Conflict and Activism

Reading over my post from yesterday, I'm struck by how odd it is that I'm in the field I'm in, studying the things I study--yet I dislike conflict.

Drama, at least in many Western traditions, depends upon conflict for its existence. One popular narrative about the origins of Western theatre identifies the first actor as the ancient Greek choral performer, Thespis. Thespis (according to ancient accounts) stepped out from his fellow performers as they sang/chanted a choral ode and began impersonating the characters mentioned in the ode. With his act of impersonation (mimesis), he essentially invented acting. It takes the playwright Aeschylus (working a bit after Thespis), however, to invent drama, which he did by adding a second actor. With one character, this narrative concludes, you have acting. With two, you have conflict, and therefore drama.

Now, this narrative has some technical problems. Aside from its historical sketchiness (we don't know that much about Thespis), it ignores the fact that plenty of theatrical traditions create fine drama using only one character. But--in the Intro to Theatre classes in which I relate this narrative--it gets a point across: Western drama likes conflict. A play where everyone agrees and everything works out is, well, boring. Some kind of challenge--ideally an interpersonal challenge--needs to spice things up.

So too with democratic theory, another aspect of my scholarship. If everyone in a community thinks exactly alike and agrees completely--or if their disagreements mean nothing (e.g., they're kept utterly secret and private)--then you don't have democracy. Democracy, as I've written before (citing people like Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Ranciere), depends upon disagreement, especially fundamental disagreements, about how best to order and run society (or about who best decides to run society). To be for democracy is not to be for some touchy-feely utopia of consensus or in some paradise where the True and the Good appear with perfect clarity to all; it's to be in a society where truth and goodness are in perpetual contest. No contest, no democracy.

Worse yet--I deal specifically with performances that play out democratic conflicts: street protests, demonstrations, rallies, sit-ins, direct actions, acts of civil disobedience, and the like. In history, I'm most excited by those theatrical movements that created or manifested intense social conflict. The first-wave European avant-garde, for instance, shattered theatrical conventions of the time, invading audience spaces, throwing out the rule for polite entertainments, challenging people's sense of distinction between life and art. The performance artists of the 70s and 80s did similarly daring experiments with the boundaries between life and art. These are some of my favorite works to study and teach.

Yet--as an audience member, I hate being made to feel implicated or uncomfortable. I'm savvy enough to know usually where to sit in a theatre so that I can appreciate the performance but avoid the "splash zone" of performer-audience interaction. In activism, I likewise hate producing such confrontations. As I mentioned yesterday, disruption-for-disruption's sake frustrates me. Many's the time when I've seen actors think up some marvelously disruptive public act ("let's all start singing a song about revolution in this public building!" or "let's go to the mall, pretend to be newspaper interviewers, ask people penetrating questions about how they're spending their money in the mall when there are so many people dying of starvation in other countries!"). Inevitably, such acts make people angry, and all too often the actors return full of a mixture of consternation and righteous indignation: "They yelled at us! Can you believe it? Our questions were so threatening to them! People just don't know how to handle it when their 'routine' gets disrupted."

Of course they got angry! What did you expect? I'm annoyed when artists produce work intended to provoke extreme reactions and then complain about the extreme reactions their work provokes. (I should specify that by "extreme reactions" I do not mean physical violence). Moreover, I'm deeply suspicious of activists who rate their efficacy by the number of people they anger or annoy though their public demonstrations. To be sure, there are times and places where people need to be made angry or annoyed, pushed from a stand-0ff-ish neutrality into making a choice. Disruption can be part of effective activism, but it is not by itself evidence of effective activism. Indeed, insofar as activism is a matter of winning hearts and minds, disruptive acts can be counterproductive.

Worse, disruptive, conflict-provoking acts can be self-serving. It's all too easy to mistake the high of "being civilly disobedient for a higher cause" as "actually doing something that advances that cause." Consider Jackass, Punk'd, Scare Tactics or similar shows. Formally, very little separates the acts recorded and replayed on such programs from some of the public performance experiments of the avant-gardists or performance artists. But in the latter case, the artists involved had a specific agenda; the medium (i.e., the rule-breaking) was determined by the message they wished to send. In the former case, it's a stunt, a prank, or an adrenaline rush.

I'm not automatically impressed, then, when performance activism (and I include many modes of public evangelism under this umbrella term) causes a reaction. Causing a reaction--sparking yells of protest or disgust--that's pretty simple, actually. "Strangle a kitten onstage," I tell my students, wringing an invisible kitten's neck, "and you're guaranteed to provoke a reaction. That doesn't make kitten-strangling an artistically or politically responsible act." (For the record: I fully oppose kitten-strangling).

The difficult thing is not creating conflict but navigating conflict.

More tomorrow,

JF