Precarity and Performance: An Introduction

Nicholas Ridout, Rebecca Schneider

TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 56, Number 4, Winter 2012 (T216),
pp. 5-9 (Article)

Published by The MIT Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tdr/summary/v056/56.4.ridout.html

Access provided by Universidade de São Paulo (3 Oct 2013 23:44 GMT)

Precarity and Performance
An Introduction
Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider

This issue of TDR is devoted to the topic of “precarity” considered in and through perfor-
mance. It is a two-part issue — taking place across the journals TDR and Women and Performance.
Though the issues are separately edited and separately published, they maintain an affiliation at
the level of their concerted call to critical thought and political action regarding contemporary
neoliberalism and the scene of performance-based art. The Women and Performance issue (23:1),
edited by Tavia Nyong’o, will follow this issue of TDR in March 2013.
We begin this introduction to the issue with the joint call for papers we wrote with Nyong’o,
as we believe that the call was answered in a fascinating spectrum of quite particular and even
divergent ways by the articles brought together here. If not all of our points of call were visited
(despite our desire for Global South and Asian contexts, the essays here focus on Europe and
North America), a good many of our questions have been taken up and engaged in the essays
that follow. The call itself, we feel, sets this issue’s stage.

The Call
Precarity is life lived in relation to a future that cannot be propped securely upon the past.
Precarity undoes a linear streamline of temporal progression and challenges “progress” and
“development” narratives on all levels. Precarity has become a byword for life in late and later
capitalism — or, some argue, life in capitalism as usual.
Life and work, and their dependence upon one another, are often imagined as increasingly
precarious, their futures shadowed by pervasive terror as well as everyday anxieties about work.
At the same time, “creative capital” invests a kind of promise in precarity with words like “inno-
vation,” “failure,” “experiment,” and “arts.” The links here between creativity and terror, art and

Nicholas Ridout teaches at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Stage Fright, Animals
and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Theatre & Ethics (Palgrave
MacMillan, 2009). He is coauthor, with Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi, and Joe
Kelleher, of The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (Routledge, 2007) and coeditor, with Joe Kelleher,
of Contemporary Theatres in Europe: A Critical Companion (Routledge, 2006). n.p.ridout@qmul
.ac.uk

Rebecca Schneider is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
at Brown University. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (Routledge, 1997), and
Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Routledge, 2011). She is
coeditor of Re:Direction (Routledge, 2001), an anthology on 20th-century Western directing theories
and practices, and the author of numerous essays on performance and visual culture including “Hello
Dolly Well Hello Dolly: The Double and Its Theatre,” “Solo Solo Solo,” and “What I Can’t Recall.”
Among other editorial associations, she is a Consortium Editor of TDR. rebecca_schneider@brown.edu

TDR: The Drama Review 56:4 (T216) Winter 2012. ©2012

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 5
 structures of risk and insecurity, point also to connections with performance and the embodied
balancing act of the live performer.
How do we pay attention to precarity — economic precarity, neoliberal precarity — through a
close reading of the performing body? At one time, claims for resistance to commodity capital-
ism were addressed through the idea that performance does not offer an object for sale. What of
the performing body in an economy where the laboring body, and its production of affect, is the
new commodity du jour? Marx already gives us the immaterial commodity that is labor itself.
Can we think about this through the labor of performance?
Does the place of the arts in global capitalism, and the particular relations implied by “affec-
tive labor,” mean that, in some ways, theatrical labor has a particular purchase on the contem-
porary scene in which such life and work appears? Might this in part account for the recent
(re)turn to performance as the hottest contemporary art of the 21st century in such institutions
as MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Tate, and the Getty, all formerly known as devotees of the art
object? While precarity has been brought to the fore in European activist circles, we are espe-
cially interested in analyses that test its utility in Asian, African, and American contexts. We also
are interested in approaches that seek to connect the political-economic usage of precariousness
with the ethical and psychoanalytic valences of the term that have emerged.
How might longstanding feminist critiques of unwaged emotional labor (including feminist
art practices of institutional critique) be brought to bear on the new configurations of relational
and participatory aesthetics? And how do interactive, installation, and ambient art practices
take their place within what some have termed “the social factory,” with its scramble to valorize
ever-new horizons of volunteered productivity? And how might these debates around precar-
ity be revivified by an analytic attuned to the predicament of the Global South, to the prison-­
industrial complex, and to contemporary regimes of racialization and neo-colonization?
We aim to explore how theatre and performance studies might resource a continuation of
the thinking of precarity. Can the “not not” work of theatre and its production of subjectivi-
ties offer productive (or unproductive) ways of thinking about changes in the nature of work, its
place in the life of the present, and its relation to futurity?
We are interested in precarity’s affects. The manipulation of affect is stock-in-trade for the-
atrical and performance labor, and much art production in general, in a post-Fordist economy
driven as much by the manufacture of affects as commodities as by material goods. If affect is
constitutively relational — or between bodies — how might it be understood as social and political?
Are we living in the affect factory?

