Articulating means of resistance
William Platt (Drama)
Insignificant Acts: Culture Jamming as Activist Performance
The study of activist performance has been a central object of analysis within performance studies for some time. This body of research has concerned itself with a broad spectrum of social and aesthetic practices, from street theatre and protest marches, to more contemporary practices that blur the boundaries between protest and experimental art. Despite this rich vein of scholarship performance scholars have paid relatively little attention to the practice of ‘culture jamming’; a playful and performative form of social activism that take aim at corporations and governments alike by appropriating and subverting the signs and symbols of pop culture. Situating culture jamming within the work of performance theorists Jon McKenzie and Peggy Phelan, and the theories of Jacques Rancière and Michel de Certeau, this paper will explore the ways in which culture jamming negotiates questions of power and agency through performance and visual art. Using the work of the Yes Men, Vacuum Cleaner, the Reverend Billy, and Brandalism as my primary case studies, this paper will argue that culture jamming must be seen as an important strain of contemporary performance practice that is changing the ways we understand the complex relationship between politics, protest and performance in the 21st century.
George Twigg (English)
Blabbermouths and Chatterboxes: Power and Parrhēsia in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Seas of Stories
Both Michel Foucault and Salman Rushdie have been criticised for a lack of potentiality of resistance in their writing, but a consideration of the linguistic practice of parrhēsia, to an extent, militates against such a reading of both writers. As Foucault relates, in the form practiced by the Ancient Greeks, parrhēsia was the linguistic imparting of the subject’s sincerely held opinion, so as to form a connection between subject and polis, with the discourse and knowledge of the former benefiting the latter. Parrhēsia is simple, unfurnished speech from a position of lesser political power than the speaker’s interlocutor, and is therefore disseminated at personal risk.
Salman Rushdie’s 1990 children’s novel, Haroun and the Seas of Stories provides a fictional example of parrhēsia working effectively against tyranny. In the country of Gup, the citizens’ shared linguistic connection allows them, through parrhēsia, to discuss their military strategy equitably and at great length. This helps them formulate an effective plan, and easily defeat an enemy force wherein discussion is prohibited. This paper will explore Gup’s parrhesiastic triumph, while acknowledging, as Rushdie does, that parrhēsia is not necessarily an effective linguistic tool against oppression in real life, which many critics of Foucault’s parrhesiastic strategy of resistance have also noted.
Jonathan Venn (Drama)
Autobiographical Performance, Silence and Madness: The Ethical Encounter in Dylan Tighe’s RECORD
The latent political resistance of autobiographical performance is evident; compounding the performer and the performed, so that the object and subject of speech are synonymous, it provides the means for marginalized and otherwise silenced groups to speak. Most radically, it potentially reinstates an ethical encounter between the audience and performer, between the self and Other. However, this encounter is by no means automatic or inevitable; much autobiographical performance has resorted to a regressive essentialism.
Rather, specific strategies must be incorporated to inculcate this encounter. Dylan Tighe’s RECORD deploys silence as a means to instigate attention from the audience whilst maintaining alterity. Silence haunts our understanding of madness. The silence of madness has been regarded as deprivation, as lack, as lacuna. However, this is reductive. The ontology of performance suggests silence is multifarious, malleable. Through performance, silence becomes palpable.
Tighe reimagines silence as re-embodiment, as withdrawal, as a refusal to represent. In the interaction between these different silences, we are compelled to regard Tighe, Tighe reclaims his ability to speak, but deprives the audience of the means to interpret. Through this, Tighe compels the audience to regard alterity, and re-establishes the ethical encounter.