Theatre, Communism, and Love
Nic oa R'idout


PASSIONATE AMATEURS


THEATER: THEORY/TEXT/PERFORMANCE
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Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love
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Passionate Amateurs
THEATRE, COMMUNISM, AND LOVE
Nicholas Ridout
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Ann Arbor


Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2013
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in
any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 1o8 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written per-
mission from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
O Printed on acid-free paper
2016  2015  2014  2013   4 3 2    1
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ridout, Nicholas Peter.
Passionate amateurs : theatre, communism, and love / Nicholas Ridout.
pages cm. - (Theater-theory/text/performance)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-472-11907-3 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-472-02959-4
(e-book)
1. Theater and society. 2. Communism and culture. I. Title.
PN2051.R53    2013
792-dc23
2013015596


For Isabel and Peter, my parents



Acknowledgments

Throughout the writing of this book I was fortunate to work in the De-
partment of Drama at Queen Mary University of London. Colleagues and
students alike made the department a truly stimulating and supportive
place to be, to work, and to think. I am grateful to them all. I owe particu-
lar thanks, for conversations that contributed in tangible ways to the de-
velopment of this work, to Bridget Escolme, Jen Harvie, Michael McKin-
nie, Lois Weaver, and Martin Welton. A sabbatical in the academic year
2010-11 made its realization possible.
During that sabbatical I was exceptionally fortunate to spend a year in
the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown Uni-
versity. For their hospitality and intellectual partnership in this, my sec-
ond professional home, I will always be especially grateful to Michelle
Carriger, Jim Dennen, John Emigh, Lindsay Goss, Hunter Hargraves, Io-
ana Jucan, Patrick McKelvey, Coleman Nye, Paige Sarlin, Rebecca Schnei-
der, Eleanor Skimin, Andrew Starner, Hans Vermy, Anna Watkins Fisher,
and Patricia Ybarra.
I have also been fortunate to enjoy a range of opportunities to present
parts of this work, in progress, at Quorum (the Drama Department re-
search seminar at Queen Mary), the London Theatre Seminar, the An-
drew Mellon School of Theatre and Performance at Harvard University,
CalArts, and the University of Kent, as well as at conferences including
Performance Studies international (PSi) in Copenhagen (2008), PSi in
Utrecht (2010), and the American Society for Theatre Research in Nash-
ville (2012), and I am grateful to the organizers of all these events for the
opportunities for conversation that these occasions afforded.
At such events and on numerous other occasions I have enjoyed con-
versations and other theatrical experiences with many people, related ei-
ther directly or indirectly to my work on this book. Among them I espe-
cially want to thank Una Bauer, Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci,
Kate Elswit, Chris Goode, James Harding, Wendy Hubbard, Shannon
Jackson, Miranda Joseph, Eirini Kartsaki, Jen Mitas, Sophie Nield, Louise


VIII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Owen, Jim Peck, Paul Rae, Alan Read, Janelle Reinelt, Theron Schmidt,
Shelley Trower, and Simon Vincenzi.
At the University of Michigan Press, LeAnn Fields is an editor with
whom conversation has been a source of inspiration and assurance
throughout. I am grateful, also, to her assistant, Alexa Ducsay, for her
support through the production process. The series editors, David Kras-
ner and Rebecca Schneider (again), have been supportive and critical
friends throughout. I am grateful, too, to anonymous readers for the press
for their comments on the manuscript and to Sarah Thomasson for in-
valuable support in its preparation.
From the beginning, Rebecca Schneider (again, again) has been a con-
stant friend and incomparable intellectual partner, in London, Provi-
dence, and places in between. Joe Kelleher enriches my experiences of
theatre, thought, and social life, always. Giulia Palladini has been a com-
rade in this project, in thought, on song, and in a little shared resistance to
productivity.


Contents
Prologue                                                      1
ONE
Theatre and Communism after Athens                            5
TWO
Of Work and Time                                             33
THREE
All Theatre, All the Time                                    58
FOUR
Of Work, Time, and Revolution                                86
FIVE
Of Work, Time, and (Telephone) Conversation                 hh1
six
Solitude in Relation                                        138
Notes                                                       163
Bibliography                                                187
Index                                                       199



Prologue
The Yetis came as a surprise. That they possessed redemptive power was
also unexpected. They appeared about half an hour through the perfor-
mance of B.#03, the Berlin episode of Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Tragedia
Endogonidia, presented at the Hebbel Theater in 2003.1 They were white,
hairy, and amiable. They enclosed part of the stage-which had recently
been transformed from a murky and cinematic darkness into a field of
white-behind a low white picket fence, with the playful enthusiasm of
children setting up a camp for the night. They carried flags, some of them
white and emblazoned with black letters in a gothic-style font, one of
them the German national flag. Then they brought the dead girl back to
life, and she danced, in red shoes, on the lid of her white coffin, while in a
recorded loop a choir of children sang again and again a song by Benja-
min Britten about the cycle of a cuckoo's life: "In April I open my bill, in
May I sing day and night, in June I change my tune, in July far, far I fly, in
August away I must."2
This girl's death had inaugurated the action of a drama. Or, more
properly speaking, the drama began when her mother awoke to find her
dead. For half an hour, before the arrival of the Yetis, we had followed this
anonymous mother through scenes of intense grief. We had watched the
woman's desperate and supposedly solitary gestures of self-consolation.
But who were or are "we"? According to a scholarly convention, "we"
may be used by an author to include the readers of a text, sometimes a
little presumptuously, in the experience or knowledge being affirmed. It
gathers consent around the text in order to allow it to proceed. According
to a less well-defined convention, "we" may also be used in writing about
performances for an audience, in order to scale up the experience of a
single spectator into an experience that may be imagined as having been
shared by others, by an audience. In a book about theatre, therefore, espe-
cially one in which questions of, say, communism, might be at stake, an
author might wish to be rather careful about the use of this "we," careful,
that is, to assume neither that a solitary experience might have been


2 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

shared by others nor that the act of writing really can gather its disparate,
solitary, and occasional readers into any kind of collective. Sometimes,
then, this problematic first-person plural may call for back-up, recruiting
other authors or spectators by means of citation to corroborate or substan-
tiate claims about experience that might be too fragile to stand alone, to
justify with force of numbers the use of the word "we," to suggest the
presence that might constitute even the most minimal form of audience:
two people, on their own, together:
The Berlin episode of Romeo Castellucci's Tragedia Endogonidia is a
play about grief. A mother awakes to lose her daughter and her
grief erupts, in full view and straight on. It comes, though, with a
glacial slowness, and filtered through a haze of semi-transparent
screens. It is sorrow played out like a history lesson we are unable
or unwilling to comprehend, processed into a series of ritual ac-
tions: stepping out of bed, walking and rocking herself, before it all
has to begin; putting on shoes and a dress; taking a child's toy (a
wooden horse) from out of the tangle of sheets; attempting to wake
the child; failing; putting on the rubber gloves; dragging the dead
child from out of the bed and off the stage; showing us the ham-
mer, balancing the hammer at the front of the stage (the weapon
moves of its own accord); scrubbing the blood from the bed and
floor; settling on the end of the bed to masturbate, or try to mastur-
bate, first with fingers, then with the child's horse: an impossible
attempt at self-abandon. As if history could be turned off at the tap
and she could be in any other moment than this one, now.3
These scenes culminated in an encounter with a disembodied female
voice that commanded the mother to "show yourself . . . cross the
bridge ... come here ... closer to me ... lean out of the window ... take
off the mask. . . eat my ash. . . eat my metal. . . drink my water."4 The
stage trembled as if in an earthquake and was transformed from a space
of gray and black into a world of pure white, into which the Yetis emerged.
During the scenes of Yeti redemption the mother stood alone, her head
shrouded, as a kind of witness who cannot see, and the performance as a
whole took on the tone, or rather the tense, of a demonstration of what
might just, at the very margins of plausibility, be possible, in a dazzlingly
improbable spectacle of resurrection:
Perhaps if we keep looping the cuckoo song, spring and summer
will always be coming, and will never pass into autumn and win-


PROLOGUE 3
ter. Amid the absolute whiteness of this winter scene a parenthesis
of sunshine will be forever erected, within which we shall live the
eternity of the promise. In the deep freeze of the state of emer-
gency, a new and benign rule will come. All that it required is that
we should have our eyes open when the Yetis appear: it is that
simple. This is not Marx's vision of history repeating itself as farce,
but tragedy presenting history as comic alternative, for those who
have eyes to see and ears to hear. Not, perhaps, these blind and
big-eared spectators who occupy the stalls, however. Here, row
upon row of stuffed rabbits have taken all the most expensive
seats. They, it seems, have paid to have this promise acted out, but
in their dumbly belligerent way of not being there they make me
all the more aware that I must, despite what I am feeling, be here
after all. If they are not going to live up to their responsibilities to a
tragedy that has moved the witnesses out of the dramatis personae
and into the dark of the house, then I must.5
If the Yetis somehow embody an idea of a "good community" of love
and care and an end to death, the rabbits in the stalls, audience and image
of an audience at once, might embody an idea of "bad community,"
which, for all that it seems "all ears," just won't do what it is there to do
and listen. Sitting in the circle, looking down across the impassive rabbit
collective, one member of the human gathering attempted to make sense
out of some disordered feelings about loss and grief, about solitude and
collectivity, about Berlin and communism. After the event this attempt
resolved into a very particular question. Why had an experience of deep
sadness brought about by watching an image of impossible resurrection
resembled so closely another experience from about fifteen years earlier,
when, sitting on the edge of a bed early one November morning in the
English south-coast town of Hastings, about to set off to run a workshop
for a community opera in a local school, I had cried tears, not of joy but of
loss, at news footage of people taking down the Berlin Wall? In 1989, I was
a professional theatre worker, engaged in a project whose existence rested
on the idea that theatre might be an instance of "good" community, re-
sponding to television representations of events taking place in the "real"
world. In 2003 I was a professional theatre spectator, engaged in a project
of writing about a theatre work that recognized its audience as "a non-
community"6 and that took a form-tragedy-for which "an authentic
foundation is impossible today."7 Both before and since I had entertained
a fragile affiliation with a tradition of political and philosophical thought
that bore the name of communism: as a teenager I had experienced the


4 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

peculiar political solitude of trying to sell copies of the Communist Party
of Great Britain's newspaper on the High Street of my solidly bourgeois
hometown. What I experienced at this performance of B.#03 was the very
faint possibility and the powerful hope that theatre might offer an image
of the unconstrained community of fellow-feeling that might ground a
utopian politics- communism-to which I remained affectively attached.
The intensity of my emotional response to the manifestation of this hope
had been shaped by feelings about the faintness of the possibility substan-
tially conditioned by the pervasive conviction that communism had "col-
lapsed" in 1989.
This book is in part an extended attempt to make sense of these con-
nections and, further, to understand what it means for such feelings to be
produced at a particular interface between work and leisure under capi-
talism. I look at the theatre as a place and a practice where it might be
possible to think disruptively about work and leisure, about work and
love, and about the apparently separate realms of necessity and freedom:
Freedom, in this sphere, can consist only in this, that socialized
man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism
with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective con-
trol instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplish-
ing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most
worthy and appropriate for their human nature. But this always
remains a realm of necessity. The true realm of freedom, the devel-
opment of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it,
though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis.8
The passionate amateurs of this book's title are those who attempt, "in
this sphere" of capitalism, to realize something that looks and feels like
the true realm of freedom-not the "free time" of capitalist leisure-but
knowing, very often, that in that very attempt, they risk subsuming their
labors of love entirely to the demands of the sphere of necessity in which
they must make their living. Some, but not all, of these passionate ama-
teurs will be found at work making theatre or trying to make, of the the-
atre, a fleeting realm of freedom within the realm of necessity and to
make it, perhaps paradoxically, endure.


ONE    I Theatre and Communism
after Athens
We are sitting in the theatre, and we are worrying about community. We
are not alone; much work has already preceded us in thinking about the
relationship between our attendance at the theatre and our participation
in both the social and the political dimensions of community. In this chap-
ter my aim is to move between the first of the three terms with which this
book announces itself to be concerned -theatre -and the second-
communism. Notwithstanding my own leap to a certain understanding
of historical communism as part of the scope (or mythical content) of
B.#03, the task of justifying communism, as such, as a central concern of
this book will eventually come to depend upon a more familiar conjunc-
tion, that between theatre and community. For, as should be clear by now,
this is not a book about a communist theatre. It seeks communism in a
certain potentiality within theatrical practice rather than in any theatre
that would name itself "communist" (even if the "Proletarian Children's
Theater" of chap. 3 might lead one to think otherwise). Communism here
is not the given name of a party, nor, least of all, of any national political
state under which theatre might be produced and presented. The com-
munism in question here remains to be found, in relation to the practice
of theatre, or rather, as a potential relation within the practice of theatre.
What is the experience of relation in the practice of theatre that might
offer communist potential? It will need to be distinguished both from a
more general feeling that those who gather in a theatre might share a
sense of community, and also from what Jill Dolan has called "the uto-
pian performative," in which participation in a live performance event
produces a public among whom a sense of human potential beyond the
constraints of the present is fleetingly captured.1 Dolan's is already a con-
siderable refinement of the idea of theatre as community, which is often
as free of specific content as claims that a theatrical event puts people in
touch with their "feelings" or makes them "think." It is grounded in spe-
cific and contemporary experiences of performance, often those in which
social identities and subjectivities marginalized or excluded in a society in

5


6 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

which power, rights, and resources are unevenly distributed according to
gender, race, and sexuality. In naming this potential "communist," how-
ever, I am trying to understand it in rather different historical and politi-
cal terms: in terms of a longer history of theatre in which opposition to
capitalism as such-rather than to its specific contemporary oppressions
and exclusions-is at stake. This will involve considerations of historical
development, of the nature of theatrical time, and of the relation of both
to the experience of work. The communist potential, then, has to do with
an experience of work, under specific historical circumstances (industrial
capitalism) and in a specific industry (theatre), where the "present" of
theatrical time-the time of performance-is the product of a specific di-
vision of labor (as between actors and spectators, for example, or ama-
teurs and professionals). The communist potential is to be found in the-
atre's occasional capacity to trouble some quite fundamental assumptions
about both work and time - about the work of time and the time of
work-that have come to shape social and cultural life at least since the
consolidation of industrial capitalism in Europe from around the end of
the eighteenth century. This capacity, I will argue, arises largely from the
participation of the theatres in question in what I have already called here
"industry," rather than from any position outside capitalism and its insti-
tutions. Or rather, the communist potential-the trouble it makes with
work and time-is experienced as a fraught relationship with industry,
with its institutions, and with capitalism itself, rather than as flight or
freedom from them. The passionate amateur-who is the person, either
knowingly or not, in pursuit of this communist potential-may be traced,
historically, then, to one of the first moments of cultural and political re-
sistance to the establishment of our now dominant understanding of the
relations between work and time; traced, that is, to the moment at which
industrial capitalism first started to assert its power. The passionate ama-
teur of this book is a theatrical variant of a historical figure whom Michael
L6wy and Robert Sayre have called the romantic anti-capitalist.2
Romantic anti-capitalism names a resistance to industrial capitalism,
articulated on behalf of values, practices, and experiences, often those of
a premodern, preindustrial, rural life, that industrial capitalism seemed
determined to destroy. Because of its valorization of premodern concep-
tions of community and social relations, it has frequently been
characterized - along with romanticism more broadly - as a conservative
or politically retrograde tendency in critical thought. Many Marxists, in
particular, especially those for whom a progressive model of historical
development is a crucial dimension of their political analysis, have re-


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 7

garded the romantic anti-capitalist with great suspicion. Indeed, the first
elaboration of the term "romantic anti-capitalist" is usually attributed to
the Hungarian Marxist, Gy6rgy Lukacs, for whom it described the sensi-
bility or worldview of writers such as Dostoevsky, whose work contains
an only partly articulated vision of community as a "world beyond es-
trangement" and which therefore falls short of an adequate materialist
critique of capitalism.3 The term is intended as derogatory. In the 1931
article in which the term first appears, a text that L6wy and Sayre charac-
terize as a "document of dogmatic frenzy," Lukacs writes that Dos-
toyevsky, a writer who had been a major source of positive inspiration for
him in the early 1920s, had transformed "the problems of Romantic op-
position to capitalism into internal spiritual problems" and that he had
thereby made himself "the artistic representative of 'a petit bourgeois Ro-
mantic anticapitalist intellectual opposition,"' a social phenomenon more
likely to lead toward the reaction of the fascist right than it could to the
revolutionary left.4 L6wy and Sayre's project is to redeem figures of ro-
mantic anti-capitalism from the pervasive conviction that romantic no-
tions of community tend inevitably in a dangerous rightward direction.
This is done, first, by locating the origins of the "worldview" as a critique
of a specific historical situation, and, second, by organizing the field in a
kind of political taxonomy, in which romantic figures of the right (Georges
Bernanos, Edmund Burke, Gottfried Benn, Carl Schmitt) are distinguished
from liberal, leftist, and revolutionary figures. The aim of both strategies
is to identify a "romantic" legacy deep within the intellectual tradition of
Marxism itself, in which "romantic" aspects of Marx's own thought and
writing (largely in the earlier work) are understood as having been car-
ried forward by figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Ernst Bloch, Walter
Benjamin (the clearest representative of this tradition included in the
present book), Herbert Marcuse, and even, albeit in a profoundly contra-
dictory way, Lukacs himself.5
Among the key characteristics of romantic anti-capitalism are that its
expressions of rebellion and its articulations of critique are directed
against the damage wrought by industrial capitalism upon human indi-
viduals and communities from a perspective shaped by a deeply felt at-
tachment to a mythical or imaginary precapitalist past: "Romanticism is-
sues from a revolt against a concrete historical present.... What is rejected,
in other words, is not the present in the abstract but a specifically capital-
ist present conceived in terms of its most important defining qualities."6
The most important of capitalism's "defining qualities" is its organization
of all human life around wage labor, in which human activity and cre-


8 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

ative capacity are primarily valued for what they can contribute to the
accumulation of capital, and in which life is measured out in units of pro-
ductive time.
The precapitalist past-the world before wage labor became the dom-
inant work-relation-takes a number of forms and throws up a diversity
of mythical antecedents as images of revolt or an alternative society. For
many German, and indeed English participants in this tradition (like Wil-
liam Morris), heroic fantasies of a highly aestheticized medieval period
proved especially appealing. For Bloch, the sixteenth-century radical
Protestant leader Thomas Mnnzer became an exemplary figure. Others,
including Lukacs, Engels, and, at times, Marx himself, looked either to
democratic Athens or to the "Homeric" era's "primitive communism" for
metaphorical and ideological resources - a preference that a number of
theatre makers and scholars almost inevitably share. Michael L6wy, re-
turning to the theme of romantic anti-capitalism in a recent study of Wal-
ter Benjamin's "Theses on the Concept of History," makes a crucial obser-
vation about the nature of this kind of use of the past. It does not involve
a desire that history should go into reverse, but rather the idea that a
genuinely revolutionary move might involve something that theatre does
rather well-an interruption or substitution of the present with some-
thing of the past, something consciously and deliberately repeated:
One might define the Romantic Weltanschauung as a cultural cri-
tique of modern (capitalist) civilization in the name of pre-modern
(pre-capitalist) values - a critique or protest that bears upon as-
pects which are felt to be unbearable and degrading: the quantifi-
cation and mechanization of life, the reification of social relations,
the dissolution of the community and the disenchantment of the
world. Its nostalgia for the past does not mean it is necessarily ret-
rograde: the Romantic view of the world may assume both reac-
tionary and revolutionary forms. For revolutionary Romanticism
the aim is not a return to the past, but a detour through the past on
the way to a utopian future.7
I want to suggest that theatre can perform this "detour" in two ways.
First, it can offer an image or enactment or repetition of some aspect of the
past-or, indeed, any time that is not the time of the "present" that the
time of theatrical "presence" replaces-in order to negate something of
our present reality. Second, within the social and economic structure of
industrial capitalism, it offers this negation of the present by way of an


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 9

experience that is not normally experienced as work, but as some kind of
nonwork or "play." Of course it is no such thing: it is work for those who
make it, just as the nonpresent past or future summoned into the present
by the act of theatre-making is also no such thing, but rather the present
itself, experienced otherwise. The detour taken through the theatre leads
through a past that is not past and is accomplished through work that
looks like it is not work. This is why the theatre is a particularly good
place for the passionate amateur or romantic anti-capitalist who wants to
find some way of undoing, even if only for a moment, the time of her
work and the work of time upon herself.8
The theatre is also a good (because perverse) place to go looking for
communist potential-not, crucially, because it offers any kind of space
beyond or outside capitalism, but precisely because it usually nestles so
deeply inside it. Much romantic anti-capitalism looks to the past because
it offers an image of an outside upon which a future utopia might be mod-
eled. In the same gesture it also assumes that there exists some essential,
whole, and unalienated humanity, from which capitalism has torn us and
to which we may one day return through a restoration of past experiences
and practices of community. This is the "romance of community" against
which Miranda Joseph offers a powerful critique.9 For Joseph community
is best understood, not as some alternative to capitalism in which human
beings will realize themselves and their social relations most fully, but
rather, as its supplement. It is a resource that lies within capitalism, and
upon which capitalist projects and enterprises of many different kinds
can draw in order to encourage the performance of subjectivities that will
assist them in the production and realization of surplus value. It is not
available, therefore, as an unproblematic source of alternative value and
good feeling for left or liberal social and political projects. But nor is it
merely an unattainable fantasy from which it would be better if everyone
abstained. As Joseph writes, just once or twice, the true name of this "sup-
plement" or "specter" is "communism": a potential for the making of a
life beyond the division of labor right where the division of labor rules. It
was partly by accident that the personal experience that seems most richly
to inform Joseph's critique was that of working as a volunteer in a non-
profit theatre in San Francisco. But it was a happy accident, not least for
the present project, for which one of theatre's most significant character-
istics is that the division of labor is not just visible there, but, literally, on
show, night after night, right where people go looking for something very
different. It is in this apparent contradiction-and it is a contradiction that
opens up only the very tightest of spaces-that the communist potential


10 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

of theatre might be found. If you can make it here, you can make it any-
where.
Others have also sought to locate this potential in aesthetic practice.
Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, writing against a communism grounded in
work, in class identity and the projected triumph of a revolutionary his-
torical subject called the working class, proposes a "literary communism."
At first glance this might appear to be a kind of joke, echoing "champagne
socialism" and suggesting, perhaps, that the "communism" in question is
little more than a luxury pose, indulged mainly by members of a bour-
geois elite who enjoy fine wine and good books. Indeed, the vulnerability
of the idea to such ridicule is perhaps part of its meaning. Instead of a
communism in which community might be the objective of a project, the
work of work, as it were, in which the members or participants are fused
together in an organic or organized union (a state that Nancy calls "im-
manence"), Nancy offers the fragile proposition of an articulation of ex-
posures. Instead of seeking communion with others, one opens oneself to
the experience of encounters with others as marking simultaneously the
limit of one's self, and the place where one's self, such as it is, begins. That
is to say, in a recognition that one's self, as such, is constituted, not by its
integrity and individuality, but precisely by its appearance in relation to
others, a relation that Nancy will call, in later texts, "compearance."10 The
"literary" dimension of a "communism" based upon this conception of
the self in relation, then, is to be found in the idea that writing marks
space between things:
What is at stake is the articulation of community. "Articulation"
means, in some way, "writing," which is to say, the inscription of a
meaning whose transcendence or presence is indefinitely and con-
stitutively deferred.11
This constitutive deferral is the "unworking" that Nancy opposes to the
"work" that seeks to achieve community, and from which he derives the
title of the publication in which he presented the idea of "literary com-
munism": Le communeauti desoeuvrie (translated, not without some diffi-
culty, into English as The Inoperative Community).12 In the title essay Nancy
outlines the extent to which a work-propelled teleology has dominated
both political and philosophical conceptions of both communism and
community. There is, he writes,
no form of communist opposition-or let us say rather "communi-
tarian" opposition, in order to emphasize that the word should not


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 11

be restricted in this context to strictly political references-that has
not been or is not still profoundly subjugated to the goal of a human
community, that is to the goal of achieving a community of beings
producing in essence their own essence as their work, and further-
more producing precisely this essence as community. An absolute
immanence of man to man - a humanism - and of community to
community - a communism - obstinately subtends, whatever be
their merits or strengths, all forms of oppositional communism, all
leftist and ultraleftist models, and all models based on the workers'
council.13
In my attempt to account for how a communist potential might manifest
itself in the particularly "literary" space of the theatre, and, most specifi-
cally, in relation to my interest in identifying this with a resistance to
work, these texts of Nancy's have been particularly useful inasmuch as
they suggest simultaneously the value of work that is not work and of a
community which is not (yet) one. The theatre that possesses this poten-
tial, I will suggest, will first of all be a theatre in which work is somehow
in question; in which the complementary relationship between work and
leisure is not taken for granted, neither by unreflective professionalism
nor by the conditioned amateurism of the recreational hobby. Second, it
will be a theatre in which there is always some kind of distance; in which
participants are always separated from one another rather than merged
with one another in an achieved community of the event. Third, it may
also be a theatre in which this distance is not just a spatial separation in
the present, but also a temporal articulation, in which the apparent pres-
entness of the present is complicated by the appearance within it of peo-
ple, things, and feelings from other times. A "theatrical" communism,
then, following Nancy, might involve the potential "compearance" of fig-
ures from both the past and the future.
Even before Nancy articulates the idea of "literary communism," a
historical point of departure for it may be detected in the approach he
takes, along with his coauthor Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, to Romanti-
cism, and, in particular, to the life and work of the Jena Romantics. This
was a group of writers who came together in the university town of Jena
at the very end of the eighteenth century -August Wilhelm and Friedrich
Schlegel, Caroline Schlegel-Schelling, Dorothea Mendelssohn-Veit, Fried-
rich Schleiermacher, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis and Friedrich Schelling. Be-
tween 1798 and 18oo their activities centered around the publication of a
journal, the Athenaeum (their affiliation with Athens, avowed in this choice
of title, includes them in the ranks of those who, as I will shortly discuss,


12 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

imagine themselves in some way to be "after Athens"). Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy describe this circle as "a sort of 'cell,' marginal (if not alto-
gether clandestine), like the core of an organisation destined to develop
into a 'network' and serve as the model for a new style of life" and also as
a "form of community," a kind of "secret society," and "the first 'avant-
garde' group in history."14 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy see the emer-
gence of this kind of association as a response to a "triple crisis" in Ger-
many: a social crisis facing a certain element within the bourgeoisie, who
have aspirations of cultural leadership but are no longer able to find sta-
ble employment or exercise such leadership in either the church or the
university; a political crisis brought about by the promise and threat of
the French Revolution; and a philosophical crisis opened up by the critical
philosophy of Kant. The Jena "cell" saw their literary project not merely
as a response to a literary crisis, but rather as the "privileged locus of ex-
pression" for a radical repudiation of bourgeois life as they found it.15 To
live together, in literature, is a way of living a critique of this life, the ex-
pression of their ambition for "an entirely new social function for the
writer . . . and consequently for a different society."16 Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy find this ambition expressed with particular precision in Men-
delssohn-Veit's statement that "since it is altogether contrary to bourgeois
order and absolutely forbidden to introduce romantic poetry into life,
then let life be brought into romantic poetry; no police force and no edu-
cational institution can prevent this."17 In this call romanticism seems to
be the realization, in the present, of a collective mode of life - secured
against law, education, and, I would add, the centrality of work to bour-
geois social order-as a kind of "communist" enclave. Just as it does for
L6wy and Sayre, then, romanticism itself emerges, historically, as a cri-
tique of capitalism, and therefore as a crucial affective and intellectual
resource for communism.
More recently John Roberts, introducing a special issue of Third Text
titled "Art, Praxis and the Community to Come," writes of contemporary
manifestations of a similar conception of communism as an "enclave"
practice.18 Roberts notes a leftward shift in art theory and practice, associ-
ated with "the increasing democratic dissolution of the professional
boundaries of art production itself," and suggests that a "new commu-
nism" developed from the 198os by philosophers such as Nancy, Alain
Badiou, and Antonio Negri has contributed to the resurgence of messi-
anic or utopian communist thought in the present.19 There is a melan-
cholic dimension to this resurgence, in that much of its thinking takes
shape in response to precisely the sense of loss and defeat for communism


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 13

that I have located in my feelings as a spectator at B.#o3, and that Nancy
articulates in The Inoperative Community. As Roberts writes of this phe-
nomenon in general, and of its tendency to locate itself in artistic practice:
In conditions of political retreat or "closure" the function of the
communist imaginary is to keep open the ideal horizon of egali-
tarianism, equality and free exchange; and art, it is judged, is one
of the primary spaces where this "holding operation" is best able
to take place.20
There is something about Jena, too, that suggests it may participate in a
similar melancholy, avant la lettre, as if the "cell" based on bringing life
into romantic poetry had formed itself in the knowledge that the "police
order" had already defeated it in the so-called real world.
But Roberts also points to a much more optimistic articulation of this
"cultural communism," particularly in its role as a major intellectual re-
source for the curatorial practice and theoretical writing of Nicolas Bour-
riaud. Bourriaud's idea of "relational aesthetics" -in which artists pro-
duce social relations rather than material objects-has been widely
discussed in contemporary art theory, and, because of its interest in peo-
ple doing things with one another, has also begun to be taken up in writ-
ing about theatre and performance.21 Bourriaud's work has been sub-
jected to the kind of critique that any discourse that achieves fashionable
status in the contemporary art market must expect, and much of it is suc-
cessful in pointing to the absence of a concrete politics and the risk that
the curatorial and critical valorization of the art practices in question
might end up subsuming whatever socially ameliorative potential they
might possess to the logics of a mode of capitalism for which, as we shall
have occasion to observe from time to time throughout this book, social
creativity of this kind is a prized commodity.22 But Roberts suggests that
the underlying affiliation of this discourse with "new" or "enclave" com-
munism "cannot be dismissed simply as yet another outbreak of specula-
tive artworld silliness and idealism."23 Stewart Martin, however, in an
earlier edition of Third Text, offers a persuasive critique of Bourriaud's
Relational Aesthetics, in which he argues that Bourriaud's idea, far from
being original, is in fact a revival of aspects of Romanticism, and one that,
in its "reversibility," offers a "utopianism" that "echoes the commodified
friendship of customer services."24
Elsewhere Martin also develops a critique of what he calls "artistic
communism." In his own contribution to the issue of Third Text intro-


14 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

duced by Roberts's essay, Martin offers a "retrospective" writing of "ar-
tistic communism," predicated upon "a conjunction or correspondence,
in particular between the post-Kantian conception of absolute art and
Marx's early conception of communism."25 This construction also begins,
as do Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, with Jena at the end of the eighteenth
century, and, in particular, with Schelling-whose "proposal of art as the
summit of practical reason," Martin writes, "exposes a general relation of
art to activity and production that is common after Kant, and indicates a
fundamental affinity with Marx and his conception of communism as a
society of free producers."26 Martin goes on to propose that this "artistic
communism" has largely been "subverted" by "artistic capitalism" -the
name he gives to "the creeping subsumption of life under capital" in the
present historical moment at which, as Martin affirms, rewriting Sartre,
"capitalism is now the unsurpassable horizon of our times."27 Martin
notes the contribution of Paolo Virno, for whom practices of "virtuosity"
represent some potential for artlike activity currently subsumed by capi-
tal to become a site for a renewed politics- "the communism of capital."
He cautions, however, against "a certain subjective idealism" in this "au-
tonomist" gesture toward the "general intellect" -that communicative
capacity held in common that thinkers such as Negri and Virno identify
as crucial to their hopes for a properly political resistance to capitalism.28
I share Martin's interest in this idea of "artistic communism" and
share to a large degree his critical perspective. While I am also skeptical of
the optimistic uses to which "autonomist" thought has often been put,
part of my project here is, nonetheless, to see whether there is anything to
be found within the practice of theatre that might actualize some of its
political potential. Martin is particularly skeptical of its now quite perva-
sive use in mainstream contemporary art practices and discourses. Its
pervasiveness in such circles might even be taken as an indication of the
extent to which its political potential has been co-opted for broadly liberal
and pro-capitalist rather than radical anti-capitalist ends. In turning to
theatre, instead, I don't wish to suggest that theatre is any more likely
than contemporary art to offer refuge from such co-option. However, I am
interested in exploring the possibility that, at least in some theatre prac-
tices of the twentieth century (and even of today), the subsumption of la-
bor under capitalism might not be as complete as Martin's account would
suggest; that there may be some continued resistance on the part of "artis-
tic communism" to the subversion wrought against it by "artistic capital-
ism." My articulation of the idea of the "passionate amateur" is an at-
tempt to describe at least one part of the spectrum of such theatre practices


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 15

(those that fall outside or undermine theatre's status as a professional
activity).
My gamble then is that there might yet be something in what "liter-
ary," "cultural," or "artistic communism" proposes, that it may be possi-
ble to actualize in collective or socially oriented artistic practices some-
thing that is elsewhere only an idea or a vision of the future (often based
on a romantic nostalgia for a mythical past): production and pleasure
beyond the division of labor. One of the propositions of this book, then, is
that some of that potentiality, or, at the very least, evidence of a desire for
it, is to be found in the activities of passionate amateurs of the theatre.
These passionate amateurs are those who work together for the produc-
tion of value for one another (for love, that is, rather than money) in ways
that refuse -sometimes rather quietly and perhaps even ineffectually -
the division of labor that obtains under capitalism as usual.
Many attempts to articulate what this potentiality might be, arising as
they do, most often, in the name of that community with which many
theatre-makers and scholars have associated the theatre, will frequently
find themselves "after" Athens. That is to say that they will dwell upon
theatre and thought that simultaneously follow an idea of theatre taken to
have been born in Athens and seek better to understand what this "Ath-
ens" might be that is so readily produced as the ground for the associa-
tion of theatre with community. I will follow in these footsteps, then, but
in being "after" Athens, I aim not merely to be in pursuit of this distant
idea; I also seek to be on its case. In particular, I seek to take account of the
critique offered by Salvatore Settis of the dominant uses to which the con-
cept of the "classical" is often put. In The Future of the "Classical" Settis
shows how what Novalis calls the "summoning" of an "antiquity" that
"has not come down to us by itself" has enabled successive generations of
Europeans to treat as given and preideological any set of contemporary
values capable of being legitimized by reference to their origins in Graeco-
Roman antiquity.29 Settis does not offer any extended consideration of
theatre, focusing instead on approaches to the "classical" by way of the
plastic arts (Vasari, Winckelmann, and Warburg are key figures in his nar-
rative, the last for his disruption of the Eurocentric interpretations fa-
vored by his predecessors). However, he does note that the "classical" is
deployed in political thought too, such as in the writing of Hannah Ar-
endt, who shares what Settis calls "a widespread belief that the Greeks
sowed the seed that would blossom much later into events and values
that today we identify with," when she claims, for instance, "that neither
the American nor the French Revolution could have occurred without the


16 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

example provided by 'classical' antiquity."30 Arendt's thought is of par-
ticular significance for this project for two principal reasons, beyond its
engagement with "classical" Greek thought and practice: first, because it
constitutes an attempt to rethink conventional Marxist conceptions of
politics as grounded in work and production; second, because it turns to
the theatre as a way to understand or explain the concept of action, which,
as opposed to labor (the necessary task of subsistence or reproduction)
and work (the labor of production, or poesis, a making that includes
"art"), is for her both the form and the content of politics.31
In The Human Condition Arendt offers an account of the polis that, in its
transitory constitution from the exchange of human speech and action,
seems to suggest a theatrical event -a temporary coming together that is
both part of and yet somehow to one side of the run of the social and po-
litical everyday, and that, perhaps crucially for the present project, de-
pends upon its participants' freedom from the demands of labor. This
might be taken to suggest, I think, that the polis might itself be constituted
in the action that is the making of theatre: theatre being one of those places
where people appear to one another and participate in action, and being
also the one very specific place in which such action is reenacted, so that
it may be collectively reflected upon:
the specific revelatory quality of action and speech, the implicit
manifestation of the agent and speaker, is so indissolubly tied to
the living flux of acting and speaking that it can be represented and
"reified" only through a kind of repetition, the imitation or mime-
sis, which according to Aristotle prevails in all arts but is actually
appropriate only to the drama, whose very name (from the Greek
verb dran, "to act") indicates that playacting actually is an imita-
tion of acting.32
Clearly, if the polis is to be thought of as theatrical in this way, it must
not be a theatre of consumption alone, but one of participation. If the polis
is, as Arendt claims, "not the city-state in its physical location,"33 but
rather "the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speak-
ing together,"34 and if she is right that "its true space lies between people
living together for this purpose,"35 then one might want to imagine not
simply that the constitution of an audience in front of a theatrical event is
a kind of political potentiality, but that the act of dedicating oneself to act-
ing and speaking together, the act, that is, of forming some kind of collec-
tive theatrical organization, is, in and of itself, a political act. I shall hope


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 17

to show how this might be the case, for both producers and consumers,
actors and spectators, in the chapters that follow.
To be more precise, such an act might be political when and as long as
it is not work, as long as it is praxis (a processual action) rather than poesis
(the making of something).36 In the four chapters that comprise the core of
this book- chapters 2-5 -theatre within the specific social and economic
circumstances of (mainly) European capitalism in the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries will be examined so as to highlight moments in
which a movement or uncertainty between praxis and poesis makes itself
known. These are moments where a politics might break out, not so much
because of an absence of work or labor (which might have to be the case
in an Arendtian perspective), but rather because the terms upon which
the theatre is made, in these four chosen examples, unsettle our capacity
to distinguish between work and nonwork, poesis and praxis, the profes-
sional and the amateur. The relation of such "moments" of theatre to
community, when community is thought of in relation to communism,
will always therefore have something to do with a critique of the division
of labor within capitalism. In going "after" Athens, in the footsteps of
Arendt, I am also following Paolo Virno, who, in an inversion of Arendt's
thought, observes that the distinctive characteristic of work in "post-
Fordist" capitalism is precisely its folding into itself of those capacities for
communication that were for Arendt, purely political, rather than concur-
ring with Arendt's account of modern life in which work has reduced al-
most to nothing the space of politics:
So then, I maintain that things have gone in the opposite direction
from what Arendt seems to believe: it is not that politics has con-
formed to labor; it is rather that labor has acquired the traditional
features of political action. My reasoning is opposite and symmet-
rical with respect to that of Arendt. I maintain that it is in the world
of contemporary labor that we find the "being in the presence of
others," the relationship with the presence of others, the beginning
of new processes, and the constitutive familiarity with contin-
gency, the unforeseen and the possible. I maintain that post-Fordist
labor, the productive labor of surplus, subordinate labor, brings
into play the talents and the qualifications which, according to a
secular tradition, had more to do with political action.37
I will also be "after" Athens with Jacques Ranciere, like Arendt, a stu-
dent of praxis, whose thought aims consistently at detaching identity


18 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

from work (suggesting, perhaps, that "the human condition" is to be
found elsewhere) and who sees this redistribution of the sensible (in
which one is no longer perceived and "identified" by one's place in the
organization of labor) as an act of politics.38 For Ranciere, this undoing of
the terms by which identity is conferred upon a subject by the work that
they do is the undoing of a political philosophy inaugurated in Athens by
theatre's ever-faithful antagonist, Plato. Theatre, for Ranciere, offers at
least an image, and sometimes even the reality, of social relations between
people who cannot be defined by the work they do. If they are actors, they
are doing a job in which, as Plato complains of artists in general, they
know nothing about what it is they are supposed to be doing, because
they are pretending to know how to be someone they are not. But pre-
cisely because they are pretending to know how to be someone they are
not, they are also demonstrating that they do know how to do something.
They know how to pretend to be someone else. The point is, precisely,
that the situation is confused, and that the confusion is about how people
might be defined in terms of what they do. And even if they are spectators
rather than actors, they are participating in a field of the social that is un-
usually hospitable to temporary identity reassignments, in which they
may reach both above and beneath their stations.39
However, Ranciere wishes to understand the relationship between
theatre and community as a "presupposition" rather than as something
that theatre might actually produce. This means that, on the one hand, he
affirms the significance and historical persistence of the idea that theatre
is an especially communitarian practice:
Since German Romanticism thinking about theatre has been asso-
ciated with this idea of the living community. Theatre emerged as
a form of aesthetic constitution- sensible constitution-of the
community. By that I mean the community as a way of occupying
a place and a time, as the body in action as opposed to a mere ap-
paratus of laws; a set of perceptions, gestures, and attitudes that
pre-cede and pre-form laws and political institutions. More than
any other art, theatre has been associated with the Romantic idea
of an aesthetic revolution, changing not the mechanics of the state
and laws, but the sensible forms of human experience. Hence re-
form of the theatre meant the restoration of its character as assem-
bly or ceremony of the community.40
But on the other hand, he insists that "it is high time we examine this idea
that the theatre is, in and of itself, a community site."41 Ranciere notes that


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 19

the fact of living bodies addressing other living bodies in the same physi-
cal space seems to lead to an assumption that theatre has "a communitar-
ian essence" (not altogether removed, I would suggest, from the "ontol-
ogy of performance" similarly derived from assumptions about the
primacy of liveness). Accepting this assumption means, he asserts, that
the question of exactly what is going on between spectators and perform-
ers, and, indeed, between spectators themselves, is avoided.
Ranciere's preliminary answer to this question is to propose that the
"presupposition" of a community is the only thing that makes the gather-
ing in the theatre different from people all watching the same television
show at the same time in different locations. This community, however, is
linked neither by their interaction (as some advocates of a more participa-
tory theatre frequently hope) nor by membership in any kind of "collec-
tive body" of the kind that might once, in Castellucci's terms, have offered
"foundations . . . for the invention of tragedy," but simply by a shared
sense of one another's equal intellectual capacity: "It is the capacity of
anonymous people, the capacity that makes everyone equal to everyone
else." Anonymous (and perhaps not even identifying with their work),
equal, "separate from one another":42 such is the condition of spectators,
according to Ranciere. It is hard to find, in The Emancipated Spectator,
much that would account for the particular pleasures of this condition,
and it is for this reason that my concluding chapter, entitled "Solitude in
Relation," seeks in the affective experience of spectatorship a more ex-
tended understanding of what might be at stake here, in what sounds like
it might be an emancipation from, rather than in or through, community.
For the time being, however, I want to develop Ranciere's suggestion that
theatre is about community to the extent that it contains a "presupposi-
tion" of community, by looking at two ways this presupposition is fre-
quently articulated in discussions of theatre today: theatre and
community- that's "classical"! -and theatre and community- that's
"good"! Both of these articulations may be understood as myths. The aim
here is not just to show that these are myths, but also to explore what
these two myths might still have to offer, for any attempt to develop a
new line in "critical romantic anti-capitalism."
1. THEATRE, COMMUNITY, AND THE "CLASSICAL"
The first myth is, precisely, that which makes Athens the model "after"
which an understanding of the association between theatre and commu-
nity is to be crafted. The act of making Athens a model may sometimes be


20 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

a matter of choice, and, at others, a process of manufacture. Only rarely is
it a case of wholly unexamined assumptions and myths of origin; most
myth-makers know what it is they are making, after all, even if, as Settis
notes, the "less explicitly" the legitimization of ideological material by
way of the "classical" is done, the "more effective it is."43 Theatre and
performance scholarship-at least in English-has for some considerable
time now taken its lead in matters of the tragic theatre of the Athenian
city-state from the conjuncture of two propositions: that the theatre in
Athens was an institution in which the relations of citizens to one another
were represented and interrogated, and that social and political life in
Athens was constituted by participatory practices-of which the theatre
was just one - such that it might usefully be understood as a "perfor-
mance culture." This lead may well have been given most decisively by
the work of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal Naquet; taken up, influ-
entially, in the field of classical studies by Simon Goldhill; and carried on
in work on Greek theatre and theatre more generally in numerous loca-
tions up to and including David Wiles's recent Theatre and Citizenship, the
opening chapter of which, in a symptomatic move, is devoted to "Ath-
ens."44 I clearly exhibit similar symptoms, in beginning, however apolo-
getically, in the same place (even if, as so often, it appears first in the guise
of Berlin). The predominance of this general view of the social and politi-
cal function of theatre in Athens is not problematic in itself. However it
should be understood, at least in some cases, as evidence either of a pref-
erence or predisposition toward a communitarian understanding of the-
atre (with which I am far from unsympathetic) or of a desire to ground an
analysis of contemporary political experiences in Greek categories. Clas-
sicists and historians of antiquity are usually more circumspect than ei-
ther political theorists (like Arendt) or theatre and performance scholars
when it comes to suggesting continuities between the present and any
specific past.
One succinct articulation of the association between theatre and com-
munity in Athens is Oddone Longo's:
It may not be amiss to insist from the beginning on the collective or
communitarian character of the Athenian theater public in the clas-
sical period: a public which is quite unparalleled in the history of
drama in that it coincided- in principle and to a great extent in
fact-with the civic community, that is the community of citizens.45
What Longo insists upon is that the "theater public" is the "community."
This insistence is qualified, crucially, by the observation that this coinci-


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 21

dence is "unparalleled." Even if -and this remains an open question -the
"Athenian theater public" may rightly be considered to coincide with "the
community of citizens," and whether or not this would allow an analysis
of the theatre as an institution or practice of the kind of community a con-
temporary theorist or activist might wish to promote (with all its notori-
ous exclusions), the key point here is that this coincidence has never been
repeated. The situation in Athens cannot, then, be evoked to describe any
subsequent real relationship between theatre and community. It may yet,
however, point to a future horizon at which such a coincidence might re-
appear. And it is made to do so, in Longo's text, in a familiar maneuver by
summoning the image of a prior "community" from which the tragic the-
atre is supposed to have developed.46 In insisting "from the beginning"
upon the "communitarian," Longo seems to allude to the idea that, even
if the theatre, as it is actually practiced, is not fully or uncomplicatedly
"communitarian," it still carries with it some trace of an earlier, perhaps
unknowable "community."
For Longo, theatre in classical Athens involved the precipitation of
two communities - actors and spectators - out of a single community that
had, in "the earliest performances," been "the collective which acted the
'drama."' So, although his account does not posit tragic drama as the ori-
gin of anything contemporary, Longo does locate it in relation to a prec-
edent "origin," in which community seems to stand for a way of life with-
out social division. Longo seeks to avoid what he cautions might become
"a too simplistic interpretation of tragedy as a directly communitarian
ritual, or to a reading of Attic drama as somehow expressive of a com-
pletely collective situation." In order to do so he notes that the theatre's
development from a predominantly choral form toward one dominated
by the discursive interplay of the actors representing individual charac-
ters "might be seen as the progressive integration of the drama into the
more pluralistic system of the polis, where division of labor, social strati-
fication, and class struggle reduce precisely the area of unanimity in the
community." Theatrical drama, then, is not the expression of a nonexis-
tent "solid collectivity free from contradictions and class conflict," but
rather, theatre is constituted as an institution for encouraging social cohe-
sion in the midst of everyday conflict, so that "the dramatic enactment
brings into being a 'theatrical community,' which in a certain sense is the
passing hypostasis of the actual polis, but without its inevitable conflicts
and cleavages."47 In this respect, this "communitarian theatre" does in-
deed look forward, in its production of an ideal polis toward which its
public (or at least some of them), and subsequent readers, spectators, ac-
tivists, and scholars, might be imagined to aspire. And it looks forward by


22 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

gesturing backward to an imaginary community out of which the real
divided society of the polis supposedly emerged. What is elided here is
that the participants in "the earliest performances," however much they
may appear to embody more fully "the community" than do the "actors"
and "spectators" divided from one another in the theatrical auditorium,
cannot themselves be understood fully to "coincide" with any kind of
"solid collectivity." This is for two reasons, one historical, the other rhe-
torical: historical, in that, despite romantic constructions in which Greek
prehistory contains a phase of "primitive communism," preceding societ-
ies were themselves characterized by clear social hierarchies and other
divisions;48 rhetorical, in that, as Longo himself has already noted, the
"coincidence" of public and community he observes in Athenian theatre
is "unparalleled." If the participants in "the earliest performances" did
indeed constitute a community of some kind, it will have been one that
was identical only with itself: that is to say it was almost certainly formed
on the basis of-and may even have helped constitute-some kind of
class division. The image of a fully collective and participatory theatrical
and political community therefore lies both before and after the moment
of classical tragedy -in a mythic past and an imagined future. The pecu-
liar coincidence of public and community that Longo identifies in the
"Athenian theater public" turns out not to be located in that "unparal-
leled" moment, after all, but rather in two nonexistent moments: in "the
beginning" of "the earliest performances" and in the intimation of a pos-
sible future that the "passing hypostasis" induces in that fleeting collec-
tivity he calls 'a "theatrical community."49 But neither of these can "paral-
lel" the "Athenian" moment itself, even as that very moment turns out no
longer and not yet to be itself. This is both a romantic and a theatrical
conceptualization of time, as I hope future chapters will show: romantic
in its appeal to an idealized past as a resource for constructing a better
future in response to a painful and alienating present; theatrical in its con-
fusion of multiple temporalities in the moment of performance.50
Without entering too deeply and prematurely into the kinks of this
kind of time-whose time will come in later chapters-it is perhaps sim-
ply worth observing here that implicit in Longo's understanding of the
political value of tragedy is the idea that it offers its participants resources
for making community, rather than an image of what community should
be. In this respect it corresponds with an understanding of mimesis as the
action of making rather than copying, in which mimesis doubles the pro-
cess of creation rather than producing copies of what has already been
created. A similar perspective may be identified in Goldhill's account too,


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 23

where the City Dionysia is understood as being "in the full sense of the
expression a civic occasion" because it places the principles of the polis
"at risk" by putting them into dramatic relation with values with which
they are in tension.51 It is the enactment of this tension that might be said
to offer community-making resources. David Wiles reaches a very similar
conclusion, in which he offers an analysis of "fifth century tragedy as a
performance practice that built community, with shared pleasure in dis-
cussion comprising but one aspect of communal polis life."52
More ambitious in its attempt to claim continuity between practices of
theatre about two thousand years apart from one another is a volume
entitled Dionysus since 69, which takes its title from the Performance
Group's celebrated production of Dionysus in 69, directed by Richard
Schechner, which is now widely regarded as a definitive example of the
uses to which "classical" material was adapted by experimental theatre
practitioners of the 196Os.33 In her introduction to the collection, Edith
Hall explains that the book responds to what its editors see as a resurgent
interest in the production and adaptation of Greek tragedy since the
1960s, an interest that, they suggest, can now, "retrospectively" be under-
stood as "a virtually inevitable consequence of this potent cultural coinci-
dence of the hippie challenge to the traditional notion of theatre, the Per-
formative Turn, and the exploration of non-western theatre conventions."54
Hall is suggesting here, I think, that the myth-making as regards the ori-
gins of performance studies-in the conjuncture of anthropology with
experimental theatre practice in the context of the counterculture of the
196os-is intimately bound up with a desire to return to and remake the
myths of origins for which the "classical" had already proved such a rich
resource. However, attention to the role of "fabrication" in this process is
somewhat occluded by the enthusiasm with which something that sounds
very much like export-led globalization is introduced:
Recently Dionysus, the theatre-god of the ancient Greeks, has tran-
scended nearly all boundaries created by time, space, and cultural
tradition, for staging Greek tragedy is now emphatically an interna-
tional, even worldwide phenomenon. This seminal art-form, born
two and a half thousand years ago in democratic Athens, rediscov-
ered in the Renaissance as prestigious pan-European cultural prop-
erty, has evolved in recent decades into a global medium.55
One of the difficulties here is the proposition that an "art-form" was
"born" in Athens. Whatever was "born" there, it only became an art


