Tony Fisher | University of London, Central School of Speech and Drama (original) (raw)
Papers by Tony Fisher
Performance Research, Dec 1, 2011
The aim of this article is to interrogate the emergence of a form of participatory theatre that I... more The aim of this article is to interrogate the emergence of a form of participatory theatre that I shall call 'radical democratic theatre'. The term 'radical democracy' derives in the first instance from the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, but in terms of its application to theatre and performance practices, it might well be drawn in relation to Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. Consequently, one useful starting point in grasping what is at stake when speaking of a radical democratic theatre is to trace the limits of Boalian thought by revisiting some of the theoretical assumptions upon which it stands. Two fundamental assumptions of specific concern have to do with (1) the nature of the theatre 'subject', as conceived by Boal, and (2) its relation to the political task of emancipation. Boal expresses this task in the following terms: 'In order to understand the poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people-"spectators," passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon-into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action' (Boal, 2000: 122). To begin to approach the limits of this task, and probe what is implicated in its basic presuppositions, I want to focus on what will emerge as a significant theoretical difference over the way in which we might understand the nature and ambition of the strategy of 'transformation'-specifically, by drawing a distinction between the underlying aims of the Theatre of the Oppressed and the project of radical democratic theatre, as it might be conceived today. While Boal thinks the emancipatory potential of theatre predominantly in terms of freedom from oppression, by contrast, I will argue that the fundamental strategic aim of radical democratic theatre is not 'liberation' per se, but the destabilisation of the relational space in which
Continental Philosophy Review, May 1, 2010
Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900
, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century Engla... more , The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 4. 15 In fact, war metaphors abound in Restoration playsfor example, in Etherege's She Would If She Could, the rake, Courtall, encourages his comrade, Freeman, to engage Sir Oliver as follows: 'thou wilt find 'em tired with long fight, weak and unable to observe their order; charge 'em briskly, and in a moment thou shalt rout 'em, and with little or no damage to thyself gain an absolute victory' (II.i).
Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900
Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500-1900
The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics
Foucault’s theatres, 2019
Theater und Subjektkonstitution
Escritura e Imagen
Escribiendo en respuesta al ensayo de Sartre sobre literatura comprometida, Adorno proclamó: “No ... more Escribiendo en respuesta al ensayo de Sartre sobre literatura comprometida, Adorno proclamó: “No es el momento para obras de arte políticas; más bien, la política ha migrado a la obra de arte autónoma, y ha penetrado más profundamente en obras que se presentan a sí mismas como políticamente muertas”. Hoy, los teóricos del “giro social” en el arte han rechazado completamente a Adorno, adoptando en cambio un nuevo tipo de compromiso en el arte. En este ensayo, revisito esta larga disputa sobre la “eficacia” social del arte en sus formas clásicas y contemporáneas. Al preguntarme cómo debemos entender la labor política del arte en nuestros días, examino dos teorías del efecto, basadas en un análisis del “giro comunicativo” de Habermas: una que alego que conduce a una reducción sociológica de lo político en el arte; y otra que sugiero que ofrece una base para entender la eficacia política del arte, comprendida en términos de lo que yo llamo una teoría del efecto político “perlocutiva” o ...
Performance Philosophy
This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – ... more This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe. What I call a ‘theatre of the impasse’ seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished. Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision to resolve its conflicts. I situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an ‘allegorical’ theatre in Benjamin’s terms. Blitz Theatre’s Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence. In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt....
Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500-1900
Performing Antagonism, 2017
This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of politica... more This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement (particularly as a means of understanding acts of protest). Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of ‘dissensual speech’ as a form of ‘unauthorised’ speech through which the ‘people’ appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault’s notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of ‘performatives’, since parrēsia—‘speaking truth to power’—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail ‘risk’ to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr.