This Issue in Response

At root, precarity is a condition of dependency — as a legal term, precarious describes the situation wherein
your tenancy on your land is in someone else’s hands. Yet capitalist activity always induces destabilizing scenes
of productive destructions — of resources and of lives being made and unmade according to the dictates and
whims of the market. But, as David Harvey and many others argue, neoliberal economic practices mobilize
this instability in unprecedented ways.
 — Lauren Berlant (2011:192)

If precarity is life lived in relation to “someone else’s hands,” it is also newly experienced by
many as life lived in relation to a future that cannot be propped securely upon the past. For
some, at least in that part of Europe where capital and labor reached a temporary accommo-
dation in the middle part of the 20th century, the “secure” past might have been capitalism
Ridout/Schneider

with social welfare. In fact, it was the systematic attack upon the welfare mode of organizing
social relations that precipitated the EuroMayDay protests that began in Milan in 2001, widely
credited with the emergence of “precarity” as a political idea in new social movements and
their theorizations.

6
 Thinking about precarity in relation to a past that might already have been only temporary
undoes a linear streamline of temporal progression and questions “progress” and “development”
narratives on all levels, challenging us to rethink all kinds of stories that we make for ourselves
in order simply to carry on: stories about jobs, institutions, social and sexual relations, health
and its preservation. But as a byword for life in late and later capitalism some have argued that
“precarity” is life in capitalism as usual: “Capital is precarious, and normally so” (Mitropoulos
2006). The secure “past” upon which a future had once been balanced turns out not to have
been a very deep past, after all, but more a brief respite from a precarity that is basic to capi-
talism as such. What many call Fordism might best be understood as a holding pattern during
which capital, confronted with labor’s clamorous demands for something more than precar-
ity (something more like livable life, perhaps), reconstituted itself in order to seek some way of
meeting labor’s calls without being compelled to undo itself altogether.
EuroMayDay and the numerous related initiatives through which the idea of precarity has
circulated as a way of describing the condition of labor in the increasingly self-confident regime
of capitalism variously known as neoliberal, post-Fordist, and so forth, seemed to present a
novel political formation — so much so that some analysts have been moved to write of a “pre-
cariat” as a “class-in-the-making” (Standing 2011). While this claim has been robustly contested
as an overstatement (see, for example, Seymour 2012), it is certainly true that the wave of col-
lective actions in public spaces that has spread around Europe and into the Americas through-
out the period during which this TDR issue was being conceived and prepared, demands some
new thinking about political subjectivities and about how common cause might be constituted.
Waves of the European experience intersect with a rather different wave-formation issuing
from the opposite shores of the Atlantic, where an ethical and political discourse about “precari-
ous life” has taken shape, at least partially in response to the US “War on Terror” (Butler 2004).
On both sides of the Atlantic, then, life and work and their dependence upon one another are
increasingly imagined as precarious. Our futures seem shadowed by pervasive terror-­mongering
(increasing privatization, surveillance, incarceration) as well as well-founded anxieties about sus-
tainability (of means of life in the form of stable work, and means of life in the form of stable
environmental well-being).
Euro-American anxieties, however, cannot be isolated as regional, for they are born in rela-
tion to the global. US actions in the form of the Occupy Movement, such as Occupy Wall
Street, are directed at global multinational capital(ists) despite the radically localized actions, city
by city, of camping at the front doors of temples of finance. Such actions are clearly inspired
by the uprisings of the so-called Arab Spring as well as the EuroMayDay protests. And labor,
in general, is increasingly globalized in its concerns. Not only is “outsourcing to Asia” a con-
stant bone of contention in the US imaginary, but “the precariat” cannot imagine itself as dis-
cretely national in any register: the spine of “flexible” or temporary labor is increasingly built of
migrant labor in global, mobile form.
At the same time, in what might be regarded cynically as a spin on this state of affairs, neo-
liberal rhetoric promotes “creativity” as the font of economic promise. The cynicism of this dis-
course is that the value it claims is appropriated from sincere (even, perhaps, romantic) attempts
to make a life at some distance from the demands of work. By appropriating these romantic
impulses, such rhetoric compels an ever more frantic psychic investment in the constant audi-
tion that has become the work of getting work. All of these connections can be made to point
to the embodied balancing act of the live performer. And this is where a journal dedicated to
Precarity and Performance