24 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

form much later, as a crucial element in a process in which, as Dipesh
Chakbrabarty writes, "an entity called 'the European intellectual tradi-
tion' stretching back to the ancient Greeks is a fabrication of relatively
recent European history."56 A second difficulty arises because it is pre-
cisely the fact that theatre in Athens was just one element in a broader
"performance culture" that lends itself to the kind of revival and reap-
propriation by Schechner and others in the name of "community." That
is to say that it is the specific historical relationship between theatre and
other social practices in the Athenian polis that constitutes the "unparal-
leled" character of the theatre in question. To abstract just the remaining
plays from that situation and to suggest, on the basis of their prolifera-
tion in recent years, that these apparent parallels point to a continuity is
a very different project even to Schechner's. Within the pages of Diony-
sus since 69 additional perspectives point as much to interruption as
they do to continuity: Lorna Hardwick writes of African and Caribbean
adaptations of plays through which, she argues, Greek drama "has itself
been decolonised," while Erika Fischer-Lichte, writing about produc-
tions by Klaus Michael Gruber and Peter Stein at the Schaubiihne in
Berlin in the 1970s, proposes that these works demonstrate the extent to
which, whether it is desirable or not, the continuity affirmed by Hall is
simply not possible:
Our distance from the past of Greek tragedy and Greek culture,
cannot, in principle, be bridged-at least not by theatre and its per-
formances of ancient Greek plays. Thus the purpose of staging
Greek - and other classical - texts is to remind us of this distance
and to enable us to find ways of coping with it individually and
perhaps to insert fragments of such texts into the context of our
contemporary reflections, life and culture. It cannot accomplish a
return to the origins -whatever they may have been. They are
gone and lost forever.57
Thus in the very historical moment at which the idea of the "classical
legacy" is under acute artistic and intellectual pressure - a postcolonial
moment, above all-it is also returned into play as a potentially universal-
izing resource by artists and intellectuals who align themselves with post-
colonial political pluralisms. While Schechner's adaptation of what Hall
calls "non-western theatre conventions" has given rise to accusations that
he is also complicit with aspects of globalization, Schechner's activity
might, if it is to be seen in this light, be understood as import rather than


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 25

export led. Whatever trade flows are carried by such traffic between cul-
tural and historical location, and however "fabricated" or contested the
idea of the "classical ideal" might be, the temptation to evoke it, either
"explicitly" or not, remains powerful. Such evocation may best be under-
stood as performative: it functions, as Novalis writes, as a summons. The
idea that theatre might be community, or, more precisely, that it can make
community, is a powerful mythic resource, but it doesn't transcend
boundaries of space and time of its own accord; it must be appropriated
in order to do its work. The most powerful of its appropriations, at least
for present purposes, are those that seek to assert a particular and privi-
leged relationship between theatre and community, and that make of that
relationship a potential agent for revolutionary social and political
change, what I call in the section that follows "the good." Darko Suvin, for
example, writing in 1972 about "political drama," offers Aeschylus's Or-
esteia in evidence to claim that
it would not be exaggerating to state that theatre and drama, as
communal arts, are ontologically political, if politics means the
health or sickness of the community which determines all human
relations in it.58
"It would not be exaggerating"; "It may not be amiss": these disavowals
in the midst of the most forceful assertion capture rather well the ambiva-
lent character of the "classical" as a resource for a politics of community
in the theatre. Something is "amiss," but it has been "summoned" any-
way, again, in an act that has to insist that it is not "exaggerating" when it
affirms, in language very similar to Arendt's, the political ontology of the-
atre: "the political art par excellence."59
2. THEATRE, COMMUNITY, AND THE "GOOD"
The idea that theatre might be a resource for making community, and that
this is "good," is the second of the two myths about theatre and commu-
nity. Its adherents include practitioners and advocates of the diverse field
variously named as applied, socially engaged, political, activist, and, of
course, community theatre, as well as many theorists and practitioners of
performance and liberatory and countercultural action. As Eugene van
Erven writes, concluding a collection of essays on practices of "commu-
nity theatre" in a range of different national and cultural situations:


26 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

All of the community theatre projects discussed in this book, I sus-
pect, would subscribe to the central aim of providing the members
of socially, culturally, ethnically, economically, sexually, cultur-
ally, or otherwise peripheral "communities" with the artistic
means to collectively and democratically express their concerns
and passions in their own, albeit aesthetically mediated, voices.60
Such projects are based on practices and political perspectives whose sub-
stantive origins van Erven locates firmly in the latter part of the twentieth
century. There are more or less the same set of circumstances as those to
which Hall attributes the resurgence of interest in Greek drama, even if
van Erven gestures briefly to the possibility that a differently oriented
scholarship might still wish to insist on "classical" origins too:
Although the usual anthropological arguments could be dusted off
to place the origins of community theatre, as indeed of all theatrical
expression, back in pre-colonial and Graeco-Roman times, its more
immediate antecedents lie buried in the various forms of counter-
cultural, radical, anti- and post-colonial, educational and libera-
tional theatres of the 1960s and 1970s.61
However, one of the most influential practitioners in this field-
Augusto Boal - grounds his theoretical account of the "theatre of the op-
pressed" in a fierce polemic against what he sees as the "coercive" anti-
communitarianism of tragic theatre as described in Aristotle's Poetics.62 In
the second English edition of Theatre of the Oppressed (published in 2000)
Boal introduces his account of the "coercive system of tragedy" with a
consciously imaginary or mythologizing account of the imposition of the-
atre's "hypocrisy" upon the "creative anarchy" of the workers' Dionysiac
song and dance. Boal's "myth" is in three parts. In the first, he describes
how the spontaneous postwork celebrations of Greek farm laborers had
to be brought under the control of the landowning aristocracy, and how
the dramatic poet and the choreographer were deployed as the agents of
this curtailment of an otherwise dangerous and anarchic freedom and
produced the choric order of the Dithyramb. In the second, more ex-
tended narrative, he tells of how the improvisations of Thespis spoke
truth in the face of the normative expressions of the dithyrambic chorus,
thus producing the protagonist, who, from behind his mask, could speak
the truth and disavow it at the same time. The third story tells of how
Aristotle, calmly deflecting Plato's rage against the hypocrisy of the ac-


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 27

tor's being two things at once, devised a system of theatre in which what-
ever subversive truth the actor might speak could be repurposed as the
error from which the obedient spectator-citizen could learn to free him-
self. Boal's view of theatre's relation to community seems very similar to
the romantic idealization of prepolitical harmony to be found in accounts
of "primitive communism," in which, for good or ill, we must always re-
turn to the Athenian moment, even if primarily to understand it as a mo-
ment in which the establishment of the state concludes a process in which
an earlier "communal" order has disintegrated through the gradual es-
tablishment of private property and the division of labor.
"Primitive communism," or, as it may be more accurately named,
"communalism," refers primarily to the idea that human societies ini-
tially held property in common. Marx includes this proposition in the
section of Grundrisse entitled "Forms which Precede Capitalist Produc-
tion."63 The tripartite developmental schema outlined here, in which an
"Asiatic" mode of production is succeeded by a transitional "ancient"
(Graeco-Roman) mode on the way to a feudal mode, is now challenged by
subsequent research and archaeological discoveries. However, aspects of
the theory of primitive communalism continue to exert an influence on
the shape of subsequent thought, including Boal's. Three in particular are
worth mentioning here.
The first is that primitive communalism is hierarchical rather than
egalitarian. This is presumably why Ellen Meiksins Wood prefers this
term rather than "communism," which suggests too strongly that any
communism that might come will be a return to an Edenic state. As Wood
notes of the early societies sketched by Marx, all featured "communal
property embodied in a higher authority, typically a despotic state."64
Boal's myth of the development of theatre in Greek societies before the
emergence of the Athenian city-state does not, it is worth recalling, begin
in an egalitarian moment, but rather a moment in which workers seek
respite from the labor imposed upon them in an inegalitarian or perhaps
even despotic state, ruled by a landowning aristocracy.
The second is that the category of "worker" is not strictly applicable in
such societies. As Marx argues in Grundrisse:
individuals relate not as workers but as proprietors - and mem-
bers of a community, who at the same time work. The aim of this
work is not the creation of value-although they may do surplus la-
bour in order to obtain alien, i.e. surplus products in exchange-
rather, its aim is sustenance of the individual proprietor and of his


28 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

family, as well as of the total community. The positing of the indi-
vidual as a worker, in this nakedness, is itself a product of history.65
The idea that to be a "worker" is not a fixed identity but the alterable re-
sult of historical circumstances is central to this project, as it is for Ran-
ciere's work. As we shall see, it is the assumed or "naturalized" identity
between a person and her work that gives rise to the figure of "the
worker," while it is the capacity of the theatre to disrupt this assumption,
which forms the basis for much of Ranciere's interest in theatrical activi-
ties. It is my ambition for the figure of the "passionate amateur" that it
should perform at least some modest disruption of identitarian catego-
ries. Boal's "workers," then, are workers only for as long as they work.
When they are doing something else they are dancers or drinkers, or they
are not defined at all in relation to what they do, and it is their freedom to
remain undefined that is under threat as their celebratory performance is
organized into theatre.
The third is that all these early forms of landed property possess as a
"presupposition" that there already exists a spontaneous or "natural"
community, which, Marx writes, "appears not as a result of, but as a pre-
supposition for the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilization of the
land."66 This "presupposition" seems to return in Ranciere's account of
the theatre public's self-understanding as community. If, as Sartre wrote
of the twentieth century, "communism is the unsurpassable horizon of
our time," might one dare say here that community has a tendency to ap-
pear, at least in the theatre, as an unsurpassable presupposition? If not
that, then perhaps at least this: the experience of being with others in the
theatre seems to offer participants in a capitalist society an intimation of
their own presuppositions about a mode of collective existence in which
the division of labor has not yet turned some of us into workers and oth-
ers into proprietors, designated some of us professionals and others ama-
teurs, or, to return to Boal's terms, made of some us actors and of others
spectators.
What Boal's myth seems to suggest is that theatre is one of the places
where this presupposition persists as intimation, or by way of an experi-
ence of intimacy in public, or, as I shall call it in the final chapter of the
book, solitude in relation. Boal implies that theatre, in spite of its division
of labor, retains affective traces of a communal practice in which labor is
set aside and hierarchy temporarily resisted, and that the task of his own
theatre is to reactivate those traces in the name of a contemporary political
challenge to oppression grounded in a desire for community. As Eugene


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 29

van Erven writes, seeking to draw some conclusions from the diverse
practices represented in his collection of essays on community theatre:
While it can never restore pre-modern communal harmony, which
probably never existed in the first place, community theatre can be
an effective medium to negotiate internal differences and represent
these in artistic forms, in the creation of which local cohesion is
enhanced and respect for "otherness" increased.67
Although there is no way back to the mythical past, even for Boal, the
origins of theatre itself are nonetheless posited as drawing on energies
that come from outside the realm of work and whose expression takes
place in the interruption or suspension of work. This "outside" of work is
of course constituted by the necessity of work, and by the regulation of
time and association in the "teamwork" of the farm or construction
worker.68 It is an outside that is already an inside, and whose occupants
are desperate to get out; to express themselves, become emancipated, to-
gether in the collective action of song, dance, and drinking. If there is a
community presupposed in this performance, it is one that work inter-
rupts, and that is, itself, an interruption of work. This is why the amateur -
someone who interrupts his or her work in order to make theatre, rather
than making theatre his or her work-may be a crucial figure for under-
standing the appearances of romantic anti-capitalism in theatre. Even if
romantic anti-capitalism might long to locate its "good community" be-
yond capitalism itself, and to seek relief from alienation in an exit from its
logics, it is almost always obliged to make do with what it can make
within them. Something of this predicament is captured in the word ama-
teur. On the one hand, the amateur acts out of love, in what Marx calls
"the realm of freedom," making an unconditional commitment that af-
firms its own autonomy. On the other hand, the amateur also acts in rela-
tion to "the realm of necessity," her activity constantly defined in opposi-
tion either to the work of the "professional" who makes her living from
theatre, or to the work she herself does to make her own living. This is
because, to follow the logic of Marx's thought, the realm of freedom is
always ultimately contingent upon the realm of necessity.69
Amateur theatre in its most familiar sense (as a leisure activity for
those who earn their livings by other means) is not, however, the topic of
this book. Amateur theatre is of course a huge field of activity of which
there is probably much of interest to be written.70 But for the purposes of
the present work, it accedes too readily to the distinction between work


30 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

and leisure that I wish to unravel here. The same may also be said of what
in the United Kingdom is often called community theatre (a term that, in
the United States, is more usually applied to what in the United Kingdom
is normally called amateur theatre). Taken as a whole, community theatre
in the United Kingdom-which often takes the form of performance
events produced by specialist professionals in collaboration with nonpro-
fessional participants -also tends to leave the work/nonwork distinction
largely untroubled. Nonetheless, many of the affects, contradictions, re-
sistances, and pleasures that I will try to account for in the discussion that
follows may also be found in community theatre (in its UK sense), and I
will end this introductory chapter by briefly indicating two of them that
seem particularly significant. The first is that there seems to be something
in the quality of the nonprofessional and often untrained theatrical per-
former that allows them to be experienced as the bearers of the values of
community presupposed in the event. The second is the peculiar, and re-
lated effect, most notable in the kind of historically based community
plays first developed in the United Kingdom by Ann Jellicoe and the Col-
way Theatre Trust and widely adopted elsewhere, in which the untrained
performer, experienced as bearer of values associated with community,
does so in the role of a figure from what is imagined to have been that
community's past (by appearing as character from a well-known local
history, for example). Both of these effects are usually reported as indices
of a kind of pre- or anti-capitalist authenticity wherein the social and po-
litical value of such projects inheres. Jon Oram, who succeeded Ann Jelli-
coe as director of the Colway Theatre Trust (now called Claque), writes in
a brief article on what he calls "the social actor":
There are conditions about the amateur actors from the community
that make the audience's transition from mere spectator to involved
performer almost seamless. Whilst we might be in awe of profes-
sional celebrity, there's a feeling of equality and intimacy when the
cast and the audience come from the same community. Amateurs
especially non-actors are closer to natural social behaviour as op-
posed to heightened performance. I build on these conditions by
ensuring that the subject of the play is about the history of everyone
in the room, and that they all share the same space. To put it suc-
cinctly there is a sense of community ownership about the play.71
Ann Jellicoe, in the preface to her Community Plays: How to Put Them On,
cites extensively from observations made by Baz Kershaw about the Coly-


THEATRE AND COMMUNISM AFTER ATHENS 31

ford community play (Colyford Matters, by Dennis Warner, produced in
1983):
The stylistic focus is possible because the unity of the event derives
from a simple shift of focus, away from theatre, towards commu-
nity. Hence, the typical situations presented provoke a historical
awareness that rests on a curious identification between the live
actors and the dead people they play. They come from the same
community and so it seems, in performance, as if they are the same
people. The result is a powerful sense of the mysterious-set
within an active celebration of shared meanings. So the explicitly
presented development of community in the past is implicitly ani-
mated in the present. The artistic unity consequently derives from
the fact that the fundamental event is not the play itself, but the
opportunity the play provides for the continuing evolution of
Colyford as a community. In other words, community plays are a
community-forming process. Thus theatre is created through com-
munity.72
Both of these observations would ordinarily tend to support a strongly
romantic conception of community, grounded in "nature," "authentic-
ity," "identification," and "unity." These are precisely the terms against
which critics of community as such, including Miranda Joseph and Jean-
Luc Nancy, direct their analysis. All the same, as Joseph notes, seeking to
distance herself somewhat from Nancy's sense of the impossibility of
community, some critical perspectives fail to account for the passion that
attends such experiences.73 What Oram and Kershaw capture are sources
for such passion-the appearance of the "natural social" and the reap-
pearance of "community in the past" -and perhaps even foundations for
the kind of "utopian performative" sought by Jill Dolan. Where I hope to
develop a further understanding of such experiences is in a consideration
of how these feelings might make meaning in more obviously compro-
mised situations, or, rather, in theatrical circumstances where the "pre-
supposition of community" is not as powerfully present. Is it possible to
experience such (intimate, public, political) feelings even where they are
not explicitly summoned up in the name of a supposedly natural or au-
thentic "community"? I am most interested, therefore, in what happens
when such passions are set in motion in ways that seem unnatural or in-
authentic (theatrical, even) or where the appearance of figures from an-
other time is experienced as a disruption rather than an affirmation of


32 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

historical continuity. This is because, in seeking to develop a critical ro-
mantic anti-capitalism, I cannot depend upon straightforward distinc-
tions between the natural, the authentic, and a continuous historical expe-
rience, on the one hand, and the artificial, the constructed, and the
discontinuous on the other. I will look for such experiences in just a few
selected locations in the chapters that follow. The search begins in Mos-
cow at the start of the twentieth century, where Chekhov's Uncle Vanya
stages feelings about work at the dawn of theatre's industrialization, and
then moves on to Berlin in 1928, where Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis
imagine a proletarian children's theatre that might perform a kind of
deindustrialization of the soul. This discontinuous history of passionate
amateurs resumes in Paris in 1967, with Jean-Luc Godard's film, La chi-
noise, in which a group of students play at being revolutionaries the sum-
mer before the real "events" of 1968. It ends in the present, more or less,
wondering, first, about the nature of theatrical labor in an economy that
has found ever more ingenious ways of commodifying such things as
"community," by way of an account of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's
No Dice, and then, in a final sequence, speculating on the extent to which
a professional spectator such as myself might have any business writing
about passionate amateurs.


TWo I Of Work and Time

It's all over. The Professor and his wife, Yelena, have gone to Kharkov,
unable to stand life in the country a moment longer. The Professor fears,
perhaps, that Vanya will take another pop at him with the gun. Yelena
needs to escape from the potential entanglements arising from her feel-
ings for the Doctor and Vanya's feelings for her. Feelings we might care to
call love. The Doctor, Astrov, has taken a final drink of vodka and re-
turned home, having promised Yelena, for Sonya's sake, that he will never
return. At the end of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Sonya and Vanya return to
work, filling out entries in account books they have neglected for the du-
ration of the Professor's visit to the estate. Neither Sonya nor Vanya has
anything more to say about their unrequited loves (for Astrov and for
Yelena). It's all over:
SONYA: We shall live, Uncle Vanya. We shall live out many, many
days and long evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials that
fate sends us; we shall labour for others both now and in our
old age, knowing no rest, and when our time comes, we shall
meekly die, and there beyond the grave we shall say that we
suffered, that we wept, that we were sorrowful, and God will
have pity on us, and you and I, dear Uncle, shall see a life that
is bright and beautiful and full of grace, we shall rejoice and
look back on our present woes with tenderness, with a smile -
and we shall rest. [.. . ] We shall rest!
TELEGIN quietly plays his guitar
We shall rest! [.. . ] We shall rest ... [Hugs him.] We shall rest!
[The night-watchman knocks. TELEGIN plays quietly; MARIYA VASILYEVNA
makes notes in the margins of a pamphlet; MARINA knits a stocking.]

33


34 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

We shall rest!
[The curtain slowly falls.]1
It is all over, but it is also a beginning, even if it is the beginning of
something that has been continuing before. It is a kind of circularity. It is
a resumption of an activity that had been interrupted, one might say dis-
rupted, by the events of the play itself, a return to the status quo ante. But
it is also a complex opening outward. For Vanya and Sonya the work to
which they return is a putting aside, or a putting behind them (perhaps
forever) of the upheavals and disappointments of love (Vanya's for
Yelena, Sonya's for Astrov). In a familiar gesture, they hope to be able to
forget, to bury their pain in renewed activity, and to rededicate them-
selves to a worthy if modest joint project after having lost themselves in
what turned out to be fruitless (unproductive) projects of the heart.
The play ends, then, with two of its principal actors announcing their
departure from the space of unproductive labor (play), through the com-
mitment given by the characters they have produced on stage, to the work
they are to undertake. With the departure of the idle and unproductive
couple of the Professor and his wife, Vanya and Sonya resolve to abstain
from theatrical behaviors brought on by the presence of this couple
(doomed love affairs, bungled shootings) and to renounce the indolence
that had overcome the household during their visit. In this sense, work is
the grim but safe antithesis to the risks and excitements of love. It is duty,
rather than passion. It might also be understood, coming as it does at the
end of the play, as a gesture toward the mundane world that the play of
theatrical production temporarily suspends. Let us get back to the day-
world of work after this brief sojourn in the night of play.
The gesture of the actors, then, doubles the movement of their charac-
ters and, at the same time, the action the audience is about to take in mak-
ing its way back to the working day: a renunciation of nonwork, an end to
the suspension of production. Yet this doubling is also a contradiction,
since it is in fact, for the actors, the very moment at which their productive
labor comes to an end, at least for tonight. They appear to set themselves
back to work at precisely the moment at which they are about to stop
working. The last lines of the play complicate this situation further, as
Sonya conjures a vision of daily work continuing to the grave, beyond
which, she repeats, "We shall rest [ ... ] We shall rest." As the actors clock
off, might they be inviting the spectators, moving now from the end of the
play toward the beginning of the working day, to take up the burden of


OF WORK AND TIME 35

their labor or to take a rest, and if so, what kind of labor and what sort of
rest might this be? In what kind of labor might both actors and spectators
jointly participate? And what kind of rest might follow?
To prepare the ground for an attempt to answer these questions I will
sketch out some ideas about work in general in industrial capitalism,
about some particular aspects of work in the context of an industrializing
Russia in the 189os, and finally, about the nature of work in the theatre,
both in industrial capitalism generally and in the specific context of an
industrializing theatre in Moscow at the time of the first production of
Uncle Vanya in 1899. By this rather circuitous route I hope to be able to
show that in the industrial capitalism of the late nineteenth and twentieth
centuries the figure of the passionate amateur took on a new and signifi-
cant form, in the person of the professional for whom life, work, and pol-
itics came to be inextricably entwined with one another. In the particular
case of the theatre industry, I aim to suggest how such passionate ama-
teurs might participate in and contribute to affective experiences of pro-
ductive consumption that revive a kind of romantic anti-capitalism. These
passionate amateurs are to be found both onstage and off: as fictional
figures produced by the labor of the actor; as actors (and other theatrical
professionals) working at the production of play; and, crucially, as specta-
tors for whom the consumption of the theatrical production is itself a
form of production, of subjectivities rather than commodities.
WORK IN INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
In chapter 1o of Capital, simply called "The Working Day," Marx presents
both a longue durie history of political struggle over the very concept of
the "working day" and a more contemporary account of a political strug-
gle over its length.2 In both cases the histories in question, as so often in
Capital, are drawn from the English experience, since England repre-
sented at the time the clearest and most advanced example of a capitalist
society, enjoying levels of industrialization with which Russia, famously,
would only compete much later (hence the supposed historical irony of a
socialist revolution taking place in Russia rather than in England, where
students and followers of Marx might reasonably have most expected it).
Let us consider this as just one anachronism among several, following
those already alluded to in the differential movements toward and away
from the "working day" in the case of a performance of Uncle Vanya and
in anticipation of others to come later in this chapter.


36 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

Marx's history of the working day begins in 1349 with a "Statute of
Labourers," introduced during the reign of Edward III, which "found its
immediate pretext (not its cause, for legislation of this kind outlives its
pretext by centuries)" in the "great plague that decimated the popula-
tion," thus, supposedly, requiring a more coordinated and disciplined ef-
fort on the part of the survivors to supply the needs of a feudal economy.
It is worth noting here, in anticipation of there being a relationship be-
tween the length of the working day and the length of the working life,
that this first attempt to standardize a working day seems to arise from
(even if it is not caused by) the premature death of actual workers. A long
struggle ensues, captured in more detail than it is by Marx by E. P.
Thompson, in a now-celebrated article, "Time, Work-Discipline, and In-
dustrial Capitalism,"3 in which he traces a gradual but by no means in-
evitable historical movement between preindustrial and industrial disci-
plines and internalizations of time. It is crucial to both Thompson and
Marx that this process should not be seen as inevitable, because it is im-
portant for both that the institution of the working day as a broadly ac-
cepted aspect of a wage-labor economy is understood instead as the out-
come of social and political struggle: only with this historicization of the
seemingly "natural" order (as night follows day) might it be possible to
imagine this order as susceptible to change through future political ac-
tion. "The historical record," writes Thompson, "is not a simple one of
neutral and inevitable technological change, but is also one of exploita-
tion and of resistance to exploitation."4
The movement described by Thompson begins in ways of life in which
"the day's tasks[ ... .] seemed to disclose themselves, by the logic of need,
before the crofter's eyes," an attitude toward the temporality of work that
Thompson characterizes as "task-orientation" and that, he suggests, is
"more humanly comprehensible"5 than what is to follow. As work in-
creasingly becomes a matter of waged employment (rather than devoted
to, say, either the corvee or subsistence), "the shift from task-orientation
to timed labour is marked."6 Thompson's close attention to records of
working-class life offers a picture of English capital experiencing, as part
of the upheavals of early industrialization, major problems with the time-
discipline of its workforce, so much so that as early as 1700 The Law Book
of the Crowley Iron Works runs to more than one hundred thousand words
and provides the basis for the imposition of similar private penal codes in
the cotton mills seventy years later.7 The development of machinery as
part of the means of production contributes a further dimension to the
time-regime: machines dictate rhythms to their operators on a minute-by-


OF WORK AND TIME 37

minute basis, as well as seeming (seeming, only seeming) to demand con-
stant attention in order that they should never be left idle. During the
course of the eighteenth century -in the period leading up to the more or
less contemporary (that is, nineteenth-century) struggles that Marx will
present in some detail-Thompson sees a capitalist organization of work
and time achieving its "normalisation": "In all these ways-by the divi-
sion of labour; the supervision of labour; bells and clocks; money incen-
tives; preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports-
new labour habits were formed, and a new time discipline was imposed."8
Thompson's reference to "the suppression of fairs and sports" might
lead one to suppose a simple inverse proportionality between work time
and leisure time, in which the more work, the less leisure. But the process
Thompson describes here is now widely understood as the basis for the
"invention" of leisure, in which, to put it very schematically, sprawling
and partly spontaneous festivities based on cyclical, seasonal time give
way to the quick fixes of nightly entertainment (cyclical but not seasonal,
except in the idea that a popular TV drama series like The Wire is pack-
aged and sold in "seasons").9 The predictable time schedule of the work-
ing day encourages a corresponding rationalization of play and recre-
ation, and "leisure industries" develop accordingly.
This interdependence of work and leisure is a key insight of the "sub-
merged" tradition in leisure studies excavated by Chris Rojek in Capital-
ism and Leisure Theory. Rojek notes the powerful appeal of the narrative
established in Thompson's article (of leisure in its modern form as the
creation of industrial capitalism) and sees it as part of a broader under-
standing within sociological thought (Veblen, Weber, Durkheim, Elias)
that sees leisure not as free time, but as time always already conditioned
by its dependence upon the established working day. Rojek suggests that
a key element in this relationship is that disposable time is "subjectively
experienced by the labourer as an alien force which he does not fully con-
trol."10 In this respect the time of leisure is as unfree or as alienated as the
time of work. Noting Marx's contribution to this tradition of thought, he
observes that, in Marx's analysis, the "working class can have leisure only
if it fulfils the production requirements of capital. The capitalist class can
only maintain its leisure relations if it ensures that in the long run more
surplus value is extracted at source, i.e. by intensifying the exploitation of
labour."11 The absence of any such thing as "free time" is vital to this un-
derstanding of leisure. As Rojek comments in introducing the topic of his
study, in terms that will resonate with anyone working in the theatre (or
other branches of the leisure industry), "the saying that work for some is


38 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

leisure for others is not only a popular truism, it is also a vital analytical
insight."12
It becomes clear that this interdependence is essential to capitalist pro-
duction when one recognizes the key role of leisure time in Henry Ford's
conception of the working day, which, as David Harvey explains, in-
cludes the idea that "the purpose of the five-dollar, eight hour day was
only in part to secure worker compliance with the discipline required to
work the highly productive assembly-line system. It was coincidentally
meant to provide workers with sufficient income and leisure time to con-
sume the mass-produced products the corporations were about to turn
out in ever vaster quantities."13 That leisure should become a form of pro-
ductive consumption was a key element in the development and exten-
sion of the Fordist system in the twentieth century (we shall see, shortly,
that aspects of this organizational form penetrated the theatre fairly
early). That theatre, therefore, is becoming a site of productive consump-
tion (in specifically capitalist terms) at around the time of the first produc-
tion of Uncle Vanya is going to be an important element in the discussion
that follows.
For now, though, we turn away, again, from leisure and back to Marx's
"Working Day." Marx summarizes (anachronistically, of course) Thomp-
son's account (which strangely, or accordingly, contains no reference
whatsoever to Marx), in which a landowner state spends several centuries
trying to compel its population to work enough, before, at last, the idea of
a working day, in which one turns up at the beginning, works through-
out, and only returns home at the end, is properly established and socially
normalized: people accept waged labor. He then moves on to the strug-
gles of the nineteenth century, which are fought not over the day as such,
but over its length. Because capitalist enterprises aim to maximize their
profit, they must maximize the surplus-value they generate. Since the
surplus-value of any product is the result of the value transferred into it
above and beyond that conferred by the socially necessary labor time
taken to produce it (the amount of time the worker must work in order to
make a living), the management of the workers' time becomes a key issue
for the owners of capital. To use the formulation to which Marx repeat-
edly returns, if it takes six hours a day for a worker to make a living, but
the worker works twelve hours every day, then the additional six hours
translate directly into surplus-value and therefore profit for the owner.
"Moments," writes Marx, "are the elements of profit."14
In this latest historical phase of the struggle over the working day,
capital is seeking to maximize its returns by extending the working day


OF WORK AND TIME 39

for as long as possible, while the emergent industrial working class is
seeking to secure the support of the state (a state of capitalists and land-
owners) for the enforcing of legal limits. One key outcome of this phase of
the struggle would be the Factory Act of 1850, which put an end to em-
ployer abuses of the Ten Hours' Act of 1844 by outlawing relay systems,
specifying that the working day (for young people and women) must fall
between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., and making two one-and-a-half-hour meal
breaks mandatory. Marx notes with characteristic irony that the gains in
productivity achieved in the period since this legislation, which the own-
ers and representatives of capital had vehemently opposed, were hailed
by classical political economists as "a characteristic achievement of their
'science."'15 He also observes that "the longer working day which capital
tried to impose on adult workers by acts of state power from the middle
of the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century is approx-
imately of the same length as the shorter working day which, in the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century, the state has here and there interposed
as a barrier to the transformation of children's blood into capital."16
The partial victory chronicled here by Marx is secured by the indus-
trial working class in concert with "allies in those social layers not directly
interested in the question."17 These allies are essentially bourgeois re-
formers who increasingly come to serve as "moral obstacles"18 to the lim-
itless exploitation of workers. It is from this class that emerge the factory
inspectors who witness the appalling conditions in which industrial labor
performs its functions, and the doctors who recognize that some deaths,
such as that of the millinery worker May Ann Wilkes, are the consequence
of overwork; in Wilkes's case of "long hours of work in an overcrowded
room, and a too small and badly ventilated bedroom."19 In abstract terms,
Marx argues, "Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-
power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-
power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective
by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way as a greedy farmer
snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility."20 This
abstract conception of capital's view of labor leaves out politics (and this
is precisely Marx's point in telling the story of the struggle over the work-
ing day); it omits the possibility that, unlike capital in the abstract, capital-
ists in the flesh might be capable of being persuaded or coerced by worker
activism, bourgeois reformists, and even the state, into acting against
their own (seeming, only seeming) interests in this sphere. Marx observes
that the 1859 Reports of the Inspectors of Factories suggests- "with sup-
pressed irony" -that the reform of the working day may have granted


40 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

the capitalist some measure of freedom from the "brutality" of his role as
the mere embodiment of capital, as the shorter working day "has given
him time for a little 'culture."21 For it is not simply the worker who must
contribute productive consumption by way of the leisure industries but
also the capitalist, who, after all, will have substantially more disposable
income than the worker to expend on such things as opera and football.
If the regulation of the working day and subsequent victories for orga-
nized labor have contributed to an increase in both the quantity and the
quality of life enjoyed by workers under capitalism, it may be the case
that the next key phase of this struggle will be over the length of the work-
ing life, rather than the working day, as current political tensions over the
retirement age and pension arrangements in Europe might suggest. This
is a subject that will return in each of the following chapters.
WORK IN RUSSIA
The country estate of Uncle Vanya might not immediately conjure up im-
ages commensurate with the industrial urban setting for the exploitation
unto death described by Marx. But the creative-destructive logic of indus-
trialization nonetheless encircles the play. The encroachment of industry
into the countryside is just offstage. It is made present in Astrov's pas-
sionate (but professional) account of the destruction of the forests. It is
personified in the appearance near the end of Act One of a "workman"
who comes to tell Astrov that "they" have come for him from "the fac-
tory."22 At the very beginning of the play, as Astrov bemoans what has
become of him over the preceding ten years - "I've worn myself out
[ ... ] I don't know the meaning of rest" -it is his recollection of the death
of a "railway pointsman" on his operating table that provokes his ago-
nized speculation about how "those for whom we are laying down the
road to the future" might "remember us."23 Work, toward a future,
whether by "road" or "rail," is established from the outset as a central
preoccupation of the play, and its cost, in terms of the loss of the living, be
they railway workers or forests, is a recurrent question. Each "working
day" is an exhausting step toward the construction of some better world.
As Raymond Williams writes of Chekhov's plays in general, "the way to
the future is seen, consistently, in work."24 This work is always shadowed
by fear: that exhaustion will tend to death; that progress will destroy
what it feeds upon; or even, in Astrov's case, that the whole process will
yield nothing in return for all this work and death:


OF WORK AND TIME 41

ASTROV: If in place of all these destroyed forests they had laid
highways and railroads, if we had here factories, mills,
schools, the people would be healthier, richer, better
educated -but there's nothing of the kind.[ ... .] We have here
a decline which is the consequence of an impossible struggle
for existence.25
At the time of the writing and production of Uncle Vanya (1897-99),
these were pressing questions of government policy and everyday social
reality. In the decade following the 1892 appointment of Count Sergei
Witte as minister of finance (he had previously served as director of rail-
way affairs within the same ministry), the industrial sector in Russia grew
by over 8 percent a year. While the urban population had grown rapidly
since the emancipation of the serfs (1861), it is crucial to recognize that
this growth also involved the urbanization and industrialization of the
countryside itself, with the railways as a crucial element in this process.
According to Neil B. Weissman's study of the social and economic re-
forms of the nineteenth century, the census of 1897 revealed that "over
half the empire's industry and sixty percent of its workers were located in
the country" and that "in the province of Moscow alone some two hun-
dred villages had become commercial and industrial in nature."26 Spencer
Golub points to just one way in which this rail-assisted industrialization,
whose consequences are rendered more explicitly by Chekhov in The
Cherry Orchard (1902-4), was changing the experience of work and time in
this now perhaps only partially rural Russia, noting that "the major tem-
poral dialogue in The Cherry Orchard is between the urban timetable of the
railroad, which begins and ends the play, and the rural timetable of the
agrarian seasonal cycle, which gives the play its act structure." With an
eye on the future, in which Lenin's arrival by train will come to signify the
launch of a process of convulsive political change, with work-political,
ideological, "Taylorized" -at its heart, Golub suggests that "Lopakhin,
whom Richard Stites calls an 'ineffectual Taylorist' [ . . . ] cannot get the
characters in the play to conform to the new schedule."27
Not that the old schedule of the "agrarian season cycle" was a sched-
ule without work: it was rather-as Thompson and others have de-
scribed -an earlier way of organizing the time of work. In Uncle Vanya the
arrival of the Professor and his wife has disrupted this schedule:
VANYA: Ever since the Professor came to live here with his wife,
my life has left its track.... I go to sleep at the wrong time, for


42 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

lunch and dinner I eat all kinds of rich dishes, I drink wine -
that's all unhealthy. I used not to have a spare minute, Sonya
and I worked-my goodness, how we worked, and now only
Sonya works and I sleep, eat and drink.... That's no good!28
This life of consumption is not the opposite of the life of productive work,
even though it may be experienced as such by both Vanya and Sonya; it is
its counterpart. Until it arrived here, in person, on the estate, it could be
imagined as something distant and somehow unrelated. Now, perhaps
most vividly in the person of Yelena, it makes its relation to production
unavoidably, even radiantly visible, while simultaneously giving rise to a
suspicion that something might be wrong:
ASTROv: She just eats, sleeps, walks, enchants us all with her
beauty-and that's all. She has no responsibilities, others work
for her.... It's true, isn't it? And an idle life can't be a virtuous
one.29
It is not that work has ceased, then-Sonya, after all, keeps it going-
but rather that Vanya and Astrov have been seduced into the scene of
consumption, to letting "others work" for them. Their feelings (their
love?) for Yelena constitute a kind of becoming-Serebryakov, not only
through a desire to supplant the Professor in Yelena's affections but, cru-
cially, by adopting his role as the consumer of the labor of others. Their
compromised and uneasy embrace of indolence -while they may experi-
ence it as the absence of work-is therefore only really its displacement.
The work goes somewhere else (Sonya does it) - a spatial fix - or it is de-
ferred, becomes mere aspiration, a vision for the future. This might be
conceived as a kind of temporal fix (the kind of thing that financialization
seeks to achieve, perhaps, by permitting speculators to be paid now for
work that will be done by future generations of workers). Thus the indo-
lence on which the characters of the play repeatedly comment may be
seen as a product of new relations among work, time, and space, rather
than as the absence of work. It is not "free" time. Like the process of in-
dustrialization, which I have already suggested circles the play, encroach-
ing upon its space and its time, work itself lurks in the wings. The indo-
lence on stage is the form in which it appears. It is, of course, an indolence
that the actors on stage must work to produce, for an audience of consum-
ers. In the consumption of this indolence-work is it possible to be wholly


OF WORK AND TIME 43

oblivious to the fact that, in the service industry of the theatre, as every-
where else, one person's leisure is always another's labor?
The idea that work might be the motor of social progress and a form of
political activity ("the way to the future," to recall Williams's phrase) un-
derpins Astrov's various speeches, and they are, at times, just that,
speeches, as Yelena's apparent failure to concentrate rather sharply re-
veals ("I see by your expression this doesn't interest you"30). It will also
become a central ideological motif of the Soviet Union, though Astrov is
not to be confused with Stakhanov (even if we might see Lopakhin as an
"ineffectual Taylorist" and Lenin as a rather more "effectual" one) any
more than the "indolent" characters of any of Chekhov's plays can really
be wholly identified with the justly doomed aristocracy whose rule will
end in 1917. John Tulloch identifies the embodiment and articulation of
this idea, in Chekhov's plays, with the emergence of the medical profes-
sion as a key element in the zemstvo system of rural self-governing bodies
in which Chekhov himself was an active participant.31
The establishment of the zemstvos formed part of the attempt at reform
initiated after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War. The zemstvos consisted
of elected local assemblies, each of which appointed an executive board to
take responsibility for the organization and delivery of elementary educa-
tion, public health, and charity in the local area.32 In the context of the in-
dustrialization process accelerated in the 189os, state support for the zem-
stvos was intensified, with annual increases in expenditure on zemstvo
activity of up to 18 percent. It was also at this time that the so-called third
element within the zemstvos -doctors, teachers, agronomists, and
statisticians- gained ground relative to the gentry and the peasantry,
while they also consolidated (not without struggle) their relative auton-
omy from the state bureaucracy. During the 189os, therefore, the zemstvos
became channels through which an emergent professional class could ex-
ercise social influence and develop some measure of political agency.
While Tulloch does not suggest that Astrov in Uncle Vanya stands in
for Chekhov himself in any straightforward way, he does demonstrate
how Chekhov's experience with and commitment to the practice of
zemstvo medicine shaped his own social position and sense of self. While
he may not represent Chekhov, Astrov most certainly does stand for and
articulate social and professional values and aspirations associated with
this emergent class of practitioners, of which Chekhov himself was one,
and their conception of working toward the future. He is, in a sense, the
representative within the play of the English "factory inspectors" whose


44 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

alliance with the industrial working class helped secure the regulation of
the working day in the story of political struggle recounted by Marx in
Capital. Astrov represents-in compromised and damaged form, of
course - a powerful idea of professional expertise at the service of the
people and of human social progress.
This conception of professional expertise and the specific historical
situation in which it emerges has two significant related consequences.
First, it enables doctors to carve out a new social position for themselves
as autonomous professionals. As Stanley C. Kramer notes, writing on
public health in the zemstvo system, the new framework
created ever greater numbers of salaried positions outside the state
bureaucracy in which the enthusiastic members of a populist intel-
ligentsia could serve the people. By transforming the physician's
identity from state servant to servant of society, it also enhanced
the potential authority of modern medicine among the peasantry.33
Second, as Tulloch points out, this autonomous role, increasingly under-
stood in terms of public service, permits doctors to articulate a political
project expressive of this revised social position, articulating a universal-
izing movement away from a narrow and elite class ideology:
The new zemstvo service role was clearly an environment of great
public need where universalistic ideals could be directed to practi-
cal tasks. If, as MacIver suggests, one sign of professionalization is
"when activity of service replaces passivity of station," and when
educated men move from a culture of patronage to one of func-
tional specificity of competence, then this was certainly taking
place among Russian zemstvo doctors who, by a conscious deci-
sion, rejected the class nature of "city medicine."34
Work thus becomes a way of doing politics. It is no longer simply the
necessary tasks of production and reproduction, which Hannah Arendt
placed in the category of "labor"35 and which Marx regarded as "eter-
nal."36 Nor is it even just what Arendt would categorize as work-namely
the fabrication of things in the world, such as art, buildings, railroads.
Instead, in this vision, work begins to transcend the category of work it-
self and becomes a form of what Arendt calls action: the relational activity
that constitutes politics. Work as political action is what will carry human
society forward into a future in which we might one day experience free-


OF WORK AND TIME 45

dom, including, perhaps paradoxically, the freedom from the "eternal"
necessity of work: "We shall rest! We shall rest!"
THE PROFESSIONAL IS/AS THE PASSIONATE AMATEUR
This development of the medical profession in late nineteenth-century
industrializing Russia was part of a broader set of developments across
capitalist Europe during the nineteenth century. The consolidation of
"the professions," as a way of conceiving and organizing such practices as
medicine and the law, led to the emergence of the distinctive and ambigu-
ous ideologeme of "professionalism." This was deeply rooted in indus-
trial capitalism and in many respects reflected its practitioners' depen-
dency upon both capital and the state, but it also carried forward certain
antimarket principles that, as I aim to show in this brief digression on the
subject of the professional, means that it bears striking resemblances to
what I have called the romantic anti-capitalism of the passionate ama-
teur.37 Indeed, the central theme of the ideology of professionalism may
be summarized as work for work's sake. The professional turns out to be
the amateur. Or at least, that is how things are made to appear. Under
certain circumstances, in the right light perhaps, the professional appears
as the passionate amateur.
Magali Sarfatti Larson identifies this idea of the "intrinsic value of
work" as one of a number of "residues" of pre-capitalist conceptions of
such service labor, along with the idea that service is universally available
in the interests of protecting the social fabric or community and the tradi-
tion of "noblesse oblige" in which social status confers social responsi-
bilities (which, in turn, of course, confer social status).38 But, while these
residues help legitimate the ideology of professionalism, they do so in
spite (or perhaps precisely because) of the fact that professions "are, in
fact, one of the distinctive features of industrial capitalism, even though
they claim to renounce the profit motive."39 What the organization of ser-
vices into professions actually seeks, she argues, "is a monopoly over the
provision of specialist services, frequently secured by means of the con-
trol and regulation of training and education (access), assisted by state
power which outlaws non-qualified practitioners (who become 'quacks'),
and consolidated by means of professional 'associations' rather than
unionisation." As the beneficiaries of state-protected monopolies the
members of professions can accentuate their difference from wage labor
within capital by abstaining from its most public organizational form in


46 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

the market (the union) while regulating their own rights to set levels of
remuneration by operating as cartels.
Although dependent upon capital for their income and upon the state
for their legal protection, professionals are able to imagine themselves as
somehow independent of both. Thus, as Sarfatti Larson observes, "at the
centre of the ideology of profession we find, necessarily, the general pos-
tulates of bourgeois ideology":40 the professional is, above all, a free and
autonomous individual and thus claims for herself, in the conduct of her
work, certain inalienable privileges associated with this status, para-
mount among which is the right to control her own time. Private offices
and secretarial support are also important, but nothing more distin-
guishes the professional from the wage-laborer than the freedom to set
her own working hours. To charge by the hour rather than be paid by it
might be another way of articulating this distinction. Of course many pro-
fessionals internalize the time-disciplines of industrial capitalism with
great ferocity and, under certain economic circumstances, may need to do
so simply in order to make a living. Many professionals justify this self-
imposed discipline by insisting on just how much they love their work. I
work eighteen hours a day, six days a week, because I am a "passionate
amateur."
There is not necessarily anything disingenuous here. While the prin-
ciples that appear to be antimarket are in reality nothing of the sort, the
structural inaccuracy of the claim to autonomy should not obscure the
fact that it is subjectively sincere. Many professionals are indeed, to some
degree or another, opponents of capital (or wish to see its powers lim-
ited), even while being among its most privileged structural beneficiaries.
This is perhaps why, in its positive aspect, professionalism is a socially
progressive or reformist element within industrial capitalism. The ideol-
ogy has organizational force and can be mobilized in support of a wide
range of social and political goals, as in the contribution of the medical
profession to the struggle over the length of the working day narrated by
Marx in Capital or, more broadly, as Harold Perkin notes in his work on
the professions, again in England, in "the special role of the professional
idea in the rise of the welfare state."41 Because this apparent "third space"
between the state and the market is largely imaginary, however, the pro-
fessional classes tend to be quite vulnerable to political co-optation by
either or both (the New Labour "Third Way" associated with the lawyer
Blair and the academic Giddens is just one example of this tendency). In
formations of this kind the professional ideology becomes, as Larson ar-
gues, simply a way of "justifying inequality of status and closure of access
in the occupational order."42


OF WORK AND TIME 47

The "Third Way" may best be regarded as a device for packaging pro-
fessional capitulation to neoliberalism, which, as an approach to the rela-
tionship between an individual worker and the market, might be re-
garded as intrinsically hostile to the maintenance of the social and
economic privileges of the professions. In practice the emergence of a full-
fledged neoliberalism in late twentieth-century capital has tended to en-
rich and empower those members of the professions most able to make
their services indispensible to business (those most dependent upon capi-
tal, such as corporate lawyers, for example) and to impoverish and disem-
power those whose services tend to rely more heavily on the state (teach-
ers, for example).
Herein lies the political ambiguity of the ideology of professional-
ism-an ambiguity in which it again resembles the position of the pas-
sionate amateur. On the one hand the professional, or the passionate
amateur, "with its persistent antibureaucratic appearances[ ... .] deflects
the comprehensive and critical vision of society [.. . ] functions as a means
for controlling large sectors of educated labor, and for co-opting its
elites,"43 as Sarfatti Larson writes.44 Professionalization, she argues, by
protecting educated elites from certain market exigencies (allowing them
to set their own time-discipline, for instance), has "functioned as an effec-
tive form of social and ideological control" and thus as a defense for capi-
tal against "elite dissatisfaction."45 On the other hand, however, and it is
interesting that Sarfatti Larson saw this trend emerging in the late 1960s
and early 1970s in France and then Italy, there are within neoliberal struc-
tures "increasing tendencies" toward the "proletarianization of educated
labour," which, she notes, "[have], potentially, great political conse-
quences."46 In this context, as professionals (or, increasingly, former pro-
fessionals47) find themselves exposed to the exigencies of the market in
new ways, often in ways that effectively convert their autonomy into pre-
carity, the professional as passionate amateur reappears as a figure both
subjectively and structurally hostile to the interests of capital and thus as
a potential participant in a political coalition organized around the soli-
darity of "immaterial labour." I will take up this theme at greater length
in subsequent chapters.
WORK ON THE MOSCOW STAGE
Uncle Vanya appears on stage just seven years after the abolition of the
Imperial monopoly. Not that Russia had lacked for theatre beyond the
Imperial stages: all kinds of theatre and performance had circulated be-


48 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

yond the legitimized locations, including a substantial amateur theatre
movement, in which Stanislavski participated and which gave Chekhov
himself his earliest experiences of theatre. The significance of the aboli-
tion of the monopoly is rather to be found in its facilitation of a profes-
sional theatre, in which the burden of patronage fell on investors, share-
holders, and subscribers, rather than upon the budget of the Court. It is
also a professional theatre built, as it were, in the first instance, by
amateurs-turning-professional. This is the theatre in whose formation
Chekhov's work participated and in which the role of the director, as in-
dustrial manager, was to become increasingly significant. The role of the
director is, of course, not entirely new - Stanislavski's own practice was
strongly influenced by the example of Georg von Saxe-Meiningen, to
name but one obvious antecedent-but the coincidence of company man-
agement, artistic vision, and day-to-day organization of the work of the
actors is a decisive consolidation of the role. Nor are all directors indus-
trial managers, even today. Many share the freelance precarity enjoyed by
the actors whose work they direct. Nonetheless, even when the director is
not the "chief executive" of a building-based theatre, or in some other
way part of the "management" of a permanent or semipermanent com-
pany, her role tends toward management functions and appropriates cer-
tain management prerogatives (even if these sometimes take only illusory
form). Actors seeking employment at a major theatre will often imagine
that it is the director, rather than the organization, that hires them. The
power of the director over the employment prospects of actors is far from
entirely illusory, even here: it is, after all, the director who constantly
evaluates the employee's performance and who, in the workplace, ap-
pears to determine the rhythm and direction of work. It may even be that
the director represents the actor's best chance of being employed again.
Even where the director is employed on similar freelance contracts to
those given to actors, and where it is the permanent stage staff of the the-
atre itself who keep time in the rehearsal room, the director is still subjec-
tively experienced by the actors (and perhaps even by the permanent
stage staff) as the representative of management. The director herself, in
this situation, however, is still likely to experience her own role as that of
an employee, in a somewhat compromised position between the "real"
management and the "real" employees. In this ambiguity of economic
and even class position, she resembles, of course, the figure of the "profes-
sional," negotiating between a commitment to the work for its own sake
and the fact that this work is in fact the management of the work of others.
The basis for this generalized experience of workplace relations is the po-


