritorialization operating via the standard:

The notion of minority is very complex, with musical, literary, linguistic, as well as juridical and political, references. The opposition between minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language (Joyce's or Ezra Pound's Ulysses). It is obvious that "man" holds the majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. . . . Majority assumes a state of power or domination, not the other way round. It assumes the standard measure, not the other way round. Even Marxism "has almost always translated hegemony from the point of view of the national worker, qualified, male and over thirty-five." A determination different from that of the constant will therefore be considered minoritarian, by nature and regardless of number. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 105)16

Defined in this way, "minoritarian" does not refer to a quantitative measurement of the bodies in the assemblage. Rather, it registers a qualitatively different form of the exercise of power between them. The difference between a becoming-minoritarian and the state of "being-majoritarian" may be said to correspond to the qualitative difference between the exercise of power by the two antagonistic social subjects of capitalism--the immanent power of a constitutive ontology and the transcendental Power of command enforced through the stamp of the dialectic: "In erecting the figure of a universal minoritarian consciousness, one addresses powers (puissances) of becoming that belong to a different realm from that of Power (Pouvoir) and Domination. . . . Becoming-minoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy" (106; my emphasis).

The reason for this brief exposition of what remains a highly elaborate concept in Deleuze and Guattari's work lies in the way in which "becoming" functions as a discriminating rubric within Deleuze's conception of the relationship between "minor theatre" and "popular theatre" (Deleuze specifically addresses Brecht's formulation of the latter). In order to attempt a reformulation of Deleuze's "minor," however, I would like to address a more contemporary popular theatre project than Brecht's: A Satire of the Four Estaites by John McGrath (presented at the Edinburgh Festival by Wildcat theatre company in 1996). This project neatly encapsulates some of the problems with the "popular" which lead Deleuze to differentiate it from "minor."

McGrath's play was the first event to be held at the newly opened Edinburgh International Conference Centre, and presents a reworking of Sir David Lindsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaites, the first Scottish morality play, into a contemporary tale of the struggle over the birth and fate of a new Scotland, personified as one Jenny McReddie. The three estates of Lindsay's play--the church, the aristocracy and the merchant class--are transformed into the politicians (a series of huge statues: a papal Thatcher, a grey Major, and a Christ-like, bleeding-heart Blair, who are, at first, triumphantly paraded, then dragged through the lobby prior to the play's beginning by a noisy procession of Mummers), the non-elected powers (a series of actors with giant papier-mâché heads: a Eurocrat, a Nato general, and a multi-national corporation), and the British merchants (a series of masked actors as Cheap Labour, Low Taxes, and Privatised Industries). The fourth estate, the media, arrive later in the form of Sal Sitcom, Sir Righteous Denunciation, and Slavering Drool (the newspaper hack), all ruled by a satirical version of Rupert Murdoch--Lord Merde. The Fourth Estate conspires to prevent the unification of Jenny McReddie and "King Humanity" (a clean-cut figure who represents "almost everything" good, and who is aided by "Democracy," "Equality," "Charity" and "Love-and-Respect") in blissful wedlock. The play utilises a range of popular forms, music hall, spectacle, pantomime, the decidedly carnivalesque song "I had-da sausage, a bonnie little sausage" to which the audience are invited to sing along, and the unforgettable camper-than-camp Erskine School Highland Dancers, who intervene with fashion, fancy footwork, and some formidable fist-waving at crucial moments in the plot.

While it may seem to be the height of academic abstraction to assess what was a highly entertaining and successful production in terms of a Deleuzian analytic, there were certain features of the play which illuminate the issue at hand. Ignoring for the moment its location within one of the most pernicious cultural industries of our time--the international festival--(which, I should insist, is a significant departure from the usual context of McGrath's work, which is more often characterised by a well-nigh Gramscian organicity with its audience), I believe that the model that McGrath presents conforms to the majoritarian aspects of the "popular" which Deleuze takes issue with:

For the theater for all, the popular theater, is a little like democracy; it appeals to a majoritarian fact. But this fact is very ambiguous. It assumes a state of power or domination and not the opposite. (Deleuze 1979, 219)

If "major" in Deleuze's scheme represents a metre-stick against which all else is measured, within the terrain of what constitutes "proper theatre," McGrath's play does not immediately appear to be majoritarian; indeed, I overheard an tourist during the interval complaining that the play's style was too amateur, too much "like high-school," too provincial--which is to say, not major enough. When we consider the thematic structuring of the play, however, I believe things appear a little different.

