Finding
However, for Wickstrom, this particularity does not do away with accessing a shared, common and hopeful space for imagining other political possibilities.
Paper
Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew
Abstract
The book begins with boulders. Whether dumped along access roads to Irish Traveller halting sites, or pitched at the threshold of a Palestinian refugee camp, these blockades are not just introduced as materials that restrict mobility, but also as materials that enforce nomadism. The nomadism that is paradoxically propelled by these inert objects signals not just placelessness, but also a task as Sisyphean as the boulders that prompt it: the formulation of a ‘new’ politics. This identifies Maurya Wickstrom’s ambition in Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: to move beyond political relativism and identitarian politics in the search for something else, an Idea, not so much of what politics is, but what it might be – what it could be. Neoliberalism is understood in the book as an increasingly hegemonic political force to be resisted through idealism and engagement with the creative playing spaces of performance. Economic imperatives are framed throughout as a defining and pivotal feature of neoliberal power that impacts on how governments and their citizens in Western democracies engage with their constitutions, freedoms and interactions. Wickstrom is particularly critical of a shift in terminological emphasis among governments and international organizations in the mid-1990s from so-called ‘structural adjustment’ programmes to ‘Poverty Reduction and Growth’ that seems to position ‘developing’ countries and the global poor ‘as part of a consensus, as partners in agreement that the IFI [International Financial Institutions] were doing positive work’ (5). It seems to me that the ‘newness’ of Wickstrom’s politics lies in its aim to work outside of neoliberal contexts that thrive on the image of there being no alternative: an image that is supported by the alignment of neoliberalism with the palliative effects of humanitarianism. Her politics seeks to change the political terms in a way that is no longer governed by the principles of helping or empowering ‘victims’, such as Palestinian refugees. This is why she is distrustful of mixing humanist values and the economy, as attempts to distribute opportunity and equality imply a distributor and, therefore, one who gives and one who is given to: that is, one who has the power to give and one who does not (as Jacques Rancière underscores throughout his oeuvre).1 What is erased in this process is a notion of equality that exists before such distribution takes place. The fact that Wickstrom’s politics borrows from a strong and influential legacy of political thinkers that includes Rancière, Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou also suggests that her mode of thinking the political is not new in itself; rather, Wickstrom’s interest in ‘thinking the political anew’ might instead be interpreted as a circumstantial ‘newness’, rooted in particular contexts that are suffering the ill-effects of neoliberal hegemony. However, for Wickstrom, this particularity does not do away with accessing a shared, common and hopeful space for imagining other political possibilities. Although she enters into a lengthy philosophical and artistic heritage of thinking the political anew, her borrowing from that heritage is not where the innovation lies. The innovation, the newness, is framed as arising in particular material contexts that, despite their particularity, preserve the possibility of investing in immaterial, ‘eternal’ and imaginative spaces of possibility (34). This emphasis on the eternal is why Wickstrom, influenced by Badiou, chooses to capitalize the term ‘Idea’: to underscore the commonality that can be read into an imaginative and creative zone for ‘thinking’ politics differently. These contexts are described in a series of case studies, in both the Introduction and over four chapters, that are broadly grouped around theatre in Palestine, Theatre for Development, Irish Traveller theatre and, in a surprising, but enriching concluding chapter, Gunther von Hagens’ anatomical exhibitions, Bodies: The Exhibition and Body Worlds – the latter pitched, controversially, as ‘a place for a re-envisioning of the human through spectacle’ (188). The 1 See, for instance, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière 1991). Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism
Authors
A. Alston
Journal
Performance Research