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PERFORMING
ANTAGONISM
THEATRE, PERFORMANCE
& RADICAL DEMOCRACY

E D I T E D BY
Tony Fisher A N D
Eve Kat s ou ra k i
 Performance Philosophy

Series Editors
Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca
Department of Dance, Film and Theatre
University of Surrey
Guildford, United Kingdom

Alice Lagaay
Zeppelin University
Friedrichshafen, Germany

Freddie Rokem
Faculty of the Arts
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel

Will Daddario
Independent Scholar
Asheville, North Carolina, USA
Performance Philosophy is an emerging interdisciplinary field of thought,
creative practice and scholarship. The newly founded Performance
Philosophy book series comprises monographs and essay collections
addressing the relationship between performance and philosophy within
a broad range of philosophical traditions and performance practices,
including drama, theatre, performance arts, dance, art and music. It also
includes studies of the performative aspects of life and, indeed, philosophy
itself. As such, the series addresses the philosophy of performance as well
as performance-as-philosophy and philosophy-as-­performance.
Series Advisory Board: Emmanuel Alloa, Assistant Professor in
Philosophy, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland; Lydia Goehr, Professor
of Philosophy, Columbia University, USA; James R. Hamilton, Professor
of Philosophy, Kansas State University, USA; Bojana Kunst, Professor of
Choreography and Performance, Institute for Applied Theatre Studies,
Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany; Nikolaus Müller-Schöll,
Professor of Theatre Studies, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main,
Germany; Martin Puchner, Professor of Drama and of English and
Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA; Alan Read, Professor
of Theatre, King’s College London, UK
http://www.performancephilosophy.org/books/

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14558
 Tony Fisher • Eve Katsouraki
Editors

Performing
Antagonism
Theatre, Performance & Radical Democracy
Editors
Tony Fisher Eve Katsouraki
Royal Central School of Speech University of East London
and Drama London, United Kingdom
London, United Kingdom

Performance Philosophy
ISBN 978-1-349-95099-7    ISBN 978-1-349-95100-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95100-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962764

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © AP/Press Association Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 Acknowledgments

The idea for this book began in 2010, in the midst of the turbulence of the
student protests in London following the arrival of the Tory-led Coalition
government and the imposition of a new fee regime; a few months later,
the Jasmine Revolution had seized the headlines, and shortly after the
occupation of Wall Street had begun in Zuccotti Park. In the six years that
have since elapsed, much has changed and nothing has changed. Austerity
regimes have intensified across European countries, with Greece experi-
encing one of the most profound economic recessions in its recent history.
Moreover, the threat of global economic depression—that spectre of 2007
that still continues to haunt us—far from disappearing looms over our
collective horizon, a consequence of the ghastly refusal on the part of the
world’s elite to draw any lessons from the recent past. For this reason, we
believe the essays assembled in this volume testify to a continued sense of
urgency in the face of ongoing crisis, but perhaps also they bear witness
to a sense of hopefulness, regarding what those events rendered possible:
the work of imagining an alternative to the status quo. And so for their
commitment to this shared project, we are profoundly grateful to all of
our contributors. We are also grateful to the Theatre and Performance
Research Association’s Theatre, Performance and Philosophy Working
Group (TaPRA), which we co-convened (2011–15), for enduring a num-
ber of our presentations on the topic of antagonism and performance, as
well as those who attended our presentation, along with our collaborator
Broderick Chow, at the London Theatre Seminar, where this book was
first conceived. Thanks are due to the series editors for their diligence, sup-
port and excellent advice—Laura Cull, Alice Lagaay and Freddie Rokem.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would also like to thank Maria Delgado and Gilli Bush-Bailey for their
words of encouragement and feedback on the project. The onerous task
of indexing was alleviated with the help of Adelina Ong, and with the sup-
port of the Research Office at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama,
for which we are also thankful. Thanks to the University of East London
and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama for providing us with
teaching relief at various stages for completing this book. Lastly, we would
like to recognise with deep appreciation the roles played by Paula Kennedy,
who first encouraged us to pursue this book as a viable and worthwhile
project; Jenny McCall who—taking over from Paula—ensured seamless
continuity of support, and April James and the editorial team at Palgrave
who helped finally steer the book to its eventual completion.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Performance and the Tragic Politics