OF WORK AND TIME 49

sition of the director as manager consolidated in the emergent profes-
sional theatres of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in-
cluding, of course, the Moscow Art Theatre.
The requirement that a theatrical production should be under the
overall control of a director is usually understood in aesthetic terms. Lau-
rence Senelick, for example, accounts for the development of a director's
theatre, with specific reference to the productions of Chekhov's plays at
the Moscow Art Theatre, as follows:
Chekhov's plays were written at a time when the stage director
was becoming a paramount factor in the theatre.[ ... .] The techni-
cal innovations of the modern stage, including electric lighting and
mises-en-scene intent on reproducing "real life," required expert
handling to blend and harmonize the various elements. Chekhov's
development as a playwright from 1888 to 1904 coincides with this
move from a stage governed by histrionic and spectacular display
to one in which ensemble effect and the creation of "mood" reigned
supreme. [.. . ] But Chekhov's "Big Four" can succeed on stage
only with strong and coordinated ensemble playing, best achieved
under the baton of a single "conductor."48
But, as Senelick is clearly aware, this is not simply a question of a new
kind of play requiring a new kind of production process. The coincidence
of Chekhov's development as a playwright with the emergence of the
director as "paramount factor" in the theatre involves reciprocal causal-
ity: the reorganization of the production process shapes the kind of plays
that get written within it. Indeed, as Nick Worrall suggests in his study of
the Moscow Art Theatre, it is partly the emergent understanding of the
making of a theatrical performance as a production process that charac-
terizes this reorganization. It was Stanislavski, as director of what was
initially called the Moscow Public-Accessible Art Theatre's first produc-
tion, Tsar Fedor Ioannovich, who "staked a claim for the importance of the
role of the director as overall organiser of the production." Previously,
Worrall writes, "Russian critics and commentators invariably spoke of
'performances'; henceforth they would speak of 'productions,' with all
the implications this had for ensemble, unity of intellectual conception
and aesthetically effective mise-en-scene."49 One key feature of this pro-
duction process was the extent to which performances would now be
made by way of rehearsal. While rehearsals in the Imperial Theatres
would typically number no more than around twelve per production,


50 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

Stanislavski's production of Tsar Fedor had seventy-four. This move to-
ward extensive rehearsal, and the more or less simultaneous develop-
ment of a formal training regime for actors as part of the Moscow Art
Theatre project, marks therefore a transition between two conceptions of
theatrical work. In the first the objective is to get as quickly as possible to
the "real" work, conceived as the performance on stage. In the second the
"real" work is what is done in the rehearsal room. This logic will find its
almost paradoxical realization in the paratheatrical work of Grotowski, in
which the work of the theatreomaker is carried out entirely for its own
sake. But it underlies nearly all modern conceptions of the work of the
theatre, from the development of extensive and departmentalized work
facilities backstage (from design to marketing) to the process orientation
of much experimental practice in the twentieth century, for both of which
the term workshop reveals the presence of an industrial model. It also gen-
erates the conditions in which actors' demands to be paid for rehearsals
could no longer be effectively resisted by theatrical managements. The
actor's job in the modern theatre is to rehearse, rather than simply to per-
form, and rehearsal is no longer understood as a kind of informal per-
sonal preparation (for hourly paid teachers in UK higher education this
preindustrial attitude to preparation still prevails, however).
The director's job is to organize this work process-management is
the organization of work-and implicitly, therefore, to ensure that suffi-
cient use of the rehearsal period leads to a successful (and even profitable)
production. Thus the work of the actor becomes subject to the general
conditions of the working day in industrial capitalism, and the director
has charge, on behalf of capital, of the labor time of the actor. This incipi-
ent Taylorization of the theatrical production process makes itself most
visible, at least to those whose focus is what happens on stage rather than
backstage, in aesthetic principles such as unified vision, ensemble play-
ing, "complicite," and the like. The industrial and aesthetic aspects of this
"moment" in the development of the theatre most obviously coincide on
stage in the subordination of character (and actor) to dramatic function
encouraged in Stanislavski's theatre and carried forward (alongside Len-
in's enthusiasm for Taylor) in the work of Meyerhold.
WORK AND REST
In the dramatic fiction presented onstage in Uncle Vanya, the estate turns
out to be a workplace, perhaps even a kind of factory, in which it only


OF WORK AND TIME 51

looks as though work is not there. The theatre in which this dramatic fic-
tion is presented turns out to be the same kind of place. To return, then, to
the questions posed at the start of this chapter: what kind of work? what
kind of rest? Sonya and Vanya are going to work. But, Sonya promises,
they will eventually rest. The actors presenting this work in which they
are about to work are working but will soon rest, when "the curtain
slowly falls." The spectator is not working now, not yet, having paid from
her waged labor for this very particular kind of rest: "recreation." But she
will soon have to work again (and if she doesn't she won't be buying any
more theatre tickets).
Work, then, first of all, is the labor of self-reproduction. We all have to
make a living somehow. There is a certain resignation to this: "we shall
patiently bear the trials that life sends us"; we will all go home, get up in
the morning, and go to work. "Labour," claims Marx, "is a condition of
human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eter-
nal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and
nature, and therefore human life itself."50 So even if someone were suc-
cessfully to overthrow capitalism overnight, they would still have to go to
work in the morning. So, if there is to be rest, it cannot be rest from work.
Work is also the basis for certain ideologies. In all their various ver-
sions these tend to involve claims that work has intrinsic, often moral
merits, beyond the production of surplus value. Stakhanovism and the
so-called Protestant work ethic are examples of this, but the most perti-
nent here is "professionalism," in which work, even when waged, is os-
tensibly conducted for its own sake and directed toward the common
good. A certain restlessness comes as part of this ideological formation,
making its adherents a slightly unpredictable bunch, as will become clear
when the events of May 1968 take center stage in chapter 4.
Work is also the production of leisure, a form of rest (amid rather than
beyond work). The work of the actors-their professional work-is orga-
nized as part of a set of interlocking industries that produce the recreation
that is an essential aspect of the worker's self-reproduction. For workers
outside the "leisure industries" work is what permits the leisure in which
the work of the "leisure industries," like the theatre, may be consumed.
The intensification of this interrelation finds its zenith in Theodor Ador-
no's and Max Horkheimer's vision of the culture industry, in which
amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is
sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and
to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at


52 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

the same time mechanization has such power over a man's leisure
and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of
amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images
of the work process itself.51
No real rest, then, for the wicked, even in the "little culture" secured by
the capitalist in his acquiescence in the reduction of the working day.
Work, at last, is how we will make the world a better place. This is, in
a sense, an extension of the ideology of the professional -who is of course
a close relation to the passionate amateur-in which the intrinsic merit
and the common good combine to underwrite political work, revolution-
ary work even. This kind of work can sometimes be done in theatres, too,
by professionals and passionate amateurs alike and sometimes together.
It is the work is that Astrov talks about in Uncle Vanya, even if we don't see
him actually doing it. Other figures in other Chekhov plays talk this way
too, carrying varying degrees of conviction, in Three Sisters, for example:
TUZENBACH: In many years' time, you say, life on the earth will be
beautiful and amazing. That's true. But in order to take part in
that life now, even if at a remove, one must prepare for it, one
must work.2
And in The Cherry Orchard, too:
TROFIMOv: Man goes forward, perfecting his skills. Everything that
is now beyond his reach will one day become near and com-
prehensible, only we must work, we must help with all our
strength those who are seeking the truth. In Russia as yet we
have very few who do work.3
The fact that as they say these things neither Trofimov nor Tuzenbach,
nor even Astrov, is actually doing any work is not simply a way of hold-
ing up either these figures or what they say to the play of irony. Or rather,
it is the kind of irony upon irony of which theatrical production is espe-
cially capable, particularly on the subject of work. Raymond Williams
sees the recourse to mere irony as typical of what he calls "English Chek-
hov," in which
the dominant tone is pathetic charm. The call to work is ironically
displaced, by the undoubted fact that it is made by those who do


OF WORK AND TIME 53

not work, and apparently will never work (as Trofimov, the "eter-
nal student," in the speeches just quoted). Thus the aspiration is
converted into just another idiosyncrasy. [ . . . ]The aspiration is
genuine. To deflect it ironically is to cheapen and sentimentalise
the whole feeling.54
After all, if they (Trofimov, Tuzenbach, Astrov) were just "doing it," we
wouldn't be hearing them talk about it. Their talk, produced by way of
the work of the actor, is, rather, like the indolence that constitutes the ap-
pearance of work in Uncle Vanya: the only way the idea of work (rather
than just the fact of it) can make an appearance on stage.55 This is the irony
of irony. Conversation is the medium in which such realities move in this
theatre. Even less than leisure, then, is it the opposite of work. Indeed, as
will become more apparent later, in consideration of the place of conver-
sation in the work of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma and of communica-
tion, including even "idle chatter" in the political thought of Paolo Virno,
conversation is itself a form of work, with emancipatory potential.
Work finally, then, is the motor of historical change, at least in the vi-
sion articulated by Astrov, Trofimov, and Tuzenbach. In one or two or
three hundred years' time this work will perhaps be done. Then "we shall
rest." But how can this be the case if work is "an eternal natural neces-
sity"? The answer lies in a rejection of the very teleology in which Chek-
hov's characters seem to invest their hope. The realm of freedom (free-
dom from work, rest) is not to be found on the far side of the realm of
necessity in some future beyond work. When Marx writes, in volume 3 of
Capital, about the realm of freedom, he insists that, although it does con-
stitute a kind of "beyond," it is nevertheless grounded in the continuing
realm of necessity. Freedom from work can be maximized under condi-
tions of "common control" over production, enabling "that development
of human energy which is an end in itself," but this "can blossom forth
only with this realm of necessity as its basis." That is to say that there is
not a process through which we may pass from the realm of necessity to
the realm of freedom, but that we are engaged, instead, in a constant
struggle to build the realm of freedom within the realm of necessity. In a
production of Uncle Vanya in the theatre today, at least one hundred years
after the moment in which a spectator might imagine Sonya's words to
have been spoken, there is a double contemporaneity at work that undoes
or loops back the implicit teleology. The spectator is the future in whom
Sonya's hopes rested. Now is still the moment in which such hopes may
be entertained. The prerequisite, Marx says, for the realization of such


54 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

hopes -that "we shall rest" -is "the shortening of the working day." So,
rather than working now in order to build the freedom of the future, po-
litical struggle over work might be about reducing the part it plays in life.
This is an interesting idea to consider when leaving a theatre of an eve-
ning, as the curtain comes down on this encounter between her work and
our entertainment.
This moment or encounter in the theatre also constitutes an instance of
the production of social relations. This is not simply another version of
the largely empty claim in which the theatrical event is said to create soci-
ality or even community in general by means of its mere gathering to-
gether of people in one place. A swimming competition would do this just
as well. This theatrical encounter is rather the production of social rela-
tions with specific content: social relations whose content is social rela-
tions, as it were, and precisely those social relations that are organized
and understood by way of work. And they are also social relations that
cross historical time: if I am the future in whom Sonya placed her hope,
then I recognize both a social relation between myself and a social situa-
tion of a hundred or so years ago, and the historicity of my own social
relations. In both recognitions there is a most definite lack of inevitability.
And a social relation that implies, even demands, a measure of reflection
upon social relation, inviting a cross-temporal conversation.
The moment in which these social relations are produced does not
posit a position on the outside of contemporary regimes of production;
there is no clear exterior space of opposition available either in the theatre
or in the play, let alone a utopia. Instead, whatever social relations with
content might be produced in this encounter are produced from within
the very core of production itself: in the characters' resignation to their
work as a kind of destiny, as well as in theatrical production's own know-
ing participation in precisely those structures of capital that determine
the difference between work and play, between necessity and freedom.
For theatrical production, far from being an instance of the heterogeneous
exteriority to capitalist production that might be claimed by and for aes-
thetic subjectivity, is of course a nest in which the logics of that produc-
tion assert themselves with insidious and delightful force, even as they
seem to produce, or perhaps to promise, at the very same time, that "rest"
that for Vanya and Sonya, at least, comes only beyond the grave, but that
might, in some other world, such as this one, be possible in life. The prom-
ise of performance, here, turns out to depend, for its very possibility, on
the fact that it is production-production rather than performance, as the
Russian commentators so rightly noted - and not, as has been claimed
elsewhere, something to be valued precisely because it is unproductive.


OF WORK AND TIME 55

Miranda Joseph develops a critique of claims that performance is un-
productive, shaped by a reading of Marx alongside Judith Butler. In Jo-
seph's reading of Marx, she emphasizes the idea, most strongly present,
she suggests, in his early texts, that all human work, not simply that
which is normally understood as economically productive (like making
things in factories), might be understood as production. This enables her
to include "the production of all sorts of things beyond traditional mate-
rial objects" as production and to graft onto Marx's theory of value the
vital contribution of feminist thought to the "recognition of values other
than monetary exchange as the measure of productivity."56 For Joseph,
then, diverse production thus produces a "diversity of subjects."57 Fol-
lowing Raymond Williams (in his late, Marxist vein), Joseph argues that
these subjects participate in (are produced by and themselves produce)
material significations that may include "subjectivity, social relations,
and consciousness,"58 as well as more obviously material products in the
form of commodities. Joseph then adds to this reading of Marx's material-
ism Butler's suggestion that, although "highly constrained,"59 consump-
tion is also a site for the production of both individual and collective sub-
jectivities.
Taken together, then, it is from these linked ideas that production may
be capable of more than just commodities, that consumption itself is a
form of production, and that this form of production may be more than
simply the reproduction of the status quo ante, or what Peggy Phelan
calls "the Same,"60 that Joseph derives an account of the moment of per-
formance that she distinguishes from that offered by Phelan:
The notion that performance is unproductive because it is live, be-
cause it is produced and consumed in the same moment, because it
is not a material commodity[ ... .] is, as I think I've made clear by
now, simply wrong.61
This is because Phelan "cannot recognize the audience's consumption as
production" and because, in thus "losing the audience" she "loses the
theatrical aspect of the artwork's performativity," which Joseph defines
as "both its reiterative and witnessed, and therefore social, aspects."62 For
Joseph this leaves Phelan with only the narrow performativity, that the
work "enacts that which it names,"63 a performativity that would elude
the economy of production by unnaming itself in the moment of bringing
its enactment to an end: "performance becomes itself through its disap-
pearance."64
In a performance of Uncle Vanya, then, the simultaneous commitment


56 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

to both work and rest constitutes a kind of promise to any or every specta-
tor that they might constitute themselves in some new orientation toward
work and its time. That this is the promise is evident only from a recogni-
tion of the structure of theatrical production, and not merely from the
content of the drama: that the actors are working to produce something;
that they are about to stop doing so, and indeed to rest, in the instant of
their rededication to work and their longing for rest; and that this call is
addressed to a presumed (even if largely fictive) set of social relations in
which the addressee might, as an act of productive consumption, choose
to constitute some aspect of their subjectivity. Thus a productive perfor-
mativity is in play, in which this subjective orientation, or orientation of
subjectivity, is on both the affective and the interpretative horizon. There
is, of course, only very limited efficacy in all this: there is no telling what
any particular spectator at any specific production might actually do or
feel within such horizons; what they might make of this promise. We
should not imagine anyone leaving the theatre and immediately dedicat-
ing themselves to their own version of Astrov's vision nor yet forming a
revolutionary party that might soon overthrow the Tsarist regime and
install a dictatorship of the proletariat.
What we might imagine, more modestly, though, is a suspension and
a fold. The time of the play suspends the work of history. In that suspen-
sion a subjectivity takes shape. That subjectivity is an imaginative self-
projection through the moment from which the play "speaks" -the mo-
ment that awaits, unwittingly, the Russian Revolution-into a future that
was the promise of that Revolution. This projection, or subjective self-
orientation in the moment of suspension, is toward at least two simulta-
neously possible futures, two destinies of the promise. Imagining for-
ward, through the moment that is the play, makes visible both the
historical failure of one particular attempt at redeeming the promise that
"we shall rest" and the still-present possibility that such redemption
might be achieved. This subjective self-orientation constitutes a recogni-
tion that its own historical situation and social relations are not inevitable.
It brings into momentary being the subject of a history that has not hap-
pened yet or of a twentieth century that might have been otherwise. But,
nothing being inevitable, there is no teleology here. The structure of this
subjectivity might seem romantic in its desire to produce the future out of
an imaginary past. But in the theatre the past in question is as here now as
the future it imagines. It performs a temporal collapse or fold. An alterna-
tive future of the past is momentarily seized in the present. It is precisely


OF WORK AND TIME 57

in this present that the promise has its time of redemption. Work really is
suspended. We could rest. Right now.
Thus it becomes possible to experience, at the end of Uncle Vanya, not
simply the bittersweet cradling of a loss, so often attributed to Chekhov's
plays. It is instead a rather stranger sensation, of mourning the loss of a
future that has not been possible while still believing fervently in its con-
tinuing possibility. Perhaps it is in an attempt to convey this strange feel-
ing that Masha, in The Seagull, famously announces, "I am in mourning
for my life":65 she is in mourning for a life that, not being over, cannot yet
be mourned and that is renewed in every production of the play. This
double feeling, in Uncle Vanya, is mapped onto what we might have cared
to call "love," which, as so often in Chekhov, seems to be a matter of being
in the wrong time.
vANYA: I used to meet her ten years ago at my sister's. She was
seventeen then and I was thirty seven. Why didn't I fall in love
with her then and propose to her? I could have -quite easily!
And she would now be my wife ... Yes ... We would both
now have been woken by the storm, she would be frightened
by the thunder and I would hold her in my arms and whisper,
"Don't be afraid, I'm here."66
For a moment the present-the present of the stage representation of a
rainy night-is the result of a past in which the future was different. Of
course the vicissitudes of love frequently deflect and almost wholly ab-
sorb directorly, actorly, and critical attention, not without some assistance
from the text. It is nearly always easier to speak of love than it is to talk
about communism. The trick, here, is almost to do both, somewhat ama-
teurishly.


THREE   I  All Theatre, All the Time

In the autumn of 1928 the Latvian theatre director Asja Lacis visited Berlin
as part of her work for Narkompros, the culture and education depart-
ment of the government of the Soviet Union.1 Among her priorities for this
visit, undertaken as a member of the film section of the Soviet trade mis-
sion, was to make contact, on behalf of the "Proletarian Theatre" group
within Narkompros, with the German Union of Proletarian Revolutionary
Playwrights. She also gave lectures on film, based on recent work develop-
ing a children's cinema in Moscow. During the course of conversations in
Berlin with two leading members of the German Communist Party (KPD),
Gerhard Eisler (brother of the composer Hanns) and Johannes Becher, La-
cis described some of the work she had done in the early years of the So-
viet revolution, making theatre with children in the Russian town of Orel
in 1918. Becher and Eisler were sufficiently interested in what she told
them to imagine that her work might provide them with a model for the
development of a children's theatre at the KPD headquarters, the Lieb-
knechthaus. They asked Lacis to work out a program for them. Her friend
Walter Benjamin, with whom she had discussed this work before, when
they first met on the island of Capri in 1924, and who had been very inter-
ested in it, now volunteered to help her with the program: "'Ich werde das
Programm schreiben,' sagte er, 'und deine praktische Arbeit theoretisch
darlegen und begriinden."'2 Lacis recalls that Benjamin's first draft was
"monstruously complicated" and that when Becher and Eisler read it, they
laughed and recognized immediately that Benjamin must have written it.3
She took it back to Benjamin to be rewritten more clearly, and it is his sec-
ond draft that exists today as "Program for a Proletarian Children's The-
ater," the text to which this chapter is devoted.4
1. READING "THE PROGRAM"
This short text is a kind of manifesto for the work of the passionate ama-
teur. Or, to put it another way, it is a claim staked on the revolutionary

58


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 59

value of play and an amateur's vision of a world in which work under
capitalism is suspended or even abolished. It challenges four very power-
ful and widely held ideas: that work is inevitable, that work is good, that
work might lead to a better world (the consolation offered, perhaps, by
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya), and that a better world is something toward
which anything might or ought to lead. As this chapter will seek to show,
it holds out the prospect of a complete reorganization of work and time in
relation to theatre; suggests a radical attempt to undo precisely the capi-
talist professionalism that had been establishing its hold over theatrical
production; and, at the same time, proposes an alternative to the cult of
work itself. This vision is articulated through the figure of the child-as-
amateur, who finds her fulfilment in the now of her beautiful childhood
rather than in the development of her skills in the service of capitalist
development or even in the teleology of the revolutionary project. It is
articulated, however, in a context-political and cultural collaboration
within the Second International-where the teleology of revolution and
the moral value of work were both hegemonic.5 Once again, the profes-
sional and the amateur live in a paradoxical relation with one another, in
Benjamin's text, in the text's own relationship to Lacis's practice, and in
the various contexts -which this chapter will explore -from which both
the text and the practice it accounts for and imagines arose. Within the
broader logic of this book, Benjamin's "Program" warns that as long as
passionate amateurs continue to work according to the logics of indus-
trial capitalism, the radical potential of their activity will be continually
suppressed.
Benjamin's "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater" starts right
in the grip of its own paradoxical position, claiming that while this "pro-
letarian education must be based on the party program," the party pro-
gram itself "is no instrument of a class-conscious education" (201). The
party program itself, because it is ideology, will only ever reach the child
as a "catchphrase," and while it would be easy enough to have children
across the country "parroting" catchphrases, this will do nothing to en-
sure that the party program is acted upon once these proletarian children
have become adults. Thus the program of which Benjamin's "Program"
will form a part is of no use for the purposes it seeks to realize by includ-
ing Benjamin's "Program." Benjamin's "Program" is, in effect, an attempt
to insert a form of antiprogrammatic thought into the party program. Its
"de-schooling" requires, more or less a priori, the abandonment of "pro-
gram." While Benjamin's text might be said to observe the letter of the
party program, its underlying logic suggests an ironic radicalization of


60 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

that very program. He must both mean and not mean what he says when
he writes that "proletarian education must be based on the party pro-
gram." In this irony lies its own "secret signal" that the "party program"
itself, if it is to be the basis for proletarian education, must change, and
change to such an extent that it somehow ceases to be a program.
The "Program" is here already showing signs of Benjamin's familiar
tendency (which will be examined in a little more detail below) to think
against the logic of a unidirectional linear time, associated with both the
relentless forward march of capitalist progress and the redemptive hori-
zon of revolutionary teleology implied by an overdeterministic reading of
Marx. Less familiar, however, is the possibility that such disruptions to
historical time might also be performed at the level of the everyday. But
that is precisely what is suggested in the "Program." Benjamin proposes
that "the framework of proletarian education from the fourth to the four-
teenth year should be the proletarian children's theatre" (202). The logic
of the "Program" suggests, furthermore, that when this theatre has ceased
to be the "entire life" of the proletarian child, once the child has passed
the age of fourteen, it may have no further role to play. Since Benjamin
declares his "Program," and, by implication, the theatre that he values, to
"have nothing to do with that of the modern bourgeoisie" (202), we might
reasonably conclude that in the society formed by graduates of the prole-
tarian children's theatre, theatre will no longer take its place within the
structure of life determined by the administrated alternation between
work and leisure. Theatre will cease to be a place where people come to
sit in the dark in their leisure time to watch people at work in the light. Its
place in the composition of a lifetime will change. Now it is something
people either do for a living or attend occasionally in the evening after
work. In the future (which must also be, of course, for Benjamin, now)
theatre is something you do for ten years as a child but that you may
never do again. To think in Brecht's terms, this constitutes an Umfunktion-
ierung (repurposing) of the theatre, far more comprehensive even than the
Lehrstick, whose theoretical proposal, in its emphasis on continual re-
hearsal rather than an orientation toward performance, was frequently
evaded in practice, including by Brecht himself.6 Benjamin's Umfunktion-
ierung of theatre is a redistribution of activity in time that detaches itself
from the patterns of life imposed by the working day, including those that
involve working during the day and going to the theatre in the evening.
This interruption of temporal logic, at the levels of both history and
the life of the individual, is therefore a direct challenge to the normaliza-
tion or naturalization of work as the purpose or meaning of a life. All the


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 61

more so, in the case of the "Program," because Benjamin does not con-
ceive of this proletarian education in terms of preparation for work. In-
stead it must precede "the teaching curriculum as such," in which specific
skills and knowledge might be acquired. It serves as "an objective space
within which education can be located," while a bourgeois education
needs "an idea toward which education leads." Lacis makes a similar dis-
tinction in her own account of the work on which the "Program" was
based:
Bourgeois education was based on the development of a special
capacity, a special talent. To speak with Brecht: it seeks to make
sausages of the individual and her capacities. Bourgeois society re-
quires that its members produce things as soon as possible. This
principle is obvious from every aspect of a child's education. When
such children play theatre, they always have the result in mind -
the performance, their appearance before the audience. That's how
the joy of playful production is lost. The director is the pedagogue
in the background, drilling the children. [.. . ] It is the goal of com-
munist education, on the basis of a high general level of prepara-
tion, to set productivity free.7
Lacis here clearly sees the activity of making or "playing" (she uses the
German verb spielen) as productive, however, whereas the rather more
paradoxical logic of Benjamin's text tends to suspend the idea of produc-
tivity as such, through its interruption of the temporality with which it is
normally associated. This suspension - of production and of teleology - is
incomplete, of course (either partial or temporary), in that the ultimate
purpose of his antiprogrammatic program is to ensure that "the party
program is acted on in ten or twenty years" (201). Productivity and pro-
gram are suspended in order that the program's objectives may be pro-
duced. Things to be achieved at a future time depend upon the suspen-
sion of all movement toward that time, a suspension that takes place
through the conception of education as the fulfillment of activity in a de-
fined "space" rather than as progress through time: "It is only in the the-
ater that the whole of life can appear in a defined space, framed in all its
plenitude; and this is why proletarian children's theater is the dialectical
site of education" (202).8
This interruption of a unidirectional temporality in which education is
understood as training for productive work is repeated in the uncoupling
of the idea of making theatre from the presentation of professional theat-


62 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

rical productions. The idea that a performance, as such, is only likely to
emerge as a kind of by-product of playfulness, as a kind of "mistake" or
"prank," as Benjamin puts it,9 means that there is no place in this theatre
for the "bourgeoise Regisseur" (765), a term that is translated into English
as "manager" but that in a theatrical context also, of course, refers to the
"director."10 That the theatre director is an industrial "manager" was a
central claim of the preceding chapter. But the productive forces at play in
the proletarian children's theatre do not need to be marshaled and coor-
dinated into a repeatable production designed to enter the repertoire of a
theatre company. The "Program" proposes an alternative to the industri-
alization of theatre. It unseats the recently appointed "Regisseur" who, as
we have seen in chapter 2, had taken managerial control not just of the
process of production but also of the education of the theatrical work-
force. This is not simply a repudiation of a bourgeois logic. While Stan-
islavski's initial practice takes shape in a decidedly bourgeois context-
and might even be understood as part of a systematic bourgeoisification
of the theatre in Russia -its insistence on work, training, and the produc-
tion by such means of a "character" proved substantially consistent with
the ostensibly antibourgeois production priorities of the early Soviet pe-
riod, which saw work as the means by which a "new man" might be pro-
duced. Although Benjamin did not know Russian-as the linguistic mis-
fortunes detailed in Moscow Diary clearly show-and is therefore
unlikely to have studied Stanislavski's account of his work as a director
and teacher, first published in Russian in 1926, it is still tempting to inter-
pret his insistence in the "Program" that the leader of the proletarian chil-
dren's theatre should not be a "moral personality" as a criticism of the
figure of the director exemplified by Stanislavski, whose work as the di-
rector of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Czar's Bride he had seen in Moscow in
1927.
Of course Benjamin's ideas here are also in sharp distinction with
what I have earlier called the "incipient Taylorization" of theatre carried
forward in the work of Meyerhold. I shall develop further the implica-
tions of this contradiction between Benjamin's "Program" and Soviet
communism's glorification of work in the section that follows. What mat-
ters here is the task Benjamin's "Program" assigns to the leader, who, far
from being a Taylorist manager driving his charges forward toward de-
fined future production, offers, in an attitude of "unsentimental ... peda-
gogic love" (203), his or her observation of what the children are doing
and making. It is this abstention from productivist goal setting, in which
the future is crafted by work in the present, which allows the leader of the


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 63

theatre to become a receiver of the "signal from another world, in which
the child lives and commands" (204). This "world" is a future, too, but
very different from a future whose outlines and contents have been
planned in advance and then realized through the industrial production
process of rehearsal. It is a future that, in its reception in the present, takes
place now; it is a fold or rupture in the progressive historical continuum.
What Benjamin's text suggests, then, is that the role of the manager in the
process of production is, at least in part, to look after that continuum.
Professionals keep history on track by keeping the workers in line. The
unsentimental love of the passionate amateur derails it. Instead of leading
the children forward, away from childhood itself, and toward the adult
responsibilities of productive work, the "Program" claims to offer its
young participants "the fulfilment of their childhood" (205), while its
adult facilitators are privileged with a glimpse of an unplanned-for future
in the "secret signal of what is to come that speaks from the gesture of the
child" (206). The signals are coming back down the yet-to-be constructed
line to the future, reversing the normal direction of pedagogy repudiated
at the start of Benjamin's text: "the propaganda of ideas" that seeks to
make the future in its own image is jammed by what the future has to say
back to the present.
The "Program" that turns out to be so antiprogrammatic is therefore
one of those moments in Benjamin's writing where his thinking about
theatre appears as part of a theorization of history or rather, in this case,
perhaps, where a theory of history underpins a theorization of theatre.
The outlines of Benjamin's theorization of history are visible in his 1919
doctoral dissertation, "The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanti-
cism," where he links a critique of the ideology of progress, as articulated
by Friedrich Schegel in particular, with the idea of messianism, which, he
suggests in a letter to Ernst Schoen, constitutes the "centre of romanti-
cism," even if, as he claims to Schoen, he is unable fully to explore this
improperly mystical concept in the context of a text composed for aca-
demic examination. It is realized rather more substantively, if only in
typically and appropriately fragmentary form, in his 1940 text, "On the
Concept of History." Benjamin's history is a crucial concept for this book's
attempt to explore distinctions between the practices of the passionate
amateur and those of the "professional" -either bourgeois-capitalist, re-
formist, or revolutionary -for whom working toward the future con-
struction of the ideal community is the dominant mode in which history
might be experienced or enacted. Werner Hamacher, in the very act of
drawing attention to the persistence of the motif of the "critique of prog-


64 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

ress" from Benjamin's early work on romanticism to his later historical
materialist reflections of history, also cautions that "one should not iden-
tify the configuration of messianism and critique of the ideology of prog-
ress in this very early work with his later outlines on the philosophy of
history."12 Nor, perhaps, is the conception of history underlying the "Pro-
gram for a Proletarian Children's Theater" of 1928 strictly identical with
those in play in either the earlier or the later texts. All the same, there is at
the very least an inclination in all three moments toward an understand-
ing of history in terms of rupture and possibility, rather than continuity
and progress. It is in its interruption of continuity and the possibilities
that might thereby be realized that the practice of theatre proposed in the
"Program" -nonprofessional, antiprofessional, amateur theatre - attains
its particular significance, for Benjamin and for the present project. Hence,
and taking the form of a momentary digression from the forward move-
ment of this chapter, in which a historical account of the practice (Lacis's)
on and for which the "Program" came to be based lies in the imminent
future, the time has come for a brief account of how this particular text
takes center stage in the conception of the "passionate amateur."
Let us think first of the "secret signal" from the future, in relation to
the "weak messianic force" with which, according to Thesis II of "On the
Concept of History," we have been "endowed" on the basis of "a secret
agreement between past generations and the present one."13 One might
imagine, then, that it is the "weak messianic force" carried by the adults
of the present generation that solicits the "secret signal" from the chil-
dren. The "signal" comes as a kind of recognition that the "weak messi-
anic force" is still, or rather, will continue to be, alive. It is a testimony that
the "secret agreement" is still in place. The agreement is "secret" inas-
much as neither generation knows its content; what it is that is agreed can
only be known in the moment in which the signal is received and recog-
nized. The arrangement is a little like an encryption software program, in
which both sender and receiver possess private keys that the other cannot
know, but where the interaction of one's private key with the other's pub-
lic key (or vice versa) allows the file or message to be decoded. It takes
both parties, both generations, for the signal to appear or to appear mean-
ingful. It cannot simply be projected from the present, intentionally and
knowingly, into the future, to be redeemed there, without already being
there. As Hamacher writes, this "weak messianic force" is
never messianic in the sense that we ourselves are enabled by it to
direct the hope for our own redemption towards the future or, to


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 65

be more precise, to future generations, but only in the entirely dif-
ferent sense that we have been "endowed with" it by former gen-
erations, even by all former generations, as the compliance with
their expectations.14
In the present, it is an endowment through which "the past has a claim"
upon us. The "secret signal" from the future is a recognition of the persis-
tence of this claim. In other words, our capacity to recognize in the ges-
ture of the child a secret signal from the future is the evidence for the ex-
istence of the "weak messianic force," that our own claim upon the future
might be recognized, even if the content of the claim we might be making
cannot be specified in advance (now) but is only realized or redeemed in
its relation to the specific historical situation of a future we cannot know.
This messianic force is weak, Hamacher suggests, because it is always
susceptible to failure, open to the possibility that possibilities (for happi-
ness, justice) might be missed. If they are not grasped by someone capable
of rising above the lethargy produced by the "automatism of the actuali-
ties unfolding homogeneously out of possibilities,"15 the future will con-
form with the present, in a reproduction of the same oppressions, over
and over again:
A historian and a politician takes a stand for the historically pos-
sible and for happiness only if he does not see history as a linear
and homogeneous process whose form always remains the same
and whose contents, assimilated to the persistent form, are indif-
ferent.16
The problem is not just the urgency with which industrial capitalism as-
serts its claim upon the future-with its relentless expansionist drive-
but also, and perhaps most disastrously, the conformity of anti-capitalist
political movements in the very same historico-temporal logic. As Benja-
min writes in his "Paralipomena to 'On the Concept of History"':
In the idea of the classless society, Marx secularized the idea of
messianic time. And that was a good thing. It was only when the
Social Democrats elevated this idea to an "ideal" that the trouble
began. The ideal was defined in Neo-Kantian doctrine as an "infi-
nite [unendlich] task." And this doctrine was the school philosophy
of the Social Democratic party -from Schmidt and Stadler through
Natorp and Vorldnder. Once the classless society had been defined


66 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

as an infinite task the empty and homogenous time was trans-
formed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for
the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less
equanimity. In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry
with it its revolutionary chance, provided only that it is defined in
a specific way, namely as the chance of a completely new resolu-
tion of a completely new problem.17
There is a possible paradox here, which the "Program" exposes rather
clearly. Once political opposition to capitalism comes to regard itself in
terms of the "infinite task," it seems to abandon itself to doing nothing, in
sure and certain expectation that the revolution will just turn up. At the
same time, in regarding its opposition to capitalism as an "infinite task,"
it aligns itself with precisely that historically specific logic of capitalism
itself -that value is derived from work-from which it might, more radi-
cally, choose to dissociate itself. Thus in Benjamin's uncoupling of play
from productivity, and in his extraction of theatre from the leisure (or
culture) industry, there is also a possibility that the progress of capital-
ism's "empty and homogenous time" might be interrupted. It is no longer
a matter of either waiting or working one's way through that expanse of
time in order to build something for the future. In place of more of the
same of this homogenous time of capitalism, then, there might come some
"flash" of a possibility not to be missed, a constellation of two different
but related "Nows" in which true historical time -the time of politics and
of happiness-might appear. Hamacher writes that, in Benjamin's con-
cept of history, "there is historical time only insofar as there is an excess
of the unactualised, the unfinished, failed, thwarted, which leaps beyond
its particular Now and demands from another Now its settlement, correc-
tion and fulfilment."18 The "Program," in its rejection of the very logic of
program, insists upon the constant generation of the "unactualised, the
unfinished" in its refusal to finish either an education or a piece of theatri-
cal performance. This is a refusal that does not content itself with waiting,
either: it must be active in its interruption of the logic in which history is
progress made by work. It is not a matter of replacing work with doing
nothing. What is crucial is that a determinate "nonwork" must substitute
for work and thus, in a sense, negate it.19
Theatre-if it can be taken out of its place in the culture industry,
stripped of its professionalism, and radically repurposed -seems like a
loophole through which the passionate amateur might exit from the "con-
formism" defined by the "illusion that the factory work ostensibly fur-


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 67

thering technological progress constituted a political achievement."20 As
a "defined space" in which "the whole of life" can "appear," it constitutes
the stage upon which an image of missed possibilities, overlooked in the
submission to work and progress and flashing into visibility in the coinci-
dence of two different "Nows," might appear: "It is not that what is past
casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is
past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a
flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dia-
lectics at a standstill."21 Perhaps that is precisely what becomes visible, as
the latent possibility of even the industrial theatre, at the end of Chek-
hov's Uncle Vanya and, in chapters yet to come, in the revolutionary
school-holiday school of Godard's La chinoise and the "romantic" evoca-
tion of "exodus" in the work of the theorists of post-Operaismo: the pas-
sionate amateur's determinate negation of work as dialectical image.
Over and over again, in Shakespeare, in Calder6n, battles fill the
last act and kings, princes, lords, and attendants "enter in flight."
The moment when they become visible to the audience stops them
in their tracks. The stage calls a halt to the flight of the dramatis
personae. Entering the sight of non-combatants and true superiors
allows the victims to draw breath as fresh air takes them in its em-
brace. That is what gives the stage appearance of these "fleeing"
entrances their hidden significance. Implicit in the reading of this
form of words is the expectation of a place, a light (daylight or
footlights) in which our own flight through life might be safe in the
presence of watching strangers.22
2. PRACTICE BEFORE THE "PROGRAM"
Perhaps it is appropriate that the idea that Asja Lacis might develop a
"Proletarian Childrens' Theater" based upon this "Program" was never
realized-not because its realization would represent some betrayal of
the text's antiprogrammatic character, but rather because the practice to
which it gestures had already taken place ten years earlier. In October
1918, Lacis was asked to take up a position as a director in the theatre in
Orel, a city about three hundred miles south west of Moscow and two
hundred miles east of the border of Belarus. On arrival in Orel (Oryol),
Lacis was immediately struck by the presence of large numbers of home-
less children on the streets. Such children-widely known in Russian as


68 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

the besprizorniki-had become a feature of city life before the Revolution
of 1917. As Alan Ball explains, the phenomenon of besprizornost-not by
any means new-had been amplified and intensified by the impact of
World War One.23 In the first place mass mobilization from 1914 deprived
families of their main breadwinners, forcing women to work long hours
outside the home and children, too, to find ways of earning money simply
to survive. Many children moved between homes that could no longer
support them and streets where they could improvise a precarious life
out of "begging, peddling, prostitution and theft."24 Then, as the war pro-
gressed and German forces pushed eastward into Russian territory, mass
evacuations eastward from Ukraine and Belarus resulted in the separa-
tion of families from one another, as well creating conditions in which
many adults died, leaving their children both orphaned and displaced. In
the immediate post-revolutionary years the care and education of chil-
dren were identified by the new Soviet government as key priorities, and
radical proposals were developed in which both care and education
might be provided by the state rather than by the family. By 1918 at least
three new government agencies were claiming responsibility for making
and implementing policy: in addition to the commissariats for Health and
Social Security, Narkompros, the Commissariat for Education (which also
oversaw artistic production), saw child welfare as part of its sphere of
operation.25
The idea that a theatre director -and one who already had experience
working with children, as Lacis had -should see the welfare of such chil-
dren as something to which she might contribute is thus entirely consis-
tent with both artistic and social policy in the first years of the Soviet
Union, a clear expression of revolutionary ambitions for the transforma-
tion of social relations. In Orel, some of the besprizorniki had been accom-
modated in an orphanage where, Lacis reports, they received food and
shelter but, as their "tired, sad eyes" showed, "nothing interested them":
they had become "children without childhood."26 Lacis herself was living
in an old aristocratic house, in which the characters of Turgenev's novel A
Nest of Nobles were supposed to have lived, and she proposed to the head
of city education that she should transform it into a space for children's
theatre rather than direct conventional productions for the city theatre.
Her proposal was approved, and the rooms of the house were opened up
for Lacis and the homeless children. In Lacis's account she was aware
from the very beginning that in order to liberate the creative faculties of
these traumatized children, it would be necessary to abandon any idea of
working toward specific goals such as the performance of a play under


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 69

the guidance of the "director's will" (Willen des Regisseurs).27 The rejection
of the manager-production complex as it is articulated in Benjamin's
"Program" thus represents both a theoretical position derived from a cri-
tique of bourgeois education (which is how Lacis herself frames it, in the
passage already cited, on the "goal of communist education") and a prac-
tical response to a specific historical situation. Lacis is proposing to "re-
purpose" (umfunktionieren) her own role as both teacher and director. She
is doing so, as we shall see, at a moment of historical possibility in which
all prior assumptions as to how basic social functions should be orga-
nized are in flux. In undoing recently consolidated bourgeois
assumptions -that the care of children should be undertaken in the home
of the "nuclear" family and that activities like education, welfare, and
theatre should be guided by appropriately qualified "professionals" - the
Bolshevik revolution's moment of historical possibility also threatens the
Platonic foundations of propriety upon which, at least in the political
sphere, the distinction between professionals and amateurs (workers and
rulers) depends. Jacques Ranciere's critique of Plato,28 in which he ad-
vances the idea that only those with no qualification to govern are quali-
fied to govern, might indeed be said to have found concrete expression in
this immediate post-revolutionary moment, in which, as Sheila Fitzpat-
rick observes in her account of the first years of Narkompros, "almost
nobody[ .. . ] had any administrative or organizational experience out-
side the sphere of emigre revolutionary politics."29 In this moment, then,
the revolutionaries, Lacis among them, are "passionate amateurs," un-
dertaking an experimental practice of individual and collective Umfunk-
tionierung, before circumstances seem to require that they should settle
down into becoming "revolutionary by profession."30 However, rather
than merely recapitulating a familiar narrative of the revolutionary po-
tentiality of the "amateur" giving way to the bureaucratic totalitarianism
of the Soviet "professional," this observation serves to unsettle another
familiar conceptualization, in which Lacis the "professional revolution-
ary" repurposes or "turns" Benjamin, the dreamily romantic amateur.
In Lacis's own account of the origins of the "Program" itself, it seems
as though this strongly gendered articulation of people to their work is
already in play. Benjamin is reported as announcing that, in writing the
"Program," he will turn Lacis's practice into theory. In his first attempt to
do so, he fails to be sufficiently practical as an author of a proposal for
action, and the "professionals" in the Communist Party leadership laugh
at what he has produced. Here Benjamin the amateur, a figure that seems
to have contributed substantially to the slightly cultish way in which his


70 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

work has been received in some quarters, appears to be a distinctively
male, almost gentlemanly role. Benjamin appears here as the gentleman
whose dilettantish skills as a feuillitoniste license his self-nomination as
the theorist-advocate of the professional woman, as though, to return to
Hannah Arendt's distinctions, he alone has the time to write (to speak, to
act), while Lacis, condemned to the sphere of mere labor, does not. In this
scenario, the laughter of the "professionals" at the appearance of a theo-
retical text so clearly not "fit for purpose" serves only to reinforce this
distinction. Benjamin is too naive, too unworldly, to accommodate him-
self to the heteronomous demands of professional revolutionary practice,
just as, in the broader narrative of Benjamin as heroic failure, the rejection
of his Habilitationschrift marks his inassimilability to the limiting struc-
tures of the professional academy.
This dyad in which women's labor supports men's (political) action
appears with varying degrees of stability throughout the material with
which this book engages. In the Platonic conception the exclusion of
women from Athenian citizenship rests upon a gendered division of la-
bor; in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya it turns out to be Vanya (who imagines he
could have been "a Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky") who relapses into idle-
ness during the visit of the Professor and his wife and Sonya who just
keeps on quietly working; in Godard's La chinoise, as we shall see, it is
Yvonne, the young woman from the countryside, who serves tea and pol-
ishes shoes for the young people playing at revolution; and, in a theoreti-
cal exposition of the gendered division of labor that makes capitalist (and
orthodox revolutionary) production possible, it is Maria Rosa Dalla Costa
who notes the fundamental significance of the work of women in the
home for the conceptualization of post-Fordist "immaterial labour."
Benjamin's "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater" has the po-
tential to undo this dyadic figure of the female professional and the gen-
tleman amateur by putting to one side the logic of work around which
this gendered valorization takes shape, even as accounts of its conditions
of production point to the extent to which that logic continued and con-
tinues to operate. This book's organizing figure of the passionate amateur
always stands in an ambivalent place: if on the one hand, in its depen-
dence upon conventional understandings of the "amateur," it might sug-
gest a certain kind of male subjectivity, on the other it seeks, at least, a
trajectory that might escape both gender distinctions grounded in work
and the very professional-amateur distinction upon which its concept
seems to rest. It does so acknowledging, all the same, that both such dis-
tinctions remain fully operational within capitalism. Like the related fig-


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 71

ure of Rei Terada's "phenomenophile" -who prefers to let his attention
stray from the matter at hand toward the seemingly inconsequential and
flickering detail-the passionate amateur will tend to appear more read-
ily in male than in female form.31 Recognizing Lacis's children's theatre in
Orel as the work of a passionate amateur, however, rather than as a prac-
tice to be elevated into action by a subsequent theorization by someone
with time on his hands, represents, then, an attempt to hold on to the
historical contingency of the category itself and of the construction of gen-
der involved in capitalism's labor theory of value. It also points to the
passionate amateur's inherent potential for self-dissolution in the resis-
tance to work itself. Historical circumstances, foremost among them the
new state's need to compete economically with its capitalist antagonists,
meant that the potential for repurposing that the Soviet Union seemed in
its early years to offer would never reach so far as to question the purpose
of work itself. As the revolutionary project of communism came increas-
ingly to identify itself, in Lenin's terms, as "soviets, plus electricity," and
to promote figures such as Stakhanov as its ideological heroes, the self-
dissolution of the passionate amateur would become one of the move-
ment's unattempted trajectories- "unactualised . . . unfinished . . .
failed ... thwarted" -but returning, in the "Program," ten years later, as
a potentiality that had yet to expire.
At the heart of Lacis's account of her work in Orel is a story that seems
to value precisely the kind of potentiality with which an aprogrammatic
and nonprofessional radicalism might wish to affiliate itself. Although
she had decided not to work in a conventional way, directing the children
in a production of a play, Lacis and her coworkers had chosen, as the ba-
sis for improvisational work by the children, a play by Meyerhold (Al-
inur) based on a story by Oscar Wilde (The Star Child), although they had
not told the children that this text was determining the improvisational
scenarios they were invited to play. Lacis had successfully engaged chil-
dren from the orphanage, and work was proceeding very well with them,
but she had yet to persuade the street children to take part. One day the
children are improvising a scene suggested to them by Lacis, in which a
group of robbers are sitting around a fire in the forest, boasting about
their exploits. It was during the playing of this scene that the street chil-
dren decide to pay their first visit to the "Turgenev house." At first the
children from the orphanage are frightened of the intruders, but Lacis
urges them to continue with their scene and to pay no attention to the
intruders. After a while the "leader" of the street children signals to his
fellows, and the group invades the scene, forcing its players to one side


72 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

and improvising their own far more ambitious boasts of murders, arson,
and robbery, trumping the imaginations of the original improvisation. At
the conclusion of this performance they turn on the other children and
announce, "So sind Rauber!!"32 For Lacis, the moral of the story lies in the
interruption or suspension of all pedagogical rules into which this inter-
vention has forced her. In its way this is a classic anecdote of radical and
child-centered pedagogy, in which the unschooled and fully embodied
imagination of the streets offers more to the theatre than the tamer confec-
tions of the more docile participants. It is a story in which the pedagogue
confronts the limits of her pedagogy, "tears up the rulebook" in the face
of "real creativity." But it is not just a story about spontaneous creativity.
Its alternative moral is a deeply Platonic one, in which the theatre is inter-
rupted by the real, in the form of those who don't have to pretend to be
"robbers." The street children's claim is that they know better. They are,
as it were, professionals, and this qualifies them for the role of theatrical
robbers in preference to the supposedly less convincing efforts of the chil-
dren from the orphanage. At the conclusion of the story, in which Lacis
chooses to emphasize an anarchic overturning of professional regulation
("I had to interrupt all pedagogical rules"), there's a dynamic counter-
interruption staged on behalf of a theatre based paradoxically on special-
ist expertise, rather than on the mere imitation of something the actors
know nothing about. The passion of the street children expresses the craft
pride of a labor aristocracy.
3. WORK, EDUCATION, COMMUNISM
The story of the robbers in the forest is for children and romantics and
above all for those romantics who, like Benjamin himself (his doctoral dis-
sertation, "The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism," recalls
the significant place of the Jena Friihromantiker in the formation of his
thought), return again and again to the memory or the imagination of
childhood. It is a story for Jean Paul, one of only two writers mentioned in
the "Program" (the other is Konrad Fiedler, a nineteenth-century art theo-
rist who emphasized the artist's capacity to see "with his hand"), of whom
Benjamin notes that he was one of only "a few unusually perceptive men"
to have glimpsed the world from which the "secret signal" of the child is
sent. And it is a story for Friedrich Schiller, the hero of whose Robbers,
Karl Moor, is a dramatic prototype for leaders of revolutionary move-
ments. In the contradictory figure of the "robbers" of Lacis's anecdote lies


