Abstract
This chapter addresses the displacement of public acts shaped by commitments to life-in-common by performative ‘life-in-public’ acts in the neo-liberalisation of everyday life. The goal is to expose both the primacy, in neo-liberal thought-worlds, of homo œconomicus, and the central role played by narrative consistency and social performance in establishing and sustaining that primacy by means of the trope of TINA (There Is No Alternative). Examples of related performance tropes functional to neo-liberal narratives are offered, in a critical overview of contemporary political communication as performance, with attention to issues of gender, race, and class embedded therein. A post-polity undergoing neo-liberalisation is identified as the ground on which new polities, new public imaginaries, must be wrought.
This chapter draws on and develops arguments first articulated in my ‘Marking “Austerity”: Critique, Purpose and Performance’. (https://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/index.php/kk/article/view/KK2013.02109/1663; Manila: Ateneo de Manila, Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014))
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Notes
- 1.
Jeremy Gilbert, ‘What Kind of thing is ‘Neoliberalism’?’ in New Formations 80/81 (2013): 16.
- 2.
http://conservative-speeches.sayit.mysociety.org/speech/601367 Speech to Conservative Party Spring Forum, Cheltenham (26 April 2009).
- 3.
http://conservative-speeches.sayit.mysociety.org/speech/601367 Speech to Conservative Party Spring Forum, Cheltenham (26 April 2009).
- 4.
http://conservative-speeches.sayit.mysociety.org/speech/601367 Speech to Conservative Party Spring Forum, Cheltenham (26 April 2009).
- 5.
‘She’s back. She’s been brought out of retirement by David Cameron. She is TINA—‘“There Is No Alternative”—the phrase forever associated with Mrs. Thatcher in the 1980s.’ (David Cameron: We will hold firm on economy, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21694944, 7 March 2013).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
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cf. Sunday Express (17 March 2013).
- 12.
cf. The Mail on Sunday (17 March 2013).
- 13.
- 14.
- 15.
Herbert J Gans, The War Against The Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
cf. Chu and Morris.
- 19.
cf. Chang.
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- 21.
Address by President Michael D. Higgins, Towards a European Union of the Citizens (European Parliament Strasbourg Wednesday, 17th April, 2013; http://www.eu2013.ie/media/eupresidency/content/speeches/20130417-President-EP-Speech-final.pdf: 7).
- 22.
Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’ in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988): 356.
- 23.
For an account of how this mechanism played out in Greece, see Yannis Varoufakis (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/26/greece-was-never-bailed-out%2D%2D-it-remains-a-debtors-prison-and-the-eu-still-holds-the-keys?CMP=share_btn_link).
- 24.
Varoufakis, Greece was never bailed out (Guardian, 26 August 2018).
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity 1800–2000: The Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 166–197.
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Jeffrey C Alexander, Performance and Power (New York: Polity Press, 2011): 82.
- 29.
56.
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Jameson (1988): 353.
- 31.
Epigraph to Alexander (2011).
- 32.
- 33.
Andrew Hoskins and John Tulloch, Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
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Paddy Hoey, Shinners, Dissos and Dissenters: Irish republican media activism since the Good Friday Agreement (Manchester University Press, 2018): 14.
- 35.
See Hoskins and Tulloch (2016); Hoey (2018).
- 36.
This is not to deny the real achievements of alternative sources of information and opinion, but to acknowledge the scale of the tasks that confront them.
- 37.
Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism (Routledge, 2002): 167.
- 38.
Alexander (2011): 82.
- 39.
James C Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale: Yale University Press, 1992): 2.
- 40.
An arresting phrase used to describe what is unfolding across Europe, and especially in Italy, by Mario Pirovano, interpreter and authorised translator of the works of Dario Fo and Franca Rame (in conversation, 2013).
- 41.
Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock (London: Faber, 1998): 88.
- 42.
- 43.
- 44.
Higgins (2013): 13.
- 45.
Alan Sitkin, ‘Tales from the Front Line of Regeneration.’ Soundings 52 (2012): 147.
- 46.
Sitkin (2012): 149.
- 47.
150.
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157.
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152.
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156.
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151.
- 52.
Raw, Anni, Eleanor (2013) A model and theory of community-based arts and health practice, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7774/
- 53.
Raw: 315.
- 54.
Raw: 322–3.
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Merriman, V. (2019). Drama in Public Worlds. In: Austerity and the Public Role of Drama. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03260-9_3
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