Performance Philosophy, 2015
Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugura... more Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugurating a ‘new field’ of study. Accompanying that claim is a radical proposition that ‘performance thinks’; that it should be counted as a form of philosophising in its own right. But in what sense can performance be construed as ‘genuinely’ philosophical thought? Taking my cue from Laura Cull’s alignment of performance philosophy with Laruelle’s practice of ‘non philosophy’ – and specifically, with its introduction of ‘democracy’ into the dispositives of ‘standard’ philosophy in order to challenge its transcendental authority over the Real – I argue that performance philosophy might be seen to enact a similar disruption of the ‘dispositives’ of performance theory. This, however, is only partly what is at stake in the fundamental proposition of performance philosophy, and I conclude by suggesting that a more radical proposal lies behind its assertion of a new ‘field’ – one that does not...
Performance Philosophy, Apr 10, 2015
He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Essex. He has published articles on radical dem... more He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Essex. He has published articles on radical democratic theatre, the aesthetics of the political in the work of Francis Alÿs, and on Castellucci's theatre of 'failed transcendence', as well as on Heidegger and Sartre in journals such as Continental Philosophy Review and Sartre Studies International. He is also co-convenor of TaPRA's Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group.
Somatechnics, 2013
In this paper I look at Castellucci's On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God as... more In this paper I look at Castellucci's On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God as a means to sketch out what I would like to call a theatre of the ‘abject/sublime’. In contrast to the Kantian notion of the sublime, which requires nothing less than the acknowledgment of the moral law by the subject, I will situate Castellucci's work within a reading of the ‘sublime’ that embraces the failure of the subject to achieve transcendence. By this I mean the subject fails to achieve the kind of ethical autonomy that Kant's radical sublime demands. Instead, I propose to interpret Castellucci's work in two ‘heteronymous’ ways: firstly, in light of Kristeva's dictum that the ‘abject is edged with the sublime’, and secondly, in terms of Levinas' claim that the face is nothing less than the ‘infinite which blinks’ (OB: 93). What results, I argue, is a theatre of ‘failed transcendence’, in which Castellucci's ‘face’ of God, returned to the abject condition o...
Theatrale Praktiken zwischen Affirmation und Subversion (unter Mitarbeit von Nadine Peschke und Nikola Schellmann), 2012
Performance Research, 2011
The aim of this article is to interrogate the emergence of a form of participatory theatre that I... more The aim of this article is to interrogate the emergence of a form of participatory theatre that I shall call 'radical democratic theatre'. The term 'radical democracy' derives in the first instance from the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, but in terms of its application to theatre and performance practices, it might well be drawn in relation to Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. Consequently, one useful starting point in grasping what is at stake when speaking of a radical democratic theatre is to trace the limits of Boalian thought by revisiting some of the theoretical assumptions upon which it stands. Two fundamental assumptions of specific concern have to do with (1) the nature of the theatre 'subject', as conceived by Boal, and (2) its relation to the political task of emancipation. Boal expresses this task in the following terms: 'In order to understand the poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people-"spectators," passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon-into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action' (Boal, 2000: 122). To begin to approach the limits of this task, and probe what is implicated in its basic presuppositions, I want to focus on what will emerge as a significant theoretical difference over the way in which we might understand the nature and ambition of the strategy of 'transformation'-specifically, by drawing a distinction between the underlying aims of the Theatre of the Oppressed and the project of radical democratic theatre, as it might be conceived today. While Boal thinks the emancipatory potential of theatre predominantly in terms of freedom from oppression, by contrast, I will argue that the fundamental strategic aim of radical democratic theatre is not 'liberation' per se, but the destabilisation of the relational space in which
Performance Research, Dec 1, 2011
The aim of this article is to interrogate the emergence of a form of participatory theatre that I... more The aim of this article is to interrogate the emergence of a form of participatory theatre that I shall call 'radical democratic theatre'. The term 'radical democracy' derives in the first instance from the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, but in terms of its application to theatre and performance practices, it might well be drawn in relation to Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. Consequently, one useful starting point in grasping what is at stake when speaking of a radical democratic theatre is to trace the limits of Boalian thought by revisiting some of the theoretical assumptions upon which it stands. Two fundamental assumptions of specific concern have to do with (1) the nature of the theatre 'subject', as conceived by Boal, and (2) its relation to the political task of emancipation. Boal expresses this task in the following terms: 'In order to understand the poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people-"spectators," passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon-into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action' (Boal, 2000: 122). To begin to approach the limits of this task, and probe what is implicated in its basic presuppositions, I want to focus on what will emerge as a significant theoretical difference over the way in which we might understand the nature and ambition of the strategy of 'transformation'-specifically, by drawing a distinction between the underlying aims of the Theatre of the Oppressed and the project of radical democratic theatre, as it might be conceived today. While Boal thinks the emancipatory potential of theatre predominantly in terms of freedom from oppression, by contrast, I will argue that the fundamental strategic aim of radical democratic theatre is not 'liberation' per se, but the destabilisation of the relational space in which
Continental Philosophy Review, May 1, 2010
Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900
, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century Engla... more , The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 4. 15 In fact, war metaphors abound in Restoration playsfor example, in Etherege's She Would If She Could, the rake, Courtall, encourages his comrade, Freeman, to engage Sir Oliver as follows: 'thou wilt find 'em tired with long fight, weak and unable to observe their order; charge 'em briskly, and in a moment thou shalt rout 'em, and with little or no damage to thyself gain an absolute victory' (II.i).
Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900
Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500-1900
The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics
Foucault’s theatres, 2019
Theater und Subjektkonstitution
Escritura e Imagen
Escribiendo en respuesta al ensayo de Sartre sobre literatura comprometida, Adorno proclamó: “No ... more Escribiendo en respuesta al ensayo de Sartre sobre literatura comprometida, Adorno proclamó: “No es el momento para obras de arte políticas; más bien, la política ha migrado a la obra de arte autónoma, y ha penetrado más profundamente en obras que se presentan a sí mismas como políticamente muertas”. Hoy, los teóricos del “giro social” en el arte han rechazado completamente a Adorno, adoptando en cambio un nuevo tipo de compromiso en el arte. En este ensayo, revisito esta larga disputa sobre la “eficacia” social del arte en sus formas clásicas y contemporáneas. Al preguntarme cómo debemos entender la labor política del arte en nuestros días, examino dos teorías del efecto, basadas en un análisis del “giro comunicativo” de Habermas: una que alego que conduce a una reducción sociológica de lo político en el arte; y otra que sugiero que ofrece una base para entender la eficacia política del arte, comprendida en términos de lo que yo llamo una teoría del efecto político “perlocutiva” o ...
Performance Philosophy
This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – ... more This essay describes a performance by the Greek theatre collective, Blitz Theatre – Late Night – as constituting a theatrical response to current political crises in Europe. What I call a ‘theatre of the impasse’ seeks to bear witness to the experience of impasse, where impasse and crisis must be fundamentally distinguished. Impasse is revealed where crisis admits of no decision adequate to the situation; and, correspondingly, where theatre loses faith in the power of decision to resolve its conflicts. I situate these claims with reference to Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s dispute over political theology, arguing that a theatre of the impasse might be thought as an ‘allegorical’ theatre in Benjamin’s terms. Blitz Theatre’s Late Night reveals, thereby, the concealed truth of the impasse: a founding human sociality experienced as world immanence. In doing so doing, I argue, this theatre frustrates every hope for the kind of political theology of the stage envisaged by Schmitt....
Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500-1900
Performing Antagonism, 2017
This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of politica... more This chapter offers an analysis of the speech conditions constitutive for the staging of political disagreement (particularly as a means of understanding acts of protest). Rather than seeking to offer an explanation for various situations of protest, however, it aims to identify what, if anything, is unique or peculiar to such modes of address. Drawing on the resources of speech act theory, the chapter suggests a reading of ‘dissensual speech’ as a form of ‘unauthorised’ speech through which the ‘people’ appear, however, evanescently. It analyses the peculiarities of dissensual speech in the following ways: first, in terms of specifying its modes of utterance, which are identified with phatic and agonic modes of address and, second, in terms of its performative attitudes. In analysing the latter, I turn to Foucault’s notion of parrēsiastic speech in order to confront a paradox that arises with my reading of dissensual speech viewed in terms of ‘performatives’, since parrēsia—‘speaking truth to power’—is radically opposed to two fundamental rules that govern performatives and illocutionary forces: that they are conventional and that their enunciator must be authorised to use them. The chapter proposes a resolution to this contradiction by showing that an affinity exists between parrēsiastic speech and dissensual speech insofar as both entail ‘risk’ to the speaker in uttering a truth. The question then is whether it is possible to collectivise that risk, or whether parrēsia necessarily remains the speech of the individual martyr.