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 73

a tension between two potentialities of the child, a tension that Benjamin's
text also expresses: between children as fairy-tale romantics or as revolu-
tionaries in the making, between pure amateurs or professionals in train-
ing. This tension might also be understood in terms of a historical rela-
tionship between bourgeois and proletarian conceptions of education and
its function. This relationship is largely one of contradiction, a contradic-
tion that is to be found within the emergent communist discourse, seek-
ing an alternative to bourgeois education, as much as in the differences
between that discourse and either conservative or liberal approaches to
bourgeois education. In terms of both the structure for education and the
conception of history implicit in Benjamin's "Program," this contradic-
tion opposes Marxist-Leninist work for a communist future to a romantic-
utopian attempt to produce the future within the present by drawing
upon the forces of the past (what Benjamin earlier conceptualized by way
of his notion of "origin as the goal")33 "The Program for a Proletarian
Children's Theater" does not just look back ten years to Lacis's work in
Orel; it also recalls some of Benjamin's own first intellectual and activist
engagements, in the youth and student movement of the final years be-
fore World War One.34
Benjamin was one of the leading members of a relatively short-lived
left-leaning youth movement operating in both Vienna and Berlin called
Anfang. Among its fellow members were Siegfried Bernfeld from Vienna,
who later became a psychoanalyst, and Gerhard Eisler, who, as we have
already seen, would become a leading member of the KPD. The leader-
ship of the movement also included one exceptionally influential older
"mentor" figure, Gustav Wyneken. Wyneken was already well known as
a theorist and practitioner of radical education. Benjamin had spent three
years at a rural school at Haubinda in Thuringen, directed by Wyneken,
apparently as an alternative to the Kaiser Friedrich Gymnasium in Berlin,
which he hated, and had subsequently joined a movement for school re-
form in Freiburg, formed in response to a public appeal for collective ac-
tion by Wyneken.35 In a statement in the inaugural issue of the move-
ment's journal, also named Anfang, published in May 1913, Wyneken,
Benjamin, Bernfeld, and Georges Barbizon (a leading Berlin member of
the group) established its main principles, conceived as a direct attack on
the mainstream education of the time. As Philip Lee Utley notes:
In most members' experience, the school employed curricular and
noncurricular practices that made it the adult world's worst of-
fender against five values. The values were major tenets of the


74 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

movement's program: social justice, universalist national neutral-
ity, individual freedom, communitarianism and sexual liberation.36
A crucial "framework of unifying ideas"37 for Anfang was Wyneken's
concept of Jugendkultur (youth culture), which affirmed that, far from be-
ing a mere transition of the infant toward adult maturity (a transition for
which formal education was conventionally assumed to be necessary),
childhood was a distinctive moral or spiritual condition:
Autonomous youth were morally superior-more spiritual (geis-
tig) in a Hegelian sense than any other age-group. Youth's spiritual
character (Eigenart) meant that youth were idealistic rather than
materialist, the theory ran; therefore they adhered to absolute val-
ues and were inclined to realize them without compromise. Inher-
ent in their spiritual character was also a need to be exposed to
humanistic culture-art and   the humanistic and   scientific
disciplines -and absorb what was consonant with absolute values
in the material learned. If given autonomy, youth would select
spiritual teachers who would aid in this task. Thus armed with
absolute values and spiritual culture, youth were considered the
dialectical antithesis of the material, philistine adult world, which
they struggled to modify.38
Rather than seeking to acquire the skills and behavior necessary for her
incorporation into the adult world, the child has a spiritual mission (in
this extremely Hegelian formulation) to transform the adult world itself
into one in which the values of the child could find full realization (as
absolute spirit, presumably); or, in a more Benjaminian formulation, the
child's mission is to blast open the continuum of successive homogenous
time in which she moves automatically along the path to adulthood,
thereby collapsing industrial modernity back into an idealized, romantic
vision of its own past (of childhood, or of the medieval forest). This means,
as Benjamin explains in an essay published in Anfang in 1913, that the
adult cannot look back at the child from a standpoint of superiority, based
on knowing what it is that the child will become. To do so would be to fail
to recognize the child as the condition in which the adult might wish to
ground her own social or political reorientation, toward an "origin as a
goal." Benjamin writes that the adult who claims to have "experienced"
things and to know more than the young person


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 75

smiles in a superior fashion: this will also happen to us -in ad-
vance he devalues the years we will live, making them into a time
of sweet youthful pranks, of childish rapture, before the long sobri-
ety of serious life. Thus the well-meaning, the enlightened. We
know other pedagogues whose bitterness will not even concede to
us the brief years of youth; serious and grim, they want to push us
directly into life's drudgery. Both attitudes devalue and destroy
our years.39
It is not hard to discern in this early text, and in another that appeared
a year later as a published version of a speech given by Benjamin as pres-
ident of the Berlin Free Student Group, the emergence of Benjamin's dis-
tinctive conception of history as a necessary corollary of this valorization
of childhood. The two ideas appear linked to one another in these early
texts just as they are in the "Program." In his "presidential" speech, given
first in Berlin at the start of the 1914 summer semester and then again in
June of that year in Weimar, at a meeting of all the Free Student Groups,
Benjamin announces that his aim is, in effect, to do precisely what he will
later propose as the goal of the Proletarian Children's Theater:
There is a view of history that puts its faith in the infinite extent of
time and thus concerns itself only with the speed, or lack of it, with
which people and epochs advance along the path of progress. [ ... ]
The following remarks, in contrast, delineate a particular condition
in which history appears to be concentrated in a single point. Like
those that have traditionally been found in the utopian images of
the philosophers. [ . . . ] The historical task is to disclose this im-
manent state of perfection and make it absolute. [.. . ] the contem-
porary significance of students and the university [ ...] as an im-
age of the highest metaphysical state of history.40
What follows is a critique of the instrumentalization of knowledge and
scholarship in the university that sounds very much like later critiques of
higher education such as the famous 1965 text produced by members of
the Situationist International- On the Poverty of Student Life:
Being a student is a form of initiation. An initiation which echoes
the rites of more primitive societies with bizarre precision. It goes
on outside of history, cut off from social reality. The student leads


76 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

a double life, poised between his present status and his future role.
The two are absolutely separate, and the journey from one to the
other is a mechanical event "in the future." Meanwhile, he basks in
a schizophrenic consciousness, withdrawing into his initiation
group to hide from that future. Protected from history, the present
is a mystic trance.41
While one might readily imagine that the militants of Strasbourg would
view Wyneken's notion of Jugendkultur, and its development by Benjamin
into the idea of a childhood that finds its own fulfillment, as just another
"mystical trance," there is an insistence in both texts, over fifty years apart
(at the beginning and at the end of the period of the Fordist exception),
upon the relationship among history, education, and work. Both texts
share a desire to interrupt the process by which education prepares its
subject for the work that will ensure the continuation of the very historical
sequence in which education leads to work. In his 1914 speech Benjamin
writes:
It leads to no good if institutes that grant titles, qualifications, and
other prerequisites for life or a profession are permitted to call
themselves seats of learning. The objection that the modern state
cannot otherwise produce the doctors, lawyers and teachers it
needs is irrelevant. It only illustrates the magnitude of the task en-
tailed in creating a community of learning, as opposed to a body of
officials and academically qualified people. It only shows how far
the development of the professional apparatuses (through knowl-
edge and skill) have forced the modern disciplines to abandon
their original unity in the idea of knowledge, a unity which in their
eyes has now become a mystery, if not a fiction.42
The simultaneous subject and object of the historical sequence that Benja-
min wishes to interrupt is, of course, the bourgeois professional: the "doc-
tors, lawyers and teachers" among whom Benjamin himself was suppos-
edly destined to take his place but from whom he was soon decisively to
separate himself, first by refusing to assimilate his "knowledge" to the
institutional demands of the "modern disciplines" and then by orienting
himself toward a radically different "community of learning" from that
envisaged by the romanticism on which his rhetoric here seems to draw:
the proletariat.43
Benjamin's views are not simply a restatement of romantic Humbold-


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 77

tian ideals, however, but may also be understood in their own particular
historical context. Despite the lip service paid to such ideals in the often
self-authored historiography of the modern German university, the real
transformation achieved during the nineteenth century was the simulta-
neous expansion and diversification of university studies in order to fa-
cilitate the development of an increasingly bourgeois cadre of profession-
als in administration; law; and, crucially, industry. This process, implicit
in the establishment, by the Prussian state, of Berlin University in 181o,
accelerated and intensified at the end of the nineteenth century.44 Now
universities faced competition from the Technische Hochschulen, special-
ist training institutions that were adapting themselves more readily than
the universities to the demands of new industrial processes and forms of
industrial organization. Universities were accused of being out of touch
and unsuited to modern economic conditions.45 Between 1890 and 1914,
however, the universities not only expanded (from twenty-eight thou-
sand students to sixty thousand) but also diversified and professional-
ized, in what Konrad Jarausch describes as a "transition from the tradi-
tional elite to a modern middle-class university."46 Geoff Eley summarizes
the findings of Jarausch's extensive research, which shows that this diver-
sification and professionalization had two dimensions. The first, Eley
writes, was "the upgrading of commercial, technical, and pedagogical
institutions, the proliferation of teaching and research fields, and the re-
configuration of the academic career structure into an elite of senior pro-
fessors and a new subordinate category of Assistenten."47 Previously
lower-status institutions of higher education (including the Technische
Hochschulen) acquired new status because they could meet the needs of
an industrializing nation, and higher-education institutions in general
started to adopt organizational forms derived from commerce and indus-
try. The second dimension of this process "concerned the societal dy-
namic of professionalization and the growing imbrication of professional,
managerial, and administrative careers with a system of regulated higher
educational qualification."48 Thus the professionalization of the univer-
sity itself became integrated with the industrial world of work in which
university graduates were increasingly seeking employment, and their
university qualifications became an increasingly standardized require-
ment for finding such work.
As Jarausch notes, therefore, this expansion was more than just a mat-
ter of quantity: it would transform the very nature of the university. Con-
servative defenders of the existing elitism, in which the Bildungsbiirger-
tum, or academic bourgeoisie, who were at least rhetorically committed to


78 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

the supposedly Humboldtian ideals of scholarship as vocation, held
themselves apart, like gentlemen, from the "arrivistes" of the petty-
bourgeoisie and feared that the traditional experience of the university
life (much romanticized in memoirs) would be contaminated. But opti-
mistic advocates of the integration of university study with the demands
of an industrializing economy sought to imagine the university itself as a
kind of factory. Jarausch cites the celebrated historian of Rome, Theodor
Mommsen, who, in 1890, had "coined the term Grosswissenschaft as a
scientific counterpart to big government and big industry."49 In 1905
Mommsen's friend, the liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack, director-
general of the Royal Library, published an article, "Vom GroBbetrieb der
Wissenschaft," in which he explicitly compares even the most apparently
arcane scholarly labor of philology-its editions, its accumulation of
knowledge about sources-to the factories of industry, arguing that
scholarship was now becoming a process of industrial knowledge pro-
duction.50 Jarausch sees this conception of collaborative research-which
extends, as Harnack is keen to emphasize, to formal international partner-
ships and exchange-as "signalling the arrival of the mass research uni-
versity."51 Harnack is fully aware of the objections that might be raised
against this terminology and the practice it names:
So whoever speaks against the large-scale industry of scholarship -
the word is not beautiful, but I can find no better one -does not
know what he is doing, and whoever seeks to inhibit the progres-
sive extension of this method of global conquest is damaging the
common good. Of course we know the dangers of this industry-
the mechanization of work, the valuation of collecting and refining
material over intellectual insight, and even the genuine stupefac-
tion of workers-but we can protect ourselves and our collabora-
tors against these dangers.52
The emergence of the idea that the highest form of education and the
scholarly inquiry with which it has become associated in the German uni-
versity during the nineteenth century is now best understood as a large-
scale industry, contributing to the general good by means of its participa-
tion in a global network of production, signals a key moment in the
professionalization of thought. It was not simply that the university was
losing touch with its supposed mission to cultivate a unified knowledge,
as Benjamin seems to claim, a mission betrayed by means of specializa-
tion and subservience to the demands of the profession. The transforma-


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 79

tion is much more foundational. The structures and ideologies developed
for the purposes of industrial production have come to determine how
knowledge itself is understood. The emergent epistemology of the profes-
sional understands the production of knowledge according to a newly
dominant ideology of work, which consigns the amateurism of the old
Bildungsburgertum to an increasingly residual position. Such residues can
become resources for subsequent emergent forms, however. Benjamin's
defense in his 1914 speech of the "original unity" of academic disciplines
in the "unity of knowledge" need not be seen as a gesture of elitist nostal-
gia. Instead it might be viewed as an attempt to reach toward a new uni-
fication of faculties that would resist the division of labor in the large-
scale industries of modern capitalism. Only a few years later the
educational reformers of revolutionary Russia would seek to realize such
a vision through either the "polytechnic" or the "united labour school";53
reformers in Germany would pursue similar projects;54 and, Benjamin
himself, following his own encounter with communist thought, would
develop ideas about education radically different from any that might
once have been associated with the Bildungsburgertum. In the "Program
for a Proletarian Children's Theater" these ideas take their most "ama-
teurish" form, whereas in another text of the same year, a review of the
communist educational theorist Edwin Hoernle's Grundfragen der Prole-
tarischen Erziehung, they seem to acquire a "professional" orientation.55
This tension between "free" work and productive work in these two texts
of 1929 is evidence of two very different critical responses to the ideology
of work that had taken a very firm hold in both Soviet Russia and the
major industrial economies of capitalist Europe and North America and
of Benjamin's interest in both.
The establishment of an ideology of work (many of whose proponents
saw it as a science, of course) derived initially from mid-nineteenth-
century developments in physics that supported the conceptualization of
the human body as the medium through which labor could be applied to
nature in order to produce the materials necessary for human progress.
Anson Rabinbach, who traces this development in some detail, suggests
that this ideology-and the scientific practices in which it was
instantiated-led to a major shift in how labor was generally conceived.
Where once it might have moral value, either positive, as in Christian
ideas of work as a spiritual mission, or negative, as in the aristocratic
Greek view of work as a degrading activity, it came, during the nine-
teenth century, to be regarded as a neutral (even natural) foundation for
human existence, without specific purpose or teleology but capable of


80 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

being directed toward one. This, Rabinbach argues, helped the ideologists
of the science of work to claim, after 1900, that their ideas transcended
politics. In Germany, the idea of a science of work (Arbeitswissenschaft)
was developed by the psychologists Emil Kraepelin and Hugo Miinster-
berg, with a view to placing the insights of the scientific study of human
behavior at the service of industrial production.56
Critics of their work, including the sociologist Max Weber, complained
that their theorizations were remote from industrial application and re-
sponded by developing an alternative and empirical approach that would
be pursued through the participation of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik. This
was a professional organization, originally founded in 1873 and com-
posed of academics, civil servants, and a few industrialists, that concerned
itself with applying the achievements of social science to central issues in
German social policy. In 1908-9 the Verein fur Sozialpolitik conducted a
survey of the "impact of industrial work on workers' attitudes and cir-
cumstances" directed by Alfred Weber, Heinrich Herkner, and Gustav
Schmoller, on the basis of a theoretical blueprint mapped out by Max We-
ber. This example of "the new empirical social science" was, Rabinbach
notes, "primarily concerned with determining the optimum yield of labor
power conceived as a social phenomenon."57 Frederick Taylor's Principles
of Scientific Management was published in a German translation in 1912,
arousing criticism from advocates of the "science of work," who feared
that Taylorism's explicit drive toward maximizing the productivity of
workers at the expense of their well-being would undo scientific claims to
political neutrality. So although Taylorism was far from universally ac-
cepted, a broad consensus took shape around the belief that work was
central to social and economic progress and that its productivity could be
enhanced through the application of scientific research to industrial pro-
cesses, including, of course, to the training and education that was to pre-
pare children and students for participation in the economy. This consen-
sus included significant sectors of the German left: "In the early phase of
the Weimar Republic, industrialists, experts in fatigue, and Social Demo-
cratic trade unionists generally shared a positive view of the science of
work as compensation for the negative effects of Taylorism."58 Few voices
seem to have been raised in resistance to what we might call the Grofibe-
trieb der Arbeitswissenschaft (the large-scale industry of the science of work
and its application to everything that moves) and its ambition to ground
and justify the whole of social life in terms of work. Even the leading edu-
cational theorist of the German Communist Party, Edwin Hoernle, envis-
ages "large-scale industry" as the basis, the location, and the purpose of a


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 81

"new pedagogy" for "mass" or "proletarian education."59 Walter Benja-
min concurs, affirming that Hoernle's book is "at its best" when it offers a
"program" of "revolutionary education for work."60
The immediate inspiration for Hoernle's program lay in the radical
proposals for the transformation of education adopted in Soviet Russia in
the first decade of the revolution. The "communist pedagogy" so enthu-
siastically welcomed by Benjamin in his review of Hoernle's work thus
took programmatic form in precisely the historical circumstances in
which Asja Lacis developed the theatrical practice upon which Benja-
min's "Program" is based. One of the central elements of Narkompros
education policy from 1917 was the idea that all children should be edu-
cated through the United Labour School, which, as Sheila Fitzpatrick ex-
plains, "according to the Narkompros programme, was 'polytechnical'
but not 'professional': it taught a variety of labour skills without special-
izing in any one of them or providing a professional or trade qualifica-
tion."61 There were two competing versions of the United Labour School.
One, advocated by the commissar himself, Lunacharsky, and his col-
leagues in Petrograd, was largely based on the "orthodox progressive"
position of antiauthoritarian, nonscholastic education and the full devel-
opment of the child's individuality, using Dewey's activity school ap-
proach as the basis for a polytechnical education.62 The other, advanced
by leading figures in Moscow, emphasized the school-commune, in
which children would live seven days a week and where labor skills
would be acquired by taking part in "life itself" in the organization and
maintenance of the commune.63 While both visions decisively rejected the
idea that education should be organized in order to facilitate the special-
ization upon which the division of labor in industrial capitalism is orga-
nized, the Petrograd version seems, on the face of it, to offer education a
greater measure of autonomy from the workplace, since the Moscow ver-
sion effectively turns the workplace into the site of education, or vice
versa. However, the Moscow version, with its idea that the "school is a
school-commune closely and organically linked through the labour pro-
cess with its environment,"64 offers a vision of childhood as a complete
way of life ("life itself") with its own intrinsic value (achieved through its
own labor), rather than as a transitional phase through which children
pass on their way to productive labor. In this respect, its relation to
work-and, indeed, to historical progress-is utopian in character and
resembles more closely than the Petrograd version the proletarian educa-
tion envisaged in Benjamin's "Program." It seeks its own realization (the
fulfillment of childhood) here and now rather than by way of an orienta-


82 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

tion to a future still to be produced by the full development of adult ca-
pacities by the maturing child.65
Hoernle's Grundfragen specifically credits Lunacharsky and Narkom-
pros with providing a blueprint for the development of a new pedagogy
suitable for a proletarian education and refers, in particular, to an exhibi-
tion presented in Berlin titled "Labour Schools in Soviet Russia."66 His
own proposals seem to echo the Moscow approach, rather than that of
Lunacharsky and the Petrograd vision of the United Labour School, how-
ever. In repudiating the associated "orthodox progressive" approach, he
is also distinguishing the communist approach from that adopted by Ger-
man social-democratic school reformers who, like Lunacharsky, drew on
a liberal tradition encompassing Pestalozzi, Froebel, Dewey, and others.67
But one cannot read his text without also noticing the extent to which it
seems, simultaneously and paradoxically, to subscribe to the ideology of
work in terms that suggest a clear affinity with the goals of "global con-
quest" through professional work as articulated by Adolf von Harnack:
The proletarian school will not only, as the pedagogical reformers
demand, be "loosened up," it will not just be "rationalized" in
terms of performance by new teaching and learning methods
(Montessori methods, Dalton plan), it will become ever more
closely connected to the public life of the proletariat and the indus-
trial and agricultural operations, it will become an important link
between economic production and public administration. Large-
scale industry has created all the material, social and psychological
prerequisites for this new pedagogy. Large-scale industry brings
the child into the factory, albeit in the evil and murderous context
of capitalist exploitation. It creates the possibility for the applica-
tion of the hands of children to the machines, it places the creative
child alongside the creative mother, alongside grown-up men and
women. It creates thereby the new social role, the new social func-
tion of the child. But thereby it creates the possibility for a new,
higher stage of children's education.68
In approving the idea of a "revolutionary education for work" Benjamin
appears to respond to this idea of the potential of human creativity, devel-
oped holistically rather than in order to reproduce the division of labor in
capitalist specialization, as the key contribution of a communist peda-
gogy. This communist pedagogy perhaps enables him now to imagine the
replacement of the nostalgic attachment he expressed in 1914 to an "orig-


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 83

inal unity in the idea of knowledge," with a commitment to "universal
labor" in which polytechnical education is the lever for the Aufhebung of a
principle formerly negated by industrial capitalism:
The immeasurable versatility of raw human manpower, which
capital constantly brings to the consciousness of the exploited, re-
turns at the highest level as the polytechnical- as opposed to the
specialized -education of man. These are basic principles of mass
education-principles whose seminal importance for young peo-
ple growing up is utterly obvious.69
The apparent contradiction between the "amateur" impulse articu-
lated so forcefully in the "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater,"
on the one hand, and the pedagogy of a "revolutionary education for
work" celebrated in the review of Hoernle, on the other, is one in which
any romantic anti-capitalist sensibility seeking to move toward a commu-
nist politics is very likely to find itself. In theoretical terms, the only way
of moving beyond this contradiction would be to undo the ideology of
work itself and to detach value from labor. The "labor theory of value" is
not a universal or transhistorical constant; it is a regime of value specific
to capitalism. To move beyond the contradiction, then, would require
nothing short of the abolition of wage labor (which Soviet Russia, over ten
years after the revolution, had not even yet attempted). Or, to put it in
more practical terms, until an alternative is found to a form of life in
which the adult human works for a living, it is likely that education will
continue to focus on preparing her to do so, however the division of labor
is organized. Any program of education that seeks to exit this logic is
likely to be compelled to return to it in some form or other: either by ac-
cepting that education is preparation for work or by making work and
education one and the same. Benjamin's "Program for a Proletarian Chil-
dren's Theater" lingers much more insistently in this contradiction than
does "A Communist Pedagogy," as though Benjamin wished to continue
to make available, to thought at least, the possibility that it might be oth-
erwise and as though Lacis's theatre practice had shown that it might.
In the absence of a truly communist society in which a communist
pedagogy might indeed be emancipated from its subjugation to wage la-
bor and the labor theory of value, the virtue of a polytechnical education
lies in its potential to release human creativity from the restraints of the
division of labor. The virtue of theatre, as a mode of polytechnical educa-
tion, is that it is an artistic practice that can be practiced, collectively, by


84 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

amateurs, rather than produced by professionals for the consumption of
others. In "The Storyteller" Benjamin suggests that the oral transmission
of stories has been largely superseded in industrial capitalism by the
novel, a literary form in which the professional establishes herself as both
author and principal subject matter of the story. The kind of theatre that
Benjamin and Lacis have in mind -a theatre in which children enact sto-
ries that exist in a collective repertoire, rather than in the commodity form
of the book-might be precisely the performance form in which the tradi-
tion of the "storyteller" might return and the experience of experience be
restored. Edwin Hoernle, too, like Benjamin and Lacis, grasps this possi-
bility and desires its realization within industrial capitalism (rather than
in a romantic retreat to the pre-capitalist forest). For Hoernle, like a num-
ber of other German socialist and communist writers and artists of the
early 1920s, saw a proletarianized fairy tale, stripped of its conformist
moralism, as precisely such a new form of collective artistic production,
crucial to the education of proletarian children:
The proletariat will create new fairy tales in which workers' strug-
gles, their lives and their ideas are reflected and correspond to the
degree which they demonstrate how they can continually become
human, and how they can build up new educational societies in
place of the old decrepit ones. It makes no sense to complain that
we do not have suitable fairy tales for our children. Professional
writers will not produce them. Fairy tales do not originate at the
desk.[ ... .] The new proletarian and industrial fairy tale will come
as soon as the proletariat has created a place in which fairy tales are
not read aloud but told, not repeated according to a text, but cre-
ated in the process of telling.70
Benjamin, Lacis, and Hoernle are all, then, insisting upon the value of a
kind of theatrical improvisation, which they all view as an artistic practice
that might allow one to "continually become human" (Hoernle), that might
"set productivity free" (Lacis) and receive "a secret signal" that would
"blast open the continuum of history" (Benjamin). This theatre is one of
those artistic practices that Susan Buck-Morss suggests might, at the begin-
ning of the revolution in Russia, have been the basis for an "ungoverned
cultural revolution"71 but that was eventually unable to do so because
it could not challenge the temporality of the political revolution
which, as the locomotive of history's progress, invested the party


ALL THEATRE, ALL THE TIME 85
with the sovereign power to force mass compliance in history's
name. Hence the lost opportunity: the temporal interruption of
avant-garde practice might have continued to function as a criticism
of history's progression after the Revolution.72
Such practices look, she writes, like "one of the dead ends of history"
but "still merit consideration"73-not simply as historical curiosities but
as possibilities that, "unactualised, . . . unfinished, failed, thwarted,"
might yet leap into a new now and demand "fulfilment."74


FOUR  I Of Work, Time, and Revolution

The theatre is about to open. Someone is speaking across the end of the
opening titles: "Un film en train de se faire."1 As the titles give way to the
film they authorize-""Visa de contr6le numero 32862"- the lights, if you
like, come up on a forestage, a kind of balcony or terrace, it seems, upon
which a young man holding a book is pacing, reading aloud from his
book, in front of a set of three windows, all behind shutters that look like
they have recently been painted a casual but meaningful red. He does not
seem to be addressing anyone in particular, either within the frame or
beyond it. Nor is he speaking to camera. This reading, speaking, thinking
person is observing a theatrical convention instead -one that might au-
thorize the reading aloud of the letter or, perhaps more appropriately, the
setting down of observations in "my tables"2-for this fretful intellectual-
as-actor makes notes, too, as he reads. Quoting, thus, the behavior of the
stage, this actor also quotes his text, of course: "La classe ouvriere fran-
gaise ne fera pas son unite et ne montera pas sur les barricades pour obte-
nir douze pour cent d'augmentation des salaires."3 The author cited here
is Andre Gorz, who would later come to bid farewell to the working class4
altogether, but who was at this moment-this is 1967-one of the most
prominent intellectuals articulating revolutionary demands on their be-
half in France, in the pages of Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes, as well
as in his own books, including Le socialisme difficile,5 from which this open-
ing text for Jean-Luc Godard's film La chinoise is taken.6
Throughout this most theatrical of films (as I shall hope to show that it
is) its characters will address one another, in lectures and performances as
well as in conversations, and they will speak to camera in response to
more or less inaudible questions posed to them from the film's invisible
director, but they will also declaim, as it were, into the air, making their
speech itself (very often speech citing other speech or writing) the stuff of
the film. "Nous sommes le discours des autres,"7 as Guillaume and Vero-
nique will shortly announce, to no one in particular. "Words, words,
words."8 Or, as they say in the movies, "Action."

86


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 87

SPEECH AND ACTION
The commonplace that "actions speak louder than words" is normally
taken to mean that the truth about a person may more readily be inferred
from what they do than from what they say. Various associated more-or-
less-commonplaces, such as the claim that "a picture is worth a thousand
words," or the accusation that someone may be "all mouth and no trou-
sers," point similarly to the idea that what counts is action, while speech
may be discounted. This cluster of attitudes can also shade into a posture
of anti-intellectualism, particularly in political contexts where direct ac-
tion assumes the aura of revolutionary virtue, while reading, writing, and
speaking are regarded as markers of indecision, weakness, and, in some
versions of the prejudice against words, class privilege.9 The idea that ac-
tions might speak louder than words has been perhaps nowhere more
politically charged than it was during the Chinese Cultural Revolution,
from which the protagonists of Godard's film take their inspiration. It is
an idea that calls into question the relations between theory and practice,
between workers and intellectuals, relations that had already become
central to political debate on the French left by 1967 and that would be a
predominant theme in retrospective analyses of the thought and action of
May '68. It is also, of course, an idea that bears directly on the questions of
work, leisure, and professionalism explored in the preceding chapter, as
well as on the idea of the passionate amateur itself.
In La chinoise, there are thousands upon thousands of words -spoken,
printed, quoted, scrawled, painted, flashed on screen -and perhaps only
one action, and a singularly unconvincing and bungled one at that. In
both speech and action, then, it resembles Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. In La
chinoise a neophyte intellectual and self-appointed representative of "the
workers" attempts the assassination of a visiting Russian apparatchik (the
"intellectual" minister of culture of a "worker's state"). In Uncle Vanya a
frustrated intellectual who "might have been a Schopenhauer, a Dosto-
evsky,"10 had he not been condemned to work for "a beggar's wage,""
attempts the assassination of a visiting Russian apparatchik (the "intel-
lectual" Professor Serebryakov). Both would-be perpetrators of action-
Veronique Supervieille and Ivan Voinitsky-turn out, on the face of it at
least, to have been much better at speech than they are at action. Their
bungled shootings might perhaps be taken as comic hints as to the inad-
equacy of action or, at least, as pointing to some kind of discrepancy be-
tween what can be said and what is to be done. That is, unless the com-
monplace, as many commonplaces do, conceals within itself evidence of


88 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

some secret measure of untruth; unless speech is action, theory is practi-
cal and the intellectual is indeed a worker.
For Hannah Arendt speech and action are the conjoined modes in
which humans (or "man" in Arendt's own text) reveal themselves to one
another: "Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial
and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to
the question asked of every newcomer: 'Who are you?"'12 One cannot do
without the other because without speech (to claim, announce) action
would lack an "actor," without whom it would merely be the function of
"performing robots." One model for such an actor might be the hero of a
dramatic narrative, whose identity is disclosed to an audience by way of
speech that claims responsibility for action, who names (and eventually
perhaps, immortalizes) himself, as it were, by means of the enunciation of
his own deeds: "In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal
actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance
in the human world."13 Thus actions only speak louder than words when
there is speech to go with them. Arendt's conjunction of speech and action
is significant here, not for the conjunction alone, but for the role it plays in
her conception of politics. This is of particular relevance, not simply for
this chapter but for the book as a whole, as we have already seen (see
chap. 1), because it is perhaps the clearest and most influential twentieth-
century articulation of an old Greek idea: that politics is for those who are
free from the burden of work. First of all, the space of politics is consti-
tuted through the speech and action of its participants and nothing else.
"The polis, properly speaking," argues Arendt, "is not the city-state in its
physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of act-
ing and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living
together for this purpose."" Second, this space is only fleetingly inhab-
ited, and many "men" are excluded from it: "This space does not always
exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them -
like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the la-
borer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman
in our world -do not live in it."15 Objections to this position (which might
rightly be described as an antidemocratic ideological stance adopted pri-
marily by representatives of the Greek aristocracy16) might focus on its
explicit exclusion of "workers" from political activity, especially, as we
shall see, in the context of 1967 and after, where the formation of a politi-
cal alliance between students and workers, based on genuine class soli-
darity rather than assumed class difference, was a real political possibil-
ity.


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 89

In the suspension of work (the fleeting habitat of a summer vacation)
that enfolds the action of Godard's La chinoise (just as it does the action of
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya), speech and action constitute for the film's char-
acters their very own brief "polis" in the form of a fictional Marxist-
Leninist cell, which they name "Aden-Arabie." The hunch of this chapter
is that La chinoise is an experiment in the possibilities of theatricality as a
mode of being political situated somewhere between Arendt's categories
of work and action, a zone, that is to say, in which "actors," uncertain of
their place in an emergent new economic order (what will come to be
known as post-Fordism), take advantage of the statutory summer holiday
to talk themselves into becoming passionate amateurs.
WHAT HAPPENS
Here's what happens. Five young people have moved into the Paris apart-
ment of Veronique's bourgeois relatives ("Ils ont des usines ou quoi"17)
for the summer and formed themselves into a Marxist-Leninist cell. Vero-
nique, a student of philosophy at the newly created University of Paris-
Nanterre, appears to be the leader of the group. Her boyfriend, Guil-
laume, is an actor. Yvonne is a young woman from the countryside who
seems to belong to the group by way of her relationship with Henri. Henri
has trained and worked as a chemist (and it is he whom we see first,
speaking, on the balcony). Serge Kirilov is a painter, his name a reminder
that the film is very loosely derived from Dostoevsky's novel The Pos-
sessed. During the course of the film members of the group educate one
another in the theories of Marxism-Leninism, taking Mao's Little Red Book,
of which the apartment has hundreds of identical copies, as their primary
text. Prompted by Veronique, the group votes to carry out an act of po-
litical violence. Henri, who had voted against this suggestion, is expelled
from the group. Serge agrees to commit suicide and leave a note claiming
responsibility for the assassination of the visiting Soviet minister of cul-
ture, but it is Veronique herself who attempts the action and then bungles
it by misreading her target's room number from a register and shooting
someone else by mistake. As the "cell" breaks up, Guillaume pursues his
search for a true socialist theatre, and Veronique's cousins return to find,
to their annoyance, that their apartment has been redecorated in Godard-
ian primary colours and Maoist slogans.
As James S. Williams notes in a recent essay on the film, La chinoise has
been generally considered a uniquely prescient film forecasting the events


90 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

of May '68."18 On its release it met critical hostility from both of the main
French Maoist political publications, the Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes and
Nouvelle Humanite, with the latter describing the film as a "fascist provo-
cation"19 and both claiming that it misrepresented the nature of their po-
litical struggle. Much subsequent critical reaction has, quite naturally,
viewed the film in the light of May '68 (and, of course, Godard's subse-
quent artistic trajectory in the Dziga Vertov Group), with Pauline Kael, in
an assessment that is used to blurb the Optimum DVD release of the film,
describing it, somewhat bafflingly, as being "like a speed-freak's anticipa-
tory vision of the political horrors to come."20 The twenty-first-century
viewer might therefore enjoy something of the same historical relation to
the film as that of the contemporary spectator at a production of Chek-
hov's Uncle Vanya: looking back in order to look ahead, with the 1917
revolutions and the events of May '68 asserting themselves simultane-
ously as the tangible futures of the represented presents and as the nonin-
evitable sequels to the fictional events. But Godard does not really predict
or anticipate. On the one hand, the intellectual experiment of thinking
Maoism in relation to late-196os France was well under way at the time
the film was being made: inasmuch as Godard is engaging with a histori-
cal reality, he is filming an immediate present, in which both Anne Wia-
zemsky and his future collaborator in the Dziga Vertov Group, Jean-Paul
Gorin, are actively involved at Nanterre. On the other, there is nothing
whatsoever in Godard's film to suggest the activism on the streets that
would characterize May '68. That Nanterre should have come retrospec-
tively to be seen as the catalyst for the events of May '68 may lend a fortu-
itous sense of pertinence to Godard's film, but it does not make Godard in
any way prescient. Nor yet does it make the film an anticipation of "po-
litical horrors," by which one can only assume Pauline Kael is referring to
the political violence that followed '68, in actions undertaken by groups
such as the Red Army Fraction, the Red Brigades, and the Weather Under-
ground. While the question of the role of violence in political struggle is
engaged in the latter part of the film-most extensively in the long dia-
logue between Wiazemsky's Veronique and the philosopher Francis
Jeanson-the argument in favor of violence, as James S. Williams notes,
"never translated itself into reality in France."21 Nor does it even begin to
resemble reality in Godard's film.
For, although the conversation about violence between Veronique and
Jeanson stands out in relation to the rest of the film for its "reality effect" -
it's shot in a "real" train rather than the stagey location of the apartment,
and sound and vision are edited unobtrusively in accordance with tacit


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 91

realist conventions -the scene of the bungled assassination, even if it is at
odds with the overtly theatrical conventions of much of the film, suggests
a daydream as much as reality, perhaps most strongly because of its com-
plete absence of consequences. Veronique arrives at the building in which
her target, Soviet minister of culture Sholokov, is supposedly located, in a
car driven by an apparent collaborator who has never appeared in the
film before. It is as though we are suddenly in some entirely other film.
The building has the appearance of an office but seems to function rather
like a hotel (perhaps a symptomatic architectural conflation of work and
leisure that reveals incidentally both superficial and structural character-
istics of the hotel itself). A single receptionist or clerk sits at a table in the
foyer. An automatically controlled sliding gate allows the car to be driven
into the forecourt. We watch from outside, through the vertical bars of the
gate and the glass wall of the foyer, as Veronique enters the building and
speaks to the receptionist so that she can obtain the minister's room num-
ber by reading it from a register on the table. As Veronique disappears
momentarily from view through a door inside the foyer, a cartoon frame
shows a man being blown up ("AAAAH!"). The next shot is of Vero-
nique's colleague sitting in the car smoking and Veronique herself getting
into the car, to report that she has done the deed, only to realize - "merde,
merde, arrete"22-that in reading the room number upside down she has
shot the wrong man. Her return to the building through a previously un-
noticed door is accompanied by much maneuvering of the get-away car,
the sliding of the gate, and, in response to the movements of the car, the
opening and closing of automatic glass doors, as well as some very self-
conscious "waiting" behavior on the part of the driver, before Veronique
appears on a balcony and makes an ambiguous signal that could mean
either that she has accomplished the assassination or that she has not.
No bodies, no blood, no "red,"23 no gunshots, even. The episode is
barely spoken of again, and there is no sign of any police response. The
receptionist, like the rest of the film, acts as though nothing has happened.
While the preceding scene - the conversation with Jeanson - is presented
as anchored in a "real world," not least of course by the device of using a
"real" person in conversation with an actor, and nearly the whole of the
rest of the film has until this point been contained within the aesthetically
coherent and thus similarly anchored setting of the apartment, this scene
feels curiously implausible and fictional. That the Soviet minister of cul-
ture, who may or may not have been assassinated in this fiction, bears the
name of the author of the novel And Quiet Flows the Don, who had been
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965, rather than that of the


92 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

actual minister of culture,24 and that in an earlier conversation members
of the cell were unsure whether he was called Sholokov or Shokolov
(chocolate, anybody?), only add to the sense of fiction within fiction. As
far as we can tell, the receptionist appears to have been right. Nothing
happened. In several reasonably convincing accounts of this film, includ-
ing an extensive conversation between Godard himself and a group of
writers from Cahiers du cinema, the dialogue on violence between Vero-
nique and Jeanson is taken to be the moral or intellectual crux of the film,
as a scene in which it apparently matters who the audience concludes has
had the better of the argument (most interpretations favor Jeanson, al-
though Godard, in this interview, says that he thinks Veronique pre-
vailed). In light of the metafictional character of the "violence" that fol-
lows, it bears recalling that the "reality effect" of the dialogue scene
disguises, at least to some extent, the nature of the conversation and, in-
deed, the scene: namely, that it is a scene and a conversation that takes
place between a real person and a fictional character. It might be naive,
then, to suppose that, following such a conversation, a fictional character
could go out and commit a real action, rather than perpetrating a further
fiction. Perhaps, here, actions simply don't speak louder than words.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENS: THEATRE
"I guess I didn't make it clear enough that the characters aren't members
of a real Marxist Leninist cell," says Godard in his interview with Cahiers.
Perhaps not, but not, it would seem to a twenty-first-century spectator,
for want of trying. At the time of its initial reception several factors may
have contributed to obscure what looks today like a pervasive and unmis-
takeable theatricality. In spite of the fact that the film was first shown
publicly as part of the Avignon Festival of 1967, in a screening in the Cour
d'Honneur at the Palais des Papes (the theatre festival's most prestigious
location), critical reception appears to have been shaped by a combination
of factors that have directed attention away from its concern with theatre.
There is, of course, the film's self-evident topicality and the fact that it was
clearly derived from Godard's own developing association with students
at Nanterre in general and the radical left organizations taking shape
there. There is also the apparent trajectory of Godard's work at the time:
Masculin-frminin (1966) and, especially, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle
(released earlier in 1967) could be taken to indicate an increasing interest
on Godard's part in the politics of the student generation and the social


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 93

and political state of Paris, France, and indeed the world under capital-
ism. His participation in the making of Loin de Viitnam (1967), a film com-
mentary on the war in Vietnam, along with directors such as Marker,
Resnais, and Varda, traditionally associated with the political left, in dis-
tinction to Godard and his familiar Cahiers associates, would have con-
tributed further to the perception that Godard himself was increasingly
politicized. Clearly this was not entirely a misperception. Despite Go-
dard's later claim25 never to have read Marx, after 1967 he devoted him-
self almost completely to the exploration of what it might mean to "make
films politically," first under his own name, then with Jean-Pierre Gorin
and others26 as the Dziga Vertov Group, and then again with Gorin as
codirector-from Un Film Comme les Autres (1968) to Letter to Jane (1972)-
and subsequently in video and television projects with Anne-Marie
Mieville-from  Ici et Ailleurs (1974) to France/tour/detour/deuxlenfants
(1978), before his so-called return to commercial film production with
Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979). As critical responses to this growing body of
work sought to establish the kind of narrative that might make sense of a
filmmaker's "career," it is perhaps inevitable that the "political" content
of La chinoise should have attracted more attention than its formal theatri-
cality, as it took its place in the critical narrative as a key precursor to the
Dziga Vertov work. However, this emphasis to some extent misses the
point of Godard's own conception of what it means to "make films politi-
cally": for Godard, at least when he articulated this distinction, the politi-
cal is not a question of content, but rather a matter of how and why a film
is composed. While the question of why would seem to drive much of the
Dziga Vertov Group work, in that it appears motivated by a sense of his-
torical urgency and by a desire to develop a meaningful purpose for the
filmmaker, in La chinoise it is more a matter of how. How, that is, the os-
tensibly "political" content of the film is shaped, or produced, even, by
the formal choices made in its composition. So, having earlier offered a
brief account of "what happens" in La chinoise, I now present a brief ac-
count of "how it happens," which will highlight-in keeping with the
analysis already offered of the "fictional assassination" -the theatre that
constitutes, I will suggest, the actual politics of the film, in which there is
clearly "no real Marxist Leninist cell."
That it is a question of theatre is because it is also a holiday. The film
takes place in the summer vacation (between the end of classes and their
resumption). As Veronique reports at the end of the film-in words and
in a manner that can only corroborate the idea that there has been no
assassination- "Avec l'ete qui finissait pour moi c'etait la rentree des


94 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

classes."27 The film ends with the bourgeois "cousins" returning to their
apartment and preparing to make good whatever damage has been done
by its summer residents: in this the narrative resembles that of Ben Jon-
son's The Alchemist,28 in which homeowner Lovewit returns from a so-
journ in the country at the end of the play to expel the fraudster Subtle
and his coconspirators, making for a conclusion that is both comic and
conservative, in Jonson and perhaps, too, in Godard. It also begins and
ends with "curtains," in the form of the red-painted shutters in front of
which Henri delivers his opening text and through which the cousins and
Veronique make their exit from view in the final shot of the film. Between
the opening and the closing of the "curtains," then, a theatrical holiday -a
suspension in the time of work, not unlike that imposed upon the estate
in Uncle Vanya through the visit of the Professor and his wife. But, as the
discussion of work and leisure in the preceding chapter has shown, one
person's holiday is always someone else's work. In Uncle Vanya, although
Vanya himself condemns the visit of the Professor and his wife for having
forced him to suspend his labor, it is simultaneously clear that, however
great the disruption, Sonya has been working throughout. In La chinoise a
similar presentation of gendered labor is in play: while the bourgeois bo-
hemians like Veronique and Guillaume develop their political sensibili-
ties, it is Yvonne who brings them tea, cleans their windows, and polishes
their shoes.
Godard's use of the holiday as the frame for cinematic narrative in La
chinoise is not new, and it will return, too. In Pierrot le fou (1965)29 Bel-
mondo and Karina take off together, abandoning Paris for a romantic-
picaresque holiday-adventure in the Midi, escaping their daily worlds of
advertising and babysitting for beaches, a parrot, boats, and, eventually,
torture and death (a holiday gone wrong). La chinoise is a holiday-
adventure of a different kind, but both seem linked to a highly specific
French appreciation of the vacances payis. It was as a result of widespread
labor unrest in the period between the election of 1936 and the eventual
formation of the Front Populaire government that employers were
obliged, by law, to permit their employees two weeks paid holiday a year.
The same legislation also effectively installed the weekend as part of the
structure of everyday work-leisure life. Godard's second film of 1967,
Weekend,3 combines elements of both Pierrot le fou and La chinoise, pre-
senting the weekend itself as a Fordist nightmare -almost literally in the
form of its famous tracking shot of a traffic jam of Parisians in exodus -as
well as the precursor to an extended season in hell, as its bourgeois pro-
tagonists murder a parent to secure an inheritance before falling into the


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 95

hands of the cannibalistic Front de Liberation Seine et Oise. The Front
Populaire government may be said to have inaugurated Fordism in
France in legislation that resembled, in its social and economic effects, the
innovation of the "five-dollar day" by the Ford Motor Company in the
United States in 1914: setting in place a system in which the workers'
wages enabled them to consume enough in their leisure time to provide
capital with the profits needed for its continued expansion. If these films
contain an intuition that there is a crisis taking shape around the relation-
ships between work and leisure or production and consumption in France
at the end of the 1960s, perhaps Godard is indeed "prescient": what he
sees, though, is not so much the immediate future of May '68, but rather
the longer underlying process in which a Fordist accommodation be-
tween labor and capital is coming apart and will eventually give way to
what is now widely understood as a post-Fordist regime. But post-
Fordism still lies in the future, for France and for this chapter. For now we
are still in the summer holiday of 1967, and there is theatre to be made.
So Henri steps off the balcony, through one of the three windows, and
into the apartment, where Veronique and Guillaume will very soon and
almost casually name the cell, once again adopting the "speech of others."
Their choice, "Aden-Arabie," suggested by Guillaume, refers explicitly to
a short novel of that name, written in 1931 by a school friend of Jean-Paul
Sartre's, Paul Nizan. The novel depicts its narrator's disgust at the condi-
tions of life in 1920s Paris, his flight to Aden, and his politicized return to
Paris. It had been republished in France in 1960 with a substantial fore-
word by Sartre. In having the cell named after a novel, rather than after a
"real" revolutionary figure, and presenting this decision as a casual act of
playfulness, the not-"real" condition of the "cell" seems to be accentu-
ated. Of course the name carries an additional contemporary resonance,
to which Godard could have chosen to allude more explicitly had he
wanted the cell to be understood as "real": in 1967 Aden was the center of
an armed uprising by leftist and nationalist Yemenis, which would result,
in November 1967, in the hasty withdrawal of British troops and the es-
tablishment of the People's Republic of South Yemen. The affiliation with
Nizan, in a way that overshadows a relationship with a contemporary
revolution, becomes part of the citational playfulness of the cell's forma-
tion.
While there may be a kind of "reality effect" associated with the cast-
ing of Anne Wiazemsky as Veronique (even though she had previously
appeared, as an actor, in Bresson's Au hasard Balthasar, she was studying at
Nanterre), the figure of Guillaume, by contrast, is already embedded in


96 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

citational networks that only enhance his theatrical character. First, as
Guillaume Meister he is Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, hero of the Romantic
Bildungsroman Willhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, a young man who leaves his
comfortable bourgeois life for a journey, through the theatre, to self-
realization. Second, he is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, the instantly rec-
ognizable poster boy for nouvelle vague cinema, teenage star of Fran ois
Truffaut's Les quatre cents coups, who had recently taken a central role in
Godard's Masculin-fiminin. Inasmuch as Leaud is "real," he is real as an
actor. As he explains in his interview within the film: "Je suis un acteur
[ .. . ] je suis sincere."31 The sincerity of the film, then, might be under-
stood to reside in its confession of theatre and, indeed, in its insistence
upon theatre as one of the courses of "action" that its central characters
might choose to take. The search for a "theatre socialiste veritable"32 is
sustained throughout by Guillaume and includes readings from Althuss-
er's essay on Strehler's production of Bertolazzi's El Nost Milan33 and a
presentation using a blackboard from which the names of celebrated
playwrights are erased one by one to leave just "Brecht" still visible.
Guillaume's sense of theatre seems to infect the cell more generally,
most notably when his lecture about the Vietnam War turns into a perfor-
mance in which Serge (Lex de Bruijn), wearing a plastic tiger mask, stands
in for President Johnson, as Yvonne (Juliet Berto), made up to look stereo-
typically Vietnamese, is first harassed by toy US warplanes and calls out
desperately for the Soviet prime minister to help her ("Au secours, M.
Kosygin!") and then turns a toy radio into a toy machine gun that she fires
repeatedly from behind a defensive shelter composed of Little Red Books.
For Manny Farber, this sequence introduces an unwelcome "amateur"
and theatrical element into the film; he describes the "playacting" as
"rawly, offensively puerile" and claims that "the use of amateurs who
play their ineptness to death is a deliberate, effectively gutsy move, but it
can make your skin crawl."34 For me, the escalation of theatricality within
the film at this point is consistent with the strange "deanchoring" effect
achieved both by the dreamlike assassination and by the most uncine-
matic practice of declaiming into thin air with which the film begins. This
is because it is entirely unclear (and purposefully so, I think) who is doing
the play-acting here: Yvonne and Serge or Berto and de Bruijn? To explore
this ambiguity a little, it is worth comparing this sequence with a similar
one in Pierrot le fou, in which Marianne (Anna Karina) and Ferdinand
(Jean-Paul Belmondo) play out little puppet-theatre-style scenes of the
war in Vietnam as a way of earning money to finance their adventure.
Here it is clear that it is Marianne and Ferdinand who are performing. But


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 97

in La chinoise there is no diegetic clue as to whether what we are seeing is
a scene staged by Berto and de Bruijn for the camera or by Yvonne and
Serge for the presumed spectators in the apartment. The actors and the
characters come apart, at least slightly and momentarily, from one an-
other, in an experience of uncertainty far more familiar from the theatre
than it is in the cinema.
Guillaume's search for a "theatre socialiste veritable" extends past the
end of the "assassination" narrative and the apparent dissolution of the
cell, into the concluding scenes of the film, in which are shown brief snap-
shots of what appears to be an attempt to approach "theatre annee zero"
(via an installation with women behind Plexiglass and some take-the-
culture-to-the-people activity involving an attempt to console a lovesick
woman with doorstep Racine). That the film is interested in showing this,
while on the other hand it abandons the narrative of the "assassination"
as if it never took place (which, of course, it didn't), further suggests that
it is at least as interested in the questions of theatre as it is in the suppos-
edly political questions it appears to address (such as the role of the work-
ing class in class struggle). The balance of real and not-real in the actions
pursued by the other characters also tends toward the not-real, or at least
the representational. By the end of the film Yvonne seems to have entered
the "real" world (she is last seen selling copies of Nouvelle Humanite,
which suggests either a need to earn money or a genuine engagement
with the Maoist left, or both), and Henri plans to find himself a "real" job
and perhaps join the "normal" Communist Party (the very "revisionists"
who beat him up early in the film). Kirilov chooses suicide (which might,
perhaps, like Vanya's bungled shooting, be seen as a "theatrical" gesture).
Veronique's "action" is even more ambivalent.
Indeed, it is by no means entirely fanciful to understand Veronique's
action as theatrical too, on two levels. First, her conception of political vio-
lence, as outlined in her dialogue with Jeanson, is demonstrative: she
imagines actions of the kind that would come to be known as "propa-
ganda" warfare in the 1970s, where targets are symbolic (such as the Lou-
vre) and actions effectively performative rather than instrumental (they
accomplish their purpose by way of their intervention in a system of rep-
resentation rather than by weakening a material enemy). Second, her
leadership of the cell, including its installation for the holiday in her cous-
ins' apartment, her role in its naming, and the literal-minded but some-
how oddly playful sincerity with which she seems to infuse its activities
in the apartment all suggest an interest in the observation of forms and
conventions that, coupled with the decoration of the apartment (in colors,


98 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

images, and texts), might more readily suggest the work of mise en scene
than that of political militancy. Like Guillaume's explicit interest in the-
atre, Veronique's influence over the group's mise en scene of itself is per-
vasive, with her playful sincerity becoming a predominant tone. Renata
Adler characterizes this tone in terms of a look: "the look of these young
who are so caught up in the vocabulary of the class struggle of a class to
which they do not belong-the look of hurt and intelligence and gentle-
ness quite at odds with what they are saying."35 Adler also suggests that
it is the relationship between politics and theatre that generates this ten-
sion or contradiction in their playing: "all the characters seem more or
less on the verge of playing themselves-very much preoccupied with
another problem at the heart of the new radicalism: the relation between
politics and theater."36 The revolutionary attitude here expressed is both
literal and ironic, sincere and playing at sincerity. As Veronique acknowl-
edges at the end of the film, in a remark that may be taken to refer to the
whole summer vacation and to the "assassination" that did not take place,
"Oui, d'accord c'est de la fiction, mais qa m'approchait du reel."37
In short, not only is the film long on words and short on action (all
mouth and no trousers), but it seems to insist, again and again and at
multiple levels, that the action that it depicts is theatre. The theatre of
what Paul de Man, writing on irony in the wake of Friedrich Schlegel,
would call "perpetual parabasis,"38 for its insistence upon negating or
confusing its own truth claims in the moment of their utterance. Indeed,
it turns out that Henri's rejection of the group stems not so much from
his opposition to its decision to act violently, which, in any case, he says,
was "completement irreel,"39 but from its confusion of Marxism with
theatre, of politics with art, a confusion that he denounces in his inter-
view within the film as "romanticism." He attributes this "romanticism"
to the influence of Guillaume, whom he describes as a fanatic, whose
father had worked with Artaud (even if, as Guillaume has revealed in his
own interview earlier in the film, he now runs a Club Med, which, he
claims, anticipating Giorgio Agamben while reaffirming the inherent in-
dustrial character of twentieth-century leisure, resembles a concentra-
tion camp).
Henri, perhaps too straightforward to appreciate the kind of irony that
interests Paul de Man, sees the theatre perpetrated by the "Aden-Arabie"
cell as "merely theatrical," in the pejorative sense that it is superficial and
lacks purchase on the "real" world. But as Guillaume/Leaud has already
pointed out, to be an actor is to be sincere. The problem, he explains, as he
acts out his story of the journalists who complain that the Chinese mili-


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 99

tant who unwraps his bandages while speaking of the wounds he has
sustained in the struggle has no wounds on his face to show, is that "ils
n'avaient pas compris que c'etait du theatre, du vrai theatre."40 As James
S. Williams observes, drawing heavily on Jacques Ranciere's essay on the
film, it is in the accumulation of moments of this kind that La chinoise
"could be said to reveal itself finally as a meditation on the theatre, as it
had always, in fact, promised to be[ ... .] an actor, like a political militant,
aims to show what cannot be seen."41 The point, in both the story of the
bandaged militant and in La chinoise more broadly, is that there is not
some simple opposition to be made between theatre and politics (or, for
that matter, between speech and action), because theatre, made politically
(like film), can make visible political possibilities not otherwise available
to view. Here, the political possibilities seem to lie more in the mise en
scene of a holiday play-revolution than they do in such more obviously
political actions such as assassinations. And since neither film nor theatre
is capable of carrying out an assassination, might it not make more sense
to make the making of either political-in-itself than attempt to make ei-
ther act outside-itself? The proposition of the film-inasmuch as it has
one, and to be fair, it is probably far too playful and ironic truly to sustain
such a burden-might then be that there is political value in the formation
of a revolutionary cell as an end in itself, rather than as a means toward
revolution as such. La chinoise as a "program for a proletarian children's
theatre" for "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola"?
If so, then this value must derive from something other than work, for,
as we have seen in chapter 2, the theatre proposed by Lacis and Benjamin
constitutes an attempt to unravel the logic and the temporality of work
under capitalism. The proletarian children's theater only produces (a per-
formance) as a "prank"42 or an inadvertent by-product of its activity and
bears no relation to the theatre in which performance is the work of an
evening's leisure ("nothing at all in common with that of the modern
bourgeoisie"43). Likewise the homemade theatre of the cellule Aden-
Arabie, whose members are filling the time of Veronique's holiday from
school at Nanterre to make a school of their own, to interrupt the work-
time rhythm of the Fordist economy by working on holiday time, and to
produce precisely nothing, neither cars nor a new social order. To make
of work something other than what it appears to be under capitalism,
then, and to do so right now, is the program for Godard's passionate am-
ateurs. It is a program that arises directly from the conditions of life, work,
and study encountered, in what would become their historically iconic
form, at Nanterre.