thinking broadly about performance as a social practice might hope to offer its own take on this
historical conjuncture.
How do we pay attention to precarity — economic precarity and the sheer vulnerability of a
body in tenuous relation to modernity’s “human rights” — through a consideration of the per-
forming body, in all of its multitude? We began our thinking about this issue from a partic-
ular interest in the performative production of affect. In Multitude: War and Democracy in the

7
 Age of Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that under neoliberal expansion in a
post-Fordist age labor and production are increasingly affective, or immaterial, creating “not
only material goods, but relationships and social life itself” (2004:108–13). And as many have
noted, the guiding affects of this manufactured social life mirror the increasing economic pre-
carity of its condition. Melissa Cooper has argued that the “operative emotions” under neolib-
eralism have ceased to be either “rational interest [or] rational expectations” but have become
“the essentially speculative but nonetheless productive movements of collective belief, faith,
and apprehension” (2008:10). In Brian Massumi’s words, building on Foucault, “Everyday fear
[...] is the correlate of neoliberal freedom” (2005:1). In this strange and potent mix, “creativ-
ity,” also now synonymous with neoliberal “innovation,” has become oddly twinned with a cir-
culating, affective reliance on terror and threat — the “risks” in artistic and critical innovation
strangely linked to increasing economic and environmental unrest. Brian Holmes, too, notes
the crossover:

Freedom has always been the great neoliberal watchword, from Hayek and the Chicago
economists to the right wing libertarians and the Cato Institute. In their theories, it is
constantly identified with economic initiative. On the left, the economy had traditionally
been seen as the opposite of art, just as the act of selling is the opposite of the spontane-
ous gift. But the aesthetic strategies of the “counter-culture” — difference and other-
ness, the rhizome, the proliferation of subjectivities — could be exalted and set to work.
(Holmes 2008:19)