The image of conjugal bliss enjoyed by the newly-born Scotland, Jenny, and the handsome young King Humanity at the conclusion (even if, in a terribly modern gesture, they do agree to forgo a wedding ceremony and just live together), presents us with a thoroughly Oedipalised telos for the play's political stance. Of course, it would be pedantic to criticise a morality play for such an easy, romanticised ending. However, the play would not appear quite so major if it were not for the "the Worthy Mob," who form a mostly silent chorus throughout. The Worthy Mob consisted of an array of characters external to the bright and blissful Scotland that occupied centre stage--alcoholics, drug addicts, down and outs, the homeless. They formed a presence within the border between stage and audience. An occasionally disruptive minoritarian force, yet gullible also--all too easily swayed from the good path of a new Scotland by the Fourth Estate (they all eagerly waved copies of The Sun, Murdoch's most successful British tabloid).

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that a becoming "is the in-between, the border or line of flight" (293). What I am suggesting is that, within the play's thematic organisation, it is the Worthy Mob who indicate a line of flight out of the "majoritarian popular" of McGrath's model. The popular as formulated here, Deleuze would insist, is incapable of a process of becoming. On the other hand, were we to construct a popular theatre project with the Worthy Mob centre-stage--attempting to formulate a new Scotland--the result, I will suggest, would be a minor theatre.

As I briefly suggested above, however, the play's actual location within the festival ought to provoke a further qualification of this reading. I think that it is fair to say that for the festival audience, when its response is not one of condescension towards the play's non-cosmopolitan character, the play's counter-hegemonic images fulfil a commodity function. Despite the specific attachments which the play posits, the festival context serves to reterritorialize its materials of expression onto the form of a cultural commodity. Its images of contestation merely serve to guarantee the liberalism of the festival's organisers. The correlation between the event's expression and content is inscribed on the price of a ticket.

Since it is perhaps a little unfair to assess the efficacy of McGrath's model of popular theatre on the basis of the social relation which is established within such a context, insofar as it may be said to represent an exceptional case, we might consider the possible ways in which it would function within the conditions which the play appears to explicitly presuppose. I will suggest that despite the politically progressive implications of its use of popular artistic forms, we can deduce from the analysis above that the thematics of the play would function within its semiotic organisation according to a principle of standardisation and reterritorialization. It valorises a set of majoritarian subjects of its statements (the characters centre-stage), whose enunciating subjects are posited as a particular strata of a presupposed audience: a national working-class "identity." Its form of expression would thus function in a similar way to the hegemony form which I outlined in my model of the popular assemblage. The identity would act as a mechanism of real hierarchism within the event's formalisation of content, insofar as it is privileged as a majoritarian constant of content which binds its "minoritarian" bodies within dominating relations of power (hegemonic relations). The non-majoritarian bodies consequently receive their political identity from the majoritarian: they are formed as "subjugated" groups within this model.17 McGrath's model, as Deleuze suggests of the "popular," assumes a state of power or domination.

In what ways, therefore, does the critique of McGrath's majoritarian model gesture towards the possible forms and functions of a theatrical event that realises the minor assemblage? I believe that Deleuze's reading of minor theatre, despite the differences between the materials of expression which it gives as examples and those I have in mind, can still tell us something about the way in which a "popular" minor theatre would function. If we understand, in the "majoritarian popular," the valorised characters of its expression, which posit the privileging of a particular "identity" in its content, as the representation of a major standard, then the minor may be defined as an attempt to elude that standardisation. Its constituency does not therefore reside in a specific identity, and its function is not the defence of such an identity. While it will inevitably begin with an "identity" or configurations of "identities," its purpose is to develop their degrees of deterritorialization. As such, it does not involve the enunciation of standards, but rather the production of "variations":

Now is not continuous variation precisely that which keeps overflowing--by excess or by defect--the representational threshold of the majoritarian standard? . . . May the theater not therefore find for itself a function modest enough, and yet effective? This antirepresentational function would be to trace, to constitute a sort of diagram of minoritarian consciousness, as a potentiality of every person. . . . For in drawing up the form of a minoritarian consciousness, it would be addressing itself to powers of becoming, which are of another domain from that of power and of the representation-standard. (Deleuze 1979, 219-220)

If, therefore, "Becoming-minoritarian as the universal figure of consciousness is called autonomy" (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 106; my emphasis), then the multiplicity of the latter's processes of self-valorisation cannot be considered as a static multiplicity of identities. A minor assemblage would involve their continual and mutual mutation. As Massumi suggests, "What one comes out of is identity. What one comes into is greater transformational potential" (1992, 106). Elsewhere, he describes these movements of deterritorialization in terms of "falling":

The one who falls, becomes. The one who falls together, becomes singular. The one who falls together becomes singular, in global embrace of the other. The one who falls together becomes singular in global embrace of the other, under the shared momentum of an ethic of yearning. The equation to derive is one of reciprocal addition, replacing capitalist division. Or, in less binary language: it is the capitalist equation thrown off, so that it does not divide without changing its nature. (1993, 36)