Performance Philosophy, 2015
Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugura... more Performance philosophy commences with an impertinent gesture when it describes itself as inaugurating a ‘new field’ of study. Accompanying that claim is a radical proposition that ‘performance thinks’; that it should be counted as a form of philosophising in its own right. But in what sense can performance be construed as ‘genuinely’ philosophical thought? Taking my cue from Laura Cull’s alignment of performance philosophy with Laruelle’s practice of ‘non philosophy’ – and specifically, with its introduction of ‘democracy’ into the dispositives of ‘standard’ philosophy in order to challenge its transcendental authority over the Real – I argue that performance philosophy might be seen to enact a similar disruption of the ‘dispositives’ of performance theory. This, however, is only partly what is at stake in the fundamental proposition of performance philosophy, and I conclude by suggesting that a more radical proposal lies behind its assertion of a new ‘field’ – one that does not...
Performance Philosophy, Apr 10, 2015
He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Essex. He has published articles on radical dem... more He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Essex. He has published articles on radical democratic theatre, the aesthetics of the political in the work of Francis Alÿs, and on Castellucci's theatre of 'failed transcendence', as well as on Heidegger and Sartre in journals such as Continental Philosophy Review and Sartre Studies International. He is also co-convenor of TaPRA's Theatre, Performance and Philosophy working group.
Somatechnics, 2013
In this paper I look at Castellucci's On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God as... more In this paper I look at Castellucci's On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God as a means to sketch out what I would like to call a theatre of the ‘abject/sublime’. In contrast to the Kantian notion of the sublime, which requires nothing less than the acknowledgment of the moral law by the subject, I will situate Castellucci's work within a reading of the ‘sublime’ that embraces the failure of the subject to achieve transcendence. By this I mean the subject fails to achieve the kind of ethical autonomy that Kant's radical sublime demands. Instead, I propose to interpret Castellucci's work in two ‘heteronymous’ ways: firstly, in light of Kristeva's dictum that the ‘abject is edged with the sublime’, and secondly, in terms of Levinas' claim that the face is nothing less than the ‘infinite which blinks’ (OB: 93). What results, I argue, is a theatre of ‘failed transcendence’, in which Castellucci's ‘face’ of God, returned to the abject condition o...
Theatrale Praktiken zwischen Affirmation und Subversion (unter Mitarbeit von Nadine Peschke und Nikola Schellmann), 2012
Performance Research, 2011
The aim of this article is to interrogate the emergence of a form of participatory theatre that I... more The aim of this article is to interrogate the emergence of a form of participatory theatre that I shall call 'radical democratic theatre'. The term 'radical democracy' derives in the first instance from the political theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, but in terms of its application to theatre and performance practices, it might well be drawn in relation to Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. Consequently, one useful starting point in grasping what is at stake when speaking of a radical democratic theatre is to trace the limits of Boalian thought by revisiting some of the theoretical assumptions upon which it stands. Two fundamental assumptions of specific concern have to do with (1) the nature of the theatre 'subject', as conceived by Boal, and (2) its relation to the political task of emancipation. Boal expresses this task in the following terms: 'In order to understand the poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people-"spectators," passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon-into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action' (Boal, 2000: 122). To begin to approach the limits of this task, and probe what is implicated in its basic presuppositions, I want to focus on what will emerge as a significant theoretical difference over the way in which we might understand the nature and ambition of the strategy of 'transformation'-specifically, by drawing a distinction between the underlying aims of the Theatre of the Oppressed and the project of radical democratic theatre, as it might be conceived today. While Boal thinks the emancipatory potential of theatre predominantly in terms of freedom from oppression, by contrast, I will argue that the fundamental strategic aim of radical democratic theatre is not 'liberation' per se, but the destabilisation of the relational space in which