The Dark Theatre: Performance in the Capitalocene

Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, Bermondsey, London Docklands, 1977-1991

Thank you to the organising committee of Performance Philosophy Biennial Prague for inviting me to share some ideas with you this morning, and for the opportunity to join you over the coming days in conversation. And a special thanks to Alice who has guided me here so helpfully, taking time from her own work so that we can work together, and to Laura for that generous introduction.

Image: Sheep

I first met Laura about ten years ago having just spoken about the Transhumance of sheep in the Drome in South East France, at a conference called Performance Literatures at Leeds University.

Image: Flock

I don’t think I admitted on that occasion that the only reason I was walking with the sheep at all was that they, around three thousand of them, would walk past the barn door of my isolated Drome Valley farmhouse at the beginning of each summer, led by their shepherds and dogs, with an enormous jangling of bells and a hullabaloo of corn chaff clouds, and return past the same door at the end of the summer having grazed in the relative cool of the mountainous high pastures in the Col de Rousset.

Image: Sheep and farmer

The flocks of sheep and their peripatetic shepherds were my neighbours in the valley of Truinas and it was obvious I should begin to follow them then, and continue to do so as I have over the last few years each summer, towards the upper pastures in the mountains of the Vercors.

Image: Flock with dog

Their ways of assembling so intelligently struck me as being considerably in advance of our own human powers of assembly, which can be so uncomfortable. That the word capitalism itself, from caputa, or head count,

Image: Butchers

the head count of animals to be moved, sold and slaughtered, derives from precisely the Roman transhumance of sheep, is a nice irony that establishes my fist link between ecology and the capitalocene.

Image: Sheep Maps

It might be my fear of flying that keeps me so local, back door research you could say. Not just fear for myself, though I do have acute vertigo, but fear for those my zig-zagging itinerary will effect on the ground below me. Whatever it is, my own journeys of exploration, such as those with the sheep, havebeen remarkably nearby, local in every sense. They are small journeys, often round the block, that have attended to the musicologist John Blacking’s exhortation of the 1970s. John, back then, and it was some time before James Clifford’s writings on postcolonial ethnography, encouraged us to reverse the expectation of anthropology of the early twentieth century that in its imperialism sought ‘to domesticate the exotic’, and rather to, counter-intuitively defamiliarise the naturalized world in acts that would rather ‘exoticise the domestic’.

Image: Question

So with this sense of local scale in mind let’s start with one of the conference’s key questions: Is there a particular notion of ethics or ethos that applies to the encounter between performance and philosophy?

My talk will address this question in two parts, and in doing so I will follow some of the contours of the invitation we all received, and these are the organizers’ words under my own titles:

Image: 1. Near Present: The Savage Sorting

Ethnographies of the Anthropocene

Near Present: The Savage Sorting

Ethnographies of the Anthropocene

In which I will consider the “ethos” built into performance and/or philosophy in terms of style, stance or attitude.

Image: 2. Long Past

Long Past: Logics of Expulsion

Ethnographies of the Capitalocene

In which, I will discuss intersections of ‘acting’, ‘action’, ‘activity’ and ‘activation’ across theatrical, political, behavioral and ethical contexts.

I take it that the first set of questions concerning ethos, might refer to where we are, or where we find ourselves and our relations to others, and the forms, modes and comportments of practice we deploy once we have found ourselves through our work withothers.

Image: Rupa Huq and Banners

So, where am I and amongst whom? Well, for the last seven weeks I have been involved in the election process in the UK at a very local level canvassing on behalf of my local Member of Parliament Rupa Huq in West London, where I have lived for thirty five years, who was returned with a majority increased from three hundred votes, to a majority of more than 13,000, votes on a twelve per cent swing from Conservative to Labour. I had to withdraw from the Hamburg Performance Studies international conference because of the collision of dates with the election campaign but had no hesitation in doing so having always believed there is a significant difference between acting politically inthe world and acting culturally through representations of politics ofthat world even when that action is in support of a form of representational democracy that has its own serious failings of course.

Image: Picket Line

I will be saying something about how the two come together in complicated ways through performance later but want to register here first, for me at least, the primacy of joining political resistance to austerity, working on picket lines to support precarious laborers in ones own university institutions,

Image: Liberate Tate

Or participating in the Deadline Paris Climate Talks occupation at Tate Modern with Platform and Liberate Tate

Image: Green Park

Or as I was able to do last summer, joining those in Green Park in Athens assembling on the side of refugees and against political extremism and the European Banking system.

Image: Considerate Constructors’ Poster

Or indeed over the last week simply joining the human chain, in solidarity and support of those victims of corporate manslaughter at Grenfell Tower, a mile from where I live in West London.

Image: Grenfell Tower

When I chose my title, the Dark Theatre three months ago, thisdark theatre could not have been in mind, but I will return to it in a while as this charred mausoleum to diverse hope stands as a morbid testament to the ‘savage sorting’ of a specific system, an artificial way of life, the capitalocene that is my subject for today.

I also take it that an invitation to consider the question of ethoswill influence the waywe meet today, and over the coming days, and might be related to what we wish to speak about. That is, something that is deeply anxious making for many somewhere else, such as the logics of expulsion I am about to describe, does not have to be anxious-making as we discuss it, here. In this way we will guard against the collapse of an obvious and serious asymmetrybetween an anxiety as felt here, and there.

Image: Docklands Tower

So, to do this work I thought I would take you back with me to a docklands community of high rise blocks grouped around a theatre in South East London thirty years ago where I lived and worked for a decade,. I would like to make a proposition at the outset that the kind of performance philosophy I am interested in operates diagnostically and heuristically. For me performance philosophy might illuminate coevalqualities between apparently distant objects of attention, such as some of the concerns I have started with, allowing for diagnostic capacities to be drawn from these examples. My examples this morning share a ‘logics of expulsion’ that as we proceed I will try to explain, and offer up, as a way to think and work. But importantly having made any such diagnosis I would like to ask what kinds of heuristic, ‘good enough’ action, or activation might be possible given current political circumstances within which one works?

Image: Map of wealth in Kensington

Coeval was one of my friend Doreen Massey’s favourite terms, a simultaneoussense of unevendevelopment that conceals continuous injustices and requires us to maintain relations between statist perceptions of non-ideal ‘case by case’ studies, (something that performance does very well with its love of radical particularity) alongside normative capacities for heuristic activism in solidarity with cosmopolitan extremities of injustice (something that performance studies does much less well with its fatal aversion to general theory). I will offer some concreteexamples as I proceed of this coeval coefficient as without a general theory, what I will call here a general economy of performance, there can be no serious attention to action in the world whatsoever. Deriving such general theory from radically particular practices is what I would like Performance Philosophy, in its diagnostic and heuristic senses, to offer me. So, I will be here setting up the problem that I would like to encounter throughPerformance Philosophy, rather than to make any claims for having in any sense prematurely solved that problem. I take it we can work on that together over the coming days, and it is for me, no one else, to take away any responsibilities to act that might pertain to such enquiries.

