SPECTACULAR POLITICS, OVER-IDENTIFICATION AND MONSTROSITY

The lecture is be based on her book Theater and Truth (2021).

“In theatre, the zombie is a dead flesh that can live any life, but in the new media, in the very heart of spectacle, the zombie is an empty image, a dead flesh made to work, that cannot live a life other than the one prescribed by the medium. The first zombie can do anything, the other can only do one thing – be dead, be nothing. The “autonomously moving non-living”, in Debord’s terms, opens a possibility for theatre that is also political as such – the possibility of conceiving reality as an unstable, unfixed, plastic matter that can model itself beyond the limits of the imaginable.

In theatre, identification is an instrument of play, of uncertainty and potentiality. The “autonomously moving non-living“ in the world of the new social (indeed economic) media is a parasitic force that sucks the vitality from both its creators and its consumers, turning it into capital. In this world, (over)identification is a tool not for liberation but for fixation – for attaching market value to what is obstinate and elusive, which is captured and enslaved by being reduced to commodity. This world, of course, is the new world of the society of the spectacle described by Debord in his clairvoyant text.”

(Ani Vaseva, Theatre and Truth, pp. 477-478).