Abstract
In this article I would like to attend to the issue of the performance of ideology, through observing mass protests organized recently throughout the neoliberal world rather than contemporary (performing) arts. I find these protests that gathered the precarious and outraged—from Spain and Greece, over the US, to the UK, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey, Portugal, etc.,—a challenging point of departure, exactly since they have often been criticized for lacking ideological and political programs, while at the same time, with their specific modes of operation—wherein citizens are physically, bodily invested—they bring to the public focus the corporeality, which might be the main ideological locus in today’s neoliberal capitalist society in general.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
The previous versions of the text were published in the book chapter “Social Drama,” eds. Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović, Public Sphere by Performance, Berlin: b_books (in cooperation with co-publisher: Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers), 2012, and as Ana Vujanović, “Performing Ideology: Communitas and immunitas in Today’s Neoliberal Democratic Society,” eds. Victoria Perez Rojo and Isabel de Naveran, There is No Other Poetry than Action, Madrid: Artea, 2014. The present version was finished in 2015.
- 2.
I have two reasons for focusing on the protests in neoliberal societies, and not involving those that simultaneously happen in other parts of the world, such as Arab countries. One is that in this article I want to show how the protests of the precarious in neoliberal society—already divergent among themselves—function as a (temporary at least) breach of neoliberal normalization of precarity which has made it into a tool of governing. The other reason is that I find the body, with its experience and affects, its technologies and techniques characteristic ideological locus in neoliberal capitalism, while I am not familiar enough with other contexts so that I can estimate how and how much is the body significant for their ideological modes of operation.
- 3.
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1969; Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972; From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: PAJ, 1974; Drama, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975; The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ, 1988.
- 4.
See further elaborations on this in “Chapter 3: Materiality of Ideology,” Public Sphere by Performance, 49–55.
- 5.
While, for instance, some other movements against neoliberal capitalism, such as Latin American anti-imperialist governments and movements, Zapatista, or revolutionary Islamism and Islamic fundamentalism elaborate their ideological programs predominantly discursively, although their interpellations as speech acts require or cause subjective embodiments too.
- 6.
Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.
- 7.
“As the complex though equally unambiguous etymology that we have till now undertaken demonstrates, the munus that the communitas shares isn’t a property or a possession [appartenenza]. It isn’t having, but on the contrary, is a debt, a pledge, a gift that is to be given, and that therefore will establish a lack. The subjects of community are united by an ‘obligation,’ in the sense that we say ‘I owe you something,’ but not ‘you owe me something.’” Esposito, Communitas, 6.
- 8.
In Turnerian view, the individual is subverted in sharing things, which annuls the principle of private property and replaces it with the commons, where the things belong to everyone and no one (between individuals) and are shared by everyone (among individuals). Communitas here demonstrates that in our social community there is enough things, yet they are not equally shared and this unequal sharing is one of the pillar of the modern individual. Espositian view, on the other hand, assumes a subversion of the individual in communitas, as the nucleus of human community formed through sharing duties, “offices,” which is an obligation for all those who want to live with and among people. Here communitas is not about things nor property, it is about giving, investing a part of the self, which creates a lack in the individual but at the same time links it to others and that way maintains the human community.
- 9.
Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” #occupy and assemble∞, special issue of the online journal Transversal (Oct. 2011), http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011.
- 10.
Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual,” From Ritual to Theater, 48.
- 11.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
- 12.
Communitas in the sense I am elaborating here, since Nancy distinguishes between the community and the society, which is close to the differentiation between the communitas and the community with Turner and Esposito.
- 13.
Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 35.
- 14.
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 132 and after, especially “Ideological and Spontaneous Communitas,” 134–141.
- 15.
Turner, “Anthropology of Performance,” 24.
- 16.
Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street.”
- 17.
Turner, “Anthropology of Performance,” 19.
- 18.
Therefore, a flash mob does not necessarily creates a communitas as antagonistic agency, while the very reason for a communitas to appear during social drama is an escalation of social antagonisms that cannot be healed any longer, as it is the case with neoliberal citizens rising up against their governments’ austerity measures and devastation of the public good.
- 19.
In discussing riots in London (2011), Nina Power noticed that this mechanism leads to representing the disobedient public in protest as a “bad public,” in opposition to the mute and obedient public, which fits the idea of public order. See Nina Power, “The Only Good Public is a Moving Public,” TkH, no. 20 (2012), 10–15.
- 20.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso, 2004; Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
- 21.
Isabell Lorey, Figuren des Immunen: Elemente einer politischen Theorie, Zurich: diaphanes, 2011; “Identitary Immunity and Strategic Immunization: Lépra and Leprosy from Biblical into Medieval Times,” translating violence, special issue of the online journal transversal (Oct. 2008), http://eipcp.net/transversal/1107/lorey/en; “Governmental Precarization,” inventions, transversal (Aug. 2011), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811/lorey/en; Lorey, “Becoming Common: Precarization as Political Constituting,” e-flux, no. 17 (2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/becoming-common-precarization-as-political-constituting/; State of Insecurity; Government of the Precarious, London; New York: Verso, 2015.
- 22.
Lorey, State of Insecurity, 12.
- 23.
“If we fail to understand precarization, then we understand neither the politics nor the economy of the present. […] It has become an instrument of governing and, at the same time, a basis for capitalist accumulation that serves social regulation and control.” Lorey, State of Insecurity, 1.
- 24.
Although Lorey does not advocate any kind of community as an alternative or mode of resistance to precarization, she points to the recent protests as attempts at criticizing the current modes of governing based on precarity. See Isabell Lorey, “Non-representationist, Presentist Democracy,” #occupy and assemble∞, transversal (Oct. 2011), http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/lorey/en.
- 25.
Roberto Esposito, “Introduction,” Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011, 1–21.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Vujanović, A. (2018). Performing Ideology: Communitas and Immunitas. In: Gržinić, M., Stojnić, A. (eds) Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78343-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78343-7_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-78342-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78343-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)