Image: Felix Guattari

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about structures of this kind, the coeval quality of the subject under discussion (say the ethics of political action) and the forms such discussions take, when I was directing the Talks programme at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in the 1990s. One of the first events which I hosted at the ICA involved the group therapist and schizo-analyst, Felix Guattari, who had come to London just before he prematurely died of a heart attack, to discuss his newly published essay The Three Ecologies. On finally shoe-horning a huge audience into the modest ICA theatre space (A Thousand Plateausin the translation by Brian Massumi had been doing great business at the ICA bookshop for years) I recall Guattari insisting, before he could possibly speak to the assembled, expectant group, that this kind of arrangement just would not suffice for the democratic purposes of his work. When the co-author of Mille Plateauxsays he does not like the seating set up you take note. As I said earlier I am sympathetic to the idea that ones ends and means should be linked formally and so readily agreed that we should remove the rising bleechers that were designed to ensure everyone could see, and seat everyone on the floor in a circle around Félix, who promptly positioned himself sitting at their centre, therefore by definitions with his back to a proportion of the audience who had come to listen to him.

Image: Quotation (Thanks to Tuija Kokonenen)

Félix had a quite soft voice and started with this passage from the work he was with us to discuss, The Three Ecologies:

“Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between eco systems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual universes of reference, we must learn to think ‘transversally’. Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated by ‘degenerate’ images and statements. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire district of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’ by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.”

Féliz Guattari, The Three Ecologies, London: Athlone, 2000, p. 43.

Image: Donald Trump

Well, that was Félix Guattari on his own version of, at the time an unnamed ‘logics of expulsion’, at the ICA in the 1990s. He was right, at least on that, and Donald Trump of course. My colleague Tuija Kokkonen who is here today and sharing her own wonderful work reminded me of the prescience of this passage a couple of years ago in her writing. But my ownrecollection of this passage, when I read it in Tuija’s work, was forcefully shaped by the prosaic circumstances in which I had first heard it read out loud. The means in this instance for me were very much getting the better of Guattari’s intended ends.

No one on that day at the ICA either knew what he was talking about, never really having heard of Donald Trump in 1992, nor could they get the analogy to algae, as they could not hearwhat he was saying and his pronunciation of algae was quite baroque anyway. It took a brave heart to suggest at this stage that given we were all there to listen to Félix we might want to return to a seating arrangement in which he couldbe heard. A less democratic proposal maybe, but a functional one at least. So we, or I should say the stage managers and I, set about putting the theatre back into the shape it had been specially put into an hour before, pulling the retractable seating out again, much to the exasperation of the ICA technicians who muttered something about their labour clearly being the one absolutely infinite resource available to intellectuals who require optimum circumstances for their own labour with little respect for the demands these demands place on others tasked with putting out chairs, taking them away, then putting them out again, in pursuit of the ideal democratic arrangement.

Image: Transversality

I thought that Guattari’s idea of transversality was already underway within that room, there and then, as much in the formof the discussion and disagreement about the seating, and ways of resolving that local dispute as it was in his startling theoretical diagnosis, his forensic analysis of the newly empowered rentiers of the Reagan and Thatcher years, those beyond any constraint of something once called society, Donald Trump’s instinct for gated communities, camps of the uber elite that like algae would proliferate across the fetid lagoon of the cosmopolitan class.

Image: Dragons Chart

Let’s push this question of ethos, where one stands and amongst whom, back a few years. Before working at the ICA I had spent five years living and working in Barcelona and it was there that I learnt something about the relationship between ethos and ethnography. My ethnographic studies there were conducted amongst residents of a group of local villages on the fringes of Barcelona where four times a year predominantly men, but also some women who were not fussed about being deafened, dressed in sack cloth coverings and entered the city squares from the surrounding towns of Vic, Manresa, Igualada, Terrassa and many more with their own distinctive coverings and ornamentations.

The Corre Focwas a ‘fire run’ that on four festive occasions over the year brought local teams of sack-covered dragons from the outlying towns and villages of Catalonia, into the Barca city squares for mayhem to ensue. I had an ethnographic interest in what was happening here and how it was happening, but my principle politicalinterest was in how an apparently ancient folkloric festive practice, had relatively recent roots in the post Franco reestablishment of Catalan culture in the 1980s with the return of democratic institutions after fascism. It had been strategically used by the Catalan Adjuntamente, the Barcelona city council, to remind citizens of the city of their supposed roots prior to the Fascist regime of Franco, appealing to a long rural past that was otherwise obscured by a more recent industrial, metropolitan history.

The correfoc was essentially a rural ritual, recomposed and convened by the local authorities as recently as the early 1980s to make a form of an apparently continuous national, and nationalist identity appearamidst the spectacle of the urban realm. What I was exploring here was therefore what I called a kind of fakelorerather than ‘a folklore’, an adventure that required deep immersion within village loyalties and groups, each rural village maintained a quite distinct, finely decorated dragon for these purposes with its own unique features, instantly recognizable by loyal supporters who flooded the city at San Juan and other religious calendar holidays to proclaim, to represent and to forcefully inscribe Catalanidentities. Indeed to burn such identities into the pyche.

Image: Correfoc

Theoretically, I was especially interested here in ‘misinterpellation’, the way that however one is ‘called upon by power’, there will always be those who find ways to subvert the force of that call. James Martel has recently written a very good book about this propensity for power to misfire and I rather wish it had been available to me in the 1990s when I was working on some associated forces. Louis Althusser of course outlined the force of this calling by power, otherwise known by the word interpellation,in his celebrated work on Ideological State Apparatuses of the 1970s. To put it simply: when a police officer, or figure of state- authority, hails a figure on the streetwith the words ‘Hey You There!’, the subject turns to face the appellant, knowing it is themthat is being addressed.

Image: Correfoc

But significantly for Althusser, wary of pure origins, it is only in nineout of ten cases that the force of law subjectivises its subject of attention in this demanding way, which of course means that in at least ‘one in ten’ cases that violence of attention between state and subject misfires. This misfire I would propose, provides opportunities for resistance, re-empowerment and play. This flaw in the mapping of subjecthood gives rise to the promising possibility that within the site of the street at least (the privileged location of Althusser’s theory of interpellation) there may well be all kinds of latent, or excessive space for performances of identity and politics that complicate at the very least state definitions.

Image: Correfoc

In the case of the dragons they too were called, they too were interpellated by the Catalan authorities, vesting them with the licensed freedom to roam the streets disgorging their anarchy upon the commercial centre of the city that would otherwise be policed to within an inch of the draconian authoritarianism that has always undergirded the apparent sun blessed freedoms of life in this part of the world. If you are in any doubt about such clement regimes of force take a bench in Ciutadella park just off the now boutique paradise of El Borne in downtown Barcelona, and watch as the police cruise the strip only picking up North Africans, Moroccans and Algerians for their rough attentions.