of the Agōn   1
Tony Fisher

2 Tragedy’s Philosophy  25
Simon Critchley

3 Tragedy: Maternity, Natality, Theatricality  43

Olga Taxidou

4 Parterre: Olympic Wrestling, National Identities,

and the Theatre of Agonism  61
Broderick D.V. Chow

5 ‘An Actor, But in Life’: Spectatorial Consciousness

and Materialist Theatre: Some Notes Apropos Althusser  81
Peter M. Boenisch

6 Is This What Democracy Looks Like? The Politics

of Representation and the Representation of Politics 101
Theron Schmidt

vii
viii Contents

7 Performing Protest: Occupation, Antagonism

and Radical Democracy 131
Pollyanna Ruiz

8 A Life Not Worth Living: On the Economy of

Vulnerability and Powerlessness in Political Suicide 149
Eve Katsouraki

9 Collective Horizons: Rethinking the Performative

and Political: (Im)Possibilities of Being Together 171
Gigi Argyropoulou

10 On the Performance of ‘Dissensual Speech’ 187

Tony Fisher

11 Remote Spectating: Drone Images and the Spectacular

Image of Revolt 209
Fred Dalmasso

12 Antagonising the Limits of Critique 231

Rachel Cockburn

13 The Political Dimension of Dance: Mouffe’s Theory

of Agonism and Choreography 251
Goran Petrović Lotina

14 The Art of Unsolicited Participation 273

Sruti Bala

15 Epilogue: The ‘Trojan Horse’—Or, from Antagonism

to the Politics of Resilience 289
Eve Katsouraki
 Contents  ix

Bibliography313

Index335
 Notes on Contributors

Gigi Argyropoulou is a researcher, curator, artist and scholar working in

the fields of Performance and Cultural Practice based in Athens and
London. A founding member of The Mavili Collective, F2/Mkultra,
Kolektiva Omonia and Institute for Live Arts Research, Gigi has initiated
and organised festivals, conferences, workshops, performances and cul-
tural collaboration projects inside and outside art institutions. Gigi is cur-
rently a PhD candidate at Roehampton University and Research Fellow at
Birkbeck University. More Info: www.gigiargyropoulou.org
Sruti Bala is Assistant Professor in Theatre and Performance Studies at
the University of Amsterdam and Research Affiliate at the Amsterdam
Centre for Globalisation Studies and the Amsterdam School of Cultural
Analysis in the Netherlands. In 2014–15 she was Fellow at the Research
Centre ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ at the Freie Universität
Berlin, where research for this essay was completed. Her research interests
are in the fields of participatory art, art and activism, feminist theatre and
performance, as well as performance pedagogy. Together with Veronika
Zangl she co-edited the special double issue of the European Journal of
Humour Research on ‘Humour, Art and Activism’, Vol. 3, Issues 2/3
(2015), and with Ashley Tellis she co-edited the anthology The Global
Trajectories of Queerness: Re-thinking Same-Sex Politics in the Global South
(Leiden: Brill, 2015). She is currently completing a monograph on The
Gestures of Participatory Art (forthcoming, Manchester University Press).
Peter M. Boenisch is Professor of European Theatre at the University of
Kent and a Fellow of the Berlin-based International Research College

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’. At Kent, he was, with Paul Allain

and Patrice Pavis, founding co-director of the European Theatre Research
Network (ETRN). His primary interest is in the intersections between
aesthetics and politics in contemporary theatre, drawing on critical phi-
losophy by Hegel, Žižek, Rancière and others. His research areas are the
fields of directing, dramaturgy, and contemporary dance, with a particular
focus on the German- and Dutch-speaking European countries. His books
include Directing Scenes and Senses: The Thinking of Regie (2015), and The
Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier (2016). With Rachel Fensham, he is co-­
editor of the Palgrave book series New World Choreographies.
Broderick Chow is Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University London,
UK, where he teaches theatre theory and history and leads the musical
theatre strand of the BA Theatre programme. His current project exam-
ines fitness and masculinity through the lens of performance studies, and
he is also working on a book project on East Asian performance in the
UK, with a focus on Filipino/a transnational performance. Broderick has
published widely in journals including The Drama Review, Performance
Research, and Contemporary Theatre Review. He is co-editor with Alex
Mangold of Žižek and Performance (Palgrave, 2014), and with Claire
Warden and Eero Laine of the forthcoming Professional Wrestling and
Performance (Routledge, 2016). In November 2014 he was runner-up for
the Yasuo Sakakibara Prize for best paper by an international scholar at the
American Studies Association Annual Meeting in Los Angeles.
Rachel Cockburn is a researcher, artist, and lecturer based in London,
UK. Her research is situated within the field of performance philosophy,
specifically the intersection of philosophy, political theory, and perfor-
mance practice. Rachel holds a PhD (2015) from the University of
London, and teaches at various universities, including Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama, where she is currently a member of the MA
Performance Practices as Research teaching team.
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at The New
School in New York. His published work includes: Re-Reading Levinas
(1991) ed. with Robert Bernasconi, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida
and Levinas (1992), Deconstructive Subjectivities (1996) ed. with Peter
Dews, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (1996) ed. with
Adriaan T. Peperzak and Robert Bernasconi, Very Little… Almost Nothing:
Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997), A Companion to Continental
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Philosophy (1998), ed. with William J. Schroeder, Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity:

Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought (1999),
Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001), The Cambridge
Companion to Levinas (2002) ed. with Robert Bernasconi, On Humour
(2002), Laclau, A Critical Reader (2004) ed. with Oliver Marchart, On
the Human Condition (2005) with Dominique Janicaud and Eileen
Brennan, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
(2005), Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
(2007), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008), On Heidegger’s ‘Being and
Time’ (2008) with Reiner Schürmann, edited by Steven Levine and Der
Katechismus des Bürgers (2008), The Faith of the Faithless (2012), Stay
Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine (2013).
Fred Dalmasso is Lecturer in Drama in the School of Arts, English and
Drama at Loughborough University (UK). He has published on practice-­
based theatre-translation and on the interaction between theatre, perfor-
mance, philosophy and politics in particular through the lens of French
philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of theatre and philosophy. He is also a
practitioner and works as artistic director and performer for collect-ifs and
more recently as a documentary film-maker.
Tony Fisher is a Reader in Theatre and Philosophy at the Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama, University of London. He has published
essays on performance, theatre and politics, and philosophy in a number
of journals including Performance Philosophy Journal, Cultural Critique,
Continental Philosophy Review and European Journal of Philosophy. He has
recently completed a monograph that examines the long-standing influ-
ence of government on the discourses and practices of theatre, due to be
published in 2017 with Cambridge University Press.
Eve Katsouraki is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Performance Studies
at the University of East London. She is the co-editor for the peer reviewed
journal Performance Philosophy, Core-Convenor for Performance
Philosophy Network International, and Co-Director for the Centre for
Performing Arts Development at the University of East London. Between
2011 and 2015, Eve was the Co-convenor for TaPRA’s Theatre
Performance and Philosophy Working Group. Her research concerns the
intersections of philosophy and performance, especially in relation to
modernism, animals, bio-art, and political performance in the public
space. She has published several chapters and articles on theatre, politics
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

and philosophy and is currently writing a monograph that explores the

close interface between philosophy, modernist theatre and the figure of
the modern director.
Goran Petrović Lotina has been a researcher, curator and writer in visual
and performing arts and film since 2000. His research combines art theory
with post-foundational political philosophy to explore the political dimen-
sion of art. Petrović Lotina has collaborated with, among others, MoCA
Belgrade, Kunsthalle Vienna, Kaai Theatre Brussels, CCA Adelaide, Kran
Film Copenhagen, ECF, 6th Moscow Biennial and Performance Research.
He has published on contemporary art internationally as an editor and
author. Petrović Lotina holds an MA in Art History from the University
of Belgrade. As a researcher, he is associated with Ghent University, the
Research centre S:PAM (Studies in Performing Arts & Media) and
Sciences Po Paris/SPEAP, the Paris Institute of Political Studies/
Programme of Experimentation in Arts and Politics.
Pollyanna Ruiz is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the
University of Sussex. She is interested in the media’s role in the construc-
tion of social and political change. Her research focuses on the ways in
which protest movements bridge the gap between their own familiar but
marginal spaces, and a mainstream which is suspicious at best and down-
right hostile at worst. In doing so, she looks at the communicative strate-
gies of contemporary political movements, such as the anti-globalisation
movement, the anti-war movement and coalitions against the cuts. These
ideas are discussed in her recently published book Articulating Dissent;
Protest and the Public Sphere which examines the ways in which coalition
movements access the mainstream media. Her new project Protest,
Technology and the Dynamics of Intergenerational Memory extends these
dynamics over time.
Theron Schmidt is Lecturer in Theatre and Liberal Arts at King’s
College London, shortly relocating to the University of New South Wales,
Australia. His research and teaching interests include contemporary the-
atre, Live Art, participatory practices, and politically engaged perfor-
mance. He has contributed articles to anthologies and journals such as
Postdramatic Theatre and the Political, Performance Research, Law Text
Culture, and Contemporary Theatre Review, where he is an Assistant
Editor. He is a co-convener of the international Performance Philosophy
network and co-editor of the journal Performance Philosophy. His book
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