100 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

NANTERRE
The Nanterre campus opened in 1964. It had been built to deal with ex-
panding student numbers at the University of Paris, which had led to fa-
cilities in the Quartier Latin becoming seriously overcrowded. Henri
Lefebvre, who joined the faculty at Nanterre in 1965, wrote of the new
facility that "it contains misery, shantytowns, excavations for an express
subway line, low-income housing projects for workers, industrial enter-
prises. This is a desolate and strange landscape. [ . . . ] it might be de-
scribed as a place of damnation."" In its proximity to the shantytowns
(bidonvilles) it brought students from relatively privileged backgrounds
not only into contact with a mode of French life far removed from their
own but also into an encounter with the presence of the Third World
within the First (an interpenetration that would come to be characteristic
of life in the post-Fordist and globalizing phase of capitalism): "No need
to go to Algeria, to Vietnam, to India, to discover the Third World [ ... ]
the Third World was living at the gates of the Nanterre Faculty."45
This is what Godard has Veronique describe, in her interview se-
quence midway through La chinoise, as her encounter with Marxism. In-
tercut with the well-known drawing of Alice pulling aside a curtain, she
speaks of how at first Nanterre had bored her, because it was a factory
inside a slum, but that gradually she realized that the same rain fell on
her, on the Algerian children, and on the Simca workers; that they are at
the train stations at the same time; they are in the same bistros and do
more or less the same work. From this experience, she says, she comes to
an understanding of three "inequalities" or false divisions in "Gaullist
France": between manual and intellectual labor, between the city and the
country, between agriculture and industry. Nanterre is here a "wonder-
land" behind curtains (a sort of theatre?) in which the emergent transfor-
mation of French education at the service of a reorganized capitalism re-
veals something of what is at stake in that very process: what Veronique
takes as an education in Marxist critique, the planners and managers of
the transformation will characterize as a step toward a modernization of
capitalism-variously understood as the transition to post-Fordism, the
end of organized capitalism (Lash and Urry), the emergence of neocapi-
talism (Lefebvre), of neoliberalism (Harvey), and of neomanagement
(Boltanski and Chiapello).46 It is Lefebvre who names the Nanterre contri-
bution to this project:
The buildings and the environment reflect the real nature of the
intended project. It is an enterprise designed to produce mediocre


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 101

intellectuals and "junior executives" for the management of this
society [neocapitalist society], and transmit a body of specialized
knowledge determined and limited by the social division of la-
bour.47
Here Lefebvre is articulating a critique that coincides, unsurprisingly,
with the analysis offered just a few years earlier by five students at
Lefebvre's previous institution, the University of Strasbourg, in a now
famous pamphlet entitled De la misere de la vie etudiante, in which Lefebvre
himself is briefly mentioned, alongside Althusser and other prominent
"stars in the vacuous heaven" of the contemporary professoriat. The stu-
dent's predicament is to be in "rehearsal" for a social and cultural role for
which neocapitalism has no place:
By the logic of modern capitalism, most students can only become
mere petits cadres (with the same function in neo-capitalism as the
skilled worker had in the nineteenth-century economy). The stu-
dent really knows how miserable will be that golden future which
is supposed to make up for the shameful poverty of the present.48
They inhabit an increasingly precarious social position in which the class
privilege of which a university education forms part comes into conflict
with the reality that their university education may not lead directly to
the kinds of elite social positions it might once have done. This tension is
also experienced within the day-to-day operations of the university itself.
The expansion of the university and its transformation from a site of
scholarly privilege into the edu-factory49 entails the introduction of new
kinds of teaching, in terms of both method and matter. This means that
students drawn into protest within the university-against both scholas-
tic arcana and associated hierarchies, as well as against infantilizing social
conditions-become active agents for the development of a "moderniz-
ing" view of the function of the university. They thus become the struc-
tural engineers of their own subjugation to the emerging logic of the edu-
factory. Such an analysis, both inspired and directly informed by thought
developed within the Internationale Situationniste, prefigures to a sub-
stantial extent subsequent critical accounts of what was to take place in
May '68.
Danielle Ranciere and Jacques Ranciere, in their coauthored contribu-
tion to a special issue of the journal Revoltes logiques devoted to a theoreti-
cal and historical consideration of May '68, argue that the transformation
of the university was a contradictory process. Before '68, "life was cut off


102 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

from the School," and while there is no place for "tender feelings for the
old forms of oppression," the opening up of "School" to "life" (including
the introduction of Althusser, psychoanalysis, semiology, and Foucault to
the curriculum, alongside more "modern" modes of teaching and assess-
ment) has led, they argue, to the subjugation of university teaching and
research to powerful external forces (of cultural production and con-
sumption):
Pendant que les militants de la Gauche proletarienne proclamaient
la revolte contre le savoir bourgeois et l'autorite academique, c'est
un nouveau type de savoir qui se mettait en place dans la dissemi-
nation des universites et dans la specialisation des filieres, un sys-
teme moderne de developpement des forces productive theoriques
qui socialisait le pouvoir des professeurs. Le systeme des unites de
valeur, du contr6le continu et des mini-memoires marquait l'entree
de l'apprentissage universitaire dans l'age de la rationalisation tay-
loriste. A l'artisanat du cours magistral et de l'examen annuel suc-
cedait une demande de production continue aussi bien pour les
enseignes que pour les enseignants, determinant un besoin d'aide
exterieure.50
To cast this development in terms familiar from the last chapter, the
French university system had been an institution characterized by strong
residual elements of a pre-Fordist conception of the relationship between
education and work (that is to say, a relationship in which the relation-
ship is neither necessary nor self-evident), in which the ideology of the
disinterested professional could be nurtured in isolation from the de-
mands of the factory and the market. It is now on the way to becoming
something very different: it is no longer to be a mechanism by which a
distinction between the professional and the worker is inscribed and sus-
tained, precisely because the production system of "neocapitalism" has
no particular use for such distinctions. The contradictory nature of this
development may be considered from two perspectives. On the one hand
it involves students studying Althusser but being encouraged to instru-
mentalize such study toward the demands of the very ideological state
apparatuses that Althusser depicts. On the other it opens up possibilities
for new kinds of class solidarity and alliances-between the traditional
proletariat of the car factory and the partially proletarianized young
bourgeoisie of the edu-factory. Of course it was precisely such an alliance
that momentarily raised the possibility of revolution in France in 1968,


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 103

and it is toward the dissolution of the supposed distinction between
worker and intellectual that much of Jacques Ranciere's subsequent writ-
ing has been directed. In the last chapter the passionate amateur turned
out to be the figure under which the professional went to work at the be-
ginning of the Fordist phase of capitalism; here in post-Fordist or neo-
capitalism the passionate amateur has no profession to pursue any longer
and must instead invent for herself new modes of living and working,
either within or against the logics of capitalist production. This is the pre-
dicament and the possibility that Godard's La chinoise presents.
The authors of De la misere de la vie etudiante take a largely pessimistic
view of the situation in the French universities before '68, emphasizing
predicament rather than possibility but noting, as it were, the possibility
of possibility in light of the actions of students at Berkeley, of whom they
write:
From the start they have seen their revolt against the university
hierarchy as a revolt against the whole hierarchical system, the dicta-
torship of the economy and the State. Their refusal to become an
integrated part of the commodity economy, to put their specialized
studies to their obvious and inevitable use, is a revolutionary ges-
ture. It puts in doubt that whole system of production which alien-
ates activity and its products from their creators.51
It is precisely this possibility that the events of May '68 were to instantiate.
For Kristin Ross, in an analysis that builds on that offered by Danielle
Ranciere and Jacques Ranciere in the piece already cited, and in subse-
quent writings by Jacques Ranciere, the significance of the events of May
'68 lay in their being a "revolt against function";52 not just against the in-
creasing specialization of both work and study but against the very idea
of work itself. In the present context such tendencies take shape in the
idea that the passionate amateur of late Fordism is in flight from social
location and that this flight might be achieved by way of theatre, a nonlo-
cation where there is scope for pretending to be, and perhaps actually
becoming, someone else and in the process moving beyond given identi-
ties of class or occupation.
For Jacques Ranciere, this "refusal of work" is not a new phenomenon,
however. Indeed, in Ranciere's own work on nineteenth-century labor,
leisure, and education, he identifies in the French working class an atti-
tude that resembles a recalcitrance regarding wage labor very similar to
that which E. P. Thompson records in the English working class's resis-


104 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

tance to the very process that "made" them into the working class. Ran-
ciere identifies the theatre-going habits and aspirations to make theatre
among the nineteenth-century Parisian working class as an important in-
stance of this resistance to work and to social location. He suggests that
workers attending goguettes53 attend as spectators who frequently enter-
tain the fantasy of becoming performers themselves and then devote
work time to teaching themselves music and versification with this aim in
mind. For Ranciere, this movement of working-class people into a cul-
tural sphere supposedly beyond that to which their formal education had
prepared them "was perhaps more of a danger to the prevailing ideologi-
cal order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs,"54 on the
basis that it destabilized deeply held notions of class identity and behav-
ior (or, in Ranciere's more recent terminology, disrupted the distribution
of the sensible), producing "fissures" in which "a minority might see a
line of escape from work which had become unbearable, but also from the
language and behaviour of the workshop, in a word from the unbearable
role of the worker-as-such," because they thereby "develop capacities
within themselves which are useless for the improvement of their mate-
rial lives and which in fact are liable to make them despise material con-
cerns."5 The theatre is a particularly fertile location for this dislocation
for Ranciere, for precisely the same reasons for which Plato feared it: it
cultivates "the habit of always being somewhere where there is nothing to
do but concern oneself with matters which are not one's own business."56
This constitutes, argues Ranciere, "a spontaneous movement of depro-
fessionalisation[ ... .] abolishing the distance between specialist knowl-
edge and amateur culture."57 La chinoise-with its playful-serious auto-
didacts (or passionate amateurs) making theatre with apparent disregard
for "material concerns" -looks like a revival of such practice in a new
historical conjunction.
The revolt of 1968, as understood by Ranciere, Ranciere, and Ross, is
more than a resistance to the terms under which labor is sold, then; it is a
renewed expression of a fundamental objection to the very fact of wage
labor, on the one hand, and to the agonizing distribution of the sensible
that it imposes upon human life under capitalism:
What if the hazards of selling one's labor power day after day,
which elevated the worker above the domestic who had sold it
once and for all and thereby alienated his life, was the very source
and wellspring of an unremitting anguish associated not with
working conditions and pay but with the very necessity of work-
ing itself?58


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 105

It is this sentiment that also lies behind Godard's citation of Andre Gorz
at the very start of La chinoise: no revolution is going to be staged for the
sake of pay rises or better working conditions. Revolution, or something
resembling it, will only take place by way of a far more radical conflict,
which Gorz himself was later to identify as characterizing the moment of
'68 and the most energetic socialist movements of the 1970s. Gorz de-
scribes this tendency as a "refusal of work," which gave rise, in turn, in
the early 1970s, in all the major capitalist economies of the West, to a "cri-
sis of governability." Nowhere was this crisis more evident than in Italy,
where, as Gorz writes, it took
the form of industrial action radically different from the customary
strikes: rejection of imposed work-rhythms; rejection of wage dif-
ferentials; refusal to kow-tow to bullying foremen; self-ordained
reductions in the pace of work; lengthy occupations in which
bosses or trade-union leaders were held against their will; refusal
to delegate negotiating power to the legal representatives of the
workforce; refusal to compromise over grassroots demand; and,
quite simply, refusal to work.59
As we shall see in the next chapter, some of the most influential cur-
rent theorizations of the changing nature of work in "neocapitalism," or
under post-Fordism, may be traced to this "refusal to work" in Italy in the
1970s: the thought of Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Maurizio Laz-
zarato, to name just three of the writers most commonly associated with
the theorization of "immaterial labor," was shaped by the politics of this
moment. While the next chapter will deal with the predicament of the
passionate amateur as immaterial laborer in the first decade of the twenty-
first century, this one moves toward its concluding stages by identifying
Godard's passionate amateurs as predecessors of today's precarious col-
lectives and individuals and theatre as a way of holding in tension the
only seeming contradictions between action and speech, work and play.
NOT NOT WORKING (A STRUGGLE ON TWO FRONTS)
Although it is only Yvonne who works in La chinoise, work is what every-
one talks about, perhaps partly in order not to be doing it. Although, of
course, with each character in turn giving an interview to camera that is
largely devoted to the topic of work, the not-work in which they partici-
pate here visibly becomes a kind of work: the work of the making of this


106 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

film "en train de se faire." Only Henri, who imagines that he will return
to the "normal" Communist Party once he has found himself a job-either
in Besan on or in East Germany-seems to see his future in terms of
work. For the others, work-whether it be the political work of the orga-
nized party or the wage labor of Fordism (and the two of course go hand
in hand, with the latter being a key location for the formation of the
former) -is no longer central to their conception of life. This, rather than
the pseudo-dispute over the place of (theatrical) violence in the political
struggle, is the real distinction between Henri and the rest of the cell. Not
between work and nonwork, however, because the making of the film
and its fictional analogue in Guillaume's socialist theatre instead consti-
tutes a kind of not-not work. To make a film; to make theatre; to educate
oneself; to make revolution is no longer work but nor is it not work. Here
then is another way of describing the position of the amateur within capi-
talism, in terms that suggest a particular relationship with theatre (the
realm of the not-not). The amateur does for pleasure (or some other per-
sonal or collective purpose) something that others do for wages. One can-
not practice, as an amateur, something for which there is no correspond-
ing professional or "work" version. To be an amateur, then, is to not-not
work. The Aden-Arabie cell is thus composed of amateur revolutionaries,
a new social category emerging in the context of the decline of Fordism
and the concomitant decline in the organizational forms of professional
politics (most particularly the trade unions and the communist parties).
Inasmuch as such amateurs-lovers of the not-not-might seek to come
together, to make common cause, to act collectively, they might be under-
stood as seeking to do so as what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a "communaute
desoeuvree" or inoperative community. Nancy, writing some time after
the historical moment of La chinoise (which might be understood, after the
fact, as at least the beginning of the end for a certain kind of communism)
but before the more widely publicized "collapse" of 1989, claims that
there is [ . . . ] no form of communist opposition-or let us say
rather "communitarian opposition," in order to emphasise that the
word should not be restricted in this context to strictly political
references -that has not been or is not still profoundly subjugated
to the goal of a human community, that is, to the goal of achieving
a community of beings producing in essence their own essence as
their work, and furthermore producing precisely this essence as
community. An absolute immanence of man to man-a humanism-
and of community to community - a communism - obstinately


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 107

subtends, whatever be their merits or strengths, all forms of oppo-
sitional communism, all leftist and ultraleftist models, and all
models based on the workers' council.60
If Nancy's critique of community is not to be neutralized as a call for
an abandonment of political action in favor of a melancholy reflection
upon the conditions of subjectivity, it might best be taken as a challenge
to animate alternate forms of politicized sociality, such as for example the
school - a kind of transient collective circumscribed in both place and
time, through which one passes rather than making one's lifework
there-or even a kind of theatre company. To hold the analysis within the
moment of La chinoise, however, is to suggest that the cellule Aden-Arabie
is precisely not a community nor yet a revolutionary movement, but
rather a temporary association formed with its dissolution preordained
(by the end of the vacation and the return of the cousins) whose purpose
is not to make a "project" but to engage temporarily in an action com-
posed mainly of speech, to produce a way of being in conversation (at
school) with one another but not fully to orient this conversation toward
a concrete common goal or to subsume its potentiality to the working out
or working up of action. Or, to take this a step further, it seeks to avoid the
collapse of the field of aesthetic play wholly into the work of either capi-
talism or community or revolutionary struggle. So, at precisely the mo-
ment at which a political alliance between artists/intellectuals and work-
ers seems to become possible and even necessary, La chinoise seems to
articulate the idea that such an alliance should not involve the subsump-
tion of one to the other. It insists, rather, that there is a struggle to be
conducted on two fronts, a phrase Godard takes from Mao himself:
Works of art which lack artistic quality have no force, however
progressive they are politically. Therefore, we oppose both works
of art with a wrong political viewpoint and the tendency toward
the "posters and slogan style" which is correct in political view-
point but lacking in artistic power. On questions of literature and
art we must carry on a struggle on two fronts.61
This is the text from which Serge is reading aloud in a scene in La chi-
noise, in which Guillaume and Veronique sit opposite each other, ab-
sorbed in their work (reading and writing, I mean). There's a record
player on the table beyond them. Serge is walking around the apartment
reading from the Mao text. "Fighting on two fronts," muses Guillaume,


108 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

that's too complicated, and as he speaks the music from the record player
cuts in over his voice. "I don't understand how you can do two things at
once, write and listen to music," he tells Veronique, who, after a while,
stops the music and tells Guillaume, "I don't love you any more. I no lon-
ger like your face, eyes, mouth. Nor your sweaters. And you bore me ter-
ribly." "What's happening. I don't understand," says Guillaume. "You
will," promises Veronique and puts on another record. As it plays-it
sounds like Schubert this time, in a longing and melancholy register -she
tells him again, "I no longer love you." She elaborates, slowly, sadly, as
the Schubert plays: "I hate the way you discuss things you know nothing
about." She seems to be taking Socrates's view of the actor here, by the
way, the actor as the worker who knows no real craft, one who concerns
himself with "matters which are not one's own business."62 "Do you un-
derstand now?" she asks. He says he does. "Je suis vachement triste."
And then she explains: see, he can do two things at once, and he has un-
derstood it by doing it, listening to her and to the music. "Music and
language." Veronique has said that she no longer loves him, and she has
not said that she no longer loves him. What's not clear is whether this ap-
parently infelicitous performative- an utterance that supposedly doesn't
work-has worked or not. Or what has worked, exactly. What does Guil-
laume now understand? He still seems "vachement triste," and Vero-
nique sounded ever so sincere (just like Guillaume himself, the actor, and
especially with the Schubert), and now she's said it, even if she didn't
mean it, she's said it, and language may have done its work. In just the
same unsettling way, the film's depiction of the "revolutionaries"
throughout is radically ambiguous. They mean it, and they don't mean it.
It's theatre, and it's for real. Or it's not, and it's not. What I'm suggesting,
in highlighting this persistent and theatrical ambiguity at the heart of the
film, is that in La chinoise it is now possible to see not some politically
confused depiction of nascent revolutionary struggle and its tendencies
toward violence, but instead a film that captures a moment in which it
was becoming fascinatingly unclear whether revolution (and the libera-
tion of human desire and potential that it ought to entail) would be
achieved by means of proper work (in the factories, with 12 percent pay
rises, or through the labor of a revolutionary party) or instead by way of
an intervention on the aesthetic "front" mounted on the peculiar wager
that the nonwork of theatrical work might actually work.
This is a wager that Godard's work after 1967 suggests he was not in-
clined to take up. After Weekend, made in the months following produc-
tion of La chinoise, and in which he (seriously?) announces the "end of


OF WORK, TIME, AND REVOLUTION 109

cinema" with this "film thrown on the scrap-heap," Godard was to turn
away from the mode of filmmaking whose potential he seems to have
exhausted. As Colin MacCabe argues, in his biography of Godard: La chi-
noise, pilloried on its release in the autumn of 1967 as wildly unrealistic,
has come in retrospect to foreshadow the events of the following year.
Even more significantly, 1968 marked Godard's definitive break with his
previous methods of production and ushered in four years of political
experimentation with film.63 The key point here is that the significance of
La chinoise lies less in its depiction of the seeds of '68 than in its near ex-
haustion of the mode of production and techniques of cinematic repre-
sentation to which it still, precariously, adheres.
Until 1968 Godard had operated within what I am inclined to call the
Fordian-Keynesian economy of French film production, in which subsi-
dies against box office receipts for producers are available and in which
"professional" legitimacy is a prerequisite for participation. To some ex-
tent Godard and other nouvelle vague directors constituted a reaction
against aspects of this system, which they condemned for the conserva-
tive tendencies it encouraged: "cinema de qualite," which emphasized
literary values and historical subject matter to the exclusion, for example,
of nearly all contemporary social or political content, was a frequent tar-
get for the critics of Cahiers du cinema. The work of directors such as Truf-
faut (the selection of whose Les quatres cent coups for the Cannes Film Fes-
tival in 1958 is often cited as the breakthrough moment for the nouvelle
vague) and subsequently Godard, while made on more modest resources
(the production budget for Godard's first feature, A bout de souffle, was
reported as having been about one-third of the normal production budget
at the time), nevertheless depended upon the investment of producers
and upon distribution through established theatres. However radical in
either content or form their work may have been, it was produced and
consumed like other cultural commodities - alongside the work of the
Hollywood auteurs whom the nouvelle vague lionized (Ford, Hawks,
Hitchcock, etc.), as well as that of the "cinema de qualite" they so vehe-
mently disparaged. And, as Godard was clearly coming to believe by
1967, there were, as a result, limits not only to what could be made and
shown within this industrial system but also to who could make and see,
and how.
His post-1968 films-first under his own name (Le gai savoir, One Plus
One) and subsequently as projects of the Dziga Vertov Group (British
Sounds, Pravda, Vent d'Est, Lotte in Italia, Jusque d la victoire, Vladimir and
Rosa) -thus constituted an attempt, or a series of attempts, to make cin-


110 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

ema differently, to make cinema outside the established structures for
"professional" filmmaking within the Fordian-Keynesian economy or, as
Godard himself puts it in his 1970 manifesto "What Is To Be Done?", to
"make films politically."64 They amount to "a voyage to the other side"
comparable to that of Maoist intellectuals in France who immersed them-
selves in factory labor as part of their political struggle. It is notable, how-
ever, that none of these films take the actual political situation in France
as their subject matter, addressing instead political struggles in locations
such as Britain, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Palestine: in opting out of the
French system of subsidies and theatrical release, Godard and then the
Dziga Vertov Group made what we might see as a paradoxical move
characteristic of politically engaged artists of the neoliberal or neocapital-
ist society that is taking shape around them. That is, they make radical
socialist cinema that depends for its production upon new entrepreneur-
ial possibilities in a globalizing economy, such as the emergence of inde-
pendent television and its franchising in the United Kingdom, for exam-
ple, which created the conditions for the commissioning of British Sounds.
But in a further paradox, made apparent by the perspective of the pas-
sionate amateur, these films, made "politically," seem to reinscribe the
very suture of work, collectivity, and political action that La chinoise has,
as I have argued here, unpicked. The passionate amateur gives way, as
the felt urgency of the political situation hails the artist to a seductive new
role, that of the "professional" revolutionary, who is no longer not not
working. The next chapter restores the paradoxical, in its consideration of
the precarious labor of the artist in the more thoroughly developed post-
Fordist economy of the early twenty-first century.


FIVE   I   Of Work, Time, and
(Telephone) Conversation
Once upon a time, back in the second decade of neocapitalism, or, as it is
now more familiarly known, post-Fordism, a telecommunications mo-
nopoly, still quite recently released into the private sector, numbered
among its subsidiaries a market research company that employed a shift-
ing population of mostly young theatre professionals to conduct tele-
phone interviews. This arrangement was far from unusual at the time.
State-funded university programs in the arts and humanities and voca-
tional training programs at a range of state-accredited drama schools
were generating a reliable supply of potential and occasional actors, writ-
ers, and directors to carry out such work in the lengthy gaps between
voiceover auditions and self-funded theatrical productions presented in
small theatres above pubs. Personable, overconfident, and hyper-
exploitable, these mostly young employees earned just enough money to
keep going and enjoyed just enough social interaction with one another to
sustain their desire to be or become theatre professionals. By keeping the
dream alive they made sure that they stayed in the "phone room" (the
term "call center" was not yet ubiquitous) for rather longer than any of
them had imagined they ever would. There were moments when they
would even start to take pride in their work, almost as though they con-
sidered themselves "professionals."
The bulk of this work was to cold-call from a "list" of contacts, in the
hope of persuading whoever answered to participate in a market research
survey and, in the event of securing this participation, to conduct a
scripted interview designed to produce market data for "the client." In
many cases "the client" was the recently privatized telecommunications
company itself, which was just starting to feel the effects of market de-
regulation with the emergence of its first competitors for wired telephony.
Occasionally a business-oriented project related to the future of telecom-
munications would be undertaken, a process that involved the mostly
young theatre professionals having to give the impression they were au
fait with such terms as "electronic mail" and "packet switching," which

III


112 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

would mean nothing to any of them for at least another six or seven years.
But far more often the projects undertaken were consumer related, deal-
ing with supermarket locations, malt-based drinks, and domestic tele-
phone services.
Some of the mostly young theatre professionals chose to conduct these
scripted conversations using pseudonyms, partly because their own
names, when spoken as part of an introductory script for a telephone con-
versation, would be likely to make a baffled interlocutor hold up the
whole business by asking "Who?" but also, perhaps, in order ironically to
underscore their own alienation in the workplace, to insist, against all the
evidence, that they weren't actually doing this, not really, that their true
self was the one going to voiceover auditions and mounting self-financed
theatrical productions in rooms above pubs. These "Potemkin" subjec-
tivities were not the only ones being manufactured here in the "phone
room." Like all such polling and surveillance of the population the sur-
veys initiated here involved the manufacture of wholly fictional subjects
to be counted as having responded to, rather than having been produced
by, the so-called research. These subjectivities were produced using a
range of techniques, from demographic classification-"male, head of
household, university education" -and linguistic approximation, involv-
ing ingenious attempts to make the answers given by actual people on the
telephone tally with the range of possible answers accommodated by the
form of the survey-"slightly interested, not very interested, not inter-
ested at all." Occasionally there were fatal flaws in project design that
made it nearly impossible to produce the subjectivities needed.
Take, for example, the survey about malt-based drinks. The "client,"
so the briefing went, was concerned about a declining consumer base,
largely composed of "older" people, who, it was assumed, although this
was not actually articulated within the briefing, might not have a great
deal of diposable income. The client wanted to reach a "younger demo-
graphic" perhaps not currently attracted to the product because of its
strong association with the elderly. A special "mixer" -a kind of glass
cylinder in which the powder used to make the drink in question could be
excitingly combined with warm liquid-had been designed with a view
to enticing these potential new customers. The task of the survey was to
find out how "interested" these potential new consumers might be in the
product if it came accompanied by this "mixer." The "list" of contacts
provided for the purposes of this survey was entirely derived from con-
tact details given by people who had entered a "competition" by peeling
off and sending in labels from jars of the product. Yes, the potential new


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 113

consumers were all selected from a list of people almost certain already to
be consumers. In this theatre of bafflement no amount of vocal training,
schooled extroversion, script-delivery skill, or even improvisation could
produce the necessary subjectivities.
Similar if less completely circular exercises involved interviewing
people in Leicestershire about a supermarket that didn't yet exist ("No,
love, sorry, I've not been there") and a project about telecommunications
itself that was almost poststructuralist in its self-reflexivity. In this latter
case the "list" was constituted by people who had, in the first place, re-
ported a fault with their telephone service and had subsequently received
a kind of customer survey call designed to evaluate their level of satisfac-
tion with the fault-repair service they had received. Most of these people
were therefore utterly bewildered (and occasionally a little irritated) to
receive, some months later, a further telephone call from a bright and
breezy and mostly young theatre professional using a pseudonym asking
them questions about how satisfied they had been with the way the previ-
ous survey of their customer satisfaction had been conducted. Other proj-
ects involved forays into the world of car repairs and international finance
capital, in the form of "mystery shopper" -style call sequences, both of
which involved entirely unconvincing acts of impersonation. In the first,
in which a Scottish auto-repair service company had paid to give its em-
ployees telephone training, the task was to make a series of calls -perhaps
one or two each every hour -to one of this company's outlets and present
oneself according to a script in which one had broken down or punctured
a tire near Aberdeen or Kilmarnock or wherever the outlet in question
was located. Few mostly young theatre professionals actually owned cars
at this period of neocapitalism, so most were as ignorant of tire brands as
they were of "electronic mail." For some reason they were also encour-
aged to betray their identities in the most obvious (and offensive) way
imaginable by putting on "Scottish" accents with which to make the
calls - one of the more interesting uses for drama school "regional dia-
lect" coaching-thereby compounding the public secret of the whole op-
eration's theatricality with a good dose of class condescension (middle-
class southern English luvvie types effectively taking the piss out of
presumably working-class Scottish employees at auto-repair shops by
producing bad imitations of their speech). The interactions with finance
capital involved similar routines (although the impersonations did not
involve simulated regional or national identities), in which calls were
made to City of London finance houses to ask whoever answered what
the LIBOR was.1 It seems quite possible that the responses given in both


114 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

these "mystery shopper" scenarios, by workers subject to the surveillance
of "performance management" even more acutely than were the mostly
young theatre professionals (whose calls were monitored for "quality
control purposes"), were as fictional as the identities fabricated to pose
the questions, since the aim of both surveys was to address the manner in
which information was exchanged rather than to verify its accuracy. Thus
both sides of the scripted conversation were completely fabricated. The
data supposedly authenticated by being attached to these entirely fic-
tional subjectivities, on either side of the telephone conversation, might
be regarded as the pure product of the regime of performance manage-
ment itself, which has nothing to manage until it performs its own object
into being.
In some cases it was often difficult, no matter how hard anyone tried,
to secure enough interviews (manufacture sufficient subjectivities) in the
more extended surveys to meet the "quota" set for the time period allo-
cated to the "project." In order that the company should not have to over-
spend on labor time, and therefore cut into whatever profit margin it had
built into the contract with the client, blank questionnaire forms were
completed without any further interviews actually being conducted,
thereby generating an entirely fictitious (not distorted or dissembling or
dissimulating but actually nonexistent) fraction of the UK population,
whose randomly assigned preferences and desires, invented by mostly
young theatre professionals, would now help guide the market planning
of the businesses paying for this "research." Let no one ever claim that
"immaterial labor" produces nothing. The occasional feeling among this
workforce, that these scenarios gave them the last laugh, was of course
just the kind of illusory compensation that was needed to guarantee their
continuing hyper-exploitability. If you can serve the man while convinc-
ing yourself that you are really fucking with the man, then you can count
yourself really fucked.
This chapter takes up the story of the passionate amateurs of post-
Fordism. The mostly young theatre professionals conducting telephone
market research are working a job they mostly hate in order to be able to
make the work they say they love. They are using their communication
skills -developed for the purpose of producing fictional representations
on stage -to produce fictional subjectivities in a market economy. Theirs
is what is often termed "immaterial labor": immaterial because it does not
produce material goods, rather than because the labor itself is somehow
accomplished without material. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's defi-
nition is clear: "immaterial labor" is "labor that produces an immaterial


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 115

good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communica-
tion."2 One of the key theoretical contexts for this chapter is the widely
held idea that the "artist" in general, and the performing artist in particu-
lar, is a paradigmatic example of the immaterial laborer in post-Fordist
capitalism and that immaterial labor itself is now taken by some to be the
paradigmatic form of labor in post-Fordist capitalism (even for those
whose labor seems to remain stubbornly material). It is in this context that
the final destination of this chapter -a consideration of the role of conver-
sation, or "idle chatter" in Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's 2007 produc-
tion, No Dice-is intended as itself exemplary of an identifiable tendency
for contemporary theatre to explore the conditions of its own production.
In No Dice a group of actors reperform telephone conversations about
their daily struggles to do the work they need to do in order to get to do
the work they are now doing-performing this very play. For example:
ANNE: Uh huh.
So it's not that rewarding?
ZACK: No.
ANNE: I just ...
ZACK: No. It's not. Not really.
ANNE: Did that first compliment make you feel like ...
"Hm! I'm good at something!"
ZACK: Yeah!
ANNE: Yeah?
ZACK: Yeah. I finally -
I finally felt like I could really do something.
ANNE: Uh huh. Did it ... for a while ... trick you into thinking:
"Hm! This might not be all that bad after all!"
ZACK: Yeah, like-
if I-if I did this forever ...
ANNE: Uh hum.
ZACK: ... and uh ...
I-I think I'd go a little crazy.3
FROM MAY '68 TO POST-FORDIST PRECARITY
The year of the telephone market research surveys was 1988, twenty years
after May '68, and the occasion for much retrospective analysis of the
events in Paris twenty years earlier, analysis that, as we shall shortly see,


116 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

had perhaps more to say about the circumstances of 1988 than it did about
the historical events of 1968 and their significance. As Kristin Ross shows,
by 1988 a fairly solid consensus had taken shape around what signifi-
cance was to be attributed to what happened twenty years ago. To be re-
cuperated from '68 were precisely those values most readily associated
with the now dominant ideology of the 1980s -the neoliberalism champi-
oned by the governments led by Reagan in the United States and Thatcher
in the United Kingdom and adopted somewhat more shamefacedly in
France under Mitterand - the values of the autonomous, self-reliant indi-
vidual, or the "entrepreneur of himself,"4 happy to live in a world where
"there is no such thing as society."5 Some of the most powerful intellec-
tual voices of this recuperation were former gauchistes now reinvented as
media-friendly nouveaux philosophes: Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Henri-
Levy, Jean-Marie Benoist. They offered (and the French media eagerly
consumed), writes Ross, an image of May as the point of origin of a purely
spiritual or "cultural" revolution - a "cultural revolution" very distant
from the Cultural Revolution in China that had once filled their thoughts.6
The "spiritual" content of this revolution was the liberation of the in-
dividual from the previously stultifying effects of Gaullist state conserva-
tism on the one hand and the class politics of the socialist left on the other.
This analysis depended upon emphasizing certain (television-friendly)
aspects of May '68-young people, charismatic leaders, the idea of a
"generation" in spontaneous revolt against an uncomprehending estab-
lishment- at the expense of others -rank-and-file militants from the
working class, the general strike, political mobilizations away from the
glamorous and symbolically charged locations of central Paris. In effect
this constituted a refusal to engage with the more explicitly political di-
mensions of May '68, in favor of a sociological perspective in which par-
ticipants were understood as motivated by psycho-social factors (genera-
tional rivalry, etc.), rather than acting with political intentions (we might
note the influence of analyses such as that of Alain Touraine on this per-
spective).7 Ross further demonstrates how the consensus was shaped by a
presentation of recent French history in which present conditions effec-
tively predicted the past:
May now had to be proleptically fashioned into the harbinger of
the 1980s-a present characterized by the return of the "individ-
ual," the triumph of market democracies, and an attendant logic
linking democracy necessarily to the market, and the defense of
human rights.8


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 117

Ross notes that Regis Debray had already, ten years earlier, written of
how "the ruse of capital uses the aspirations and logics of militants against
themselves, producing the exact result unwanted by the actors: opening
up France to the American way and American-style consumption hab-
its."9 This logic lent itself readily to the political volte-face performed by
the former leftists: in effect their position was to claim that what they had
got (in the form of neoliberalism) was what they had wanted all along,
even if, back then, they hadn't known that they wanted it.
Written at around the same time as Ross's book, and, like hers, clearly
influenced by the events of 1995, in which a major social movement and a
general strike against Alain Juppe's program of economic "reforms" re-
turned protest to the streets of France, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's
influential and much debated book The New Spirit of Capitalism represents
a substantial new contribution to the discussion of the meaning of '68. It
is of particular relevance to the present work because of the way it seeks
to understand the relationships between work in general and cultural
production in particular within the framework of post-Fordism. Origi-
nally published in France in 1999, and translated into English for publica-
tion in 2002, this work adds little to the chorus celebrating the triumph of
the "spiritual" or "cultural" revolution of '68, adopting instead a critical
perspective on the historical elision in which today's neoliberal capitalism
constitutes the legacy of the revolt. As we shall see, Boltanski and Chia-
pello's analysis does depend, to some extent, upon precisely this histori-
cal elision, even if it takes a far dimmer view of its neoliberal destiny than
that espoused by the nouveaux philosophes.
In Boltanski and Chiapello's analysis of France after 1968 the develop-
ment of the post-Fordist economy in which we now live and work
emerged as a response, on the part of capital, to the challenge of '68.10
They track the emergence of this response through a survey of business
and management theory and related literature through the 1970s and
'8os, identifying the rise to hegemony of contemporary management the-
ory, which they call "neo-management." They argue that "neo-
management aims to respond to demands for authenticity and freedom
which have historically been articulated in interrelated fashion, by what
we have called the 'artistic critique,""' and they cheekily supplement this
argument with a lengthy footnote that shows the rhetorical similarities
between contemporary management theory truisms and the personal and
social values promoted by the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolu-
tion of Everyday Life.12 In this respect, Boltanski and Chiapello appear to
reiterate the "ruse of capital" theory of May '68, which Ross finds in Regis


118 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

Debray's tenth-anniversary reflections, and in emphasizing the impor-
tance of the "artistic critique," they could also be said to be part of the
consensus Ross critiques, in which the real struggle of May '68 was "cul-
tural" or "spiritual," rather than social or political. More than simply not-
ing these surprising yet somehow predictable continuities between ten-
dencies in '68 thought and the texts of neo-management, they locate their
cause in the transition of an influential generation of bourgeois intellectu-
als from soixante-huitard activists to 198os management consultants:
In their formative years the new consultants, who in particular es-
tablished local discussion mechanisms in the second half of the
198os, had often participated very actively in the effervescence that
followed May '68.[ ... .] They had become experts in the Foucauld-
ian critique of power, the denunciation of union usurpation and
the rejection of authoritarianism in all its forms. [.. . ] They special-
ized in humanist exaltation of the extraordinary potential secreted
in each person [ . . . ]; in the supreme value of direct encounters,
personal relations, particular exchanges; and in the proselytizing
adoption of an attitude of openness, optimism and confidence.13
Thus, argue Boltanski and Chiapello, the values of '68 are carried from the
streets into the new capitalist workplace, and the artistic critique is effec-
tively answered: oppressive and hierarchical modes of work give way to
teams and networks of professional partners; spontaneity and creativity
become prized assets for corporations; work within capitalist production
succeeds in satisfying the deep human needs that the revolt of '68 sought
to articulate. Thus I come to love my job.
But this comes at a price, and this is where Boltanksi and Chiapello's
account starts to diverge from that presented by the cheerleaders of
French neoliberalism. Where the old form of capitalist production-what
Boltanski and Chiapello call Taylorized work or Fordism- commanded
and compelled the worker's body (and sometimes her mind) for the dura-
tion of the work shift, the new form subtly seduces but nonetheless com-
pels the body and the mind of the worker in his or her every waking mo-
ment. If work is the sphere of creativity, what is left to the sphere of
recreation, if not to dream solutions to the problems of work? Or, as
Boltanski and Chiappello put it more sociologically:
The Taylorization of work does indeed consist in treating human
beings like machines. But precisely because they pertain to an auto-


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 119

mation of human beings, the rudimentary character of the methods
employed does not allow for the more human properties of human
beings [ . . . ] to be placed directly at the service of the pursuit of
profit. Conversely, the new mechanisms, which demand greater
commitment and rely on a more sophisticated ergonomics [ . .]
precisely because they are more human in a way, also penetrate
more deeply into people's inner selves-people are expected to
"give" themselves to their work-and facilitate an instrumentaliza-
tion of human beings in their most specifically human dimensions.14
The "artistic critique" of capitalism has been successfully answered, then,
but in a manner that might remind us to beware what we wish for. How-
ever, it has a partner in anti-capitalist thought, which Boltanski and Chia-
pello call "the social critique," which "seeks above all to solve the prob-
lem of inequalities and poverty by breaking up the operation of individual
interests."15 Both were strongly present, they affirm, in the events of '68,
when the "social critique" bore its familiar "Marxist stamp,"16 but more
recently, they write, referring to their book's genesis in 1995, "social cri-
tique has not seemed so helpless for a century as it has been for the last
fifteen years."17 Far from being answered, this critique has not even been
fully articulated, and for Boltanski and Chiapello, as "sociologists," this
commands attention, especially if, as we may suspect, the answer to the
artistic critique has exacerbated the inequalities that the social critique
seeks to contest: the freedom and creativity secured for some has been at
the expense of others condemned to low pay, intensified and accelerating
precarity, or long-term unemployment.
Boltanski and Chiapello's thesis of the two critiques is itself subject to
a critique that returns us to the Rancierian perspective articulated by
Ross, in which the distinction between the social and the artistic critiques
is seen as a production of bourgeois sociology that serves to obscure an
underlying political continuity. As we have seen, Ranciere suggests that
the worker who aspires to participate in the artistic and intellectual ac-
tivities usually assumed to be the preserve of the bourgeoisie poses per-
haps a more fundamental challenge to the security of the bourgeois order
than those who sing revolutionary songs and thus confirm their position.
The unprecedented, even if not ultimately complete, let alone victorious,
alliance between students and workers in May '68 revealed, as the analy-
sis developed in Rivoltes logiques suggests, a potential underlying class
solidarity across sociological categories (students and workers) in a situa-
tion where the subsumption of the university under neocapitalism was


120 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

creating conditions in which young would-be professionals from the
bourgeoisie could start to recognize themselves as workers. Alberto To-
scano, in a review essay that considers both Ross's book and Boltanksi
and Chiapello's, suggests as much in arguing that
to distinguish between social equality and cultural liberation is al-
ready to betray the paradoxical power of '68 as the attempt to abol-
ish the functional distinction between these two facets of emanci-
pation (and to preempt, one could argue, the recuperative attempts
to play them off against one another).18
Sociological or market research approaches to the condition of the "cul-
tural" or "artistic" worker might continue to insist that the "phone room
worker" and the "actor," for example, constituted two separate identities,
defined by their categories for distinction. A more political analysis would
be able to understand how these two people (or statistical units) might be
able to inhabit the same body. They do so as workers who sell their labor
power, quantified in terms of time, to capital. This is true whether they
are employed as actors or as telephone market research interviewers.
Maurzio Lazzarato presents a rather more polemical version of the
same objection, informed by the emergence of "intermittent" theatre
workers as a key element in the growing European anti-precarity move-
ment:
Les malheurs de la critique de la  critique artiste   conduite par
Boltanski et Chiapello sont nombreux, mais le plus grand qui lui
soit arrive, est precisement le mouvement de resistance des  ar-
tistes   et des  techniciens  du spectacle et la naissance de la Co-
ordination des intermittents et precaires, dont elle constitue
l'expression la plus aboutie.
Les six mots de l'un des slogans du mouvement des intermittents
(< Pas de culture sans droits sociaux  ) suffisent a faire vaciller
toute la construction theorique de Boltanski et Chiapello et a faire
ressortir les limites de leur analyse du capitalisme contemporain.
Traduit dans leur langage, le slogan  Pas de culture sans droits
sociaux  devient en effet Pas de liberte, d'autonomie, d'authenticite,
sans solidarit, igalit, securite  . Ce que Boltanski et Chiapello con-
siderent comme potentiellement <<aristo-libiral  , comme incom-
patible avec la justice sociale, devient un terrain de lutte: le seul,


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 121

peut-etre, a partir duquel on puisse affronter et ruiner la logique
neoliberale.19
Lazzarato, as we have seen, is the theorist of "immaterial labor" to whom
Hardt and Negri direct the readers of Empire for a full definition of the
concept. Toward the end of the previous chapter I promised that this one
would consider the predicament of the passionate amateur of the early
twenty-first century in terms of "immaterial labor," and so, before turn-
ing to a sustained engagement with the passionate amateurs of the Na-
ture Theatre of Oklahoma's No Dice, I will conclude this discussion of the
post-Fordist aftermath of '68 with an attempt to explain how the work of
Lazzarato, and that of Paolo Virno, might illuminate the conditions in
which No Dice was produced and of which it speaks.
Two ideas articulated in Lazzarato's "Immaterial Labor" essay are of
particular relevance here. The first is that "immaterial labor" names all
labor in post-Fordism, effectively eradicating distinctions between man-
ual and intellectual labor. The second is that the communication now re-
quired of all labor is a manifestation of a "mass intellectuality" that poses
a political challenge to the owners of capital. This second idea is a variant
of one of the core claims of autonomist Marxism more generally, that the
political action of workers is autonomous in the sense that it is not merely
a response to the demands of capitalism. From this perspective, therefore,
what Lazzarato sometimes calls the "great transformation" in capitalism
since the early 1970s -the shift to post-Fordism-is a response on the part
of capital to the revolt against work mounted in the late 1960s.
Lazzarato articulates the first of these ideas as follows:
The concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of la-
bor. On the one hand, as regards the "informational content" of the
commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in work-
ers' labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary
sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly
skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal
and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards the
activity that produces the "cultural content" of the commodity, im-
material labor involves a series of activities that are not normally
recognized as "work" -in other words, the kinds of activities in-
volved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fash-
ions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opin-
ion. Once the privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its children,


122 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

these activities have since the end of the 1970s become the domain
of what we have come to define as "mass intellectuality."20
Crucially, if a little confusingly, the concept of immaterial labor should
not be understood as marking a distinction between material and imma-
terial labor. The point is rather to understand that the field of immaterial
labor itself is highly differentiated and that it may include workers in all
kind of employment, across all sectors of the economy, from the car fac-
tory to the fast-food restaurant, the university classroom and the theatri-
cal stage. It is also to recognize as "work" all kinds of activities that are
normally not understood as such, which might for our purposes here be
considered to include the production of "amateur" theatre, as well as all
acts of spectatorial consumption. Paolo Virno describes this reconstitu-
tion of the relation between "labor and non-labor" (or "work" and "life,"
as it is so often figured in mainstream discourse) in terms of a new distinc-
tion in a post-Fordist economy between "remunerated life and non-
remunerated life."21 He also suggests that this state of affairs amounts to
an effective repudiation of the "proletarianization thesis," in which all
labor, including the intellectual labor normally performed by the bour-
geoisie (such as teaching in a university or working in the theatre), has
been reduced to the form and status of manual labor and its workers so-
cially declassed as a consequence. For Virno, whose account of "mass in-
tellectuality" tends above all to emphasize "the generic linguistic-
cognitive faculties of the human animal," the reverse is in fact the case in
post-Fordism, when Marx's distinction between "complex" and "simple"
labor comes undone:
I hold that the intellectuality of the masses [ . . . ] in its totality is
"complex" labor-but, note carefully, "complex" labor that is not
reducible to "simple labor."[ ... .] To say that all post-Ford era la-
bor is complex labor, irreducible to simple labor, means also to
confirm that the "theory of proletarianization" is completely out of
the mix. This theory had its peak of honor in signaling the potential
compatibility of intellectual to manual labor. [ . . . ] The theory of
proletarianization fails when intellectual (or complex) labor cannot
be equated with a network of speicalized knowledge, but becomes
one with the use of the generic linguistic-cognitive faculties of the
human animal.22
Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, in their review of recent theorizations of
immaterial labor, affect, and precarity, point out that, while differenti-