Image: Ban

The dragon-humans were indeed drawn to the city centre by the serenading of horns from the city square and from the mayor reading the Bans for the Correfoc from the balcony of the city hall. Despite the unpleasant conservatism of Catalan culture with its own xenophobic tendencies the arrival of the dragons was a response to a call while being wildly in excess of any callers’ control.

Image: Correfoc

Liberal regimes of the licensing of spectacle, deeply held freedoms and capacity for risk outdoors that the Spanish have held dear since medieval religious devotionals, are way more tolerant to personal injury than any British or North American context would ever allow in the cultural if not the housing realm. These regimes ensure that this excessive display carries a spectacular imaginary beyond the confines of any kind of more utilitarian political theatre of identity. While the canny Catalan grandmothers looked on from their balconies above, often sitting on the spare gas bottle for their ovens indoors, those unwary consumerists of the city, tourists, would be backed up into cul de sacs where unprotected by sacking like their playful prancing, fire-spilling pursuants, they are commonly burnt. The specialist eye hospital at Saints would be prepared for multiple admissions on such days, as a consultant said to me, predominantly from those outsiders to the culture who had mistaken what they were witnessing as constrained by the strict safety protocols of western theatrical performance.

Image: Man with bat instrument

I wrote very little about these practices at the time but diddedicate a chapter of the book that I wrote while in Barcelona, Theatre & Everyday Life, to a study of the relationship between performance, safety and risk that derived directly from my work under sackcloth running with the dragon-runners.

Image: Quotation

This was how I framed this relation at the time, it is a page that has a very different resonance after the last week in my neighbourhood in London: “In the margins of the history of the theatre on fire, where guilt and recrimination flare in equal measure, the work of the historiographer is muted. For already this site is a place where the ‘other’ is responsible. The gesture which attaches ideas to places is, de Certeau explains, precisely the historian’s gesture. If history is the relations between a place, analytical procedures and the construction of a text, the historiographical process becomes one of delimiting place, the practices therein and their conversion into writing. But fire so fundamentally affects us as to drive all reason from that place, for often the writing of the history of fire is the writing of the dead, literally. And witnesses become in this world accomplices, their speaking is prejudice.”

Theatre & Everyday Life, pp. 230-231.

Image: Exit

Indeed by the end of this talk I will suggest it is precisely state interpellation, the naming of those in poverty as a poor to be expelled and incarcerated, that has in a wholly verifiable, systemic way, burnt once living, thriving and loving identities into non-being. In a grotesque inversion of the coming into identity of Catalan cultures through fire, running at the boundary between risk and safety, the regimes of austerity in the UK have consigned whole population of the inadmissible to the continuous threat of annihalation. In the second part of this talk let us see how that has been achieved and what one small group tried to do to resist it.

Image: 2. Long Past: Logics of Expulsion

Let me offer a second model of this journeying close to home borne of my own practice of witnessing and prejudice, that we have identified as a question of ethosfor today’s purposes.

Image: 2. Long Past: Logics of Expulsion.

Ethnographies of the Capitalocene

This second part of my narrative will necessarily have an anecdotalfeel but like all anecdotes, for good or ill, these examples will bond ‘event and context’ in sutured ways that performance and cultural thinking, or more precisely performance and philosophy you could say, can still, I believe, learn something from. And by way of being concerned with practice, my own in this case, the anxiety as to the relevance or not to the question in hand can of course be leavened by the understanding that these practices took place, and irrespective of their use value today, the capital I am about to make from them amongst you, these practices might have had othereffects, affects and implications for others elsewhere, beforetoday.

Image: Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop, Black and White Image

I first ‘played at home’ you might say during the decade of the 1980s, directing a neighbourhood theatre in a derelict warehouse in Rotherhithe for ten years, in the Docklands area of South East London,

Image: Warehouse

where a loose alliance of local participants living in local authority housing, numbering about a thousand people in total, of all ages and cultural backgrounds, resisted the forced eviction of their families away from their homes on the river, to inland ‘camps’ built beneath the shadow of a new wave of safely sprinklered towers with glowing mastheads such as HSBC, RBS and Barclays.

Image: Banks

The unelected development quango, the London Docklands Development Corporation was operating without democratic restraint forcing residents away from the profitable real estate gains of the water which could be bundled up free of contamination by the poor, to Gerry built accommodation in the shadow of these towers. The ‘water’ was never referred to as water but as a, or preferably, the ‘river view’.

Image: Aerial Shot of the River and neighbourhood

The area we occupied was a tightly circumscribed and rapidly reducing zone at the behest of this capital, a ghetto really,

Image: Map

just south east of Jamaica Road cradled in the bend of the river just beyond Tower Bridge at one river edge of which stood this dilapidated warehouse, our theatre.

Image: Silwood Estate

My own council accommodation, public housing in the Silwood Estate over this decade was within sight of the theatre and all those I worked with, who were my neighbors, friends and foes alike.

Image: Housing towers

When I talk about camps shadowed by banks I am sensitive to the opportunistic mobilization of that dreadful, historically specific word, from the lagers of South Africa in the nineteenth century, through the distribution of barbed wires of the twentieth, but I will insist that the political-juridicial structure that allowed for the eviction of the residents in our neighborhood in the 1980s offers material evidence of a political space that can be associated with that more brutal lineage of camps either side of the twentieth century. A ‘logics of expulsion’ is what connects these practices.

Image: Logics of Expulsion

What is a logics of expulsion? Well, according to Saskia Sassen a ‘logics of expulsion’ describes the sharp growth in the number of people, enterprises and places expelled from the core social and economic orders of our time. If my own work over three decades as I described it in the first part of this talk, has been about ‘radicalinclusion’, forms of expansionof the collective beyond professionalism and then humanism through performance, then the idea of radicalexpulsion, its inevitable antinomy, takes us beyond familiar ideas of growing inequality and captures something of the brutality and complexity of the pathologies of today’s global capitalism, what I have called in my sub title, the capitalocene.

Image: Camp

A logics of expulsion allows me to connect two principle experiences that were obvious within the immediate neighbourhood of that theatre that I worked at for that decade: the expelling of low incomes workers and the unemployed ex-dock workers from government social housing, welfare and, in some cases health protection, and the simultaneous investment by the banks that had flooded the very area of the theatre in loans to advanced extraction industries that had the power to transform natural environments much further afield into dead land and dead water, amounting to an expulsion of life from the biosphere. The two processes were examples of expulsion which when thought together become a logics the one depending on the other for what it can do.