project ‘Being Seen, Being Heard: Politics, Theatricality, and Engagement

in 21st-Century Performance’, is under contract with Northwestern
University Press.
Olga Taxidou is Professor of Drama at the University of Edinburgh. Her
research focuses of the centrality of theatre for modernism in general and
in particular on the ways the theatre makers and the theatre philosophers
of modernity understood and rewrote classical Greek drama. Her books
include The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig
(1998); Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (2004); Modernism and
Performance Jarry to Brecht (2007). With V. Kolocotroni and J Goldman
she has co-edited Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents
(2000–present) and is co-editing its sister volume with V. Kolocotroni,
Modernism: A Dictionary (2016). She also writes adaptations of Greek
Tragedies some of which have been performed. At present she is complet-
ing two books, Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance (2016) and
Tragedy’s Mother. Over the past couple of years she has been a Visiting
Professor with New York University.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Performance and the Tragic

Politics of the Agōn

Tony Fisher

Why antagonism and performance? In one sense the answer to this ques-
tion is obvious. Consider the following as a preamble to the discussion that
follows. We are living through the aftermath of world-changing events.
Clearly any number spring to mind: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the launch-
ing of the World Wide Web, G8 protests, and many more. If one looks
closely enough, or (like Benjamin’s Angel of History) one is compelled to
bear witness with open eyes, no doubt events pile up like the carnage left in
history’s wake. Still, two particular events sit prominently at the forefront
of these opening reflections owing to their devastating consequences—the
war in Iraq and the global financial crash of 2008. To say that we are liv-
ing through the aftermath of those events is really to say that we are living
through the time of their aftermath. It is a time of uneasy ­alliances, fraught
with dangers, in which governments are blindsided by the rapid develop-
ment of unforeseen threats and by the rise of new p ­ olitical forces that are

T. Fisher (*)
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London,
Eton Avenue, London NW 3 3HY, UK

© The Author(s) 2017 1

T. Fisher, E. Katsouraki (eds.), Performing Antagonism,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95100-0_1
2 T. FISHER

as capricious as they are exigent. With the aftermath—literally, what grows

after the reaping of a harvest—commences a strange and restless temporal-
ity that has the power to undo politicians, states and peoples alike. What
follows in the aftermath of war, for instance, is profoundly ambiguous. If it
is not quite a period of declared hostility, nor is it a time in which peace can
be proclaimed. In the aftermath of war it seems there is always more war.
In the time of the aftermath one might well expect some kind of reck-
oning to occur. Just as for the punishment of vicious crimes (how many
lives were sacrificed in seeking retribution for the atrocity committed at the
World Trade Center?), so too there should be a reckoning for the criminal
misadventures of the ‘financial services industry’ that sparked events no
less momentous than 9/11. Yet these events, which bear the signature of
banks rather than jihadists—Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae,
HBOS … the list goes on—saw no real prosecutions against the rapacious
hedge fund managers and brokers who ‘broke’ the system they played; saw
no ‘new deal’ announced by a US president elected on an explicit prom-
ise of hope and ‘change’; and led to no transformation of the economic
assumptions that had, over a period of 30 years, produced inequalities
of wealth unseen in the West since the Victorian era. And yet, if things
appeared to assume an uncanny appearance, that of a return to ‘business
as usual’, those appearances quickly proved deceptive. In both the USA
and in Europe, where the politicians were unable to mobilise opposition
to vested interests and lobbies, the public were not so constrained. They
mobilised themselves. With slogans such as ‘Make Ready Your Dreams’,
‘Wake Up!’ and ‘Another World Is Possible’, Occupy seized the historical
moment, inspiring thousands to take part in political activism—many for
the first time—against the governing plutocracy, with its concentrations
of wealth and political influence. Yet the Occupy movement could not
transform the inertia that characterises the torpid time of the aftermath
(we continue to endure after all the dead hand of discredited neo-liberal
orthodoxy). Nevertheless, just as the afterimage of a spark ignited in the
dark retains its impression on the retina, so Occupy remains a vital and
illuminating phenomenon for our times.1 For the same reason, that most
remarkable event of recent years, which on a tide of popular protests swept
away monuments and dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, also defines
our time as one in thrall to both the afterimage of an event that remains
undimmed in our eyes, testifying to its momentary brilliance (the so-called
‘Arab Spring’), and a time of brutal reckoning that followed (with Western
reluctance to support the democratic revolutions in North Africa).
 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND THE TRAGIC POLITICS... 3