The image of the "nomad" features heavily within Deleuze's project--his elaboration of an assemblage able to oppose the contemporary State, termed a "war machine," is referred to as a "Treatise on Nomadology" (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 351-423). Elsewhere, he refers to his philosophy as a form of "nomad thought." Once we utilise his conceptual framework for the elaboration of a radical cultural praxis, I will suggest that the term "nomad" acquires a more concrete valency. The processes of deterritorialization in contemporary society produce a range of "real life" nomads--the migrants, the refugees, the displaced, minorities of all kinds (Goulimari 1993). In McGrath's play, such figures are allowed to assume centre stage for a short period, immediately after the interval, prior to the arrival of the main characters. They call attention to themselves, they shout a little; the festival audience indulges in a little guilt or quiet embarrassment. The figures of the new Scotland arrive, and assure them their claims will be dealt with after the adversary has been dealt with; but in the meantime, they are invited to resume their places in the margins. The practice of a minor theatre is a becoming-minoritarian of that model.

I believe we may perceive such processes at work already within projects which, for example, utilise the popular within a postcolonial context; what Gómez-Peña refers to as the production of "border culture" (1989). The processes of deterritorialization often allow some "luggage" to be taken along the way--stories, traditions, modes of expression--though, as Caren Kaplan reminds us, some are allowed to take more than others (Kaplan 1987). While, undoubtedly, such "luggage" has the effect of producing a reterritorialization, by virtue of its functioning as a material of self-valorisation, it of a qualitatively different nature to that produced through the capitalist assemblages. The continuous variation of identity is a function of self-determination; the opposite of a subjugated group. As Guattari and Negri insist:

It is not a question of denying the levels of abstraction which the deterritorialized processes of production made man conquer. What is contested by communism are all types of conservative, degrading, oppressive reterritorialization imposed by the capitalist and/or socialist State, with its administrative functions, institutional organs, its collective means of normalization and blockage, its media, etc. The reterritorialization induced by communist practice is of an entirely different nature; it does not pretend to return to a natural or universal origin; it is not a circular revolution; rather it allows an "ungluing" of the dominant realities and significations, by creating conditions which permit people to "make their territory," to conquer their individual and collective destiny within the most deterritorialized flows. (Guattari and Negri 1985, 140)

What I am suggesting is that my conception of "minor theatre" may provide one possible means to confront the complexity of a politicised practice of artistic activity in contemporary society. That these processes must of necessity be bound up with other revolutionary social struggles if they are to achieve any lasting change in the relations of power in society is an obvious truism, although, of course, such things are easier said than done. I believe the Deleuze, Guattari and Negri framework elaborated above provides one possible theoretical apparatus with which to direct such action; and, unlike so many other postmodernist theories, it is one which thoroughly optimistic. It allows us to describe the "genuinely emergent," in Raymond William's sense of the term--if not in specific, concrete terms, then at least in terms of an abstract model of its social function: a politicised, theatrical practice producing cultural self-valorisation.

I do not think it absurd to base a revolutionary politics on semiotic and analytical exercises that have broken with the dominant semiology; in other words, on ways of using the spoken and written word, pictures, gestures, groups and so on, that would direct along very different lines the relationship between the flux of signs and all the de-territorialized fluxes. . . . The overthrow of modern capitalism, therefore, is not just a matter of struggling against material enslavement and the visible forms of repression, but also, and above all, of creating a whole lot of alternative ways of doing things, of functioning. (Guattari 1975, 106; 1979, 269)

Notes

Chapter Three

1 I would suggest that, in general, this coupling of Deleuze and Guattari's work with that of Negri's provides a more fruitful, and in many ways far more meaningful, context for the utilization of Foucault's analyses than of his usual reading in terms of Lacan and Althusser.

2 See the beginning of my introduction to this thesis.

3 This distinction, in light of the influence of Rolland on the formulations of many of the Marxian modernist projects for a popular theatre, of course cannot be maintained absolutely; but insofar as Rolland's model is one of the unification of a social community across the divides produced by relations of domination (drawing its inspiration from a reconstructed model of Greek tragedy, Wagner and Rousseau), I believe it has some validity. On Rolland, see Fisher, "Romain Rolland and the Ideology and Aesthetics of French People's Theatre" (1979) and Bradby and McCormick, People's Theatre (1978). On the influence of Rolland on revolutionary formulations of people's theatre in Russia, see Kleberg, Theatre as Action (1980).

4 I have insisted that my connection of Deleuze and Guattari's theorisations and those of autonomist Marxism enable a contestation of capitalist power's "ruling [of] the relationship between social struggles and capitalist (social, productive, state) restructuration" (Negri 1992, 105); that is to say, it provides a means of contesting the reterritorializations of the culture industry.