Image: Banking City

I use the ugly word capitalocene for a reason. The epochal transformation that interests me in this talk today are rooted in diverse and often old histories and genealogies. But my starting point with you is precisely the early 1980s, a moment that obviously represents a vital period of change in both North and South, capitalist and communist economies alike. The first feature of this shift is the material development of growing areas of the world into extreme zones for economic operations. On the one hand this is the global outsourcing of manufacturing, servicing and clerical work that the shift to the docks from the East of London to containerisation across global, downriver deep-water pools represented.

Image: Banking Poster

Simultaneously with this drive there is the active worldwide making of global cities, such as the immediate neighborhood of the theatre, as strategic spaces for advanced economic functions, including cities such as Canary Wharf built from scratch on the site of the brutal renovation of old cities, old neighborhoods such as that of South East London. These sites for finance are nothing new, they have existed as longs as humans have existed, but what is new here, and I would suggest led and modeled by places such as the precise location I am speaking about in South East London, is the capacity to develop enormously complex instruments that allow it to securitize the broadest-ever historically speaking, range of entities and processes. Given finance here is selling something banks do not have, not money in other words, which banks have a lot of, finance needs to invade, that is securitize, nonfinancial sectors to generate its new profits. Hence the rise of the derivative so beautifully analysed in the cultural sphere in the work of the late great Randy Martin. The logics here become ones of extraction and destruction these are not anomalous affairs they are systemic deepening of capitalist relations.

So, what am I trying to do with you today, is, if I can, to offer a general theory of expulsion that arises from a single, parochial example close to home, followed by a second example somewhat less close to home. A more or less philosophical theorization you could say that begins with the facts at local, ground level, freed from some familiar vocabularies that have undervalued class analysis at the behest of identity politics, and takes us through some perhaps novel geopolitical, economic and cultural differentiations that might be of assistance in our own work.

Image: Camp

The local housing expulsion was obvious and catastrophic amounting to a land grab that led to a wave of displacements and enforced incarcerations. The acquisition of land is of course not a lone wolf event as Saskia Sassen has made clear in her empirical studies. It requires, and in turn stimulates, the making of a vast global market for land. It entails the development of a rampant specialized servicing infrastructure to enable sales and acquisitions, secure property or leasing rights, develop appropriate legal instruments, and in the case of the Docklands community I am talking about, push for the making of new laws to accommodate such purposes in sovereign countries. The novel types of contract and forms of ownership, I would suggest here, were precisely prototyped in places like the Docklands area of London in the 1980s, and when these modellings could not be resisted, were exported globally. Each of these shifts of expulsion brought new and dangerous challenges for those summarily displaced. As tower blocks with river views were forcibly cleared, retro-fitted at an investment level that the residents of Grenfell House could only dream of, those expelled from their long term communities found themselves bunched within in-land corridors of dilapidated high rises and mid war low rise housing that was barely fit for purpose.

Image: High Rise Camps

As Giorgio Agamben has reminded us all camps are born notout of ordinary law, but are born out of ‘the state of exception’, of which the lawless land acquisition of the 1980s on behalf of capital and the new financial city could be taken as on extreme urban example, which set the models for many such acquisitions that followed.

As Agamben describes it: “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule.” (‘What is a Camp?’, Means Without Ends, Minnesota, 2000, p. 39.) The camp is paradoxical in this respect as it is a piece of territory that is placed outside the normal juridical order, but not simply an external space, rather what it captures is not just what happens within its confines, though that can be awful enough, but also what is happening without, where the conditions for humans to be deprived of their rights and prerogatives are fostered to the point that acts against their interests no longer appear illegal, to those inside orout. Camps historically fall back on a certain internal consensus as to what is and is not acceptable enforced by a policing regime with little or no relation to the norms that would commonly prescribe action within the realm of ordinary law.

Image: Cover of Theatre & Everyday Life

I wrote about this experience at length in the book I mentioned earlier, tgat I worked on in Barcelona,Theatre & Everyday Life. There was a sub title to that book: An Ethics of Performance. And the introduction of that work starts with a fierce and at the time unpopular critique of the presumptions of an exotic ethnography, common among performance studies specialists at the time:

Image: Text

“The ritual enquires of theatre anthropology have enriched the possibilities of what is considered part of the theatre field, but as field work, have left to some degree, the domestic to the sociologist and the statistician. The nature of the domestic is chameleon in the sense that the theatre maker is often not of the place of performance, knows little about it in a geographical or historical sense and less about its emotional qualities. This ‘lack’ is an ethical concern with very specific cultural consequences. Ethos after all derives from the sense of ‘being at home’ and to deny this propensity for the theatre maker would not appear to me to be an encouraging start for a theatre philosophy. The local and particular are as demanding of consideration now as the cosmopolitan. They are closest to the everyday, are less easy to extrapolate from their context, and less easy to bring ‘home’ to be studied.”

Image: Text 2

“This difficulty does not make them more interesting but demands considerable investment on the part of any theatre concerned enough to look beyond its own imported context. “Being there’ and ‘being here’ are no longer so easy to define. Being here and critical is as urgent a project as being elsewhere, though does not deny those who are elsewhere. Obviously ‘being here’ depends on where ‘here’ is. If it is a place where cultural capital accumulates it provides a departure point for ‘being there’. Travels in the name of theatre, which replicate with heightened political sensitivity the ‘grand theatre tours of the Victorian period, are still only a relatively recent phenomenon, and like the grand tour have inflated the relevance of the exotic over the domestic. Being here for me is London and Barcelona in the 1990s, but there should, if this book touches on first principles of theatre, be a fundamental connection and distinction with what it is like to make theater there, wherever that might be.”

[Theatre & Everyday Life, 1993, pp. 8-9]

I remember Sue Ellen Case, my tutor at the University of Washington in Seattle, encouraging me quite forcefully to reconsider using the terms ethos, and ethics in my work. I think her sensitive critical words amounted to: Drop Them! In the late 1980s, prior to the widespread availability of Emmanuel Levinas in English, ethics was a term which was still redolent with moralizing cant. Anyway I resisted Sue Ellen, which was what she really enjoyed with all her students I think, and stuck with ethics in all its problematic normativity.