It is in light of this strange and tumultuous periodicity of the aftermath

of events—that are as dispersed as they are connected in disparate and
unpredictable ways—that the reader might first approach the essays col-
lected together in this edition. It is not that every essay deals directly with
these events—many do, some do not. The theme of Broderick Chow’s con-
tribution, for example, is Olympic wrestling; while Gigi Argyropoulou’s
essay is situated firmly within the context of an activist theatre collective
that emerged during the first years of the austerity crisis in Greece. What
all the contributions share, nevertheless, is a thematic concern with what
this period reveals—not just in terms of how the performance of the politi-
cal as such can be thought as a problem of performance, but insofar as that
performance attests to a fundamental insight into the essentially ‘agonis-
tic’ nature of the political. For each of the writers gathered here grapples,
in one way or another, with the emergence of this new conception of the
political, even if it is a conception that is as old as politics itself. It is in
the events surveyed above and their aftermath that one catches sight of
this new kind of dissensual politics in situ—one whose future remains
far from certain, to be sure. Yet it is also, importantly, a politics that does
not eschew uncertainty, insecurity, or even—as Rachel Cockburn’s essay
argues—a sense of its own precarity. Indeed, one way in which its radicality
emerges is in the way that such a conception compels us to confront the
dimension of the political as precisely bound up with the inherent pos-
sibility of failure insofar as it embraces the ambiguity and the exigency of
human action. For this reason, it seems apposite to designate this concep-
tion (borrowing a phrase from the work of Stephen Johnston) a ‘tragic
conception of the political’.2
Not only does such a designation help to define what is at stake for
many of the writers assembled in this volume, it also indicates two impor-
tant ways in which ‘performance philosophy’—the critical activity of
thinking undertaken in, through and around certain forms of theatre and
performance making—engages with events whose influence and effects
the world has hardly begun to escape. First, I would suggest that what
unites the contributors collected together in this volume is that each
seeks to delineate a radical democratic politics that we might yet forge,
reflecting on new paths of resistance opened up to capitalist relations of
­subordination and domination, over recent years, by novel forms of activ-
ism, civil disobedience and protest, and the reassertion of plural demo-
cratic identities—see, for example, the contributions of Dalmasso, Fisher,
Katsouraki, Ruiz and Schmidt. Secondly, there is a combined effort to
4 T. FISHER

examine practically how theatre and performance can be ‘political’ without

reiterating the hoary idea that theatre and politics are somehow ‘the same’
and without resorting to the cliché that because theatre possesses a public
it must, therefore, be inherently political (or the converse that politics is a
kind of ‘theatre’). The question posed here is: what kind of theatre exists
today that can respond to such events, and while resisting the peremptory
assumptions and expectations of a moribund ‘political theatre’ exploit the
power of theatre to bring this new politics to the stage—see the contribu-
tions of Bala, Boenisch, Cockburn Lotina and Taxidou. Taking these two
interconnected lines of enquiry together, the significant contribution of
this book might be described as follows: to provide an insight not so much
into the ‘theatrical’ as into the tragic dimension of the political.
Understanding politics in terms of its contingency, its constitutive open-
ness, its arbitrariness and its unpredictability, the book seeks to delineate a
‘tragic’ politics through an analysis of its performance; a performance that
is bound to the contending forms of life that define and shape it: ‘tragedy
as a materialization of the myriad impossibilities, infractions, and agonies
which characterize, even define, the political’.3 It is a tragic politics in the
specific sense that a tragic conception places ‘the agōn’—or ‘struggle’—at
the very centre of the experience of the political; and where politics will be
principally defined, as per the key thematic of this book, through the expe-
rience of its antagonisms. Equally, it is precisely in light of this antagonistic
dimension of the political that political experience and tragic experience
can be described as cognate or equivalent. Simon Critchley provides a
succinct summary of this experience in the second chapter of this vol-
ume, ‘Tragedy’s Philosophy’: ‘What the experience of tragedy invites is
neither the blind impulsiveness of action, nor some retreat into a solitary
life of contemplation, but the difficulty and uncertainty of action in a
world defined by ambiguity where right always seems to be on both sides.’
The lesson of tragedy for politics, as Olga Taxidou reveals through her
astute analysis of the subversive trope of the ‘Mother-machine’, is that the
political cannot be predicated solely on a hopeful ‘natality’, as she puts it,
but (with a mise-en-scène permeated by violence) must acknowledge the
‘mourning and negativity’ that encompass democratic life.
I am not suggesting, of course, that no work has been done in this area
before in performance and theatre studies. The emergence of a body of
work that views the politics of art and performance primarily in terms that
foreground antagonistic relations can be traced back to Claire Bishop’s
intervention in debates surrounding Nicholas Bourriaud’s highly influ-
 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND THE TRAGIC POLITICS... 5