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 123

ated, this subsumption of all labor in post-Fordism under the heading of
"immaterial labor" still risks obscuring precisely those distinctions be-
tween workers that might constitute profound differences in political in-
terests:
While it might be true that most work today is in some sense im-
pacted by information and communications, the grandiosity of
such a claim obscures profound differences between different
groups of workers-between, for example, the fast food operative
with a digital headset or electronic till in their minimum wage Mc-
Job, and the highly educated, well-paid cultural analyst.23
On the other hand it also provides at least a theoretical basis for the for-
mation of the kind of "cross-class coalitions" that Andrew Ross identifies
has having been produced, in the flesh, by the anti-precarity movement.24
The emergence of such new formations is precisely the point of the sec-
ond of Lazzarato's key claims that bears upon this discussion. That is that
as capital comes to depend upon the "mass intellectuality" of its work-
force, it becomes politically vulnerable to the powers of reciprocal com-
munication and self-organization that it needs its workers to exercise:
Work can thus be defined as the capacity to activate and manage
productive cooperation. In this phase, workers are expected to be-
come "active subjects" in the coordination of the various functions
of production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command.
We arrive at a point where a collective learning process becomes
the heart of productivity, because it is no longer a matter of finding
different ways of composing or organizing already existing job
functions, but of looking for new ones.25
Workers who are "active subjects" involved in "collective learning"
and "composing and organizing" in the workplace pose a potential threat
to their employers because in acting upon their own autonomy they may
come to insist upon and be able to force some reorganization of the terms
on which they are employed, even when employers would wish to resist
any such move:
Employers are extremely worried by the double problem this cre-
ates: on one hand, they are forced to recognize the autonomy and
freedom of labor as the only possible form of cooperation in pro-
duction, but on the other hand, at the same time, they are obliged


124 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

(a life-and-death necessity for the capitalist) not to "redistribute"
the power that the new quality of labor and its organization imply.
For Virno this means that labor itself becomes the site of political action,
thus collapsing the distinction established by Hannah Arendt, upon
whose thought Virno explicitly draws, between labor and work, on the
one hand, and action (including, as we have seen in chap. 4, speech), on
the other:
My reasoning is opposite and symmetrical with respect to that of
Arendt. I maintain that it is in the world of contemporary labor
that we find the "being in the presence of others," the relationship
with the presence of others, the beginning of new processes, and
the constitutive familiarity with contingency, the unforeseen and
the possible. I maintain that post-Fordist labor, the productive la-
bor of surplus, subordinate labor, brings into play the talents and
the qualifications which, according to a secular tradition, had more
to do with political action.26
In the second half of this chapter the aim will be to explore what kind
of communicative labor might constitute a mode of political action in the
theatre. The crucial word here may be in. Just as the logic of Virno's argu-
ment might be that we should not be looking for political action outside
the workplace, we might hold on to the possibility that the political action
of the theatre will take place in the theatre, rather than seeking to extend
itself into any other part of the so-called real world. This is to insist, once
again, that the theatre does not stand to one side of the "real" world or
offer an alternative to it: the theatre is a real place, where real people go to
work, and where their work takes the form of "conversation."
NO DICE: "WE WANT TO ENJOY OURSELVES IN
SOCIETY, RIGHT?"
The show is about four hours long, perhaps a little less. As the audience
enters the theatre, the show's codirectors, Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska,
prepare and distribute to everyone sandwiches (a choice of peanut butter
and jelly or ham and cheese) along with a soda (a choice of Diet Coke or
Dr. Pepper). Thus fortified for the long evening the public is then wel-
comed from the stage by Copper and Liska, who forewarn them of the


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 125

length of the show but promise that there will be an intermission and that
they have saved some of the best bits for the second half.27 In the perfor-
mance that follows three principal actors (Anne Gridley, Robert M. Johan-
son, and Zachary Oberzan), joined from time to time by Kristin Worrall
(who also plays Erik Satie Gnossiennes on an electronic keyboard that rests
on an ironing board) and by the directors, and accompanied on occasions
by either Lumberob or Thomas Hummel, performing beatbox, play out
scenes in which all the dialogue is fed to them as iPod recordings of tele-
phone conversations that Liska previously conducted with "coconspir-
arators, friends and relations."28 Rather than imitate the voices and into-
nations of the recordings, however, Gridley, Johanson, and Oberzan
present the script in assumed accents (French, Irish, Jamaican, and so
forth) and with a gestural repertoire that seems to derive from both televi-
sion melodrama and disco. The scenes consist mainly of conversations
about boring clerical work; aspirations to write stories; the actors' own
efforts to sustain an experimental theatre company; other actors they like;
other performances (including a "Dinner Theater" event and the New
York appearances of the Moscow Cats Theater); and relationships with
food, drink, Radio Shack, and Philip Morris. In other words, the subject
matter of this performance is the conditions in which it was made.
A sort of pendant to this performance may be found on the company's
website, in the form of a video in which viewers are invited to "see Nature
Theatre of Oklahoma get paid after a work-in-progress showing of No
Dice. This is the first time we made any money at all."29 The video shows
Gridley, Johanson, Oberzan, Worrall, and Liska variously rolling around
on the floor among dollar bills, performing fragments of musical theatre
dance routines with fans of bills, covering one another with bills, and
throwing bills in showers over one another, all to a soundtrack of Ginger
Rogers singing "We're In the Money." Intercut with this material are in-
tertitles with texts adapted from an essay by the artist Mike Kelley that
discuss artworks as both commodities and gifts.30 The end of the video
informs viewers: "At the end of the work-in-progress run in July 2006 the
box office was split among the performers. Each received $224.10 for over
115 hours of rehearsal. That's roughly $1.95 per hour."31 This is a com-
pany that presents itself as being concerned with time and money. Just
before the intermission the company discuss and perform a dance rou-
tine, which, they speculate, might serve as a commercial for cigarettes,
thereby enabling them to "be the first theatre company that has found a
way to-that goes CORPORATE!-that has SOLD OUT! . . . We do-
ha! -we do our EPIC."32 The "EPIC," we learn, will be eleven hours long


126 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

and will require smoke breaks, so this dance-commercial will "be an invi-
tation for an intermission!"33 The published text indicates that during the
intermission M&M candy will be sold to "MAKE MONEY FOR THE
COMPANY."34
The video and the show itself foreground in one and the same gesture
both a wholly "unprofessional" attitude to the relationship between time
and money and a shamelessly "professional" one. A very long show, at
least in theory, takes a long time to make and always takes a long time to
perform. If the performers calculate their earnings by the hour, even
though they are actually not hourly wages but a share of box office, it
would make economic sense to make a much shorter show, since there is
no indication that ticket prices are calculated in relation to the length of
the performance. The audience is theoretically getting a good deal here
then, even if, as the comically apologetic "warning" about duration at the
beginning suggests, the actual economy of theatre-going works rather
differently, and audiences tend to feel that since they are "giving" their
time to the performance, it will have to be very good indeed to be worth
four hours of it. The sandwiches and soda therefore seem to function as a
kind of placatory countergift. There is a great deal of calculation devoted
here to creating confusions around calculation. In getting more than they
normally get (in terms of the calculable quantity of entertainment pro-
vided, plus snacks), the audience might be thought to be keeping the per-
formers' wages unusually low, almost to a point at which the whole trans-
action seems to be threatening to depart from the logic of exchange and to
participate entirely in an economy of the gift.35
But at the same time, by making these calculations visible as they do, the
company insist upon their participation in an entirely rational market of
commodity exchange, even if their own behavior within it might be experi-
enced and understood as bordering on the irrational. The irony of exposing
their own calculations (which may, of course, be entirely fictional, just like
the eleven-hour version of the show, whose existence is nonetheless at-
tested to in publicity materials36) is that the acts of calculation are simulta-
neously "naive" (because sophisticated calculation would be far more dis-
creet) and "calculated" (in that they are calculations and in that they seem
to feign this naivete). The idea of getting commercial sponsorship from
Philip Morris by taking advantage of the fact that cigarette commercials are
not, as far as they are aware, banned in the theatre is both devious and
hopeless.37 They come across as complete "amateurs" at being "profes-
sional" and highly "professional" in their calculating amateurism.


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 127

Another consequence of this attention to the economy of theatre pro-
duction and consumption is that No Dice turns out to be a show performed
by real people, rather than by actors pretending to be real people. It is not
immediately apparent that this is the case, at least not in the way that it is
immediately apparent in the work of Rimini Protokoll.38 This is the collec-
tive "label" under which Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel
make a range of work, much of which, since 2000, has involved employ-
ing "experts" to make and perform theatrical projects with them. For ex-
ample, Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Erster Band was a theatre piece in which
people for whom Marx's text had played an important part in their lives
appeared on stage to talk about it. In Sabenation: Go Home and Follow the
News former employees of the Belgian state airline, Sabena, which went
bust in 2001, devised and performed a piece that presented the stories of
their lives as Sabena employees. In this last case the fact of theatre as a
workplace was of course heightened by the fact that performing in Sa-
benation had become at least a temporary job for a group of people who
had lost previous jobs as a result of Sabena's collapse. Just as the perform-
ers in Sabenation and other Rimini Protokoll shows were employed be-
cause of their prior expertise-work they had done or experiences they
had had outside Rimini Protokoll -the "employees" in Nature Theatre of
Oklahoma's No Dice may be understood as being employed because of
their expertise in being members of a theatre company that doesn't pay
them enough to live on. That this means that as a result of "being" actors
they might be "good" at "acting" may be said to be incidental, particu-
larly in light of a show that has deliberately worked so strongly against
the grain of what might normally be thought to constitute "good acting"
or acting defined according to "professional" norms ("lines" not being
memorized, silly accents, cliched gestures, incoherent costumes). This is a
show about actors as workers, rather than one in which actors, who al-
ways are workers (except, of course, when they are amateurs, in which
case they are workers elsewhere), pretend that they are anything else. In
this respect, whatever its studied amateurism, it is a show about theatre
as a professional activity. That is to say that it has questions to ask about
what it means for theatre to be so, questions rather like those thrown up
by Lacis and Benjamin's "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theatre,"
about what theatre might be able to do to the organization of the time of
work. Perhaps this is why it insists on making an explicit parallel between
itself and the "Dinner Theater," not just because, in a rather modest way,
the audience at No Dice eats and drinks during the show, but because:


128 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

ANNE: We probably won't get back ...
for like ... four or five hours
BOBBY: Mmm hm.
ANNE: It'll be, you know -
the whole evening will be tied up.
BOBBY: Is your husband going?
ANNE: No, no. No. It's just a girl's thing.
BOBBY: Mm hm.
ANNE: He's ... (breath. carefully)
Let's see ...
He's -NOT -particularly -
a lover of theater.
BOBBY: Mm hm.
ANNE: If he sees theater that
he ... (pause)
stays awake for-
it's usually a large -
musical-Broadway type
musical.
BOBBY: Mm hm.
ANNE: (pause) Um ...
BOBBY: (long pause) That's good.
ANNE: Heh heh heh ...
BOBBY: That's good. (big breath)39
That "the whole evening will be tied up" by the experience of theatre, and
that the sleep required for the recreation of the worker in time for his
morning's labor might be interrupted by "a large musical," starts to sug-
gest a reorganization of the time of work inaugurated from within the
time of play. Rather than occupying the time left over once work is done,
play here threatens to relegate work to a secondary and subsidiary claim
upon time. We'll start working once this is over, or, as one of the mostly
young theatre professionals once said, back in 1988, in response to a man-
ager's sarcastic question about whether he was going to do any work that
day or just sit there reading the paper, "I think I'll just sit here and read
the paper, if it's all the same to you."
The play-No Dice-proper starts rather as Uncle Vanya leaves off,
with an explicit announcement about both the work of making the play
and the work within the play. Everyone has their sandwiches and soda,
and Pavol and Kelly have made their introductions:


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 129

ANNE: (In a French accent) Are you working?
ZACK: (In an Irish accent) Ohhh yeah! Heh heh!40
Zack (Zachary Oberzan) affirms that he is now at work, making the play,
while simultaneously reproducing an earlier conversation in which his
"Ohhh yeah!" was uttered on the phone, in response to Pavol Liska's
question "Are you working?" posed as part of the process of generating
material for use in the play and answered in relation to some other, non-
or pretheatrical work. In reproducing the response originally given to
Liska's question, Zack announces that he is working too, or working
again, working, presumably, at the sort of job-acting-that the person
whose conversation he is imitating is doing their present job (for Walmart)
in order to be able to do. That is to say that Zack is talking about and per-
haps even doing two jobs at once: the clerical day job in the past and the
(all) nighttime acting job in the present. It could even be the case-
although there is nothing to suggest that it actually is-that Zack himself
was the person Zack is imitating here: he is, after all, one of the nine peo-
ple whose conversations are credited in the published text.41 And in both
work situations, the project is the organization of the time of work: in the
theatrical present, by posing the question of our relationship to the time
of play, and in the recorded past of the conversation with Liska, by "cod-
ing TARS right now."42
ANNE: Taurus? It's like-like the car?
ZACK: No. TAR.
T-A-R
Time Adjustment Request
Form
ANNE: Oh, okay
Time Adjustment Request Form
ZACK: Uh-huh,
ANNE: And that's -? Wha-
When they're asking for time off?
Or when they're coming in ...
ZACK: Yeah when they're asking for-
or they missed a punch?
on the clock-?
ANNE: Mm hm.
ZACK: or um (pause)
if they wanted to go on vacation ...


130 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

ANNE: Mmmhm.
ZACK:... or, uh, if they're sick ...
ANNE: Mmmhm.
ZACK: (pause) Um ...
Things like that.
Yeah.43
This work in the past, then, is a function of the Taylorist micromanage-
ment of employee time, presumably designed to ensure its maximum
(rather than optimum44) use by the employer (Walmart) and the regula-
tion by the clock of the distinction between the time of work and the non-
work times of illness or vacation. The work and nonwork time of the the-
atre, then, by calling into question the very distinctions upon which the
work of "coding TARS" depends and to which it contributes, somehow
appropriates the time regulation of the workplace for nonproductive and
time-costly redeployment in the space and time of play, even as, despite
its comic flirtation with excessive duration, No Dice itself remains lodged
within the temporality governed by the logic of TARs, performed, as it is,
after the end of the "normal" working day. Like the end of Uncle Vanya,
then, the beginning of No Dice offers its audience an extended moment in
which to consider their own place in the time of theatre and theatre's
place in the time of their own work and leisure: it issues a time adjust-
ment request.
It is a request with at least a hint of redemption to it, as long as our
conception of redemption is limited to a sense somewhat closer to that
used in relation to life insurance policies than it is to the messianic. What
is to be redeemed, in and through the production and performance of No
Dice, is precisely the (life)time spent on all those other jobs, some of which
seem to have involved little more than the passing of time through the
mere occupation of space:
ANNE: Like-I had to go to ...
work a little bit today ... ?
ZACK: At the ... um ... real estate?
ANNE: Yeah ... (pause) Yeah!
Like you go sit in people's apartments, and ...
um ... nobody's there, really ...
and like nobody hardly ever comes ...
ZACK: Uh-huh.
ANNE: And then you just ...
then sometimes they walk in.


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 131

ZACK: Uh-huh. Like it's -the -
apartments are furnished?
ANNE: Yeah! Like uh-I could just go -if you wanted to sell your
apartment, like I'd go sit in your apartment ... and you
weren't there, and-then people would come and look at it.
You know ... ? And I'd just let them walk around and look at
it.
ZACK: Uh-huh. But I'd have to go out?
ANNE: Yeah. (pause)
But it's -(breath)
It's not a bad way to like make some money 'cause you just
sit there ... you know,
you don't really do anything.45
The time redeemed by its translation to the stage is the time wasted on the
way to doing whatever it is you really want to be doing; the time spent
sitting in someone else's apartment, the time spent processing other peo-
ple's time adjustment requests or calling them up to talk to them about
nonexistent tire replacements or speculative supermarket constructions.
Or, in other examples of wasted time redeemed during the course of No
Dice, writing the "same story I've been writing for about 20-25 years,"
performing for web-cams in Times Square, working without pay for "a
bunch of magicians," watching daytime television, doing a voiceover au-
dition, playing a maniac in a Russian TV crime serial, all of which sce-
narios involve the subjection of one's own time to the demands of anoth-
er's. Nowhere is this more emblematically the case than in the act of
substituting for an absent apartment owner. It is this particularly mean-
ingless occupation-more so, even, than playing the role of a maniac-
that points most directly to the work of the actor, whose task is also to
occupy the space that is someone else for a specified period of time (espe-
cially, perhaps, when the task of the actor is, literally, to speak that other
person's words, word for word). When I was much younger I sometimes
imagined that the time spent by an actor pretending to be someone else
was time they were losing from their own life. I still think that there is
some truth in this early theoretical intuition.
All these expenditures of time in their various wastes of shame are re-
deemed, either by the making of No Dice (and the payment eventually re-
ceived for those who do so) or by the conversations (themselves part of the
making of No Dice) that have lifted these expenditures themselves from
the uninterrupted flow of "dead" commodified time.46 The act of redemp-
tion is performed in order to cash in this time and its conversations at the


132 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

next level: not, of course, in some "free" or uncommodified time, but
rather in the commodification-squared temporality of the theatrical,
where an additional portion of surplus value is squeezed from the pro-
cess, as an almost unnoticed by-product of the industries of real estate,
magic, advertising, and Russian television. Just as one might seek to cash
in one's own "phone room" labor by repurposing it years later as aca-
demic research. The redemption doesn't return the time wasted, nor does
it make anything all right. It merely reappropriates it by "taking the bor-
ing part of my life and making it into art."47 For as Anne repeats, presum-
ably reperforming Pavol Liska's side of the conversation with the TAR
coder reperformed here by Zack, "Yeah, that's when you need me to-It's
like my job is now to ... (pause) perk people up[ ... .] to make your work ...
productive."48 Liska's affirmation of this goal-presented moments later
in even more "redemptive" terminology as "to take the things that make
us ... (pause) suffer and turn them into something beautiful" - also sounds
like the benign flipside (or ironic reappropriation) of contemporary digital
capitalism's project of turning all our "free-time" social relations into pro-
ductive work. For, as Tiziana Terranova has argued, this "free labour" -
from voluntary participation in the development of "open source" soft-
ware for corporations such as AOL to the minute-by-minute production of
data for advertisers involved in participation in social media like
Facebook-has become a structural feature of contemporary capitalism,
tending, in the gloomiest analyses, to the complete abolition of any work/
nonwork distinction.49 At stake in this state of affairs, then, is the very
survival of the amateur; of the subjects who are the focus, for example, of
Jacques Ranciere's studies of proletarian leisure, those whom Kristin Ross
describes, in the introduction to her English translation of Ranciere's The
Ignorant Schoolmaster, as "workers who claimed the right to aesthetic con-
templation, the right to dead time-and, above all, the right to think."50
The assertion of such rights might be achieved by the act of closing the
laptop and going for a walk or, alternatively, by the application of thought
to the transformation of this "dead time" into an object for the aesthetic
contemplation of others. Something like No Dice, for example.
While these might turn out to be the directions in which an audience
might be encouraged to think in its contemplation of No Dice itself, some-
thing altogether different seems to be going on within the frame of its
nonfictional action. Here words of encouragement tend instead towards
the fulfillment of work. Twice during the first half of the show the same
passage of conversation is reperformed, in which one speaker expresses
his confidence in the other's capacity to work his or her way out of their
slough of despond, offering such words of encouragement as


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 133

BOBBY: I-I'm sorry that, um. . . (breath)
things are not -(pause)
ROSY at-(pause)
at your workplace.
BOBBY: And I feel like there's a lot of-
lot of good WORK being
done ... and a lot of
-GOOD ENERGY
BOBBY: Yeah. (pause)
Well-I think -
I think we're - we're workin' -
our way towards each other.
So...
Sounds good?
ANNE: Yes.
BOBBY: So let's get together and eat
some-
eat some hot dogs or
something.
ANNE: Okay.
BOBBY: Okay?
ANNE: Yeah. Yeah.
BOBBY: So hang in there ... and ...
um ... I'll call you.51
In both iterations, the first performed by Bobby and Anne, the second by
Bobby and Zack less than ten minutes later, the "words of encouragement"
are reperformed in such a way as to ironize their apparent authenticity for
comic effect. Or rather, the performance mode through which these words
are made to appear (the accents, gestures, and costumes of risible inauthen-
ticity) automatically consigns them to the category of the cliche and the sec-
ondhand, not least because they are so visibly and audibly and literally sec-
ondhand (like all verbatim theatre, even though so much of it still seems to
insist upon the authenticity of its relation to the horse's mouth).52 The effect
is that the inauthenticity is ostended, even if it was never, in the first in-
stance, actually intended. The repetition of the same passage so soon after its
first appearance serves to heighten this effect. The idea that one might even-
tually succeed in moving on from all the dead-time nonwork occupation of
space and, with "the beginning of the MILLENIUM," enter the promised


134 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

land of fulfilling and productive achievement is presented here, then, as al-
ways already laughable. But not quite, or rather, only by virtue of its having
been made "into art": whoever first spoke these words (as though words
could ever be spoken first) presumably intended them sincerely and strug-
gled with the language available for this interpenetration of the personal
and the political to find a way of saying something, however dumb, to some-
one else, someone they cared about. It's only in the theatrical act of selecting
and re-presenting them that these "words of encouragement," reentering
the circulation of always-already-spoken speech from which they were
"first" retrieved, or rather, "redeemed," gather back to themselves the scuffs
and tears of the secondhand and inauthentic.
These "words of encouragement" will appear a third time, almost at
the very end of the evening, to be redeemed (cashed in) yet again, but
with a strikingly different value. Their value here relates, again, to the
sequence of events in which they appear. Anne has just offered her rendi-
tion of her favorite scene from Jacques Rivette's film Celine et Julie vont en
bateau, which she introduces as follows:
ANNE: where Jule is pretending to be Celine ...
(pause) and Celine ...
(That's good!)
Celine performs in a-Uh-
And she's a magician ...
(long pause)
But she's ... currently
OCCUPIED -uh-in a ...
(pause)
... so she can't-go to the ...
But CELINE-
is auditioning for a tour that's going to Beirut!
(pause)
But Julie ... takes her place!53
Anne then goes ahead and reperforms a scene from a film in which
someone performs as and for someone else, an audition, an attempt to
get a job. The scene of this reperformance redoubles the citational char-
acter of the performance in which it appears (No Dice) while presenting
the mechanism of actorly substitution as the means by which theatrical
employment itself might be obtained. The possibility of an infinite re-
gress opens up, in which all performance becomes an audition, the


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 135

whole of life an attempt to find work, and not even for oneself, but for
someone else; as though the actors of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma
were at work in front of an audience now, in their performance of No
Dice, hoping that one day someone, maybe one of those someones whose
conversations they are reperforming here, might finally, in this new
"MILLENIUM," get an actual and proper job, one that would not be
some simulacrum of a job, nor a way of getting the job they really want,
but would really and truly be the job itself. It is in the aftermath (in
which "everyone seems lost and at an end") of this theatre of endless
deferral, conjured up by the citation of Rivette's three-hour cinematic
exploration of theatrical illusion, that the attempt to redeem the "words
of encouragement" will be made.
First "KRISTIN, one of the musicians, who has been silent throughout
the show, now steps forward and speaks."54 She does so without the ac-
coutrements of audio feed, dramatic gesture, or assumed accent, and she
speaks directly to the audience, as herself as it were, about what it is that
"we" might be looking for here in the theatre: "We don't want to enjoy
ourselves ALONE . . . but we want to enjoy ourselves in SOCIETY,
right?"55 And our way of "enjoying ourselves" is through "our conversa-
tions, for instance, here," which constitute, she suggests, "a form of
ENJOYMENT-actually."56 As she speaks the other actors on stage-
Anne Gridley, Robert Johanson, and Zachary Oberzan-remove their
hats and wigs and earpieces and, thus unmasked, make their way to posi-
tions in the audience, from which, "in a normal, quiet, reassuring man-
ner," they speak directly, each to an individual member of the audience,
"the words of encouragement":
WELL, GOOD TO TALK TO YOU! I-I'M SH-SORRY THAT,
UM . . . (BREATH) THINGS ARE NOT-(PAUSE) ROSY AT-
(PA USE) AT YOUR WORKPLACE-BUT I KNOW THAT IF YOU,
YOU KNOW, I MEAN ... I-I THINK IT YOU-IF YOU-YOU
SHOULD JUST GO FOR IT-YOU KNOW? YOU SHOULD JUST
FOLLOW THAT.57
The familiar theatrical trope of removing the mask, accompanied by the
meticulous construction of the tone and manner of the utmost sincerity,
would seem to hold out the "authenticity" of the communicative act as an
object for aesthetic contemplation: look at us doing the "reality effect." Yet
at the same time, having brought into play the possibility that "we" might
be here because we want to enjoy ourselves, in society, in conversation,


136 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

and having done so after the dejected collapse of Anne's Rivettean hyper-
theatricality, the performance somehow requalifies the seeming authen-
ticity of these "words of encouragement," redeeming, perhaps, the affec-
tive force -the desire for things to be better -that forced them into speech
in the "first" place. In this odd and undecideable moment it feels very
hard not to accept at face value, whatever the words, this phatic commu-
nication of empathy and solidarity and to prefer such acceptance over the
risk of feeling like condescending Marxists out to piss on everyone's
chips:
MAYBE FROM THE-YOU-YOU SEE A CLEARER PICTURE,
AND-BLEAKER THAN ME-? AND I'M JUST MORE NAIVE
AND-AND       (BREATH)-AND     STUPID-?     PFFT! -AND -
UNINFORMED - ?58
The suggestion, then, is not that these words of encouragement will actu-
ally make things any better, nor that anyone will get the job itself-let
alone that capitalism will be overthrown-but rather that getting together
and eating some hot dogs sometime, having a little conversation, for the
sake of it, might, for the time being, be a worthwhile way of spending
one's time. Of being, in time, with others, "in SOCIETY."
The undecideability of this penultimate moment ebbs away in the con-
cluding sequence of the piece, in favor of a more straightforward align-
ment of language and sentiment, as the audience hears, for the first time,
one of the recordings made as part of the preparation for the show. It is a
conversation between Pavol Liska and Teresa Gridley (Anne's mother), in
which they discuss, among other things, how well the production of No
Dice has gone and how Teresa had been deployed within the show as "our
secret weapon." Gradually the recording fades out to leave only the pro-
jection of the transcript visible in the dark, as Pavol and Teresa talk about
"choreography" and the pleasure Teresa takes from dancing in her wheel-
chair. The show ends with the lights back up and an "emphatic, energetic
dance."59 As an example of Virno's "being in the presence of others" this
is of course, as always in the theatre, vitiated by the fact that some of the
people in the room are clearly not involved in the "conversation" or the
"dance." Indeed it is the clear recognition that the terms of participation
are differentiated that distinguishes work like this from more utopian at-
tempts to produce "community" in the theatre or to galvanize collective
political action outside it.60
This work knows that it is just half of a conversation about conversa-


OF WORK, TIME, AND (TELEPHONE) CONVERSATION 137

tion, and one in which it is as important that the conversation is possible
as it is that something significant is said. One possible other half of this
conversation - offered with some reciprocal signification in mind - might
be to propose that No Dice, in both the manner of its making and the com-
munication it seems to end up making, offers something not far from
what Virno suggests regarding "idle talk." Virno's proposition is that
"idle talk" -condemned along with "curiosity" by Heidegger, writes
Virno, as "typical manifestations of the "unauthentic life," which is char-
acterized by a conformist leveling of all feeling and all understanding,"61
and as opposed to an authentic relation to the world to be found in
work-is now to be understood as "the primary subject of the post-Fordist
virtuosity discussed in the second day of our seminar,"62 that is to say, as
constituting precisely the talent for political action, derived in Autono-
mist thought from Marx's conception of the "general intellect," and from
which work was once said (by Aristotle and Arendt, for example) to dis-
qualify us. Lodged within work itself, then, is something that is both in-
imical and its precondition: the "idle talk" that is precisely the communi-
cative capacity of the human that makes work today possible and equally
precisely that capacity for solidarity and collective action that carries the
potential to undo the terms upon which wage labor is established and
that Virno calls "the communism of capital."63 Taking a cue from the Na-
ture Theatre of Oklahoma's use of the word "society" -""We want to en-
joy ourselves in SOCIETY, right?" -might this communism be under-
stood as a society rather than a community; a changeable association
made of multiple conversations, across the intimate distances of the pub-
lic space, rather than as a community that might close around its partici-
pants?


six  I Solitude in Relation

The thing about Yetis is that no one knows what they want. They come
from nowhere and return there. Not only do they live outside human so-
ciety, but they are unconstrained by historical time. They are, of course,
the productions of a utopian imaginary, mysterious inhabitants of a Shan-
gri-La preserved among snowy peaks against the contaminations of capi-
talist modernity.1 So when they intervene onstage in Societas Raffaello
Sanzio's B.#o3 -setting up picket fences, kissing, performing an act of
resurrection-part of their affective charge (their charm, perhaps) arises
from a sense that they have no stake in human affairs. Their intervention
appears amiably disinterested, as though they were purely and simply
the hominid embodiment of the "unsentimental ... pedagogic love" that
Walter Benjamin recommends as the appropriate disposition for the
leader of a proletarian children's theatre. Yetis are neither professionals
nor amateurs-these are categories that only make sense in a human
economy in which one works for one's living-they are the pure act of
redemptive love itself. They are the possibility to which the amateur
might aspire in the devotion of her energy to a labor that is its own re-
ward and to which the revolutionary might aim in her visions of a hu-
manity liberated from the alienation of wage labor. So while they may not
be counted in the brief taxonomy that follows of the figure of the passion-
ate amateur in the theatre, their fleeting and improbable appearance on
the stage in Berlin in 2003 illuminates both the possibilities to which the
work of passionate amateurs is directed and the impossibility of their re-
alization, even within the imaginary worlds of theatrical production.
What was so strange, and so utterly astonishing, in the appearance of the
Yetis in Berlin was not that their intervention violated accepted norms of
plausibility, but rather that it transgressed codes of theatrical or drama-
turgical viability. Astonishment arose not from the failure to conform to a
credible representation of "real-life" logics or likelihoods, but rather from
a leap beyond what even the theatre might normally allow. For all those
passionate amateurs who are not yet Yetis, the problems of what theatre

138


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 139

allows (what one can do with it, within it) and what it does not (what it
cannot do, what cannot happen there) are the stuff of everyday life, deter-
mined by needs, interests, and historical circumstances. Notwithstanding
their passionate attachments to values that challenge those established by
capitalist exchange-most of them are, after all, "romantic anti-capital-
ists" -none of them very fully lays claim to a Shangri-La beyond Marx's
realm of necessity. All of them live and work on the inside.
Before proceeding to the substance of this final chapter, then, I offer a
brief recapitulative summary of the various passionate amateurs whose
historical circumstances and theatrical actions have figured so far. The-
atre in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century experienced a
process of industrialization and specialization in which there emerged, as
an increasingly dominant figure, the "professional": the worker who
combined his or her livelihood with a commitment to wider social or cul-
tural objectives. The "professional," as either doctor (Astrov) or manager
(Stanislavski), is thus this book's first contradictory figure of the passion-
ate amateur. She is the worker whose "love" is subsumed within capital-
ist production but who is also the bearer of "romantic anti-capitalist" val-
ues. There then followed a political response that involved an attempt to
free recently professionalized and industrialized activities, including ed-
ucation and theatre, from their subsumption by capitalism and to repur-
pose them in the interests of a revolutionary politics. In the case of Walter
Benjamin and Asja Lacis, the proletarian children's theatre was a practice
that sought to actualize in the present a communism that Soviet-led or-
thodoxy was systematically consigning to a perpetual future. This ortho-
doxy, as Susan Buck-Morss has shown, brought Soviet communism and
western capitalism into mutually reinforcing alignment for most of the
rest of the twentieth century. Economic growth and technological prog-
ress were to be secured on the basis of a compact between capital and la-
bor in which the exploitation of labor required for the constant produc-
tion of surplus would be ameliorated by social welfare. As the terms of
this compact began to unravel in the avowedly capitalist West, groups of
workers and trainee workers (students) started to articulate demands that
exceeded its terms by challenging not merely the conditions under which
work was performed but the centrality of work itself. The student mem-
bers of Godard's theatrical-revolutionary cell in La chinoise go to work in
their summer holidays to make a theatre in which it might somehow be
possible to live one's entire life, in a fictional project that could almost be
a reenactment of Benjamin and Lacis's unrealized "program." In the post-
Fordist moment of No Dice, the actors of the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma


140 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

work constantly in the hope of getting work, redeeming the boredom and
frustration of meaningless employment in an attempt to hold a conversa-
tion that the structure of the theatre simultaneously suggests and prohib-
its. They can talk to us about how important it is to talk, but we don't, or
won't or can't, talk back. Unless, of course, we write. The spectator who
writes rather than the spectator who participates is therefore the subject
of this final chapter. The spectator who participates-the spect-actor of
Boal's theatre or the convivial enthusiast of Bourriaud's relational art
practices-might be said to join the conversation by becoming part of the
event itself and may even be understood to experience some feelings of
being part of a community constituted by the event. The spectator who
writes-often understood as the critic-is normally understood to stand
entirely outside the event and to perform a number of mediating func-
tions, from scholarly interpretation to recommendations for a good night
out. In practice most professional spectators - including those who choose
to write about events in which they participate-move between the fic-
tional polarities of community and detachment, principally because, in
order to perform their professional function (as academics or journalists,
for example), they generally need to enter into the relationships offered
by the event on the same terms as all the other spectators with whom they
share the experience (or at least try to do so, whatever the various compli-
cations offered by personal or professional relations with the producers).
Thinking about the professional spectator as someone who does for a liv-
ing what most people do mainly just for the love of it invites comparison
with the figure of the passionate amateur, who may be doing out of love
something from which others make a living, even if she may not always
do so. In both cases clear distinctions between amateur and professional
activity are hard to make, and it is vital to the formation of both
categories-the professional spectator and the passionate amateur-that
this should be the case.
Terry Eagleton identifies this confusion as constitutive of the historical
formation of criticism as practice and institution:
The contradiction on which criticism finally runs aground - one
between an inchoate amateurism and a socially marginal
professionalism-was inscribed within it from the outset. . . . The
eighteenth-century gentleman was of no determinate occupation,
and it was precisely this disinterested detachment from any par-
ticular worldly engagement which allowed him equably to survey
the entire social landscape. The gentleman was custodian of the


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 141

comprehensive view, representative of a many-sided humanity
which any specialist expertise could only impoverish.2
Criticism seeks to establish its objective and autonomous status as a dis-
interested practice free from either state or commercial control, and, in
doing so, to help to legitimate literature, art, theatre, and music as au-
tonomous activities too. The drive to autonomy is a self-contradictory one
for both kinds of cultural producer, for artist and critic alike, as it encour-
ages the very specialization that makes cultural production subject to the
social division of labor, above which its claims to inhabit the realm of
freedom might seek to elevate it. This involves a lived tension very similar
to that articulated by Chekhov's Dr Astrov, between an impulse toward a
commitment to universal human values on the one hand and the profes-
sional forms in which such values can be made useful in real social situa-
tions on the other. As Eagleton observes:
Either criticism strives to justify itself at the bar of public opinion by
maintaining a general humanistic responsibility for the culture as a
whole, the amateurism of which will prove increasingly incapaci-
tating as bourgeois society develops; or it converts itself into a spe-
cies of technological expertise, thereby establishing its professional
legitimacy at the cost of renouncing any wider social relevance.3
Eventually, according to Eagleton's historical narrative, the figure of the
critic (who for Eagleton is primarily if not exclusively a literary critic) is
able to secure this "professional legitimacy" in the university, as the "hu-
manist" higher education generally associated with the "Humboldtian"
university and its antecedents takes shape around the end of the nine-
teenth century. This incorporation has contradictory consequences, one
of which is to provoke the mixture of conservatism and radicalism that
characterized Walter Benjamin's critique of the university in his earliest
writings. Eagleton sees the security achieved as a form of "professional
suicide" in which criticism's "moment of academic institutionalization is
also the moment of its effective demise as a socially active force."4 But in
order to resist or mitigate the effects and affects of this self-negation, crit-
icism within the university seeks to develop and maintain a range of insti-
tutional conventions, variously substantial and fictional, to preserve the
impression of autonomy. "Academic freedom" is one of the most power-
ful ideological tools in this process: it might be regarded as the central
tenet of a "professional humanist" attempt to recreate the bourgeois pub-


142 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

lic sphere to which modern criticism likes to trace its descent and to do so,
as Eagleton notes, "from within the very institutions which had severed criti-
cism from it: the universities."5
In her study of the disciplines of theatre studies and performance
studies, Shannon Jackson traces a very similar pattern in the history of the
American academy, drawing productively on Barbara Ehrenreich and
John Ehrenreich's theorization of the "professional-managerial class":
"salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and
whose major function in the social division of labor may be described
broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist relations."6
Jackson writes of the work of members of this professional-managerial
class in the academy:
Many academics, meanwhile, worked to maintain a separate pro-
fessional position outside relations of capitalism and commerce,
sometimes by adopting explicitly socialist language, other times by
calling for the safe preservation of moral and cultural inquiry. Hu-
manities professors in particular tried to create a separate sphere of
cultural capital while simultaneously legitimating themselves cur-
ricularly and institutionally within professionalizing terms.7
We might consider that a significant factor in the complex set of circum-
stances leading to the university becoming the focus for anti-capitalist
protest in the late 1960s was that a new crisis was taking shape, in which
the "safe preservation of moral and cultural inquiry," or "the bourgeois
public sphere" as recreated within the university, would face a powerful
challenge from a drive to subsume education more fully to the require-
ments of capital. With the Fordist-Keynsian compromise under threat
and a concomitant demand for a technical-managerial workforce, govern-
ments launching neoliberal projects would see the university as voca-
tional training for immaterial labor. This would not, in the end, involve
the expulsion of the critic from the university, of course, but would lead
instead to the formation of a new set of contradictions in which the ro-
mantic anti-capitalist professional spectator in the academy would be se-
duced by the idea that the culture and creativity he or she supposedly
espoused could be leveraged in a new economic compact between capi-
talism and its internal critics under the name of "creative industries." The
make-believe revolutionaries of Godard's La chinoise now look, with
hindsight, like the first generation to intuit the terms of this new deal.8
This book concludes therefore with three acts of criticism, each of


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 143

which, whatever claims it may make to being a labor of love, constitutes
an instance of professional activity. That is to say (that which normally
goes without saying) that its communication with its "community" of
readers and other writers is sustained and facilitated by institutions of
higher education, professional associations, and processes of industrial
production and distribution of what is sometimes called knowledge. As
well as placing its producer in a condition of debt, acknowledged here as
a matter of professional etiquette that can often overlap with expressions
of what is sometimes called love, these conditions of production involve
the expectation that some of the cultural capital accruing from publica-
tion will be traded in an economy of professional advancement. Each of
these three acts of criticism seeks to account for specific feelings and expe-
riences encountered in the contemporary theatre. A professional commit-
ment to protocols of knowledge production in capitalism conspires here
with affective affinities forged in these encounters, and others like them,
in the form of an obligation to attend to the three theatre works discussed
here as meaningful and intentional acts of communication in their own
right. The very same commitment and affinities also require that this at-
tention to their singularity should be articulated in relation to the broader
argument or "contribution to knowledge" that might justify the publica-
tion of this book. Each of these accounts of moments in performance
might therefore be understood as part of an examination of the place of
theatre spectatorship in the romantic anti-capitalist subjectivity-formation
of the professional-managerial class. In other words, they briefly sketch
some of the contours of an affective affiliation with communism, not con-
structed as a utopian imaginary outside capitalist relations, but nurtured
deep within the cultural form- theatre -that most often reproduces
them. Each of these moments involves an experience of solitude in rela-
tion, the difficulty of which might also be captured in the idea of commu-
nism on your own.
LOVE AND ILLUSION
The first of these three moments is the briefest and serves as a prelude to
two more substantial accounts of performance. It involves an apparently
trivial error toward the end of a performance given at the 2005 Venice
Theatre Biennale by the Slovenian collective Via Negativa. The error was
both trivial and perhaps only apparent: its consequences were entirely in
keeping with the logic of the production. The piece in question was More,


144 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

and it was one of seven productions that formed part of a cycle of works
by Via Negativa based on the seven deadly sins.9 More was ostensibly a
performance about gluttony, although this thematic sin, like the other six
in the cycle, may best be understood as subsidiary to an exploration con-
ducted across all seven pieces into the nature of theatrical communica-
tion. As Tomaz Krpid observes in an article on the company's work, this
interest in theatre as a "sphere of communication" rather than as an aes-
thetic medium takes some inspiration -and hence the name of the collec-
tive project-from the practice of Jerzy Grotowski.10 Unlike Grotowski,
however, this project is interested in what happens to acts of communica-
tion between individuals when they are performed in a theatre, rather
than in how theatre might help make community of any kind. More is
composed of a series of twelve solo performances, each of which appears
to involve some kind of personal narrative, confession, or ordeal. Some-
thing about the sociality of this particular theatrical set-up, however,
works to turn this familiar and individualizing device into a reflection
upon the extent to which it might be possible to establish anything collec-
tive on the basis of relations between individuals. In this respect it is inter-
esting that Tomaz Krpid comments on the composition of the audience for
Via Negativa performances as one way of distinguishing the work from
projects that seek to realize a theatrical community:
I am not saying that the aim of the theatre project Via Negativa is
to raise a community or a collective consciousness in the tradi-
tional manner of speaking. Some of the spectators are friends or
acquaintances of the performers; some are professionally inter-
ested in the work; many are cultured theatre-goers; some are just
casual visitors."
That work, leisure, and friendship rather than "community" are invoked
here as motivations for individual attendance at Via Negativa's perfor-
mances suggests that the work itself may do something to encourage
spectators to pay particular attention to the ways in which they differ
from and relate to one another and the performers, rather than just what
brings them all together for this event.
More is presented by a group of seven performers and a "moderator,"
whose tasks include introducing the work, explaining the structure of the
piece, and engaging the audience's participation. The piece works like
this: the company sets out a wide range of food products across the front
of the stage, and, the moderator explains, it is the task of the audience to


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 145

nominate foodstuffs and, with the help of the moderator, determine
which will be used in the performance. Each choice triggers a pre-
prepared solo performance by one of the other performers, in which the
selected foods are used: rice and sausage are eaten, fish gutted; a per-
former covers his face with cured meats; stories are told, memories re-
called, confessions offered. The moderator brings the evening's encounter
to a close by soliciting our applause for each of the other seven performers
in turn. This gives the audience a chance to express for the first time the
warmth with which they had earlier responded inwardly to the work of
the red-haired woman who ate the processed chicken sausage, and who
smiled with such charm, and also to engage again in boisterous enthusi-
asm for the work of Grega, almost recapitulating the earlier chants (Grega!
Grega!) that had seen him through his rice-eating ordeal. But the modera-
tor leaves one of the performers out, failing to introduce her so she can
receive our applause, and the audience quickly starts shouting back to
correct his mistake. The woman with the black hair, who had earlier stood
on one leg in a bowl of spaghetti soup and then filled her eyes and her
underpants with chocolates, stands up now and laughs as she acknowl-
edges the audience's friendly applause. Her name is Barbara Kukovec.
This looks and feels like a straightforward encounter, a social transac-
tion between people who have been in one another's company for a while.
It feels like saying goodbye to two or three people with whom you have
shared part of an evening at a bar, but whom you had never previously
met and may never see again (something that happens often enough at
theatre festivals). But this feeling is, to some extent, founded in illusion.
The encounter, however fascinating in its mimesis of the social, is some-
how missed. Earlier in the day the show's director, Bojan Jablanovec had
said that the encounter between performers and spectators that their
work sought to promote was not an encounter that looked to destroy the
theatrical situation. Although the work would, he said, be "friendly" (no
attempt to attack or expose the audience, for example), it would play with
the conventions of the situation rather than attempt to do without them.12
That is why our feelings toward the performers, as people, are a little
more complicated than at first they may seem.
Our relationship, such as it is, with each performer is one that has been
mutually constructed from those materials that the performance itself has
allowed to appear. Although some of the feelings toward the performers -
which might take the form, for example, of a desire to meet them for a
drink for part of an evening in a bar-may arise from projections devel-
oped by solitary members of the audience, projections contingent, per-


146 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

haps, upon appearance; they may also be understood as a result of the
care with which the evening's performance has been constructed. They
are to do with the presentation of faces and the calculation of distances,
rather than with the psychology of identification or empathy upon which
many accounts of the communication of feeling on stage depend. All
seven performers sit perhaps two -thirds of the way back on a very deep
stage. As they sit, they adopt casual positions on their chairs, from which
they are able to exchange glances with one another and that they are at
liberty to shift, into new casual poses. Their faces are a long way away,
still, so we are initially invited instead, I think, to "read" character (moral
rather than fictional) from posture. As each performer gets up from this
starting position to present his or her individual performance, the posi-
tion each adopts relative to the depth of the stage looks like it has been
measured with great accuracy, as though each position has been assessed
for its potential for social or affective heat or rather, in this case, warmth.
The case of the woman with black hair whom the moderator forgot
(whom we now know to be Barbara Kukovec) is perhaps particularly re-
vealing in this respect, and I will try briefly here to track the development
of her "relationship" with the audience, through her stage position and
the availability of her face. She performs two of the twelve "acts" that
make up the evening. In the first (spaghetti soup) she comes right forward
to collect the pan of soup itself from the lineup of foodstuffs across the
very front of the stage. She retreats to about the same depth as that ad-
opted by the previous (and first) performer (who skins and guts a fish
while talking about herself: "I am a good fish"). However, the "good fish"
has by now retreated to a position a little further back, so when the woman
with the black hair stands on one leg in the soup, head forward a little,
perhaps to help her balance, perhaps to help her slurp the spaghetti into
her mouth, she is closer to the audience than any of the others. She also
addresses us directly ("My mother has the illusion that I love her, only
when I eat her soup") and in terms that already suggest that the genera-
tion of warm feeling between people may be constituted by action rather
than, say, by something beneath the surface. We are invited, perhaps, to
love her a little too, even though we know nothing of her, apart from the
surface that she chooses to present to us in this performance. Next comes
a development that reveals in a delightful impasse the logic of the show:
the moderator returns to solicit the audience's choice of the next foodstuff
to be used. Chocolates are called for by the audience, but no one responds.
Eventually it transpires that this is because the performer responsible for


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 147

the "chocolates" sequence is already engaged in a performance, and she
can't move on to "chocolates" until she has finished her soup. When she
has finished with the soup, Kukovec gathers up each of the four or five
mainly heart-shaped boxes of chocolates from the front of the stage and
parades in a gentle parody of a strip artist, chocolate box pressed against
a hip, as though she were naked and trying to cover herself, teasingly.
Once all the boxes have been gathered and carefully laid out, she takes
two chocolates and presses them into her eyes. She then spends the next
few minutes stuffing chocolates into her trousers (perhaps even into her
own body) while standing in an awkward unseeing stance, legs apart,
torso leaning forward. Eventually she ceases to be the focus of attention.
A parody of self-revelation is thus followed by an act that is simultane-
ously a closing up of the self, a cutting off of the performer from the eye
contact that had previously constituted a key element in her stage "per-
sona" and also a difficult kind of self-exposure, in which nothing specifi-
cally personal is exposed, other than, perhaps, the exposure of the per-
sonal as such, as something other than what it had seemed, back then, to
be. She has performed an act of self-exposure, but that which has been
exposed remains secret.
A little while after this she returns to her seat at the back and gets the
chocolate out of her eyes. Then she leaves the stage altogether by a door
halfway back in the stage left wall, perhaps to remove more chocolate
from herself. Once she returns she sits and watches the performance and
the audience, legs crossed, and with what looks like, from this distance,
the expression of someone enjoying a familiar amusement. With every
minute that passes her face becomes more enigmatic. The site on which
we had been encouraged to "read" her has turned, perhaps, into precisely
the kind of secret that her self-exposure had revealed: the secret that
points to a particular kind of opacity of the human. It is perhaps a para-
dox typical of the theatrical situation, that a work such as this that ap-
pears to offer complete transparency-the lights are on, there is no pre-
tending, the audience determines the sequence of events-should in fact
turn out, in the most "friendly" way imaginable, to be a reminder of just
how little we know of one another and, at the same time, of the pleasures
of the kind of social relation in which solitude does not preclude an entry
into some apprehension of collectivity. It is in this apparent confusion
between relation and unrelation that we might come to understand some-
thing theatrical in Jean-Luc Nancy's conception of "compearance," intro-
duced briefly in chapter 1, in which it is the spatial distance across which


148 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

one encounters someone else that permits or even produces relation. For
Nancy this distance is both incontrovertible and necessary. In Being Sin-
gular Plural, for example, he writes:
Even if being-social is not immediately "spectacular" in any of the
accepted senses of the word, it is essentially a matter of being-
exposed. It is a being-exposed; that is, it does not follow from the
immanent consistency of a being-in-itself. The being-in-itself of
"society" is the network and cross-referencing of co-existence, that
is, of co-existences. That is why every society gives itself its spec-
tacle and gives itself as spectacle, in one form or another. To this
extent, every society knows itself to be constituted in the nonim-
manence of co-appearance, although society does not expose this
as a "knowledge." It exposes what it knows as its own stage and
through its own stage praxis.13
This suggests that, in spite of any of the stories we tell ourselves about
how community is founded in the theatrical-political-ritual togetherness
that we imagine the Greek theatre to have been, and in spite of the fact
that we recognize such stories as myth, we might yet make use of the
theatre as a way of making known to ourselves the conditions of our
being-social, understood not as a full community of individuals but as a
network of relations of exposure, a "theatrical communism," perhaps.
CAT TIME
The second of these three acts of criticism involves cats. The study of ani-
mals in performance has taken on a life of its own in the last decade, and
in some of my previous work I have attempted to contribute something to
this strand of thought.14 I suggested that there was no ontological distinc-
tion to be made between the functions of human and nonhuman animals
in the theatre and felt fairly certain that the one thing they -animal ani-
mals, that is - could never be on stage was other, even if they seemed that
way when imagined either to be or to stand for a natural existence outside
the social relations shaped by capitalism. They could signify the condi-
tions of labor in the theatre, they could nudge us into a consciousness of
the history of their subjugation to human ends more generally (by mak-
ing us think back to the substitutions of sacrifice), and they could stand in
as figures for our own sense of what a life beyond our own might be or