Image: Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop Empty Space

The narrative of the book, a study of what it was like to recognize ‘being here’, from this starting point on, runs something like this. On arrival in the dockland’s neighborhood in 1983 it had been immediately obvious that Peter Brook’s overly idealized, inane conception of the ‘Empty Space’ of theatre would have to go. Our first critique of this modernist theatrical orthodoxy contested Peter Brook’s purist fantasy of the ‘empty space’ awaiting its theatre, a tabula rasa for professionals to enter and exit at will.[i]

Image: Poster Project

We counter intuitively perceived theatre to have been superseded in that populated place by the quotidian performances of everyday life, those that remain for good and ill. In each case study in the book the fetishized myth of the isolated artist is dislodged from the centre of the scene to allow what we called ‘understudies’,[ii]those as yet unwritten and un-regarded by hegemonic cultural forms to take their due part.[iii]At the time Jacques Ranciere was writing on ‘the part of those who have no part’ (avoir-part)[iv]we were enacting this substitution.[v]

Image: Sommerakademie

Ranciere and I subsequently gave consecutive keynotes for Martin Spanberg’s 2004 iteration of the Frankfurt Sommerakademie where concepts of ‘the artist formally known as audience’ and ‘the emancipated spectator’ were first circulated, debated and adopted.[vi]But Theatre & Everyday Life also accompanied a swathe of work in environmentally responsive cultural theory that followed from Bruno Latour,[vii]Graham Harman,[viii]Isabelle Stengers,[ix]and Jason Moore,[x]in conceptual arenas such as social networks, object ontologies,[xi]and ecological dimensions of the capitalocene.[xii]

Image: Poster Project on Fence

Theatre & Everyday Life conceptualised a ‘lay theatre’ that resisted both the paternal welfarism of community arts rhetoric and the separatist presumptions of a professionalised realm.[xiii]The principle conceptual category of the work, perhaps its onlyworkable concept, Lay Theatre, articulated diagnostic and heuristic tools for those seeking to forge relations between cultural interventions, critical citizenship and avant garde political agency.[xiv]It offered the first sustained encounter in the theatre studies field with conceptualisations of the ‘amateur’ and ‘failure’,[xv]critiquing previously hegemonic notions of ‘professionalism’ and ‘virtuosity’,[xvi]and was unusual at the time for its braiding of materialist theatre histories within fully rounded ecological frames of reference.[xvii]The first part of the book thus brought into question Peter Brook’s received wisdom, the modernist avant-garde idealism of the ‘empty space’ of theatre.

Image: The Theatre Machine (Crane)

In three chapters, Lay Theatre, Regarding Theatre and Everyday Life, I asked us to look again at a populated place in which the artist ‘formerly known as audience’ has always already been at work.[xviii]These ghostings of the theatre machine are, I wanted to suggest, what give performance its palpable and problematic politics. Theatre is always exclusive in this historic respect, an act of aesthetic expulsion preceding a political debt to those it has exiled.[xix]The cultural logics of expulsion[xx]as evidenced in this docklands decade over a period of intense financialisation, thus mimic the material exclusions of those rendered precarious in the neighbourhood by rapacious debt.

Image: RTW and Map

The second part of the book, ‘Nature Theatre Culture’, positioned performance as the mediating arbiter between conceptions of nature and culture, ferrying the understandings of one, to and fro, through the other for analysis and activation.[xxi]Written from within the heart of a declining docklands neighbourhood that had once profited from the exploitation of ‘cheap natures’ of Empire, here the capitalocene is recognised for its profoundly ecological dimension.

Image: Docklands Poster Project: banks

While the work was avowedly local in its reach, taking account of our continuous cultural resistance in the form of performance and images to the tsunami of capital inflows to the area, the very far-reaching influences of these banks and multi-corporations, in and across landscapes very far away was, of course, always actually the point. Any analysis that forgot this continuous stretching of the local to the global was destined to a fatal partiality.

Image: River Performances

The performances and theatre we made with those embattled residents of the neighborhood over those ten years, performances that numbered in their hundreds ranging across all genres from choreographic, experimental, theatrical, site specific, we eschewed all such labels, social theatre, community theatre, as trite betrayals of the complexity of what we called ‘real contexts’, would routinely make these associative links and force fields of power appear in ways that theatre is peculiarly suited to.

Image: Boat Armada

Here we took to the river to take our message about the loss of local land to the banks to the House of Parliament.

Image: Poster Project Land

My own questions at this time amongst these people then equally concerned protection of those residents’ well-being and protection of their land from development by rapacious outside interests with no interest in them but this work alsoconcerned the environment and its shaping through what was most starkly obvious in the area, the workings of the Capitalocene. The docks themselves with evocative names like Cinammon Wharf, drawn from the empire’s trade in spices, explicitly pointed us to this ever-present environmentalmilieu.

Image: Poster Project and Big Money

Of course given there was no Anthropocene then, or no talk of it at least, although we were clearly at the docklands heart of one of the industrial motors of that Anthropocene, there was no Capitalocene either, quite yet, or again, no one describing it in quite that way. My view from where I stood amongst those docks over those years alongside others, was that Capitalism was less an economic system, less a social system and more a way of ‘organising nature’, with an emphatically lower case n. Not a Nature that is out there, but a nature, or natures, within each and all of us as we worked a land that was called Rotherhithe with its own natural history. The origin of the name of the place itself told this story before our arrival: Reder was a place after all, where heier, cattle were once landed. Reder heier, or Rotherhithe as it came to be known in the 1700s around the time this canal in Amsterdam was being developed.

Image: Banks on Herengracht

Our crisis, the one we were living through was not one of capital AND nature, but of modernity throughnature. Nature was never just there of course, not least of all in these docks, it was always and everywhere historical. It was capital’s aim to ensure nature worked harder and hard in each of it cycles, at the teeming edge of which were dockland landscapes of this very nature, Dutch, British, North American, broadly speaking over the last three hundred years since those banks started being built on the Gouden Bocht, the Golden Bend of Herengrcht in Amsterdam in the 1640s.

Image: Banks at Canary Wharf

Now the banks were all around us, finding their own way of facing out towards the water of this colonial trade. The search here, as Jason Moore has pointed out in his work on The Web of Life, is a seeking not just of nature but successively ‘cheaper and cheaper natures’. It is Cheap Nature that is the driving motor of capitalism. Historical capitalism thus implies, and necessitates historical nature, and historical nature since the sixteenth century implies and necessitates historical capitalism. The category of the Anthropocene as a mode of explanation makes for a far easier story than the one I am telling here as it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production. It does not ask us to think about these relations at all. An abstract Humanity is at work throughout the Anthropocene, all the key material concerns of Performance Studies for instance, those of intersectionality are wiped clean in the interests of the anthropos as a largely abstract collective actor.

Image: Cheap Natures

It is materially obvious with climate change, waste proliferation and attendant ecological crises that capitalism is exhausting its ecological regime. What Jason Moore describes as that process of getting extra-human natures, and humans too, to work for very low outlays of money and energy, is the history writ large in the Docklands community of capitalism’s great commodity frontiers and capitalism’s long waves of accumulation. The appropriation of frontier lands, of which the camps I evoked earlier, those that stretch from Calais to Raqqa, become the outsourced border zones for ‘resource wars’ fought elsewhere, have been the indispensible condition for each great wave of capital accumulation represented by those towering banks, from Dutch hegemony in the seventeenth century to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. This ‘cheap nature’ strategy has been failing for at least a century now and with the fig leaf of financialisation, and the capitalization of reproduction beginning post 2008 to reveal their own multiple contradictions, it is quite apparent that the Capitalocene is entering another ‘systemic spasm’ that will have further serious consequences and make the current camps we are discussing appear modest by comparison.

