Form and Violence: Beyond theatrical content

Considering the ways that theatre enacts and performs its politics, this chapter sidesteps political content to take up an analysis of the politics of theatre through its form as well as the mechanisms of its creation and consumption. In doing so, the chapter considers Slavoj Žižek’s theories of subjective and objective violence in the context of theatre. Building on longstanding philosophical and theoretical traditions, Žižek describes subjective violence as experienced directly, either bodily or emotionally, while objective violence is the linguistic, ideological, and systematic conditions that create and even sustain subjective violence. Understanding that violence is not politics, this chapter serves to imbue theatre with a latent and actual sense of violence as a marker of action, in both the dramatic and political senses. Rather than searching for a political reading of characters and plots, which may seem either obvious or retrograde, this chapter examines how infrastructures of live entertainment impact and shape global flows of capital and performance. Cutting against arguments of taste and aesthetic preference, what violence is enacted by the mere performance of theatre, and how might such forces might be directed toward new political forms and projects?.