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 149

might be like. But they could never really be that life beyond our own
because the moment they set their paws upon the stage they had become
part of it, however much romantic anti-capitalist animal lovers might
wish it were otherwise. But certain affective experiences persisted, and
one of these furnishes my second example.
In the summer of 2004 Sodcetas Raffaello Sanzio presented the London
episode of Tragedia Endogonidia at Laban. During this performance there
was a scene in which Saint Paul cut off his tongue and fed it to a group of
cats and kittens. The tongue was not real, but the cats and kittens were. I
found myself trying to account for how intriguing I found the way they
padded quietly about the stage. It was as though the cats were my own
prosthetic device, a set of furry feelers launched into a virtual space to
explore and map it for me, their paws transmitting back to me an account
of its dimensions, darknesses, folds, and intensities that I wouldn't have
been able to pick up without them. I should make it clear at this point that
I didn't actually receive any data in this way. That I felt that I might do
was what mattered.
My interest in this experience was reawakened a few years later while
reading Daniel Heller-Roazen's The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation.
The first chapter concerns the Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, a novel, if
we may call it that, by E. T. A Hoffmann. Murr is the author of a text that
appears to interleave his own feline "life and opinions" with an account
of the life of the musician Johannes Kreisler, a character around whom the
composer Robert Schumann would later write a piano composition enti-
tled Kreisleriana. Murr loves the feeling that he is feeling. He is skeptical of
the reason supposedly located in the heads of humans: skeptical not so
much of its existence as of its value. He speculates on the possibility of
acquiring human consciousness but feels no need to do so. Heller-Roazen
writes:
At night, at least, Murr knows nothing; in the apparent absence of
representation and cogitation, the dark night of the cat remains, by
definition, utterly "conscious-less." The cat perceives "the princi-
ple that holds sway over us" not by the organ of reason "that is
supposed to sit in the heads" of men, but by an irreducibly animal
faculty, namely sensation, or, as Murr puts it, "feeling."15
In this Murr is like the ancient philosophers, including Aristotle, who do
not speak of consciousness at all, but speak rather of sensation or the sen-
sitive faculty, as that by which animals may be said to be (as opposed, for


150 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

instance, to plants, that have only nutrition but no sensation). Nonethe-
less, we recall, it was Aristotle himself who sought to make the distinction
between human and nonhuman animals on the basis of reason and lan-
guage, thereby distinguishing himself from many of the pre-Socratics,
who, as Heller-Roazen notes, accepted "no such partition between man
and other beasts."16 What Heller-Roazen then advances, through a close
reading of Aristotle's De anima, is the idea that all animals, human and
nonhuman, share a "common sense," which is the sense of sensing. This
is not really a sixth sense at all, but a kind of meta-sense that Heller-
Roazen associates with Murr's delight in feeling himself feel. The key mo-
ment in Heller-Roazen's explication of Aristotle comes in relation to the
philosopher's resolution of an apparent contradiction in his account of
the senses. Because each sense has its proper organ, medium, and object,
according to Aristotle, no single sense can sense its own sensing:
If it is by the sense of sight that we perceive that we are seeing, he
reasons, then the sense of sight must be said to have not one but
two objects. The proper sensible quality of vision will be not only
the visible, as he has until now maintained, but also the mere fact
of vision, and it will be necessary to reject the doctrine developed
in the preceding sections of the treatise, according to which there
corresponds a particular quality, grasped by means of an organ in
a medium at a point between two extremes. But if, instead, it is by
a sense other than sight that we perceive that we are seeing, the
problem still cannot be said to be solved. It seems, if anything,
more pressing. For what will one say of this second sense: does it,
too, perceive that it perceives the fact of vision?17
As Aristotle frames the problem: "Either the process will go to infinity,
or there will be some sense that is [the sense] of itself."18 This "common
sense" is, for Heller-Roazen, not the candidate for the role of conscious-
ness within Aristotle's thought, as subsequent commentators have sought
to promote it, but rather, a form of sensation. It is in the sensation that is
this "common sense" or "inner touch" that we know ourselves to be our-
selves. And this is what we share with all the other animals, rather than,
as in the model in which this "common sense" becomes "consciousness"
and enables rationality and language, that which divides us from them. It
is not surprising, then, that Heller-Roazen, who is, after all, a translator of
Giorgio Agamben, should think about this possibility as a way of show-
ing up and evading, conceptually at least, the operations of what Agam-


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 151

ben has called the "anthropological machine" (the use of the exclusion of
the animal in order to produce the category of the human).19 The division
of the human animal from the nonhuman animal requires also the divi-
sion within each human between those qualities that are proper to the
human and those that are not, that are understood as the nonhuman or
animal within. The existence of this remainder-that which is left over
inside the human once its human properties have been established-
points, for Agamben and Heller-Roazen, to "a dimension of the living
being in which the distinction between the human and the inhuman sim-
ply has no pertinence: a region common by definition to all animal life. In
the idiom of classical philosophy the name of this shared region is 'sensa-
tion' (aisthesis)."20
What happens, then, is that in the dominant tradition of classical com-
mentary the Aristotelian separation of humans from animals is shored up
by claiming that the sense of "sensing that we are sensing" is the property
not of all animals, as Aristotle himself has asserted, but the property of
human animals alone, as Aristotle has subsequently come to mean. What
matters for the present discussion is that it is precisely in the moment of
the invention of consciousness as a faculty apart from sensation, and as
something that will come to define the human, that upon which the hu-
man/nonhuman animal distinction is founded in classical thought, that
we may also find the very concept that might help us unsettle that distinc-
tion again. And that therefore, it might be in moments of shared, mingled
explorations of sensation that animal-human relations in the theatre
might offer, again, some way of thinking about labor and our desire to be
free of it. In the performance of the cats in the London episode of Tragedia
Endogonidia it was perhaps my sense of their sense of their own and my
senses of sensing that made me sense the cats and kittens as my own or-
gans of sense. That what we had in common, in the theatre, was our sense
of sensing, in my human animal case heightened perhaps by the fact that
the theatre is an invention of my own kind expressly designed, one might
say, to help us sense our own sensing.
What does this have to do with labor? Returning to the idea discussed
in the previous chapter that the labor performed by performers in the
theatre might be exemplary of what is variously called "affective" or "im-
material" labor, we might inquire as to the affects or emotional experi-
ences that the cats produce in terms of our experience of work ordered by
time. The theatre involves organized time. It measures the work time of
its workers in relation to the work and leisure timetables of its consumers,
and it makes this measurement audible and visible. Most theatre then


152 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

involves the organization of time within that time: the time of drama-
turgy; sometimes the fictional time that runs alongside but at a different
speed from real time; sometimes simply real time made palpable in the
measure of the musical performance and count of the choreography; or,
in a most general sense, the organization of actions in and through space
and time that constitute more or less anything that happens on stage,
ever. Thus the theatre intensifies our experience of time as linear, progres-
sive, and regular. The cats, and the feelings they provoke, undo this pro-
cess. The cats do what the cats do, and they do it without reference to the
temporality of either the theatre as workplace or the theatre as time-
world. Or at least we feel this to be so. Imagine detaching your attention
for a few moments from the forward movement of the action on stage,
drifting away from the dramaturgy that is organizing the sequence of
events in time, and allowing your experience to be governed by the furry
antennae as the cats pad the stage, some with speedy paw-steps, some
tentatively, sniffing out and peering into its folds and corners and dark-
nesses. Are you starting to hollow out an experience of an extended pres-
ence in space but without measurement or regulation -a kind of cat time
in which you can feel yourself slipping momentarily outside the time by
which our work and leisure (and the performance itself) are organized?
What is the quality or nature of this participation in the movement and
presence of the cats? I'd suggest that we might think of this attention not
in terms of our eyes following, tracking the cats, but, to follow through
with the idea that the cats themselves function like antennae, as a kind of
sensing more readily associated with listening.
This is where Jean-Luc Nancy makes his final appearance. For Nancy,
listening is a turning of the attention and the senses toward both the
world and the self. In fact he characterizes listening in terms that draw
upon precisely the same concept of aisthesis, or sense of oneself sensing,
that Heller-Roazen also takes from Aristotle. Nancy writes:
Indeed, as we have known from Artistotle, sensing [sentir] (aisthe-
sis) is always a perception [ressentir], that is, a feeling-onself-feel
[se sentir sentir], or if you prefer, sensing is a subject or it does not
sense. But it is perhaps in the sonorous register that this reflected
structure is most obviously manifest.21
And, formulated slightly differently:
To be listening is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be
open from without and from within, hence from one to the other


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 153

and from one in the other. Listening thus forms the perceptible
singularity that bears in the most ostensive way the perceptible or
sensitive (aisthetic) condition as such: the sharing of an inside/out-
side, division and participation, de-connection and contagion.22
Listening, then, is the mode of attentiveness in which we simultaneously
sense ourselves and ourselves sensing our relation with others. It is a mode
of "compearance" and a becoming-audience. It might be practiced in the
theatre auditorium as a kind of feeling-in-common that approaches but
never closes into identification, participation, or community but that is
also, nonetheless, a feeling-in-common of not being regulated by the tem-
porality of capital. This experience might therefore be another specifically
theatrical instance of Nancy's "literary communism": the production of a
fragile being-in-common of singularities, produced, one might say,
through the affective labor of the writer -and by extension the choreogra-
pher, the dramaturg, the actor, her soup, her chocolates, her face turned
toward ours, our applause, her smile, her laughter, our love, and of course
the cats. Such production might open onto the fleeting emergence of a feel-
ing of feeling in which the temporality of work and leisure is undone, an
emergence all the more poignant for its arising in precisely one of those
places in which work and leisure articulate their relations with one an-
other with peculiar force. To have such a feeling of liberation from the
work-leisure dynamic in, say, a wilderness would be one thing. To have it
in a theatre is quite another, especially as a professional spectator.
SOLITUDE IN RELATION
Chris Goode steps out onto the stage of the small upstairs theatre at the
Oval House in London. He steps up from a seat on the front row stage
right, to stand in the light in front of a full house of around sixty people.
"So I step out onto the stage," he says, speaking of some other stage in a
vast auditorium in front of a thousand people.23 As he stands there, on
this grand, heroic utopian stage, behind him there are children and foxes
and squirrels, he says, and, as he opens his arm, snow falls. This, he will
soon reveal, is the first of two dream sequences in this evening's perfor-
mance. "I'm Chris," he announces now, in the kind of conversational but
partly public tone of someone used to weighing and choosing every word.
In tonight's show he is going to tell us about some things that have been
going on in his life recently. It's not that these things are any more impor-
tant than whatever might be going on in our lives right now, and, he even


154 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

suggests to the audience, some other time we might all come round to
"your place," and "you" can tell us all about "your" stuff. But tonight
we're here, in this theatre, it is just us and this theatre, and although some
of what is going to be said might be hard to say, and hard even to listen
to, it is "just stuff." Theatre, Chris tells us, is where he comes, or what he
uses, to think about things; it makes more sense to him, he tells us, to
make that thinking social, than it does just to sit at home and write things
down. And so that he is not entirely alone tonight-the life of a solo per-
former can be difficult-he has a guest who will join him on stage, a dif-
ferent guest each night, who will sit with him, listen, talk, and perform
parts of the show with him. On March 12, 2012, his guest was Karen
Christopher; on March 15 it was Theron Schmidt. Chris welcomes his
guest to the stage, and the two of them sit down on straight-backed up-
holstered chairs on either side of a low table. Behind them a stretch of
color-dappled flooring rises up to extend into a kind of backdrop, the
kind that might look inoffensive on camera. There's a bookcase with a
number of small objects on it. We are flirting with the format of the day-
time talk show. At Chris's prompting his guest talks about how the two of
them know each other. For a while it feels as though Chris is the host, and
the show is really about the guest. Of course the idea that a talk show
might ever really be about the guest is a fiction in which we all collude in
order to make it happen.
He says that what he is going to tell us will be the truth. He has
changed a few details to make things work better, but nothing significant
enough to make what he will tell us anything other than the truth, the
truth about himself, the only thing about which he thinks he is able to
know the truth. He also wants this to be part of a social interaction. Al-
though the show varies from night to night, not least because of the un-
predictability of the interaction with the guest (which is in any case quite
carefully orchestrated and prepared), it is, straightforwardly, that kind of
theatre that is composed of a series of repeatable events, carefully orga-
nized in advance, and, very clearly, not the kind of theatre that is going to
try to coerce its audience into extensive participation. So the extent to
which the thinking in this theatre is going to be social is going to be
shaped by qualities of mutual attention rather than any attempt at impro-
vised conversation. In place of the false excitements of joining in, we are
simply invited to give our attention, to assist, by means of our presence,
at the making public of what might otherwise have been thought and
imagined in solitude, in the hope, perhaps, that the simple but difficult act
of making it public in this way, the act of offering it for the attention of


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 155

others, might place that solitude in new relations. Or, in other words, that
the person who speaks to us from this stage, who says "I'm Chris" to-
night, and the next night, and the night after that, to different people each
night, might be both Chris and "Chris," where the difference between
them, and their truths, is so infinitesimal as not quite to matter, while, at
the same time, so real and substantial and immediate and significant as to
make this event just theatre enough. It is in the fine judgment of what it
takes to make theatre just theatre enough that this performance finds its
remarkable poise and communicates-however hard and painful its sub-
ject matter-a kind of quiet public joy.
Chris Goode is a theatre-maker working as a writer, director, and per-
former in a diverse range of projects. He has recently formed Chris Goode
and Company with his producer, Ric Watts, having previously worked as
artistic director of Camden People's Theatre in London (2001-4), as well
as leading his own company, Signal to Noise, beginning in 1999, with
which he presented a mixture of large-scale works for theatre spaces and
more intimate pieces for performance in domestic spaces. He is also a
poet and gives public readings and performances of his own poetry, as
well as that of other experimental poets. Even when he works as a solo
artist-in situations, like God/Head, that look like "one-man shows" -it is
always clear that performance is understood and undertaken as a collab-
orative project. Both God/Head and his 2012 touring production of an ear-
lier "one-man show," The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley, originally
created in 2009, are directed by Wendy Hubbard, one of a constellation of
artists who, so it seems, are going to be providing Chris Goode with his
"and Company" in forthcoming work. From 2006 to 2011 he was the au-
thor of a blog-Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire-where he
wrote about "theatre, art, poetry, music, London, the weather, airports,
sudden fury, different music, still not cutting down on sugary snacks,
film, horses, people doing sin, incidents, refractions, the entire dark
dream outside." In an early entry on this blog he reports a conversation
with "J" about the "blog voice," which he describes as "the strange hybrid
of private journalling and the performance of intimacy to an unknown
public."24 The idea that theatre might be a way of giving form to acts of
communication that might otherwise be impossible or at least uncomfort-
ably difficult might even-with allowances for the convenience of
narrative-account for Goode's continued interest in theatre and perfor-
mance in preference to the more obviously solitary path of the writer.
Asked about the "gregariousness and companionability" of the theatre-
making process, in an interview with Chris Johnstone for the Argument


156 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

Room, Goode reveals, noting that "this is such a cliche," that even as a
child he was interested in "using constructed events that I can control to
engage with other people."25
In the process of closing Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire
he wrote about the way in which his various commitments to collabora-
tive theatre-making had coalesced into the decision to create Chris Goode
and Company as a way of sustaining a kind of discursive plurality of
which theatre might be capable, but that a blog, he felt, can only rarely
achieve:
For now there are two things that feel profoundly important. One
is to keep remaking and rethinking theatre as a polyvocal space, a
social space, a space that's scrupulously hospitable to difference
but also in itself a place we can hold in common. The other is to
refuse - and to offer a welcoming alternative to - what we seem to
see more and more, all over, which is the simulation of participa-
tion: whether that's about theatre that presents itself as interactive
but actually has no room within itself for a consequential or caus-
ative interactivity, or about the free-reign multivoice playgrounds
of below-the-line territories in blogs, on news sites and so on, in
which contributors are reduced to one-person mobs, bullies en-
raged by their own impotence and by the apparent impossibility of
being part of a virtual discourse that can ever, ever amount to any-
thing, or would even wish to.26
Many of his recent works are much more self-evidently "poly-vocal"
than God/Head: in 2011, for example, in a project called Open House, Goode
and four other performers spent a week in a rehearsal room at the West
Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, to which they invited anyone who cared to
do so to join them and contribute to the making of a piece of theatre, from
scratch, to be shown at the end of the week, which culminated in a one-off
collaboration involving sixteen performers. But for all its similarity to the
"one-man show," God/Head is quite clearly a social act, one that, as I hope
to suggest in the discussion that follows, makes the question of social rela-
tion its most pressing preoccupation.
The sense of public joy that I have suggested the piece might be con-
tributing is partly, perhaps substantially, a matter of attending to our at-
tention to one another, and one of the key functions of the show's guest
seems to be to draw attention to this attention; an ancient enough device,
of course, with which an onstage surrogate allows the spectator to exam-


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 157

ine and calibrate her own responses to the action. If we are to imagine
ourselves as having dropped in at Chris's place to hear about his stuff, it
helps to have a plausible placeholder for ourselves, anchoring the social
thinking in something that at least looks like a real conversation between
two people, of the kind in which the truth might indeed be told. Some-
times it looks that way because that is precisely what it is, particularly in
one exchange between Goode and Theron Schmidt, in which Schmidt, his
speech fraught with hesitations and all the while acknowledging the par-
ticular difficulty of saying such things in public, says to Goode that he
sometimes thinks it might be a better if he spent more time with other
people and less time on his own. It also helps that the guest makes visible
the relational nature of the whole enterprise, so that no member of the
paying public can quite absorb themselves into the illusion that what
Goode has to tell is for their ears only: if we have come round to Goode's
place for the evening, it's more like a small party than a tete a tete.
So, after the dream with the squirrels and the stage and the snow, and
after the explanations of what's going to happen, the introduction of the
guest, and some conversation between host and guest, the main event of
Goode's show is broached. It's a story from the everyday life of a writer.
He's starting work a little late, on a day in April 2011, and after a little bit
of faffing about, he decides he should do some grocery shopping before
settling down to work. He is opening a show in a week's time, and he still
hasn't finished writing it, and he has another show to write too - "the
deadlines are piling up" -and so he doesn't have any time for either
"monkey business" or "shenanigans." It is on his way back from the su-
permarket that it happens. He feels it "here" (he touches his chest, per-
haps a little above the level of his heart) and "maybe here" (he touches his
chest a little lower down), and here his speech slows as though it were
absolutely necessary that precisely the right words should appear: "That
there is nothing bigger and realer and more vivid in the world, in the
world of my perceptions in this moment, there is nothing realer than the
presence, the immediate and total presence of God." He pauses. "In
whom I do not believe."
We will hear this story four or five times during the course of the rest
of the evening. On each occasion Goode retains the rhythm and intona-
tion of this first, very careful, clear telling, as well as the slightly apolo-
getic gesture - two fists shaken from side to side at ear level - that accom-
panies his use of the phrase "mixing it up" to describe his occasional use
of an alternate route between his home and the supermarket in Stoke
Newington. But on each occasion there are variations, as aspects of the


158 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

story only touched upon in its first rendition are opened up and ampli-
fied. Perhaps the most significant amplification is his account of the show
he'll be writing once the show he's about to open is finished. This is a play
he has been asked to write, and he's decided that it's going to be about a
boy of thirteen, alone in his room, who's maybe queer and maybe not sure
whether he knows it yet and who might-that is, if Chris Goode chooses
to write it that way-be harming himself in some way. Another expansion
of the story of the encounter with God in Stoke Newington involves an
account of a visit to the doctor in Leytonstone ten years ago when it be-
came clear to Chris that everyone else in the waiting room (which was it-
self merely a stage set) was a member of a religious cult, armed with
knives and ready to kill him. Chris recalls his rationalization of this expe-
rience some ten minutes after leaving the doctor's surgery: of course it
wasn't a stage set, of course no one was plotting to kill him, it was just his
brain doing something funny, something chemical. Except, and again of
course, he realizes that it could be the brain chemicals now, tricking him
into believing that no one really had any knives. We will hear, too, about
a second epiphanic moment, several months after the first, which took
place on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh as Chris was on his way, uncharac-
teristically a little late, to the theatre at which he was performing in the
Fringe Festival, and with the assistance of his guest, we will witness a re-
enactment of his conversation, in a dressing room at Bradford's Theatre in
the Mill, with an academic psychologist who gently suggests that the
epiphanic experience may have a neurochemical explanation and that it
may also have been precipitated by the encounter between Goode's own
"suggestibility" (he is an actor, after all) and the psycho-physical triggers
of the trance music and inspirational self-help material he had been listen-
ing to through headphones on the two occasions in question.
But the either/or scenario seemingly suggested by the dialogue with
the psychologist is not the scenario that Goode's performance is explor-
ing. Whatever else it may be, God/Head is not really a piece about whether
or not God exists, and it is most certainly not the kind of science-versus-
religion discussion you might hear on BBC Radio 4, even if, as Goode
suggests at one point, this is what he first thought he might come up with
when he considered what he might make in response to the invitation
from Oval House. Goode's scenario has more to do with relations be-
tween people: it is, in a sense, about its own attempt to make relations
between people, but to do so from a position of solitude. Because it is
played out in a theatre, that scenario is always curiously subjunctive. For
the event to make sense its audience has to experience what Chris or


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 159

"Chris" presents as sincere and truthful and also to hold it at the very
slightest distance; to take each act of communication as an experiment in
communication, as an invitation to consider how it might be if someone
were to say something like this:
But turning love chemicals into love songs is a billion miles away
from how basically fucking angry I feel about, um ... the medical-
izing of sadness: turning the fundamental sadness of being alive
and being ultimately alone and wanting to fight that aloneness
with love and art and fucking and being friends and hating capital-
ism and sometimes sometimes wishing you were dead, how angry I
feel about a multi-billion dollar industry which depends on turn-
ing that reality into an illness that can be cured. That can just be
suppressed.
The show offers numerous scenes of solitude (of "being ultimately
alone"), each of which is experienced specifically in relation to theatre:
there is the boy in his room in the play Chris is writing; there is Chris
himself as a man at home with his theatre-writing deadlines; Chris on the
way to his own performance, listening to music and speech through
headphones while moving through public space; Chris in that peculiar
airlock between the public and the private (the dressing room), conduct-
ing a conversation about the inside of his own head that he will later re-
enact in the public space of another stage in another town. At the same
time it is a show structured around the deeply disturbing experience of
not being alone, of having one's solitude interrupted by the perception of
a relation to the absolute. One aspect of the epiphanic encounters with the
reality of God is that "God can see me. God can see inside me, see through
me. Can see me. For myself. All that I am." God, then, is the overwhelm-
ing sensation of no longer and never being able to feel alone. An exposure
so total that appearing in public to speak truthfully about oneself will, by
contrast, feel like the most blessed solitude. Theatre emerges here as a
paradoxical place of revelation; as a practice that makes it possible to say
things in public but to do so in a sort of private capacity, to make disclo-
sures without fully embracing them as one's own. Theatre figures as both
refuge and liberation, as the place where one might go to satisfy a longing
to be able to speak with the conviction that everyday life seems not to
permit; to command a kind of certainty and the eloquence that goes with
it; to possess the cadences of the preacher, the inspirational speaker, the
self-help guru: in short, to emulate the example, in Goode's case, of Iyanla


160 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

Vanzant, whose appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show have awakened
in him an enduring admiration and to whose words he was listening
through his headphones on that morning in April when he encountered
God in Stoke Newington. Which is precisely what happens here, as Goode
announces that he "can feel the language that's been forming in my
mouth," which, at the very start of the show, in the first dream, he was
"not quite ready to speak yet."
It all comes together as ecstasy. Standing, as it were, to one side of his
own show, producing from within his own show what the show itself
seems to have been about the struggle to produce, Chris sets up a music
stand in a kind of gear change that gently but firmly articulates the dis-
tance between him and his audience to perform, in the role of poet and
preacher in one, a text whose materials are familiar to everyone who is
listening, a recomposition of the words and phrases he has used so far, to
talk about his epiphany, about his childhood dreams and his favorite
book, about his hypno-therapy, and about his work in theatre:
Look up, my friends! Look up at the sky!
There is no shit-slinging dream monkey in the sky.
But the stars are interconnected and the snow is really coming
down and the sky is falling in. And the truth is in action and we
showed up to work.
Link this on! Link it on!
Here, and now, in this place, yield to the truth.
Our bodies are sad and we are separated from each other and our
hearts are falling down. Link this on!
We are naked in plain sight. In our own sight of ourselves. Open
your mouth. Open your fucking mouth! The stars are intimately
connected. And this page is best.
The effect is stirring and beautiful and possessing. And "stirring" and
"beautiful" and "possessing." Let the music stand between him and the
audience, stand for and stand as the articulating of a distance between
people who, however "intimately connected" and "in plain sight" of one


SOLITUDE IN RELATION 161

another they may be, are also always "separated from each other" even in
this moment at which Chris performs being so triumphantly beside him-
self for them. Let it stand also for the fault in the whole setup that, in the
second and final dream of the show, makes a mystery of what the theatre
does for communication. In this second dream Chris is in a huge theatre
again, but this time he is in the auditorium rather than on the stage, close
to the front of the stage, where eighteen actors, men and women, some
dressed, some naked, stand in a line at the back of the stage looking out at
the audience. One after another they run toward the front of the stage:
And when they get to the front edge of the stage, they jump into
the air.
They leap into the air. Into the darkness of the auditorium.
One after another. Running to the edge and leaping.
And another, and another. Running to the edge of the stage and
leaping.
But the thing is ...
There's a fault. There's some kind of fault in the dream.
Because I don't know what happens when ...
I'm watching them running and leaping but I don't know ...
I can't tell ...
I don't know whether they ...
The "fault" in the dream is the gap between stage and auditorium imag-
ined as though the theatre possessed a kind of inaccessible fold that pre-
vented anyone from passing across it. It is a fold in which we can only
imagine that something might be going on, through which something
might be communicated, if only we could get to the place where it was
being communicated, if only it weren't always disappearing, out of our
grasp, into the fold. Chris leaves the stage. His guest opens an envelope
and follows some final instructions to tidy up the space and leave. The


162 PASSIONATE AMATEURS

audience applauds. They don't come back. They will never know whether
they.
The things that Chris might say or want to say can only be said this
way because of the possibility that it is only "Chris" saying them or that
he might just be "saying" them. The theatre protects us from full commu-
nication, from the "immanence" that is the communion of community.
This is maybe why it is one of those odd places outside the most intimate
of personal relations where it is possible to attempt such communication.
The theatre is where solitude in relation can begin to approach the experi-
ence of communism on your own. It is precisely because there can in fact
be no community here in the place where it is always presupposed that
the experience of listening among others acquires a peculiar condition, in
which the intensities of both solitude and relation are amplified, so that
inside a theatre auditorium one feels oneself both more alone and more
related than one does on the outside in so-called real life. If the profes-
sional spectator has any special access to this experience, it may be due to
a special kind of receptivity: not some special sensitivity, sensibility, or
expertise, but rather a disposition arising from the extent to which the
division of labor constitutes a more decisive element of the experience
than it does for someone encountering such an experience in their leisure
time. The feelings I have tried to account for in these three acts of theatre
criticism are ordinarily thought either to exceed or to stand entirely out-
side the "realm of necessity," participating instead in the "realm of free-
dom" as love, friendship, and sensual perception. We are used to thinking
and feeling that such feelings are authentic rather than commodified and,
if we are romantic anti-capitalists, to value them accordingly. To experi-
ence something of such feelings within the realm of necessity -as part of
one's professional activity, that is-is to enjoy (if that is the right word) a
momentary disruption of the normal relations between freedom and ne-
cessity. It is to love one's work through the work of another, to find real
pleasure in the manufacture of that love as a commodity.


Notes
PROLOGUE
1. For a fuller account of this production, of the entire Tragedia Endogonidia
project, and of the work of the Societas Raffaello Sanzio, see Claudia Castel-
lucci et al., The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 2007).
2. Benjamin Britten, "Cuckoo!," Friday Afternoons, op. 7. no. 3, 1935, choir
of Downside School, Purley, with Viola Tunnard (piano), Decca Music Group
Ltd., recorded 1967.
3. Joe Kelleher, in C. Castellucci et al., Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio,
76-77.
4. Romeo Castellucci, "Tragedia Endogonidia" (unpublished production
text, courtesy of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, 2004), my translation.
5. Nicholas Ridout, in C. Castellucci et al., Theatre of Societas Raffaello San-
zio, 88.
6. Chiara Guidi, in C. Castellucci et al., Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio,
217.
7. Romeo Castellucci, in C. Castellucci et al., Theatre of Societas Raffaello
Sanzio, 30.
8. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin
Books, 1981), 959.
CHAPTER 1
1. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2005).
2. My understanding of romantic anti-capitalism is substantially indebted
to the work of Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, as developed first in Robert
Sayre and Michael Lowy, "Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism," New Ger-
man Critique 32 (1984): 42-92, and subsequently in Michael Lowy and Robert
Sayre, Romanticisim against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2001).
3. Paul Breines, "Marxism, Romanticism, and the Case of Georg Lukafs:
Notes on Some Recent Sources and Situations," Studies in Romanticism 16, no.
4 (1977): 482.

163


164 NOTES TO PAGES 7-12

4. Lowy and Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity, 1o8. Lukacs'
article, which they cite here, is "Uber den Dostojevski Nachlass," Moskauer
Rundschau, Marc. 22, 1931.
5. A sense that Benjamin is an exemplary figure of romantic anti-capitalism
is explored more fully in chap. 3. In chap. 4 the idea that significant aspects of
the romantic anti-capitalist tradition surfaced at street level in Paris in 1968 is
implicit.
6. Sayre and Lowy, "Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism," 54-55.
7. Michael Lowy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of
History" (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 5.
8. For a much more extensive consideration of questions about the politics
of theatre's time and its repetitions, see Rebecca Schneider, Performing Re-
mains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon and New
York: Routledge, 2011).
9. Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2002).
so. See Jean-Luc Nancy, "La Comparution" [The Compearance: From the
Existence of "Communism" to the Community of "Existence"], trans. Tracy B.
Strong, Political Theory 20, no. 3 (1992): 371-98; and Jean-Luc Nancy, Being
Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000).
11. Jean-Luc Nancy, "Literary Communism," in The Inoperative Community,
ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Si-
mona Sawhney (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1991), 8o.
12. Jean-Luc Nancy, La communeauti disoeuvrie (Paris: Christian Bourgeois
Editeur, 1986).
13. Jean-Luc Nancy, "Inoperative Community," in Inoperative Community,
2.
14. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute:
The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and
Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 8.
15. Ibid., 5.
16. Ibid., 6.
17. Dorothea Schlegel (Mendelssohn-Veit) to her son, in Lacoue-Labarthe
and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 6.
18. John Roberts, "Introduction: Art, 'Enclave Theory' and the Communist
Imaginary," Third Text 23, no. 4 (2009): 353-67.
19. Ibid., 355. Since Roberts's "Introduction," the "enclave" has perhaps
enlarged a little. In the context of the latest crisis of capitalism taking shape
from 2008, one might point to such diverse but related events as a two-day
conference in London, held in March 2009 under the title "The Idea of Com-
munism," convened by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, contributions to which
were later published in a book: Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek, eds., The
Idea of Communism (London and New York: Verso, 2010); the experiments in
collective living as politics revived and developed by the "indignados" in
Spain or the various "Occupy" movements; and the success of the neo- or


NOTES TO PAGES 13-15 165

postcommunist radical left coalition Syriza at the Greek parliamentary elec-
tions of May and June 2012 (with the familiar caveat that the "old" commu-
nism as embodied in the KKE refused to have anything to do with it).
20. Roberts, "Introduction," 354.
21. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and
Fronza Wood (Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 2002). Other work seeking to de-
velop similar conceptions of artistic practice as social and communicative ac-
tion includes Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication
in Modern Art (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2004). For
its influence within theatre and performance studies, see Shannon Jackson,
Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2011); for an overview of some of the potential for theatre studies,
not just of Bourriaud's work, but also of the thought of Alain Badiou, Jacques
Ranciere, and Paolo Virno (the latter two will be of particular significance in
this book), see Simon Bayly "Theatre and the Public: Badiou, Ranciere, Virno,"
Radical Philosophy 157 (2009): 20-29.
22. A typical critique of Bourriaud may be found in Claire Bishop, "An-
tagonism and Relational Aesthetics," October 11o (2004): 51-79.
23. Roberts, "Introduction," 355.
24. Stewart Martin, "Critique of Relational Aesthetics," Third Text 21, no. 4
(2007): 379.
25. Stewart Martin, "Artistic Communism-A Sketch," Third Text 23, no. 4
(2009): 483.
26. Ibid., 485.
27. Ibid., 482, 481.
28. Ibid., 492. See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of
Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and An-
drea Casson (Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2004).
29. Salvatore Settis, The Future of the "Classical" (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2006). The citation from Novalis is from his Tagebucher und Briefe Friedrich von
Hardenbergs and is offered by Settis as an epigraph to his book. I have sought
to indicate a few recent examples of such legitimization at work in both the-
atre and politics in Nicholas Ridout, "Performance and Democracy," in The
Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9-22, with particular reference to the sup-
posed relation among theatre, democracy, and the political predispositions of
performance studies itself:
In its revived form, then, the myth may be stated as follows. Theatre
and democracy were born together; both represent a sociality and a
mode of appearing in public which is beneficial to the construction of
community; performance itself, as an embodied practice, embeds the
abstractions of democratic representation in a participatory constella-
tion of activities (theatre-going, sports); and finally, performance stud-
ies reasserts these connections by giving voice to the under-represented,
advocating for an anti-elitist culture, and restoring the body's perfor-
mance to its place alongside the text in academic practice. (15)


166 NOTES TO PAGES 16-18

30. Settis, Future of the "Classical," 11-12.
31. The attempt to rethink Marx's "ontology of labour" and to replace it
with a "political ontology" (see Christopher Holman, "Dialectics and Distinc-
tion: Reconsidering Hannah Arendt's Critique of Marx," Contemporary Politi-
cal Theory 10, no. 3 [2011]: 332-53) in order properly to describe "the human
condition" is regarded by many critics as abstract, idealizing and universal-
izing, and insufficiently attentive to the specific historical conditions of the
economic and the social (from both of which Arendt sought to detach the
political). See also Axel Honneth, "Work and Instrumental Action," New Ger-
man Critique 26 (1982): 31-54.
32. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1998), 187.
33. Ibid., 198.
34. Ibid., 198.
35. Ibid., 198.
36. Sometimes this sort of distinction has been articulated in terms of "per-
formance" and "theatre," with performance valorized for its capacity to es-
cape valorization according to the logics of capitalist production and ex-
change. I prefer to keep the praxis-poesis distinction alive within the work of
theatre, in view of theatre's tendency, which it is the project of this book to
emphasize, to wobble a little between the productive and the nonproductive,
the autotelic and the teleological.
37. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude.
38. For a consideration of Ranciere's relationship to Arendt's thought, see
Andrew Schaap, "Hannah Arendt and the Philosophical Repression of Poli-
tics," in Jacques Ranciere and the Contemporary Scene: The Philosophy of Radical
Equality, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty and Alison Ross (London and New York:
Continuum, 2012), 145-65.
39. See, variously, Jacques Ranciere, Aisthesis: Scenes du regime esthetique de
l'art (Paris: Editions Galilee, 2011); Jacques Ranciere, Staging the People: The
Proletarian and His Double, trans. David Fernbach (London and New York:
Verso, 2011); and Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans.
Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
40. Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (Lon-
don and New York: Verso, 2009). Ranciere's theorization of politics as aesthet-
ics, across a range of texts, but most recently in Aisthesis, traces a very similar
set of historical connections to those suggested by Stewart Martin. Martin's
perspective, however, differs substantially, from Ranciere's. Reviewing the
publication of the English volume of Ranciere's writing, The Politics of Aesthet-
ics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New
York: Continuum, 2005), Martin writes:
Far from reconstructing the conditions of possibility of debates around
modernist art and politics, Ranciere has merely reasserted its romantic
heritage. But it was precisely the indifference of romanticism to the
conditions of the political economy of capitalism that generated the
aporias of these debates in the first place, and, in the process, rendered


NOTES TO PAGES 18-23 167

romanticism culturally inadequate and politically harmless. Ranciere's
position should be judged in the same terms. The affection with which
his oeuvre is held by many on the Left looks dangerously like nostalgia
for yet another form of romantic anti-capitalism.
See Stewart Martin, "Culs de sac," Radical Philosophy 131 (2005): 42.
41. Ranciere, Emancipated Spectator, 16.
42. Ranciere, Emancipated Spectator, 17.
43. Settis, Future of the "Classical," 102.
44. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal Nacquet, Myth and Tragedy in An-
cient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd, (New York: Zone Books, 1988); Simon Gold-
hill, "The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology," Journal of Hellenic Studies 107
(1987): 58-76; Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne, Performance Culture and
Athenian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David
Wiles, Theatre and Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
In his introduction Wiles notes that "my enquiry necessarily begins in Athens
where theatre and the democratic citizen emerged at the same historical mo-
ment, apparently as part of a single process" (18).
45. Oddone Longo, "The Theatre of the Polis," in Nothing to Do with Dio-
nysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I.
Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 13.
46. See Jean-Luc Nancy, "Myth Interrupted," in Inoperative Community, 43-
7o; Romeo Castellucci, "The Animal Being on Stage," trans. Carolina Melis,
Valentina Valentini, and Ric Allsopp, Performance Research 5, no. 2 (2000): 23-
28.
47. Longo, "Theatre of the Polis," 16, 17, 18, 19.
48. See, e.g., George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social
Origins of Drama, 2nd ed. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1966), which
draws heavily on Engels, Bachofen, etc.; for a substantial corrective to this
view, also from a Marxist perspective, see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class
Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests
(London: Duckworth, 1981).
49. Longo, "Theatre of the Polis," 19.
5o. For a survey of romantic anti-capitalism, which is one of the most sig-
nificant "communist" tendencies for the purposes of this book, see Lowy and
Sayre, Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. For theatre's temporality, see
Schneider, Performing Remains. The fullest engagement with this temporality
is to be found in chap. 3's consideration of Walter Benjamin's conception of
history, itself the work of a romantic anti-capitalist upon whom Schneider
draws significantly.
51. Goldhill, "Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology," 114.
52. Wiles, Theatre and Citizenship, 47.
53. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Amanda Wrigley, eds., Dionysus since
69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2004). For Schechner's own account of Dionysus in 69, see Richard
Schechner, Environmental Theatre (New York and London: Applause, 1994).
Froma I. Zeitlin offers an analysis of Schechner's production in her contribu-


168 NOTES TO PAGES 23-27

tion to Dionysus since 69 ("Dionysus in 69," 49-75), in which she observes that
Schechner's view of Greek culture is "romantic" in that it idealizes "their pur-
ported links with other quite different cultural manifestations" (58) and that
"what strikes him most about the ancient theatre is the civic nature of perfor-
mance in Athens," where, as Schechner himself writes, "Here in a single circu-
lar arena the whole community came to see its reality enacted" (Schechner,
"Theater and Revolution," Salmagundi 2, no. 2 [Fall 1967-Winter 1968]: 11-27,
cited in Zeitlin, "Dionysus in 69," 57).
54. Edith Hall, "Introduction: Why Greek Tragedy in the Late Twentieth
Century?" in Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley, Dionysus since 69, 29.
55. Ibid., 2.
56. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), cited in Page
duBois, Out of Athens: The New Ancient Greeks (Cambridge and London: Har-
vard University Press, 2010), 5. Page duBois's project is to reveal alternative
lines of historical and cultural transmission and exchange. In her critique of
classical studies she suggests that even "the most enlightened of classicists"
(she is referring here to Jean-Pierre Vernant) participates to some extent in this
continuing fabrication: Vernant's characterization of "Greek civilisation," she
writes, demonstrates "the great virtue of dethroning the Greeks from their
pedestal as the point of origin of human civilisation tout court, but also the
limitations of a Western perspective that sees the Greeks as autonomous and
isolated from the Near East, Africa, and India, a perspective now eroded by
our situation within globalization' (duBois, Out of Athens, 15).
57. Erika Fischer-Lichte, "Thinking about the Origins of Theatre in the
1970s," in Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley, Dionysus since 69, 341. In proposing
that they are "lost forever," Fischer-Lichte typically reckons without the ca-
pacity of performance to return things to us differently, discontinuously. It
might be more accurate to say that we cannot return to origins, but that in
performance, origins are somehow returned to us, but not as the origins they
originally were.
58. Darko Suvin, "Modes of Political Drama," Massachusetts Review 13, no.
3 (Summer 1972): 311.
59. Arendt, Human Condition, 188.
6o. Eugene van Erven, Community Theatre: Global Perspectives (London and
New York: Routledge, 2001), 255.
61. Ibid., 1.
62. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 1979). For a
persuasive critique of Boal's reading of Aristotle and the conclusions he draws
about Greek theatre, see Paul Dwyer, "Theoria Negativa: Making Sense of
Boal's Reading of Aristotle," Modern Drama 48, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 635-58.
63. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
(Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 471-
75.
64. Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Historical Materialism in 'Forms Which Pre-
cede Capitalist production,"' in Karl Marx's Grundrisse: Foundations of the Cri-
tique of Political Economy 15o Years Later, ed. Marcello Musto (Abingdon and
New York: Routledge, 2008), 8o.


NOTES TO PAGES 28-39 169

65. Marx, Grundrisse, 471-72.
66. Marx, Grundrisse, 472.
67. Van Erven, Community Theatre, 257.
68. The story of capitalist regulation of the time of work is summarized in
chap. 2, drawing substantially on the work of E. P. Thompson, himself a sig-
nificant figure in British "romantic anti-capitalism."
69. Marx writes: "The true realm of freedom, the development of human
powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with
this realm of necessity as its basis." Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 958-59.
70. Some of this work has recently been done for the substantial subfield of
amateur productions of Shakespeare in Michael Dobson, Shakespeare and Ama-
teur Performance: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
71. Jon Oram, "The Social Actor," Claque Theatre, 2006, www.claquetheatre.
com/wp-content/ ... /ArticleThe-Social-Actor.pdf, 2.
72. Ann Jellicoe, Community Plays: How to Put Them On (London: Methuen,
1987), xvii.
73. Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, xxix-xxx.
CHAPTER 2
1. Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, in Plays, trans. Peter Carson (London:
Penguin Books, 2002), 200.
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben
Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).
3. E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,"
Past and Present 38, no. 1 (1967): 56-97.
4. Ibid., 93-94.
5. Ibid., 6o.
6. Ibid., 61.
7. Ibid., 81.
8. Ibid., 90.
9. Of course many such series make the working day and the working life
their primary subject: the repackaging of daily work in the form of evening
entertainment would be the basis for a study unto itself, ranging from The
Wire, via innumerable police and hospital shows, to The Office and, most re-
cently, Parks and Recreation. This is one rather literal way in which leisure is
always a form of work.
so. Chris Rojek, Capitalism and Leisure Theory (London and New York: Ta-
vistock Publications, 1985), 42.
11. Ibid., 46.
12. Ibid., 14.
13. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1989), 126.
14. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 352.
15. Ibid., 409.
16. Ibid., 382.


170 NOTES TO PAGES 39-51

17. Ibid., 409.
18. Ibid., 341.
19. Ibid., 364-65-
20. Ibid., 376.
21. Ibid., 416 n68.
22. Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 152-53.
23. Ibid., 146.
24. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1966), 144.
25. Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 178.
26. Neil B. Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1981), 21.
27. Spencer Golub, The Recurrence of Fate (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1994), 32.
28. Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 147.
29. Ibid., 166.
30. Ibid., 178.
31. See John Tulloch, Chekhov: A Structuralist Study (London and Basing-
stoke: Macmillan, 1980).
32. See Weissman, Reform in Tsarist Russia.
33. Samuel C. Kramer, "The Zemstvo and Public Health," in The Zemstvo in
Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government, ed. Terence Emmons and
Wayne S. Vucinich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
34. Tulloch, Chekhov, 53.
35. Arendt, Human Condition.
36. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 133.
37. For a detailed exposition of the figure of the passionate amateur as a
subcategory of the romantic anti-capitalist, see chap. 1.
38. Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 220.
39. Ibid., 9.
40. Ibid., 221.
41. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 188o (Lon-
don and New York: Routledge, 1989), xiv.
42. Sarfatti Larson, Rise of Professionalism, xviii.
43. Ibid., 237.
44. See also Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, on nonprofits, com-
munity, and "the spectre of communism."
45. Sarfatti Larson, Rise of Professionalism, 237-38.
46. Ibid., 234.
47. See, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pur-
suit of the American Dream (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).
48. Laurence Senelick, The Chekhov Theatre: Century of the Plays in Perfor-
mance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
49. Nick Worrall, The Moscow Art Theatre (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 1996), 7-8.
50. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 133.


NOTES TO PAGES 52-58 171

51. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment,
trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), 137.
52. Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, in Plays, 216.
53. Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, in Plays, 312.
54. R. Williams, Modern Tragedy, 145.
55. There are, of course, some exceptions to this, including David Storey's
The Contractor (London: Cape, 1970) and Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen (Lon-
don: Oberon Modern Plays, 2012).
56. Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, 32.
57. Ibid., 33.
58. Ibid., 36.
59. Ibid., 34.
6o. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New
York: Routledge, 1993), cited in Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, 66.
61. Joseph, Against the Romance of Community, 66.
62. Ibid., 66.
63. Ibid., 66.
64. Phelan, Unmarked, 146.
65. Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, in Plays, 83.
66. Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 162-63.
CHAPTER 3
1. Narodnyi Komissariat Prosveschcheniya, which may be translated as
People's Commissariat of either Education or Enlightenment. For an account
of its earliest years, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment:
Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts Under Lunacharsky, October 1917-
1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). By 1928 Narkompros
was becoming the target of a "class war on the cultural front" launched by
radical proletarian elements in the Soviet Union who viewed it as part of a
cultural establishment dominated by intellectuals and bureaucrats whose
commitment to proletarian culture was suspect. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Cul-
tural Revolution in Russia, 1928-32," Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 1
(1974): 33-52. The role of Narkompros in the development of both theatre and
education in the immediate post-revolutionary period will be considered fur-
ther below.
2. "I will write the programme," he said, "and set out the theoretical basis
for your practical work": Asja Lacis, Revolutiondr im Beruf: Berichte iber prole-
tarisches Theater, iber Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator, edited by Hilde-
gard Brenner (Munich: Rogner and Bernhard, 1971), 26. This autobiographi-
cal text is the principal source used here for the origins of the "Program for a
Proletarian Children's Theater." See also Beata Paskevica, In der Stadt der Pa-
rolen: Asja Lacis, Walter Benjamin und Bertolt Brecht (Essen: Klartext Verlag,
2006).
3. Lacis, Revolutiondr im Beruf, 26.
4. Walter Benjamin, "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater," in


172 NOTES TO PAGES 59-66

Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others,
ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge and
London: Belknap Press), 201-6 (hereafter cited in the text). The German text is
in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Ver-
lag, 1989), 763-69. The German text is also reproduced in Lacis, Revolutiondr
im Beruf, 26-31. It was unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime.
5. The KPD, for example, "idealized productive labour"; Eric D. Weitz,
Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 7.
6. See, for example, Andrzej Wirth and Martha Ulvaeus, "The Lehrstuck
as Performance," TDR/TheDrama Review 43, no. 4 (1988): 113-21:
The way the Lehrstuck was performed during Brecht's lifetime stood
in contradiction to the radicality of its theory, which emphasizes a
sharp contrast between the Schaustnck [a play for the benefit of the
audience] and the Lehrstuck [for the benefit of the players]. The radical
core of Brecht's utopian theory is the idea of an autarkic (self-sufficient)
metatheatre, a utopian objective accompanied by a utopian ideology.
(116)
7. Lacis, Revolutiondr im Beruf, 23 (my translation).
8. This is where Benjamin's text seems to have its most extraordinary con-
temporary resonance, with the Occupy movement, where the occupation of
space seems to coincide with the refusal to articulate demands that might be
met in the future: perpetual rehearsal for revolution as the only way to secure
the space of revolution.
9. "Hier kommen Auffnhrungen nebenbei, man kdnnte sagen: aus
Versehen, zustande, beinahe als ein Schabernack der Kinder, die auf diese
Weise einmal das grundsdtzllich niemals abgeschlossene Studium unter-
brechen": Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, 765.
so. See also Marx, Capital, vol. 3, for the manager as orchestral conductor,
or Regisseur.
11. His laborious attempts to get a waiter to serve him hot soup one eve-
ning resulted in a plate of sliced cheese. See also Jacques Derrida, Moscou
aller-retour (Saint Etienne: Editions de l'aube, 1995), 93.
12. Werner Hamacher, "'Now': Walter Benjamin on Historical Time," in
The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought, ed. Heidrun Friese (Liver-
pool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 172.
13. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," in Selected Writings, vol.
4, 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others, ed. Howard Eiland and Mi-
chael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2003),
390"
14. Hamacher, "'Now,"' 165.
15. Ibid., 167.
16. Ibid., 171.
17. Walter Benjamin, "Paralipomena to 'On the Concept of History,"' in
Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, 400-401. This is the Thesis XVII that
Agamben found.


NOTES TO PAGES 66-75 173

18. Hamacher, "'Now,"' 164.
19. See Scott McCracken, "Idleness for All," New Formations 53 (2004): 65-
76, for a more extended reflection on Benjamin's writing on "idleness" as a
nonwork and antiwork practice, especially in Convulute m of the Arcades Proj-
ect.
20. Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," 393.
21. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), 462.
22. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. J. A. Under-
wood (London: Penguin, 2009), 110.
23. Alan Ball, "'The Roots of Bezprizornost' in Soviet Russia's First De-
cade," Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (1992): 247-70.
24. Ibid., 250.
25. Alan Ball, "State Children: Soviet Russia's Besprizornye and the New
Socialist Generation," Russian Review 52, no. 2 (1993): 229.
26. Lacis, Revolutiondr im Beruf, 21.
27. Ibid., 22.
28. See the introduction.
29. Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment, 20.
30. Revolutiondr in Beruf (Revolutionary by profession) is the title of Lacis's
(German) autobiography.
31. See Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to
Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
32. "That's robbers!": Lacis, Revolutiondr im Beruf, 24.
33. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 37.
34. There were many different youth movements, whose participants were
predominantly from the middle class. The Wandervogel was one of the earliest
and largest of the groups, largely male and Protestant in composition and
conservative and conformist in social orientation, with hiking or rambling as
its core collective activity, reflecting a typically romantic affiliation with ideas
about the value of nature as a corrective to the alienation of the urban indus-
trial modernity upon which the prosperity of its members' parents largely
depended. For a history of the various movements see Walter Laqueur, Young
Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962).
35. See Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James
Rolleston (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 19-23.
36. Philip Lee Utley, "Radical Youth: Generational Conflict in the Anfang
Movement, 1912-January 1914," History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 2
(1979): 209.
37. Ibid., 211.
38. Ibid., 211-12.
39. Walter Benjamin, "Experience," in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926,
ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London:
Belknap, 1996), 3.
40. Walter Benjamin, "The Life of Students," in Selected Writings, vol. 1,
1913-1926, 37.