Image: I Didn’t Jump I was Pushed

But, notwithstanding the deployment of esoteric language to explain these forces, words like Anthropocene and Capitalocene, as a performancespecialist I can notice quite readily the Mise en Sceneof that period. A mise en scene that certainly alerted me to the necessity of conjoining cultural and environmental thinking and action at every turn. These scenic arrangements took the form of a sequence of interventions in the civic life of the neighbourhood in direct resistance to the ant-democratic initiatives of the London Docklands Development Corporation, who, requiring no planning consent, and with generous sweeteners from the government in the form of tax breaks, ran riot across the landscape here, while very far away from Lagos to Ogoniland, the extraction industries they supported reeked a more brutal havoc.

Image: Theatre With Kids

Our work was built on models of course. Resisting the platitude of the Empty Space was not simply an altruistic defence against those who fiercely protected their neighbourhood against all new comers, the neighbourhood after all was already very well known for its race-hate speech and deep identity divisions. The Empty Space was surely populated, but that population was as often a bellicose, belligerent and bigoted dissensus, as it was anything like an avant-garde liberal consensus. No, Claire Bishop would not speak to me now, and as Matthew and Lin know very well in this audience not having Claire Bishop speak to you can be deeply uncomfortable when that ‘not- speaking’ takes place in public, if we had bought into the soft welfarism of that discredited patrician wing of community arts social management at the expense of innovation.

Image: Womens’ Work, Mary Kelly

Rather the resistance to the Empty Space required us to recover not just those communitarian practices that preceded us but those avant gardepolitical agencies that had come before in the form of artists’ interventions that had a peculiarly close attachment to, and derived from the non-artists, the lay community, who had in fact brought them into being. There were hundreds of these that we recovered as part of our work, this South East corner of London had always been a remarkably fertile territory for abandoned practices of this nature, and their disappearance from the scene was only another expulsion to consider in our own commitments to the recovery of histories that would remind us of the territories long term commitments to justice.

Image: Womens Work, Work Cards

Take for instance Mary Kelly’s 1970s project Women’s Work that now, finally has been recovered and shown at Tate Modern in the Switch House, under those artists’ names. We knew a great deal of this work years ago, in around 1984, because we knew those women who had been the subjects of this work, who would come to the theatre warehouse and tell us that they had spent years working with Mary Kelly on this project, though they were never sure quite what the outcomes of the project had been nor were they very impressed by the lack of instrumentalism of that art, it had not improved their conditions of work beyond the satisfaction of working together on the project which as one of the women said, was what they did everyday anyway.

Image: Peak Freans

Or on another occasion I had been working in a neighboring factory for a year, the biscuit factory, Peek Freans that took up a prominent ten acre site in the neighborhood and over the years had provided employment for almost all the mothers of the kids who used to come and work with us at the theatre workshop.

Image: Workers Leaving the Factory

In preparation for site specific performance over three nights at the end of the year’s residency I had found a 35mm film in the basement of the factory that turned out to be one of the earliest examples of factory gates filming that latterly Harun Farocki incorporated into his exceptional installation Factory Gates, also now owned and showing at Tate Modern in London.

Avant Garde political agency as far as I understood it during this work was concerned not with these representationsper se, but the testing of viable forms of resistanceand the propositions for political, social and cultural transformations that these works initiated, in the work place. Ours was always a normative perspective, not just an explanatory one, normative standards being those that pertained to an ideal standard or model, an ethically responsive, radically inclusive counterforce to hegemonic forces of artistic conservatism. These normative concerns could not of course be proved or disproved, rather they were there to be weighed and judged. That was our work amongst others, weighing and judging normative principles, ethical attitudes, reasons for doing things as well as doing those things. For instance it was patently impossible for us to provethat the local council should provide adequate housing for those expelled form their homes, the workforces picture by Mary Kelly in their work, rather what was significant for us was to surface the opinion that they should be.

Image: Older men working

Our real and abiding interest over this decade was in how moral principles might make the journey to become political obligations amongst those in a nascent neo liberal domain, justified and propped up I have to say by a spineless postmodern relativism, who presumed no such thing mattered. We were asking here what conceptions of political agency might support normative innovations and political transformations. Performance provided the activist mode for the trying out of such diagnostic and heuristic experiments in agency. Avant garde political agency included the heuristic role of conflict for developing a normative account able to improve on its rivals both with regard to problem diagnosis and its capacity to guide political transformation given existing political structures.

Image: Silwood Estate

We were no anarchists, we recognized the protection exiting political structures already gave to many of those most unjustly treated by statist politics, but our actions were always heuristic in the sense that they could not be optimal, but had to settle with being ‘good enough’.

Image: High Rise Block

When Augusto Boal visited for a week to work with the neighborhood of regular participants who numbered about three hundred people of all ages, the community constantly challenged Augusto to trade in his high flow rhetoric of change for some substantial yet much more modest gains in the neighbourhood, in one case, chillingly now, seeking support to expose the hopelessly inadequate fire regulations and exits in one of the highest blocks in the neighbourhhood, at 27 stories well above Grenfell House heights. Boal was peculiarly unable to respond to these invitations having become enamored with his own aesthetic regimes of Joker and Forum Theatre, and I have to say his guru status, something which our neighbourhood had very little time for.

Image: Theatre Switch

This ‘minor journeying’, ‘ethnographic localism’ you could call it, recovering archaeologies of avant garde agency and communitarian creative practices continued for me until the early 1990s when the theatre was forcibly closed from beneath us. The theatre had a single light switch with two settings: On/Off. So, without simplifying matters too much, between 1977 and 1991 the light switch was on. Then it was off. Dark Theatre. Small history I suppose, just one of a plethora of theatre bankruptcies then and now.

Image: Projection of switch

In the year I arrived, just downstream from Tower Bridge, the annual rent on the two-storey building measuring 30m x 15m, was £875 (27,298 CZK) by the time I left, £96,000 (2,994,990 CZK). In that first year I was able to raise the annual rent by letting out the basement of our theatre illegally in the form of a pop-up launderette for use by the many single mothers in the area who liked to hang out in our building with their young kids. By 1990 that rent had increased by a factor of almost 100. An amount I could not raise with a pop-up launderette.

Image: RTW Developed

Given all our work was being conducted for free with many who could not afford school uniform never mind cultural taxation, it was inevitable that we would have to close. I had no property which could otherwise have been used as collateral or guarantee against loss so we were essentially bankrupt and in default of our lease. It was not perhaps surprising that it was the banks themselves who had eventually swept away our resistance with their tide of credit to another city just beyond us, the increasingly hawkish developers, and wanted us out in order to sell on the modest theatre to convert it into four, rather less modest luxury apartments. I noticed one of the apartments sold the other day for 7.5 million pounds.