5 It is interesting to note here that Jameson's attempt to provide a conceptual framework for video analyses the "logo," as the "synthesis of an advertising image and a brand name" (1991, 85), in terms almost identical to those of Deleuze and Guattari's content / expression semiotic (the latter of which was developed primarily by Guattari through a conjunction of Peirce and Hjemslev's semiotics).

6 Of course, the truth content of aesthetic semblance was traditionally a product of the division of labour; it was "bought with the exclusion of the lower classes&emdash;&emdash;with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality" (Adorno and Horkheimer 1944, 135). The deterritorialization of aesthetic semblance through commodification, and its subsequent reterritorialization as advertising image, however, does not abolish that exclusion; on the contrary, "mass art has taken that alienation of the masses from art, blindly sustained in life by society, up into the process of production as its presupposition, lives from it and deliberately reproduces it" (Adorno 1991, 55).

7 "Advertising becomes information when there is no longer anything to choose from, when the recognition of brand names has taken the place of choice, when at the same time the totality forces everyone who wishes to survive in consciously going along with the process. This is what happens under monopolistic mass culture" (Adorno 1991, 73).

8 "All mass culture is fundamentally adaptation. However, this adaptive character, the monopolistic filter which protects it from any external rays of influence which have not already been safely accommodated within its reified schema, represents an adjustment to the consumers as well. The pre&emdash;digested quality of the product prevails, justifies itself and establishes itself all the more firmly in so far as it constantly refers to those who cannot digest anything not already pre&emdash;digested. It is baby&emdash;food: permanent self&emdash;reflection based upon the infantile compulsion towards the repetition of needs which it creates in the first place" (Adorno 1991, 58).

9 That is, insofar as we may understand Adorno's description of the "administered society" as synonymous with the real subsumption of society under capital, or postmodernism. As Adorno suggests: "[T]he word culture cannot be avoided; this proves to what a degree the category, correctly criticized hundreds of times, is both fitting for and dedicated to the world as it is&emdash;&emdash;namely, to the administered world" (1991, 93&emdash;4).

10 It is in the suggestion that the concept of the "culture industry" is adequate to postmodernism, however, that my analysis diverges from Jameson's reading of Adorno; he suggests that "any sophisticated theory of the postmodern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimer and Adorno's old 'Culture Industry' concept as MTV or fractal ads bear to fifties television series" (1991, x).

11 See also Stourac and McCreery, Theatre as a Weapon (1986) 25&emdash;6; and Kleberg, Theatre as Action (1980) 10&emdash;18.

12 A noticeable feature of almost all the accounts of the various movements for a "worker's theatre" is the emphasis on the mass scale of their operations.

13 Of course, this only indicates an abstract, functional model, such that the ratio of peasant / proletarian bodies varies from one actualisation to the next; it also indicates, however, that by virtue of the power relations implicit in its relations of hegemony, the popular assemblage has the potential to be actualised as a quasi&emdash;fascist machine.

14 Translated and quoted by Harry Cleaver, "The Inversion of Class Perspective" (1992) 137; note #13. Tronti's essay was published in Quaderni Rossi in 1962, and reprinted in his Operai e Capitale (Turin: N.p., 1971) 39&emdash;59. Only a few essays from that seminal book have been translated into English, which is why I am quoting from Cleaver's essay.

15 "The organic composition of man is growing. That which determines subjects as means of production and not as living purposes, increases with the proportion of machines to variable capital. The pat phrase about the "mechanization" of man is deceptive because it thinks of him as something static which, through an "influence" from outside, an adaptation to conditions of production external to him, suffers certain deformations. But there is no substratum beneath such "deformations," no ontic interior on which social mechanisms merely act externally . . . . Only when the process that begins with the metamorphosis of labour&emdash;power into a commodity has permeated men through and through and objectified each of their impulses as formally commensurable variations of the exchange relationship, is it possible for life to reproduce itself under the prevailing relations of production. Its consummate organization demands the coordination of people that are dead. . . . The organic composition of man refers by no means only to his specialized technical faculties, but&emdash;&emdash;and this the usual cultural criticism will not at any price admit&emdash;&emdash;equally to their opposite, the moments of naturalness which once themselves sprung from the social dialectic and are now succumbing to it. Even what differs from technology in man is now being incorporated into it as a kind of lubrication. Psychological differentiation, originally the outcome both of the division of labour that dissects man according to sectors of the production process and of freedom, is finally itself entering the service of production" (Adorno 1951, 229&emdash;230).

16 The quotation within Deleuze and Guattari's quotation here is from Yann Moulier's preface to the French edition of Mario Tronti's Operai e Capitale (1966; French ed. 1977). Moulier also introduces Negri's Politics of Subversion (1989) 1&emdash;44.

17 See the elaboration of the concept of "subjugated groups" towards the end of my section on the mass assemblage above.