A Theatre of Operations: A Discussion between Alain Badiou and Elie During

ELIE DURING: Let's start with a major question. If one grants that a politics of theatre exists, is it possible to speak of a politics of 'theatre without theatre'? A lot has been said about avant-garde theatre abolishing the stage or the separation it implies. In some cases an avant-garde abolished the stage by promoting it as a 'physical concrete site', 'a unique site without borders or barrier of any sort', in which the placement of bodies is more important than the text, and which forms 'the theatre of action itself' (Artaud). One can also speak of the abolishing of the auditorium rather than the stage. In any case, what this action marks is the emergence of a new spectator who is no longer a simple spectator but also an actor or actant participating in a kind of collective creation. It is clear that contemporary performance has been heavily influenced by this gesture in the various spaces it constructs whether inside galleries or on their thresholds. But what then remains of the 'public' that is traditionally associated with the idea of theatre? In your opinion, is the suppression of the stage or its transfiguration capable of opening a new space, a site for the emergence of a collective subject?

ALAIN BADIOU: The relation between the stage and the public has always been a torturous problem for theatre. Think of Molière's meditations on the duality of the public (the nobles and the bourgeois, the court and the town) or of Brecht's concept of the dialectical division of the audience, of Agit-prop theatre in the Soviet Union, or Vilar's idea of a 'popular' theatre and the vogue of happenings about 50 years ago like the more contemporary fashion of 'street theatre'. In Greece, theatre was already a political instrument, or to be exact a function of the State. Wealthy citizens were obliged to pay for theatrical performances through a kind of tax. This is the source of the persistent idea that theatre has a political, democratic and even revolutionary function. In reality, as I have argued ever since my essay 'Rhapsody for the Theatre', theatre is bound to the State; it is a public mediation between the state and its exterior – the crowd, gathered together. And just as circulation occurs in both directions (from power towards the crowd and from the crowd towards power), theatre is entirely ambiguous. It is the point at which a certain audacity of the State encounters the intellectual resources of what is collective, gathered together and public. Louis XIV himself funded Molière's materialist adventures, and in France popular theatre just like street theatre is still funded by the State. I don't think abolishing the stage radically changes this situation. It is merely a formal transformation and the theatre has seen many of those. Why would a crowd which does not revolt against flagrant injustice actually constitute itself as a collective subject through the grace of a theatrical summoning? The ambiguity of the situation of theatre can only continue. Theatre is an art and art will always be a site divided between subversion and institution, contemplative passivity and active rupture, the State and the crowd, creation and the market. An important work displaces these frontiers but it cannot abolish them.

ED: But then if the political virtue of theatre resides in its position, the question arises of what remains of that position in performance art. If we define 'theatre without theatre' as a form of pure theatricality, a modality of the presence of bodies freed from representation, performance comes down to the organization, according to an intention to create art, of an immediate experience of being-together. Consequently is there not a risk that performance will fall into a degraded form of 'ethical' theatre consecrated to revealing either the performativity at work in social exchange or – by staging suffering or mistreated bodies – increasing awareness of the vulnerability of beings and the relation between beings? In fact, just to focus a little, could we return to what constitutes for you the specificity of theatre?

AB: I think that there is theatre as soon as there is a public exhibition, with or without a stage, of a desired combination of bodies and languages. The exhibition of the body alone we will name 'dance' and of language alone 'reading', even if no written text pre-exists. Theatre is the intersection of the two. Moreover it displays elements external to the languages' / bodies' duality such as images, screens and activities (painting, sculpting or throwing objects, etc.), but these elements simply introduce new dimensions of the body (violence, nudity, sex, imaged deformations, etc.) or of language (soundscapes of all types, mixes of languages, music, etc.). In this framework an insistence on a particular aspect of theatricality, like the contemporary impact on theatre of all the forms of dance or an emphatic use of violence on bodies, would in fact express ideological demands like those you mention: focusing on the fragile life of bodies, on threats to the entirety of what is conceived as 'natural', hostility to any strict coding of individual life, dissipation of the frontier between public and intimate life, etc.. The problem is that these demands simply reflect contemporary subjectivities rather than presenting a genuine movement for their transformation. What needs to be found – whilst accepting the formal transformations – is a more affirmative element, or rather, to take up Brecht's terms, a didactic element. The question of the relation between theatrical action, performance and politics cannot be reduced to the radicality of gestures. It supposes that all of this be integrated within a larger vision of the challenges of the contemporary epoch.

But before one even gets to that point, perhaps it is not so easy to 'exit' theatre or internally annul it. In fact, theatre cannot be reduced to the stage and its perspective or to the interpretation of a pre-existing given (a text or...