174 NOTES TO PAGES 76-79

41. U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, On the Poverty of Student Life, Considered in Its Eco-
nomic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a
Modest Proposal for Its Remedy, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/
display/4 (1966).
42. Benjamin, "Life of Students," 38.
43. The idea of the "unity of knowledge" was central to romantic concep-
tions of education, as espoused by Fichte and Humboldt, which have come to
be associated, widely but misleadingly, with the reform of the German uni-
versity in the early nineteenth century and, in particular, with the foundation
of the University of Berlin. See Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and Uni-
versity in Germany 1700-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980), for a detailed account of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century university
reform; and Mitchell G. Ash, "Bachelor of What, Master of Whom? The Hum-
boldt Myth and Historical Transformations of Higher Education in German-
Speaking Europe and the US," European Journal of Education 41, no. 2 (2006):
245-67, for a summary and a debunking of the myth.
44. The damage caused by specialization to the work of the university, and
to teaching in particular, was the target of a lecture given in Basel by Friedrich
Nietzsche in 1872. For an account of this lecture, its reception. and its relation
to post-1871 developments in Prussian education, see Christian J. Emden,
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2008), 112-19.
45. See C. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 237.
46. Konrad H. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany:
The Rise of Academic Illiberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982),
156.
47. Geoff Eley, "Educating the Bourgeoisie: Students and the Culture of
'Illiberalism' in Imperial Germany," review of Students, Society, and Politics in
Imperial Germany: The Rise of Academic Illiberalism by Konrad H. Jarausch, His-
tory of Education Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1986): 291.
48. Ibid., 291.
49. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics, 24.
50. Adolf von Harnack, "Von GroiBbetrieb der Wissenschaft," in Wissen-
schaftpolitische Reden und Aufsdtze (Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: Olms-
Weidemann, 2001), 3-9.
51. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics, 24. Harnack's text refers directly
to the development of academic exchanges between Berlin and Harvard uni-
versities.
52. Harnack, "Von GroiBbetrieb der Wissenschaft," 5 (my translation).
53. See Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment; Jon Lauglo, "Soviet Edu-
cation Policy 1917-1935: From Ideology to Bureaucratic Control," Oxford Re-
view of Education 14, no. 3 (1988): 285-99; and James C. McClelland, "Prole-
tarianizing the Student Body: The Soviet Experience During the New
Economic Policy," Past and Present 8o (1978): 122-46.
54. See Marjorie Lamberti, The Politics of Education: Teachers and School Re-
form in Weimar Germany (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2002); and
Donald R. Tracey, "Reform in the Early Weimar Republic: The Thuringian
Example," Journal of Modern History 44, no. 2 (1972): 195-212.


NOTES TO PAGES 79-86 175

55. Walter Benjamin, "A Communist Pedagogy," in Selected Writings, vol. 2,
1927-1934, 273-75; Edwin Hoernle, Grundfragen der Proletarischen Erziehung
(Berlin: Verlag der Jugendinterantionale, 1929).
56. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of
Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 2,
10, 191-94.
57. Ibid., 198.
58. Ibid., 282. For an account of the development of socialist and commu-
nist political organization in Germany, and the relationship of the German
Social Democratic and Communist Parties (SPD and KPD) to questions of
worker organization, management, and discipline, see Weitz, Creating German
Communism.
59. Hoernle, Grundfragen, 139-41.
60. Benjamin, "Communist Pedagogy," 274.
61. Fitzpatrick, Commissariat of Enlightenment, xvi.
62. Ibid., 29.
63. Ibid., 30.
64. Cited in ibid., 33.
65. James C. McClelland characterizes both versions of the "polytechnic"
approach to education as "utopian" in order to distinguish them from an al-
ternative "heroic" attitude that he sees embodied by the Red Army under
Trotsky and efforts to enforce military-style discipline and "monotechnical"
vocational education. See James C. McClelland, "The Utopian and the Heroic:
Divergent Paths to the Communist Educational Ideal," in Bolshevik Culture,
ed. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez and Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1985), 114-30.
66. Hoernle, Grundfragen, 142.
67. See Lamberti, Politics of Education.
68. Hoernle, Grundfragen, 141.
69. Benjamin, "Communist Pedagogy," 274-75.
70. Edwin Hoernle, cited in Jack Zipes, ed. and trans., Utopian Tales from
Weimar (Polygon: Edinburgh, 1990), 13.
71. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Uto-
pia in East and West (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002), 50.
72. Ibid., 60.
73. Ibid., 50.
74. Hamacher, "'Now,"' 164.
CHAPTER 4
1. "A film in the process of making itself" (my translation).
2. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen,
1982), 1.5. References are to act and scene.
3. "The French working class will not unify nor mount the barricades in
order to win a twelve percent increase in wages": Andre Gorz, Le socialisme
difficile (Paris: Du Seuil, 1967) (my translation: the published English transla-
tion does not quite convey the sense of the sentence as cited in the film).


176 NOTES TO PAGES 86-92

4. In 1980 Gorz published Adieux au proletariat (Paris: Galilee, 1980). The
English translation of this influential work is Farewell to the Working Class:
Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism,
trans. Michael Sonenscher (London: Pluto Press, 1997).
5. Gorz, Socialisme difficile.
6. Jean-Luc Godard, La chinoise, ou plutot a la chinoise, dir. Jean-Luc Godard
(1967; London: Optimum Releasing, 2005), DVD, 93 min.
7. "We are the speech of others": Godard, La chinoise.
8. Shakespeare, Hamlet.
9. In the period following 1968, some on the left explicitly sought to re-
place speech with action, in the turn toward armed struggle: "Shortly after
forming, Weatherman declared the need 'to be a movement that fights, not
just talks about fighting.' The RAF [Rote Armee Fraktion], in its first mani-
festo, announced, 'We will not talk about armed propaganda, we will do it"':
Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army
Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 21.
so. Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 186.
11. Ibid., 185.
12. Arendt, Human Condition, 178.
13. Ibid., 179.
14. Ibid., 198.
15. Ibid., 199.
16. See Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient
Political Theory: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Social Context (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1978).
17. "They've got factories or something": Godard, La chinoise (my transla-
tion).
18. James S. Williams, "'C'est le petit livre rouge / Qui fait que tout enfin
bouge': The Case for Revolutionary Agency in Jean-Luc Godard's La Chi-
noise," Journal of European Studies 40, no. 3 (2010): 206.
19. Cited in Jacques Bontemps, Jean-Louis Comolli, Michel Delahaye, Jean
Narboni, and Jean-Luc Godard, "Struggle on Two Fronts: A Conversation
with Jean-Luc Godard," Film Quarterly 22, no. 2 (Winter 1968-69): 20-35.
20. Pauline Kael, blurb of La chinoise, ou plutot a la chinoise, dir. Jean-Luc
Godard. Her review of the film upon its release in the United States, pub-
lished in the New Yorker, is far more discriminating. See Pauline Kael, Going
Steady (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 76-84.
21. J. Williams, "'C'est le petit livre rouge,"' 216.
22. "Shit, shit, stop"; Godard, La chinoise.
23. See Jean-Luc Godard, "Let's Talk about Pierrot: An Interview with
Jean-Luc Godard," by Jean-Louis Comolli, Michel Delahaye, Jean-Andre
Fieschi, and Gerard Guegan, Cahiers du cinima 171 (Oct. 1965), reprinted in
Tom Milne, ed. Godard on Godard, trans. Tom Milne (New York and London:
Da Capo, 1972), 216.
24. The actual minister of culture of the USSR at this time was Yekaterina
Furtseva, who was the only woman ever to become a full member of the Po-


NOTES TO PAGES 93-98 177

litburo (until Galina Semyonova in 1990). She took a particular interest in the-
atre and cinema in her fourteen years as minister of culture, a post to which
she was appointed after her expulsion from the Politburo for criticizing
Khrushchev, a suicide attempt, and political rehabilitation. Her obituary in
the Washington Post reads: "Ekaterina A. Furtseva, Soviet minister of culture
and the highest-ranking woman in the Soviet regime, died of a heart attack
yesterday in Moscow at the age of 63. She was a handsome, blonde woman
with a great zest for life and some very strong ideas." See Dorothy McCardle,
"Soviet Official Ekaterina Furtseva Dies," Washington Post, Oct. 26, 1974.
However, it is fairly clear that the "real" target of this unreal assassination
was in fact the French minister of culture, Andre Malraux, to whom Godard
had written an open letter in 1966, following the banning of Jacques Rivette's
film La religieuse (which starred Godard's by-now-estranged wife, Anna Kar-
ina), in which he accused Malraux of being a "collaborator." The banning of
La religieuse is cited by Veronique as a prime example of the oppression that,
she argues, forces her into violence. Le Nouvel Observateur, April 6, 1966. Re-
printed in Cahiers du cinima (April 8-9, 1966), 177.
25. Jean-Luc Godard, interview with Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, Apr. 30,
1970. Winston Wheeler Dixon describes this claim as "disingenuous in the
extreme": Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997), 85.
26. Other members of the Group listed in their manifesto were Gerard
Martin, Nathalie Billard, and Armand Marco, but according to Steve Cannon,
Jean-Henri Roger and Paul Burron "among others also participated": Steve
Cannon, "'When You're Not a Worker Yourself.. .': Godard, the Dziga Vertov
Group and the Audience," in zoo Years of European Cinema: Entertainment or
Ideology? ed. Diana Holmes and Alison Smith (Manchester: Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 102.
27. "As the summer ended, for me it was back to classes": Godard, La chi-
noise (my translation).
28. Might it even be worth wondering whether acting like a Marxist-
Leninist cell while not really being one is either a kind of "fraud" or, alterna-
tively, an attempt at a kind of alchemy? Or speculating that the choice of
Jeanson as a "reality principle" who will seek to end the alchemy is a hidden
reference to his Anglophone namesake, Jonson?
29. Jean-Luc Godard, Pierrot le fou, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1965; London:
Optimum Releasing, 2007), DVD, 1o6 min.
30. Jean-Luc Godard, Weekend, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (1967; London: Artifi-
cial Eye, 2005), DVD, 90 min.
31. "I am an actor ... I am sincere": Godard, La chinoise (my translation).
32. "A true socialist theatre": Godard, La chinoise (my translation).
33. Louis Althusser, "The 'Piccolo Teatro': Bertolazzi and Brecht," part 4 of
For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1982).
34. Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, rev. ed. (New
York: De Capo Press, 1998), 270.
35. Renata Adler, "Talking to the Young," New York Times, Apr, 4, 1967, 58.
36. Ibid., 58.


178 NOTES TO PAGES 98-102

37. "Yes, sure it's fiction, but that gets me closer to the real": Godard, La
chinoise (my translation).
38. See, for example, Paul De Man, "The Concept of Irony," in Aesthetic
Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996), 179.
39. "Completely unreal": Godard, La chinoise (my translation).
40." They hadn't understood that it was theatre, real theatre": Godard, La
chinoise (my translation).
41. James S. Williams, "C'est le petit livre rouge," 212. See also Jacques Ran-
ciere, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006):
"The political militant and the actor are alike: their work is to show us not
visible horrors, but what cannot be seen" (150); "That is what we see in this
cinema between two marxisms that concludes as a meditation on the theater"
(152).
42. Benjamin, "Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater," 202.
43. Ibid., 203.
44. Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution, trans.
Alfred Ehrenfeld (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 104.
45. Jean Bertolino, Les Trublions, cited in Margaret Atack, May 68 in French
Fiction and Film: Rethinking Society, Rethinking Representation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999), 29 n15-
46. See Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991); David
Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005); Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans.
Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2006).
47. Lefebvre, Explosion, 104.
48. U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, "On the Poverty of Student Life."
49. The term edu-factory has been used to describe the university in terms of
the concept of "social factory" developed in Autonomist thought, in which the
social, or in this case the educational institution, is understood as a site of
production. It has been adopted as the name for a collective of activist schol-
ars who jointly published Toward a Global Autonomous University (New York:
Autonomedia, 2009).
50. According to Danielle Ranciere and Jacques Ranciere,
While the militants of the proletarian Left (GP, Gauche proletarienne,
was a post-68 Maoist party) proclaimed a revolt against bourgeois
knowledge and academic authority, a new type of knowledge was es-
tablishing itself in the scholarship produced in the universities and in
the specialization of its branches, a modern system for the develop-
ment of the productive forces of theory that socialized the power of the
professors. The system of credit units and continuous assessment
marked the entry of the university apprenticeship into the age of Tay-
lorist rationalization. A demand for continuous production replaced
the artisanal work of the masters course and the annual examination,


NOTES TO PAGES 103-13 179

both for teachers and students, shaping a requirement for external
support.
Danielle Ranciere and Jacques Ranciere, "La legende des philosophes (Les
intellectuels et la traversee du gauchisme)," in Les lauriers de mai, ou, Les che-
mins du pouvoir (1968-1978), special issue, Rivoltes logiques (Feb. 1978): 9 (my
translation).
51. U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, "On the Poverty of Student Life."
52. Kristin Ross, May '68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), 32.
53. Goguettes were social groups that gathered in cafes and restaurants so
that members could perform songs.
54. Jacques Ranciere, "Good Times or Pleasure at the Barricades," in Voices
of the People: The Social Life of 'la sociale' at the End of the Second Empire, ed.
Adrian Rifkin and Roger Thomas, trans. John Moore (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1988), 50.
55. Ibid., 50.
56. Ibid., 52.
57. Ibid., 51.
58. Jacques Ranciere, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-
Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1989), 54.
59. Andre Gorz, Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, trans.
Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 10.
60. Nancy, "Inoperative Community," 2.
61. Mao Tse-Tung, "Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art," May
1942, in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Peking: Foreign Language
Press, 1966), 302.
62. Ranciere, "Good Times," 52.
63. Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), 180.
64. Jean-Luc Godard, "What Is to Be Done?" Afterimage, no. 1 (April 1970).
CHAPTER 5
1. Not what it meant, but what the rate set for that day was. The London
Interbank Offered Rates (LIBOR), established in 1986, is derived from infor-
mation supplied to the British Bankers Association and is used as an indicator
of what financial institutions charge one another for loans. In the context of
this discussion it is an interesting example of the way market behaviors are
conditioned by what people say. It has been alleged that some banks under-
reported their borrowing costs during the 2008 financial crisis, giving the im-
pression that they were in better financial condition than was really the case,
and that the LIBOR was therefore not reliable at times of financial crisis. See
Carrick Mollencamp and Mark Whitehouse, "Study Casts Doubt on Key
Rate," Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2008, 1.


180 NOTES TO PAGES 115-17

2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 290. Hardt and Negri direct the reader in
search of a fuller definition and analysis to Maurizio Lazzarato, "Immaterial
Labor," trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emory, in Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Mi-
chael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996), 133-47.
3. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, No Dice, transcription and arrangement
by Kelly Copper (New York: 53rd State Press, 2007), 17.
4. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France,
1978-1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226. Foucault's French
original- "l'entrepreneur de soi-meme" - does not specify gender.
5. Margaret Thatcher, interview for Woman's Own, by Douglas Keay, tran-
script, Sept. 23, 1987, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689.
6. K. Ross, May '68, 182.
7. See Alain Touraine, The May Movement: Revolt and Reform (New York:
Random House, 1971).
8. K. Ross, May '68, 182.
9. K. Ross, May '68, 185.
so. In this respect-that capital was responding to the political action of
labor-their analysis resembles that of autonomists such as Antonio Negri.
See, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labors of Dionysus: A Cri-
tique of the State-Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994):
The history of the recent transformations should be centred, we be-
lieve, around the events of 1968. In that year the workers' attack against
the organization of factory labor and against the social division of la-
bor reached its summit. Through their struggles, the workers, up until
then regimented in the factory and in society in the Taylorist, Fordist,
and Keynesian mode of production, shattered the categories and the
equilibria of the capitalist reproduction of society en masse through
successive waves of extended struggles on an international level. To
reformulate a Hegelian phrase, in 1968 the ferocious beast of living
labor smashed every disciplinary limit. It was necessary, therefore, to
tame it. In the years immediately after 1968, then, a new era of relation-
ships began between capital (along with its State, be it bourgeois or
socialist) and labor. (272)
11. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 97.
12. They cite Vaneigem, for example, thus: "What people do officially is
nothing compared to what they do in secret. People usually associate cre-
ativity with works of art, but what are works of art alongside the creative
energy displayed by everyone a thousand times a day: seething unsatisfied
desires, daydreams in search of a foothold in reality, feelings at once con-
fused and luminously clear, ideas and gestures presaging nameless upheav-
als": Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution in Everyday Life, trans. David Nicholson-
Smith (London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1983), 147. This is cheeky
because there is nothing to suggest that Vaneigem is suggesting that this


NOTES TO PAGES 118-23 181

"creativity" is to be found in the workplace nor even that it should be. It is
also cheeky because they claim that this and the other passages they cite
were chosen "almost at random," a phrase in which the word "almost" re-
veals the deliberation involved. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capi-
talism, 101 n24.
13. Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 197-98.
14. Ibid., 98.
15. Ibid., 39.
16. Ibid., 39.
17. Ibid., xxxv.
18. Alberto Toscano, "Beginnings and Ends: For, Against and Beyond '68,"'
New Formations 65, no. 1 (2008): 101.
19. Maurizio Lazzarato, "Mai 68, la 'critique artiste' et la revolution neo-
liberale," La revue internationale des livres et des idees, Sept. 21, 2009, http://
www.revuedeslivres.net/articles.php?idArt=271:
The misfortunes of the critique of the "artistic critique" conducted by
Boltanski and Chiapello are numerous, but the greatest to have be-
fallen it is precisely the resistance movement of theatre "artists" and
"technicians" and the birth of the Coordination of Intermittent and
Precarious Workers, which constitutes its foundational expression.
The six words of one of the slogans of the intermittent movement, "no
culture without social rights," are enough to unsettle the whole of
Boltanski and Chiapello's theoretical construction and to make appar-
ent the limits of their analysis of contemporary capitalism. Translated
into their language, the slogan "no culture without social rights" be-
comes, in effect, "no liberty, autonomy and authenticity without soli-
darity, equality and security." That which Boltanski and Chiapello
considered as potentially "aristo-liberal," as incompatible with social
justice, becomes a field of struggle, perhaps the only one from which it
might be possible to confront and undo the logic of neo-liberalism.
(My translation)
20. Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor," 131-32.
21. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 103.
22. Ibid., 109.
23. Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, "In the Social Factory? Immaterial La-
bour, Precariousness and Cultural Work," Theory, Culture and Society 25, nos.
7-8 (2008): 9. See also Angela Mitropoulos, whose work is cited in Rosalind
Gill and Andy Pratt, "Precari-us," Mute: Culture and Politics after the Net 1, no.
29 (2005): 88-96.
24. Andrew Ross, "The New Geography of Work," Theory, Culture and So-
ciety 25, nos. 7-8 (2008): 31-49.
On the face of it, an alliance of cleaners, web designers and adjunct
teachers, to cite just three representative occupations from these sec-
tors, is an unlikely prospect. It is easier to imagine on paper as a theo-


182 NOTES TO PAGES 123-29

retically plausible construct than as a flesh-and-blood coalition in
broad agreement on strategies and goals. For one thing, there is a size-
able imbalance in the social capital enjoyed by this range of constitu-
ents. Those in occupations with the most cachet would almost inevita-
bly expect to be front and center, and, over time, would surely sideline
the others. (41)
Nonetheless, Ross draws on his own empirical research into protests by jani-
tors, job dissatisfaction among IT workers in "high-tech sweatshops" (43) and
the political organization of adjunct labor in American universities, to suggest
that we should be attentive to the "fellow-feeling" that is the precondition for
such alliances (43).
25. Lazzarato, "Immaterial Labor," 134.
26. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 51.
27. This account of No Dice is based upon performances seen at the The-
aterhaus Gessnerallee in Zurich in Oct. 2008 and at HAU3 in Berlin in Nov.
2009, as well as upon the published text.
28. Amber Reed, introduction to No Dice, by Nature Theatre of Oklahoma
(New York: 53rd State Press, 2007).
29. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, "We're in the Money," http://www.ok-
theater.org/videomoney.htm.
30. See Mike Kelley, "In the Image of Man," in Minor Histories: Statements,
Conversations, Proposals, by Mike Kelley, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2004), 50-55.
31. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, "We're in the Money."
32. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, No Dice, 93.
33. Ibid., 94.
34. Ibid., 95.
35. That there is no way the gift can escape the logic of exchange is not lost
on Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, any more than it is on Jacques Derrida,
whose Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1992), is a rich exploration of this impossibility.
36. In material used on the website at the Theaterhaus Gessnerallee in
Zurich, No Dice is described as "their entertaining three and a half hour ver-
sion of the legendary and originally eleven hour melodrama-show": Theater-
haus Gessnerallee, Gessnerallee Zurich, http://www.gessnerallee.ch/en/pro
gramm/archive/vorstellung1/auffuehrung/91/index.html  (accessed  Nov.
2011).
37. There should be a study made into why it is that all kinds of uncom-
mercial, broadly anti-capitalist people, some of them Marxists, both enjoy and
seem strangely good at dreaming up crazy business ideas of this kind.
38. For critical accounts of Rimini Protokoll, see Miriam Dreysse and Flo-
rian Malzacher, eds., Rimini Protokoll: Experts of the Everyday (Berlin: Alexan-
der Verlag, 2008).
39. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, No Dice, 27.
40. Ibid., 16.


NOTES TO PAGES 129-38 183

41. Listed as Marc Dale, Anne Gridley, Teresa Gridley, Robert M Johanson,
Jo Liegerot, Zachary Oberzan, Adam Tsekman, Katarina Vizinova, and Kristin
Worrall.
42. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, No Dice, 16.
43. Ibid., 18.
44. See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimen-
tal Life in the Russian Revolution (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 147.
45. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, No Dice, 34.
46. See Conrad Russell, "Against Dead Time," Time and Society 11, nos. 2-3
(2002): 193-208, for an extended discussion of a series of "romantic" critiques
of capitalism's dead time, from Michael Ldwy's account of romanticism as a
critique of modernity, via the Situationists, to Paul Virilio.
47. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, No Dice, 21.
48. Ibid., 21.
49. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Lon-
don and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2004).
50. Kristin Ross, translator's introduction to The Ignorant Schoolmaster, by
Jacques Ranciere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), xviii.
51. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, No Dice, 72-73.
52. The possibility that No Dice might be considered an instance of "verba-
tim theatre" might usefully be explored alongside the suggestion above that
it is also an example of the kind of "documentary theatre" developed by
groups like Rimini Protokoll. This might point to a broader category of "non-
fiction" theatre.
53. Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, No Dice, 139.
54. Ibid., 145.
55. Ibid., 145.
56. Ibid., 145.
57. Ibid., 146.
58. Ibid., 147.
59. Ibid., 158.
60. See Ranciere, Emancipated Spectator, for a critique of the myths of par-
ticipation in theatre.
61. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 89.
62. Ibid., 90.
63. Ibid., 111.
CHAPTER 6
1. Stories of wild men who live in the snow appear to have entered the
western imaginary from Nepalese and Tibetan culture during the nineteenth
century and developed a distinctively modern life there from the 1930s,
where, as Peter Bishop suggests, they comprised part of a utopian fantasy of
the Himalayas as a sacred place. See Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La: Ti-


184 NOTES TO PAGES 141-44

bet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
2. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-
Structuralism (London: Verso, 2004), 69.
3. Ibid., 36-37.
4. Ibid., 65.
5. Ibid., 76-77.
6. Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial
Class," in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press,
1979), 12; cited in Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Acad-
emy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 46. A full study of theatre criticism as a profession has yet to be written,
although there is a brief book on the subject by a well-informed British news-
paper critic: Irving Wardle, Theatre Criticism (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 1992). Also Marcie Frank explores, very interestingly, the idea that, in
England at least, literary criticism itself may have a particular historical rela-
tionship with the theatre: Marcie Frank, Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of
Criticism: From Dryden to Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
7. Jackson, Professing Performance, 46.
8. For a discussion of how a radical and socialist project might still be
sustained by teachers and intellectuals who "sneak into the university and
steal what they can," see Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, "The University
and the Undercommons: Seven Theses," Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 101-15.
9. Via Negativa made these performances during the first seven years of
their collective work, beginning in 2002 with Starting Point: Anger and con-
tinuing with More (2003), Incasso (2004), Would Would Not (2005), Viva Verdi
(2006), Four Deaths (2007), and Out (2008). For more on the company's work
see Marin Blazevid, ed., The No: Via Negativa 2002-2008 (Lubljana: Maska,
2010); and the company's website: Via Negativa, http://www.vntheatre.com,
accessed Nov. 5, 2012. The performance at Venice was presented as part of the
Theatre Biennale, directed by Romeo Castellucci.
so. Tomaz Krpid, "The Spectator's Performing Body: The Case of the Via
Negativa Theatre Project," New Theatre Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2011): 168. The in-
terview with Via Negativa's director, Bojan Jablanovec, in which the idea of
theatre as "a sphere of communication" is articulated, is available: Bojan
Jablanovec, interview with Andrea Copad, trans. Polona Petek, Maska 20
(2005): 92-93, http://vntheatre.com/en/i-see-theatre-above-all-as-a-sphere-of-
communication-not-as-a-medium-of-aestheticisation:
Via Negativa is simply a return, a backward glance cast towards the
reasons, the meaning, the goal and objectives, as well as the methods
of theatre as such. It is not about developing a different theatre or in-
venting a new stylistic paradigm. It is simply a reconsideration of the
meaning of theatre as a medium and an exploration of its mechanisms.
Nowadays, I see theatre, above all, as a sphere of communication, not
as a medium of aestheticisation. Institutional theatre, to some extent,


NOTES TO PAGES 144-56 185

underestimates the audiences -in terms of how it communicates with
them and what kind of language it uses. Negativa is all about opening
up theatre as a space of communication.
11. Krpid, "Spectator's Performing Body," 172.
12. These comments were made in a public dialogue at the Venice Theatre
Biennale, coordinated under the title Fare e Rappresentare, by Claudia Castel-
lucci, and led by Joe Kelleher and myself.
13. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 69.
14. A significant precursor to much recent work is Alan Read, ed., "On
Animals," special issue, Performance Research 5, no. 2 (2000). My own contribu-
tion may be found in Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals and Other Theatri-
cal Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
15. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New
York: Zone Books, 2007), 17.
16. Ibid., 91.
17. Ibid., 34.
18. Ibid., 35.
19. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
20. Heller-Roazen, Inner Touch, 92.
21. Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Ford-
ham University Press, 2007).
22. Ibid., 14.
23. Chris Goode, "God/Head," unpublished typescript, 2012, 2. All the
subsequent direct quotations from this performance are from a version of the
script that Chris Goode generously shared with me.
24. Chris Goode, "Corkafleeg," Thompson's Bank of Communicable De-
sire (blog), June 23, 2006, http://beescope.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-
min=2005-12-31T16:00:00-8:00&updated-max=2006-6-28T2:34:00%2B01:00&
max-results=47&start=39&by-date=false.
25. Chris Goode, "A New Vision for Theatre," interview with Chris John-
stone, Argument Room, July 21, 2011, http://www.livestream.com/theargu-
mentroom/video?clipld=pla_56a63c90-fd2b-4867-bc9d-af9b2376e8bb.
26. Chris Goode, "Season's Greeblings; And Another Year Over," Thomp-
son's Bank of Communicable Desire (blog), Dec. 30, 2011, http://beescope.
blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2011-1-1TOO:00:OOZ&updated-
max=2012-1-1Too:oo:ooZ&max-results=27.



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Index

actions, 92, 97, 99, 139, 152; and
speech, 87-89
Adler, Renata, 98
Adorno, Theodor, 51
Aeschylus: Oresteia, 25
Agamben, Giorgio, 98, 150, 151,
172n17
Althusser, Louis, 96, 101, 102
Anfang, 73, 74
Anfang (journal), 73, 74
animals in performance, 148-53
Arendt, Hannah, 15-16, 20, 25, 44,
70, 89; The Human Condition, 16-
17; Ranciere's relationship,
166n38; speech and action, 88;
work and action, 89, 124, 137
Argument Room, 155-56
Aristotle, 16, 137, 149-51, 152,
168n62; De anima, 150; Poetics, 26-
27
Athenaeum, 11
Athens: theatre and communism af-
ter, 5-32; theatre, community, and
the classical, 19-25
Autonomism, 14, 121, 137, 178n49,
18on-o
Badiou, Alain, 12, 165n21; "The Idea
of Communism," 164n19
Ball, Alan, 68
Barbizon, Georges, 73
Becher, Johannes, 58
Belmondo, Jean-Paul: Pierrot le fou,
94, 96
Benjamin, Walter, 7, 74, 76-77, 78, 84,
99, 138, 164n5; conception of his-

tory, 64, 73, 75, 167n5o; "The Con-
cept of Art Criticism in German
Romanticism," 63, 72-73; critique
of university, 141; idleness,
173n19; "On the Concept of His-
tory," 63, 64; "original unity," 76,
79; "Paraliperoma to 'On the Con-
cept of History'," 65-66; "Program
for a Proletarian Children's The-
ater," 58-73, 79, 81-82, 83, 127,
139, 171n4, 172n8; "The Story-
teller," 84; "Theses on the Concept
of History," 8; "unity of knowl-
edge," 79, 174n43
Berlin, 32, 58, 73, 75, 82, 138; commu-
nism, 3. See also Castellucci, Ro-
meo; HAU3; Kaiser Friedrich
Gymnasium; Schaubnhne; Soce-
tas Raffaello Sanzio
Berlin Free Student Group, 75
Berlin University, 77, 174n43, 174n51
Benn, Gottfried, 7
Benoist, Jean-Marie, 116
Bernanos, Georges, 7
Bernfeld, Siegfried, 73
Bertolazzi, Carlo: El Nost Milan, 96
besprizorniki, 68
Bildungsburgertum, 77-78, 79, 96
Billard, Nathalie, 177n26
Bishop, Claire, 165n22
Bishop, Peter, 183n1
Bloch, Ernst, 7, 8
Boal, Augusto, 28-29, 140, 168n62;
Theatre of the Oppressed, 26-27
Boltanski, Luc, 100, 181n19; The New
Spirit of Capitalism, 117-19

199


200 INDEX

Bourriaud, Nicolas, 140, 165nn21-22;
Relational Aesthetics, 13
Brecht, Bertolt, 60, 61, 96, 172n6
British Bankers Association, 179n1
Britten, Benjamin, 1
Burke, Edmund, 7
Burron, Paul, 177n26
Cahiers du cinima, 92, 93, 109
Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes, 90
Camden People's Theatre, 155
Cannon, Steve, 177n26
capitalism, 4, 13, 15, 66, 70, 93, 99,
104,107,121, 142, 148, 159,164n19,
166n4o; anti-, 19, 29, 32, 35, 45,
163n2, 164n5, 166n4o, 167n5o,
169n68; artistic, 14, 119; contempo-
rary, 132, 181n19; critique of, 12,
17, 183n46; European, 17; indus-
trial, 6, 7, 8-9, 35-40, 45, 46, 50, 59,
65, 79, 81, 83, 84; infinite task, 66;
knowledge production in, 143; la-
bor in, 71, 82, modern, 79, 101;
neo-, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 111,
113, 117, 119-20; overthrow, 51,
136; political resistance to, 14;
post-Fordist, 17, 100, 103, 115;
western, 139
Castellucci, Romeo, 19, 184n9; Fare e
Rappresentare, 185n12; Tragedia En-
dogonidia, 1-3
Chakbrabarty, Dipesh, 24
Chekhov, Anton, 53; The Cherry Or-
chard, 41; The Seagull, 57; Three Sis-
ters, 52; Uncle Vanya, 32, 33-35, 40-
44,48,49,52,57,59,67,70, 87, 89,
90, 141
Chiapello, Eve, loo, 181n19; The New
Spirit of Capitalism, 117-18, 119-20
Chinese Cultural Revolution, 87
Christopher, Karen, 154
Claque Theatre, 30
Colyford, 30-31
Colway Theatre Trust, 30
communism, 1, 4, 5, 71, 106, 139, 143,
162, 167n5o, 17on44, 175n58; liter-
ary, 10-11, 153; of capital, 137; op-

positional, 107; post-, 164n19; the-
atrical, 5-32, 148; work and
education, 62, 69, 72-85
Communist Party, 4, 58, 69, 97,
106
community: theatre and the classi-
cal, 19-25; theatre and the good,
25-32
Copper, Kelly, No Dice, 124-37
Costa, Maria Rosa Dalla, 70
Debray, Regis, 117-18
De la misere de la vie etudiante, 101,
103
de Man, Paul, 98
Dewey, John, 81, 82
Dixon, Winston Wheeler, 177n25
Dolan, Jill, 5, 31
Douzinas, Costas: The Idea of Com-
munism, 164n19
duBois, Page, 168n56
Dziga Vertov Group, 90, 93, 110;
British Sounds, 109, 110; Jusque a la
victoire, 109; Lotte in Italia, 109;
Pravda, 109; Vent d'Est, 109; Vladi-
mir and Rosa, 109
Eagleton, Terry, 140-42
education: communism and work,
72-85
edu-factory, 101, 102, 178n49
Eisler, Gerhard, 58, 73
Eisler, Hanns, 58
Eley, Geoff, 77
Engels, Friedrich, 8, 167n48
Factory Act of 1850, 39
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 24, 168n57
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 69, 81
France, 86, 95, 117; after 1968, 117;
capitalism, 93; cultural workers
educated elites, 47; Fordism, 95;
Gaullist, loo; neoliberalism, 116;
Revolution, 12, 15, 102; thinking,
90. See also Front de Liberation
Seine et Oise; Front Populaire;
University of Paris-Nanterre


INDEX  201

Frank, Marcie, 184n6
freedom, 4, 6, 28, 117; academic,
141-42; anarchic, 26; from brutal-
ity, 4o; and labor, 16, 45, 46, 53, 54,
119, 123; Maoism, 110; necessity
and, 54, 162; realm of, 29, 53, 141,
162, 169n69
free time, 4, 37, 42, 132
French Revolution, 12, 15, 102
Front de Liberation Seine et Oise,
95
Front Populaire, 94
Furtseva, Yekaterina, 176n24
German Communist Party (KPD),
58, 73, 8o, 172n5, 175n58
German Union of Proletarian Revo-
lutionary Playwrights, 58
Gill, Rosalind, 122-23
Glucksmann, Andre, 116
Godard, Jean-Luc, 95, 99, 177n24;
Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle,
92; France/tour/detour/deuxlenfants,
93; Ici et Ailleurs, 93; La chinoise, 32,
67, 70, 86, 87, 89-99, 100, 103, 104,
105, 1o6, 107, 108-9, 110, 139, 142,
176n20; Le gai savoir, 1o9; Letter to
Jane, 93; Loin de Vitnam, 93;
Masculin-frminin, 92, 96; One Plus
One, 1o9; Pierrot le fou, 94, 96;
Sauve qui pent (la vie), 93; Un Film
Comme les Autres, 93; Weekend, 94,
1o8-9;"What Is To Be Done?," 11o.
See also Dziga Vertov Group
goguettes, 104, 179n53
Goldhill, Simon, 20, 22-23
Golub, Spencer, 41
good community, 3, 29
Goode, Chris, 153-60, 185n23; The
Adventures of Wound Man and Shir-
ley, 155; God/Head, 155, 156, 158,
185n23
Gorin, Jean-Paul, 9o; Letter to Jane,
93; Un Film Comme les Autres, 93.
See also Dziga Vertov Group, 93
Gorz, Andre, 86, 105; Le socialisme
difficile, 175n3

Greek: aristocracy, 88; civilization,
168n56; culture, 15, 79, 167n53;
drama, 24, 26; farm laborers, 26;
parliamentary elections, 164n19;
prehistory, 22; theatre, 20, 27, 148,
168n62; thought and practice, 16;
tragedy, 23
Gridley, Anne: No Dice, 125, 135
Gridley, Teresa, 136
Gruber, Klaus Michael, 24
Hall, Edith, 23, 24, 26
Hamacher, Werner, 63-65, 66
Hardt, Michael, 114-15, 121,
18on2
Hardwick, Lorna, 24
Harvey, David, 38,100
HAU3, 182n28
Haug, Helgard, 127
Hebbel Theater, 1
Hegelianism, 74, 18on-o
Heller-Roazen, Daniel: The Inner
Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation,
149-51, 152
Henri-Levy, Bernard, 116
Herkner, Heinrich, 80
Hoernle, Edwin, 80-81, 83, 84;
Grundfragen der Proletarischen
Erziehung, 79, 82
Hoffmann, E. T. A.: Life and Opinions
of Tomcat Murr, 149-50
Horkheimer, Max, 51-52
Hubbard, Wendy: The Adventures of
Wound Man, 155
Hummel, Thomas, 125
idleness, 70, 173n19
illusion, 66, 135, 157; and love, 143-
48
immaterial labor, 47, 70, 105, 114-15,
121-23, 142, 151
Jablanovec, Bojan, 145, 184n-o
Jackson, Shannon, 142; Social Works:
Performing Art, Supporting Publics,
165n21
Jarausch, Konrad, 77-78


202 INDEX

Jellicoe, Anne: Community Plays: How
to Put Them On, 30
Jena Romanticism, 11, 12, 13, 14;
Friuhromantiker, 72
Johanson, Robert M.: No Dice, 125
Johnson, Lyndon, 96
Johnstone, Chris, 155
Jonson, Ben: The Alchemist, 94,
177n28
Joseph, Miranda, 9, 31, 55
Jugendkultur, 74, 76
Juppe, Alain, 117
Kaegi, Stefan, 127
Kael, Pauline, 90, 176n20
Kaiser Friedrich Gymnasium, 73
Kant, Immanuel, 12, 14, 65
Karina, Anna: La religieuse, 176n24;
Pierrot lefou, 94, 96
Karl Marx: Das Kapital, Erster Band,
127
Kelleher, Joe: Fare e Rappresentare,
185n12
Kershaw, Baz, 30, 31
Khrushchev, Nikita, 176n24
Kraepelin, Emil, 8o
Kramer, Stanley C., 44
Kreisler, Johannes, 149
Krpid, Tomaz, 144
Kukovec, Barbara: More, 145, 146,
147
labor, immaterial, 47, 70, 105, 114-
15, 121-23, 142, 151
"Labour Schools in Soviet Russia,"
82
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 11, 12, 14
Larson, Magali Sarfatti, 45, 46, 47
Lash, Scott, 100
Lacis, Asja, 32, 58, 59, 61, 64, 70; chil-
dren's theatre (Orel), 67-68, 71-73;
industrial capitalism, 84; proletar-
ian childrens' theatre, 67-69, 99,
127, 139; Revolutiondr im Beruf:
Berichte iber proletarisches Theater,
fiber Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin
und Piscator, 171n2, 171n4, 173n30;

theatre practice, 81, 83, 84; theatri-
cal improvisation, 84
The Law Book of the Crowley Iron
Works, 36
Lazzarato, Maurizio, 105, 120-22,
123; "Immaterial Labor," 121,
18on2; "Mai 68, la 'critique artiste'
et la revolution neo-liberale,"
181n19
Leaud, Jean-Pierre: La chinoise, 96,
98; Les quatre cents coups, 96;
Masculin-fiminin, 96
Lefebvre, Henri, 100-101; De la
misere de la vie etudiante, 101, 103
Lenin, Vladimir, 41, 71; and Taylor,
43, 50
Leninism, 73, 89, 92, 177n28
Liska, Pavol, No Dice, 124-37
London Interbank Offered Rates
(LIBOR), 113, 179n1
Longo, Oddone, 20-22
love, 15, 19, 33, 42, 57, 62, 108, 138,
153, 159, 162; disappointments of,
34; excitement, 34; and good com-
munity, 3; and illusion, 143-48; re-
demptive, 138; unsentimental, 63;
and work, 4, 46, 114, 118, 139, 140,
143
Lowy, Michael, 6, 7, 8, 12, 163n2,
183n46
LukAcs, Gydrgy, 7, 8
Lumberob, 125
Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 81, 82
Luxemburg, Rosa, 7
MacCabe, Colin, 109
Malraux, Andre, 176n24
Marco, Armand, 177n26
Marcuse, Herbert, 7
market research, 111, 114, 115-16,
120
Martin, Gerard, 177n26
Martin, Stewart, 13-14, 166n4o
Marx, Karl, 7, 60, 93, 127; Capital, 35,
44, 46, 53; classless society, 65;
early conception of communism,
14; exploitation unto death, 40;


INDEX 203

general intellect, 137; Grundrisse,
27-28; labor, 51, 122; materialism,
55; ontology of labor, 166n31;
primitive communism, 8, 27;
realm of freedom, 29, 53-54,
169n69; realm of necessity, 139;
"Statute of Labourers," 36; theory
of value, 55; vision of history, 3;
working class, 37; working day,
35-36, 37, 38-39, 44, 46
Marxism, 6-7, 73, 89, 92, 100, 119,
167n48, 177n28, 182n37; Autono-
mism, 121; conceptions of politics,
16; and theatre, 98, 178n41. See also
Autonomism
McClelland, Charles E.: State, Society,
and University in Germany 1700-
1914, 174n43
McClelland, James C.: "The Utopian
and the Heroic: Divergent Paths to
the Communist Educational
Ideal," 175n65
Mendelssohn-Veit, Dorothea, 11
Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 50, 62; Alinur,
71
Morris, Philip, 125, 126
Morris, William, 8
Moscow: stage, 47-50
Moscow Art Theatre, 49, 50
Moscow Diary, 62
Miinsterberg, Hugo, 80
Minzer, Thomas, 8
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 14, 31, 106-7, 147-
48, 152-53; Being Singular Plural,
148; The Inoperative Community,
10-12, 13
Narkompros, 58, 68, 69, 81, 82, 171n1
Narodnyi Komissariat Pros-
veschcheniya (People's Commis-
sariat of Education), 171n1
Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, 53,
137, 182n35; No Dice, 32, 115, 121,
125, 127, 135, 139
Negri, Antonio, 12, 14, 105, 114-15,
121, 18on2, 18on-o
neo-management, 117, 118

New Yorker, 176n20
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 174n44
Novalis, 11, 15, 25; Tagebucher und
Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs,
165n29
Oberzan, Zachary: No Dice, 125, 129,
135
Occupy movement, 164n19, 172n8
The Office, 169n9
Oval House, 153, 158
Paris, France, 32; 1920s, 95; 1968-88,
116-17; politics, 93; working class,
104. See also University of Paris-
Nanterre
Parks and Recreation, 169n91
Paul, Jean, 72
Perkin, Harold, 46
Petrograd, 81, 82
Phelan, Peggy, 55
Philip Morris, 125, 126
Plato, 18, 26-27, 69, 104
Politburo, 176n24
post-Fordism, 89, 95, 100, 105, 111,
114, 137, 139; capitalism, 17, 103,
115; economy, 110, 117, 122; labor,
17, 70, 121, 123, 124
Pratt, Andy, 122-23
presuppositions, 18, 19, 28, 31
professionalism, 11, 45, 46, 47, 51, 59,
66, 87, 140
professionals: as passionate ama-
teurs, 45-47
progress, ideology of, 63, 64
proletarian children, 84
proletarian children's theatre, 32, 6o,
61, 62, 64, 67, 99, 138, 139
Rabinbach, Anson, 79, 8o
Ranciere, Danielle, 103-4, 178n5o;
Rivoltes logiques, 101-2, 119
Ranciere, Jacques, 17-19, 28, 99,
165n21, 166n38, 178n5o; critique of
Plato, 69; The Emancipated Specta-
tor, 166n4o; Film Fables, 178n41;
The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 132; The


204 INDEX

Ranciere, Jacques (continued)
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribu-
tion of the Sensible, 166n4o
recuperation, 116
"reality effect," 90, 92, 95, 135
Red Army Fraction, 90, 175n65
Red Brigades, 90
repetition: of past, 8; theatre, 16,
164n8
Reports of the Inspectors of Factories,
39-40
Revoltes logiques, 101, 119
Ridout, Nicholas: Fare e Rappresen-
tare, 185n12; "Performance and
Democracy," 165n29
Rimini Protokoll, 127, 182n38,
183n52
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai: The
Czar's Bride, 62
Rivette, Jacques, 136; Ciline et Julie
vont en bateau, 134, 135; La reli-
gieuse, 176n24
Roberts, John: "Art, Praxis and the
Community to Come," 12-14
Roger, Jean-Henri, 177n26
Rogers, Ginger: "We're In the
Money," 125
Rojek, Chris: Capitalism and Leisure
Theory, 37-38
romantic anti-capitalism, 6-7, 8, 9,
29, 32, 35, 45, 83, 139, 142, 143, 149,
162, 163n2, 164n5, 166n4o, 167n5o,
169n68, 170n37
Ross, Andrew, 123, 181n24
Ross, Kristin, 103, 104, 116-18, 119,
12o; The Ignorant Schoolmaster,
132
Russell, Conrad: "Against Dead
Time," 183n46
Russia: industrial capitalism, 35-40;
Revolution, 56; work in, 40-45
Sabena, 127
Sabenation: Go Home and Follow the
News, 127
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 14, 28, 95; Les
Temps Modernes, 86
Saxe-Meiningen, Georg von, 48

Sayre, Robert, 6, 7, 12, 163n2
Schaubiihne, 24
Schechner, Richard, 24-25; Dionysus
in 69, 23, 167n53; "Theater and
Revolution," 167n53
Schegel, Friedrich, 63
Schelling, Friedrich, 11, 14
Schiller, Friedrich: Robbers, 72
Schlegel, Friedrich, 11, 98
Schlegel-Schelling, Caroline, 11
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 11
Schmidt, Theron, 65, 154, 157
Schmitt, Carl, 7
Schnoller, Gustav, 80
Schoen, Ernst, 63
Schumann, Robert: Kreisleriana, 149
Senelick, Laurence, 49
Settis, Salvatore, 20; The Future of the
"Classical," 15
Shakespeare, William, 67, 169n70
Signal to Noise, 155
Situationist International: On the
Poverty of Student Life, 75-76
Situationists, 117, 183n46
Social Democratic Party, 65, 80,
175n58
Socetas Raffaello Sanzio: Tragedia
Endogonidia, B.#03, 1, 4, 5, 13, 138,
149, 163n1
solitude, 4; in relation, 28, 153-62
speech, 43, 75, 86, 134, 136; and ac-
tions, 16, 87-89, 99, 105, 107, 124,
176n9
Stakhanov, Alexey, 43, 71
Stanislavski, Constantin, 48, 139; The
Czar's Bride, 62; Tsar Fedor Ioanno-
vich, 49-50
Stein, Peter, 24
Suvin, Darko, 25
Syriza, 164n19
Taylor, Frederick, 50; Principles of
Scientific Management, 80
Taylorism, 41, 43, 50, 62, 8o, 118-19,
130, 178n50, 18on1o
Technische Hochschulen, 77
telephone market research surveys,
1111, 114, 115-16


INDEX 205

Ten Hours' Act of 1844, 39
Terada, Rei, 71
Terranova, Tiziana, 132
Theaterhaus Gessnerallee, 182n27,
182n37
theatre: community and the classi-
cal, 19-25; community and the
good, 25-32; criticism, 162, 184n6;
and performance, 13, 20, 47-48,
155, 165n21, 166n21
Theatre Biennale, 143, 184n9, 185n12
Third Text, 13
"Third Way," 46, 47
Thompson, E. P., 38, 41, 103-4,
169n68; "Time, Work-Discipline,
and Industrial Capitalism," 36-37
Thompson's Bank of Communicable
Desire, 155, 156
Tieck, Ludwig, 11
Touraine, Alain, 116
Toward a Global Autonomous Univer-
sity, 178
Tulloch, John, 43-44
Turgenev, Ivan, 71; A Nest of Nobles,
68
Ulvaeus, Martha: "The Lehrstilck as
Performance," 172n6
United Kingdom, 30, 110, 116
United Labour School, 79, 81, 82
University of Paris-Nanterre, 89, 90,
92, 95, 99, 100-105
University of Strasbourg, 101
Urry, John, 100
Utley, Philip Lee, 73-74
Vaneigem, Raoul: The Revolution of
Everyday Life, 117, 18on12
van Erven, Eugene, 25-26, 29
Verein fur Sozialpolitik, 8o
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 20, 168n56
Venice Theatre Biennale, 143, 185n12
Via Negativa, 143-48, 184n-o; In-
casso, 184n9; More, 143-44, 184n9;
Starting Point: Anger, 184n9; Would
Would Not, 184n9
Vidal Naquet, Pierre, 20
Vietnam War, 93, 96

Virno, Paolo, 14, 17, 53, 105, 121, 122,
124, 136, 137, 165n21
von Harnack, Adolf, 82; "Vom GrofB-
betrieb der Wissenschaft," 78,
174n41
Wandervmgel, 173n34
Wardle, Irving: Theatre Criticism,
184n6
Washington Post, 176n24
Watts, Ric, 155
Weather Underground, 90
Weber, Alfred, 80
Weber, Max, 37, 8o
Weissman, Neil B., 41
Wetzel, Daniel, 127
Wiazemsky, Anne: Au hasard
Balthasar, 95; La chinoise, 95
Wilde, Oscar: The Star Child, 71
Wiles, David, 23; Theatre and Citizen-
ship, 20, 167n44
Wilhelm, August, 11
Wilkes, May Ann, 39
Williams, James S., 89-90, 99
Williams, Raymond, 40, 43, 52, 55
The Wire, 37, 169n9
Wirth, Andrzej: "The Lehrstinck as
Performance," 172n6
Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 27
work: education and communism,
72-85; not-, 105-1o; refusal of, 103,
105; and rest, 50-57; value of, 11,
45, 59
working class, 10, 36, 86, 97, 116; En-
glish, 103-4, 113; French, 103-4,
175n3; industrial, 39, 44; Marx,
37
World War One, 68, 73
Worrall, Kristin: No Dice, 125
Worrall, Nick, 49
Wyneken, Gustav, 73-74, 76
Zeitlin, Froma I.: "Dionysus since
69," 168n53
zemstvo system, 43-44
Zizek, Slavoj: "The Idea of Commu-
nism," 164n19; The Idea of Commu-
nism, 164n19