Image: Conclusion: By Way of Disappointment

Conclusion: By Way of Disappointment

Image: Text from Theatre & Everyday Life

Everything I have discussed with you this morning grew out of disappointment. I wrote about that disappointment in this way in Theatre & Everyday Life:

“Supporting a theatre in such an area for thirteen years eventually gave way to closure. Keeping a theatre open is more or less difficult. Closing a theatre is a provocation to say something else. Where there is interruption in what has been a continuity, questions are asked as to how and why such a situation could have arisen. For ‘being there’ becomes pattern and habit and is the point at which everyday life begins to incorporate a theatre into itself as though it were somehow natural and given. But this habitual world threatens the fragility of a theatre which demands recognition and favours few can afford. There was always something there, but the remains of a theatre are less coherent than buildings suggest, and it is these fragments which are testament to what happened and why a theatre rarely sinks without trace. That a building remains, means little in a time when the combustabilityof theatre has been so reduced. Like other transformations in the neighbourhood a theatre can become a cinema, a bingo hall, and a carpet warehouse within a generation.”

[Theatre & Everyday Life, 1993, pp. 24-25]

Image: Law Courts

Well, in keeping with my exhortation to continue to treat the disappointment, the closure of the dark theatre, as an opportunity to ‘say something else’, I have most recently been spending some time examining and participating in the conduct of thislocal neighbourhood, in and around the Strand and Fleet Street.

Image: Candy and Candy

I have been spending most days since February at the Royal Courts of Justice observing a trial between a multiple bankrupt, Mark Holyoake, famous for bringing an Icelandic bank to its knees following the failure of his fisheries businesses, and two very well know real estate developers in the UK, the brothers bling, Nick and Chris Candy.

Image: Grosvenor Gardens House

They are fighting over the control of this piece of real estate on the fringe of Belgravia in central London, Grosvenor Gardens House.

Image: Rolls Building

So, twenty-five years on from the small histories I have been talking you through, during March, April and May this year I have been observing the daily proceedings of a civil case in the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Local news. Once again I am close to home as Court 30 is in the Rolls Building which backs onto the King’s College Maughan Library where I work. So, I can see most of the objects of my study from the seats I study in.

Image: Candy at Rolls Building

While this is almost macrobiotic research, like the sheep in the Drome at my back door, nothing of interest is further than 200 metres away, I hope this does not make these concerns parochial, nor without relevance to our wider discussions here. I would suggest indeed that precisely what I am looking at in this tiny area of he world, disproportionately effects everything I have been talking about this morning.

Image: Candy and Candy

What I am looking at in Court 30 is a case that involves extortion, physical threats, defamation, fraud and industrial strength tax evasion. All common practice for those in the businesses that were spawned in that property rush that drove us from Rotherhithe, the one in the Docklands that today has spread like a rash of extremist enclaves parasiting off the taste of another new elite of super wealthy. There is something peculiarly attractive about the Candy Brothers, their immense and rapacious work ethic, e mail evidence is always cross examined and timed so one knows that a huge volume of business is being done by these people at times that that most of us 99% are fast asleep, if we have a place to sleep,

Image: One Hyde Park

their demanding aesthetic standards on behalf of their clients who they have educated to move beyond bling to appreciate the modernist lines of a Richard Rogers residential masterpiece at One Hyde Park, their Italian boots and tailored suits, and what the judge, Lord Justice Nugee calls their ‘love of Anglo Saxon language’ that they coyly refrain from repeating in court in case it offends those of us sitting there pretending not to be shocked at the workings of this system now laid absolutely bare for us all to see.

But what am I really doing in that court each day? Well I suppose I am examining the thing I can only suggest is as close to Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’, his idea of ‘millionfold growth’, as I am likely to be given public access to at the outset of this twenty first century. After this public debacle there will be very few billionaires of this kind who will risk allowing disagreements over money to get as far as legislation. The settlement business will be the norm from now on in, this is a one-off and it speaks to the systemic fraud that the litigants here mistook for business as usual.

I am tracking the secret life of a loan that having begun between two friends at £12m has gone so spectacularly wrong over the last five years that one friend is now seeking a redress of £130m in the courts only to discover that in so doing each and all of the claimants in the case on both sides have been described by the cross examining councils as pathological liars. Again its is not the shock of the new that this represents for us sitting there, as the predictable bad new days rearranged in another yet more heightened form of baroque embezzlement. Not of each other, who cares, but of those beyond them who do pay for the roads, schools and hospitals with their taxes. When this was put to Chris Candy by the cross examining council there was unfettered laughter in the court from the Candy supporters who considered such a proposition as ludicrous. Other people pay taxes.

The loan runs between two friends in London, between their office in Belgravia and Knightsbridge and their offices in Guernsey and Monaco. It runs from the debt collectors they unleash on each other from Russia, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan and it runs between the alleged threats one makes to the other, regarding the safety of his wife’s unborn child. It runs from the failed IVF of the wife of one of the defendants who claims he would never say such things about the unborn, and it runs to those who invest in these apartments at £6000 a square foot for whom the Candy premium represents a staggering 300% over any other residential building that struggles to realize £2000 a square foot. And the exterminist nature of these developments of course drive the continuous expectation that with a city on heat as London certainly is, there could be no reason to look beyond these transactions to identify those in camps of a rather different kind elsewhere who are the inevitable victims of such loans, defaults, investments and threats. Indeed those with whom I am concerned today.

Image: Rotherhithe Theatre Workshop developed

But this is not really what I came to tell you about this trial. The point I am raising here is somewhat more parochial, more local, in keeping with my talk as a whole. Without warning or apparent note, during cross-examination of the co-defendants, the ‘Brothers Bling’, Candy & Candy, Dark Theatre returned. Unheimlich. I knew on our departure, 107 Rotherhithe Street had been developed by property speculators, everything with a ‘river view’ was, but sitting in Court 30, surrounded by financial journalists, personal security and reputation managers, I realised that the very building we had spent those years working in, resisting the developers, had experienced what Nietzsche would have described as ‘millionfold growth’.

Image: Rotherhithe Interior

Now refashioned as luxury apartments for ‘high net worth individuals’, our poor dark theatre no longer had light switches but human sensors and fingerprint recognition. Legitimate Presence/Illegitimate Presence. Council for the claimant, Mark Holyoake, was asking what value one might place on such technologies of the self? And I realised that the very example they were using to discuss these technologies was the theatre that I had run thirty years before, the one I had been evicted from and the one that following innumerable refits and up-scalings had been bought by Candy and Candy and transformed into a luxury condominium block with finger print sensitive security.