In short, to animate the multinational circulation of wealth ever upward to the extreme few,
neoliberalism effectively occludes any distinction between counterculture and commerce and
traffics in the speculative affects of faith and fear as those affects accompany and are exacerbated
by strategic elimination of commons, dislodging of infrastuctural securities, and proliferation
of risk.
How can we think rigorously about the neoliberal traffic in affect in the interests of capital?
The production of feelings has been, of course, stock-in-trade for theatre and so in launching
the call for papers we were eager to prompt essays addressing performance-based art’s com-
plicity in or critique of neoliberalism’s social factory. Analyzing the production of feelings and
the various practices or structures through which affect circulates is essential to understanding
the neoliberal condition. And while there are ongoing debates over distinctions between affect,
feelings, and emotions, we are of the opinion that thinking about theatre can only aide us in
this effort.
Something we did not foresee at the time of our call for papers was that several of the essays
in this issue would come to explore affective engagements at borderlines (literal or imagined)
between life and death. As life appears more broadly vulnerable in relation to global capital
marketing in uncertain futures, what critical promises might we explore for rethinking not only
the “good life” but also, as Jill H. Casid suggests here, the “good death”? Do classical capital-
ist relationships to living labor and dead labor, work and idleness, change as neoliberal policies
promote the immaterial registers of affective engagement and speculative finance? Can labor
relations between “live” and “dead” be reimagined through performance practices such as the
Occupy Wall Street tactic of public living as well as their deployment of the collective dead in
zombie marches?
Another question that arises across the essays concerns the tension between what might be
called “good precarity” and “bad precarity,” as limiting as such appellations admittedly appear.
As we’ve said, neoliberal rhetoric fronts “creativity” as a font for freedom, innovation, and eco-
nomic promise, at the same time that it sets stock in fear and collective disenfranchisement.
Ridout/Schneider

Thus creativity and terror, art and structural insecurity, become uncomfortable affiliates. As the
essay by Critical Art Ensemble in this issue reminds us, “precarity” has long been a vital and
necessary tool in actions that critique capitalism, at the same time that life in neoliberal capital-

8
ism appears increasingly precarious. Several of the essays ask implicitly here whether what CAE
terms precarity’s “positive qualities” — leaning away from habit, stepping outside of comfort
zones, chancing the speculative and uncertain act of critical thinking — can be used to under-
mine or interrupt neoliberalism’s negative, fear-mongering mode of precarity that imposes
insecurity for the many in the interest of enormous wealth for the few. Deploying precarity to
critique precarity might in some ways be reminiscent of Brecht’s deployment of the alienation
effect as a form of materialist critique. While Marx critiqued alienated labor as a negative aspect
of capitalism’s use and abuse of labor for the gains of the capitalist, Brecht attempted to deploy
alienation positively in order to provoke critical thought that might lead to actions of resistance
and change. Might a similar technique regarding precarity be emerging in performance-based
art, in which a body producing affective engagement simultaneously critiques deployments of
affective engagement in the neoliberal affect factory? Can affect critique affect? Can complicity
critique complicity? If not only “creatives” but also “artistic critique” has been coopted by neo-
liberalism’s management modes of “flexibility,” “disalienation,” and “freedom,” as Holmes has
argued, what kinds of art activity promote non-capitalist modes of exchange (2008:10–13)?
This collection of essays cannot quite fix these questions into singular answers, and we
wouldn’t want them to (suggesting, perhaps, an intransigent taste for flexibility and instabil-
ity that aligns us with the very structures we critique?). But the volume does, we feel, multi-
ply its call in a variety of responses — and thereby keeps the call open for further thought and
exchange. The essays and roundtable collected here are each deeply thoughtful, and in our
opinion each poses excellent prods toward further askings, further leanings, further pursuits for
and against precarity and its (dis)contents.
References
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso.
Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University
of Washington Press.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York:
Penguin.
Holmes, Brian. 2008. Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering. Brooklyn, NY:
Autonomedia.
Massumi, Brian. 2005. “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact.” Paper presented at the conference “The
Sinues of the Present: Genealogies of Biopolitics,” Workshop in Radical Empiricism, Montreal, October.
Revised and published as “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat.”
In The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 52–70. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010.
Mitropoulos, Angela. 2006. “Precari-us.” Mute 1, 29. www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/precari-us
(9 July 2012).
Seymour, Richard. 2012. “We Are All Precarious — On the Concept of the ‘Precariat’ and Its Misuses.”
New Left Project, 10 February. www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/we_are_all_
precarious_on_the_concept_of_the_precariat_and_its_misuses (9 July).
Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. www
.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/The-Precariat/book-ba-9781849664554.xml (9 July 2012).
Precarity and Performance