Image: Rotherhithe Crane

The Dark Theatre was now fully illuminated again, it was in the spotlight, it was evidence in a legally contested scene involving alleged extortion, threats, fraud and tax evasion. X marked the spot. Nick Candy smiled and said: “Your Honour, we don’t work with shady people”. The public gallery laughed. I had lost my sense of humour.

Image: Francis Galton Mug Shot

As Giorgio Agamben has pointed out, having refused to accept invitations from states where bio-metric data determines access through borders, for the first time in the history of humanity, ‘identity’ is no longer a function of the social persona and its recognition by others, but rather a function of biological data which could bear no relation to it. In this process we have literally lost touch with our own means of identification.

Image: Fingerprients

The new entry system to that luxury block of apartments, that was once a dark theatre with free access for all, now shows us something crucial for our future about the impersonal, the potential of the impersonal in an increasingly personalised world. An increasingly personalised world that has never perhaps, felt more impersonal, where our supposedly defining human-hands have provided the very means to dehumaniseus. This ‘digital data’ epitomizes and marks our age as avowedly as the digital data-base that accumulates, collates and centralizes it.

Taking my starting point from this Dark Theatre and its aftermath, its fallout on my life you could say, my talk has reflected upon a quarter century interregnum of uber-accelerated economics, a state of financialised exception in which the irregularities of the market in 2008 will soon appear a mere ornament.

Image: Questions

While the Capitalocene describes the continuous conditions of production of ‘cheap nature’, historically orchestrated from these very docks, what might activism look like in such a scenario. How are the epistemic implications of structural injustice to be addressed through performance? What kind of philosophy might be adequate to such acts and how might such philosophies offer innovative, immanent, diagnostic and heuristic potentials for performance thought and practice? Beyond the ubiquitous radical particularity of performance theory is there any such thing as a general theory of theatre, and if so, who wants or benefits from it?

Image: Trump Tower

The sober proposition I am offering this morning (Off) is that we should recognise we are labouring in the Capitalocene, whose brutal character demands that we recognise that forms of knowledge and intelligence we respect and admire are often at the origin of long transaction chains that can end in simple expulsions. My affirmative insistence (On) is that now is the time for rethinking avant-garde political agency, the commitment to fostering the mise en scene of justice through performance has never been more necessary. What is there left to say, or worth saying in the time that remains, when a theatre closes, when it goes dark, and then is illuminated again, as something else, fearful yet familiar? Off/On.

Image: Model Tower

I suppose, to close, what I am doing in thinking about each of the discrete mise en scene above, is revealing an aversion to abstract speculation. Throughout the several years of work I have described here, and one reason for taking the time to take you back with me to something I do not commonly discuss, is the prominence I wish to give to figures, often rather mundane figures, but also economic figures, a general economy of performance you could say, that stimulate thinking of one kind and action of another. Here everything and anything in the world, that ‘millionfold growth’ can be thought provoking, deserving of contemplation and wonder yes – not simply an ultimately replaceable representative of a genus of an Idea, a source of inexhaustible singularity and multiplicity, but most pressingly an invitation to action.

Image: The Dark Theatre, Burnt

Action? To what purpose? Thinking and practicing in the interests of radical inclusion I hope, against the logics of ‘radical expulsion’, I hope. The dynamics here marks a contestation between those logics that force people and no-persons out and those that bring people and non-people in. What I call socialism. In this work it is not sufficient to notethose who are expelled but to cross into the spaces of the expelled, to capture and work amidst that site or moment of expulsion lest we forget. Philosophically and analytically beneath the specifics of each of the domains I have placed alongside each other this morning, lie emergent systemic trends. Despite their enormously diverse variety from the empowerment of the global banking system, as evidenced by the London docklands example, to the enfeeblement of its local democracy, these dynamics are ones of liberated profit-seeking and indifference to environment. Whether such movements and forces look different in London or Barcelona or Prague is not really the point, they clearly do, but not so different as to not share something: that if such destructive forces cut across my own oh so parochial, local boundaries I can only imagine what I would discover should I be more emboldened to travel much closer to home, and really to open my eyes at what is most taken for granted at my own back door. At the moment the air outside that door is filled with after-burn.

Here philosophical rigour becomes key given that these forces are subterranean and our interpretive methods are simply not up to date nor up to scratch. That is why this weekend’s work, and what you will have to say, is so important to me. The more I rail against the platitudes of Social Theatre, Political Theatre or Community Theatre, terms that I have castigated for three decades, the more I announce my dependency on something that I take it, might be called here, Performance Philosophy. Here a land grab in the small corner of the world that was my decade in Rotherhithe, is one small concrete instance of a much larger and elusive type of grab. The capitalocene as I am characterising it through these ethnographies is thus marked by the expulsions that I have outlined, but also is characterised by the erasure of incorporation. Thus the question of who quite might be responsible for those plots of land sold to something called multi-corporations, was always beyond us if we did not understand the global incorporationof everything that lay before us. Amongst these sophistications it is shocking to observe the elementary brutalities that accompany such expulsions of the systemic. It is the diagnosis of such predatory formations, and resistance to them, that will require a Philosophy worth its name and a Performance that meets its ambitions.

So what is at play here is a question of membership and constitutive participation. I think this is what has just been realised again in the UK when for the first time in three decades an overtly socialistmanifesto was offered to an electorate numb with neo liberal, austerity cant, with platitudes such as ‘strong and stable’, strong and stable my arse. It was the recognition by a newly energised younger electorate of a larger ‘life space’ than had for long been thought possible. The micro-spaces I have been attending to over the years, and this morning, might offer some figures yet for working inthis life space, not an empty space but a life space teeming with experience and expectation. Yet each space, as we witnessed so horribly, right next door to where I live in West London, just last week, gives notice of a capacity for destruction that if it is not faced will violate us, and violate others, beyond us, much less able to survive corporate nihilism’s savage attentions.

Whatever seating arrangements Felix Guattari has for his seminar in the sky his insistence on transversality remains one of the complex means to attest to such violences. But we have to recognise that the seating arrangements are not surplusto the philosophical questions in hand, for they form the tone, timbre and tension of those very questions. Indeed, their ethos. Sometimes, on a day like today, the seating arrangements are all we have. Not least of all the way our seats face will shape any answer to the following question that I will finish with this morning. Where are the expelled? The spaces of the expelled require us to think and act with critical care, to conceptualise them yes, but to realise them and to enter them, to join them. It is our imperative to make such spaces, spaces to which we have legal as well as ethical commitments. By identifying, naming, and entering such expelled spaces, or spaces of the expelled, there is the opportunity to recognise the populations of each when they make representations to us, to enter the collective of consideration that we consider our own. They become subjects of our discussion as we work with them, togethertoday, and I am grateful for your joining me in the further legitimation of the expelled, amongst other things worth thinking seriously about.

Thank you for listening