ential ‘relational aesthetics’. While Bourriaud proclaimed the arrival of

participatory, immersive and dialogical forms of art that occupied galler-
ies, opening them up to forms of ‘inter-human commerce’,4 and which
notably rejected ‘any stance that is “directly” critical of society as futile’,5
Bishop contended that the mere fact that art could be celebrated as a
space of intersubjective ‘commerce’ by no means secured for the artwork
its democratic credentials or status. The ‘relations set up by relational aes-
thetics are not intrinsically democratic’, wrote Bishop, ‘since they rest too
comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and community as
immanent togetherness’.6 Instead of a relational aesthetics, Bishop pro-
posed a ‘relational antagonism’ in which art ‘can be a critical force that
appropriates and reassigns value, distancing our thoughts from the pre-
dominant and pre-existing consensus’.7
In the field of theatre and performance studies, however, the problem
of antagonism has been treated either unsystematically or with a great deal
of circumspection. Jen Harvie, for example, agrees with Bishop that ‘par-
ticipation is not intrinsically politically progressive’, yet cautions against
the emphasis Bishop places on ‘dissenting practices’ in art at the expense
of overlooking ‘models of community that recognise people’s social inter-
dependence’.8 Prioritising dissensus within art or performance, she argues,
can lead to ‘bad feeling’ and the alienation of audiences. In a similar vein,
Shannon Jackson writes, ‘when a political art discourse too often cele-
brates social disruption at the expense of social coordination, we lose a
more complex sense of how art practices contribute to inter-dependent
social imagining’.9 Notwithstanding the emphasis placed on antagonism
in this book, I agree that the politics of so-called ‘socially engaged’ per-
formance practices cannot be simply a matter of mutual exclusion—the
assertion of an ‘either/or’—as if political engagement could be reduced
to a simplistic choice between a position of permanent opposition and
self-exclusion or the deathly embrace of conformism implicit in the poli-
tics of consensus. Nevertheless, the practices of dissension of concern to
the contributors in this volume must already be, by definition, implied in
the stance taken by radical democratic forms of engagement; it belongs to
any political practice, whether artistic or otherwise, that seeks to call into
question prevailing distributions of power. As Joe Kelleher remarks, ‘the-
atre’s job, politically speaking, is to oppose the current state of consensus
by provoking disagreements of various sorts’.10 Although one should be
careful not to read this kind of statement at face value (I will return to the
complexities of contemporary discussions around political theatre below),
6 T. FISHER

what is important to understand at this point is the connection Kelleher

makes between politics and disagreement. What this alludes to is a fun-
damental division in terms of how the word politics is to be understood
in practice. On the one hand, there is a kind of politics—as the French
philosopher Jacques Rancière has it—that aims at the ‘dispersal’ of poli-
tics, where ‘the good political regime … coincides with the satisfaction of
citizens’ apolitical needs’.11 For such an understanding, politics signifies
nothing less than the ‘political suppression of politics’ itself—a procedure
of ‘depoliticisation’.12 On the other hand, there is a form of politics that
arises when the demos asserts itself as a power of division, whose condition
of visibility lies precisely in the act of disagreeing with the existing con-
sensus: ‘The demos might well be nothing but the movement whereby the
multitude tears itself away from the weighty destiny which seeks to drag it
into the corporeal form of the ochlos, into the safety of incorporation into
the image of the whole.’13
There is something further that might be said here that goes to the
heart of the tragic conception of the political. A tragic conception of the
political should not be conflated in any simple-minded sense with oppo-
sitional practices per se, or with the objective fact of division and dissent.
Antagonism is not to be understood as reducible to a ‘real’ opposition—to
the empirical level, where it might be exhausted—but rather, it should be
grasped at the symbolic level where social reality is seen to be discursively
constructed, and where the social imaginary is constituted.14 This line of
thinking was forcefully developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, where they wrote:

if, as we have demonstrated, the social only exists as a partial effort for
constructing society—that is, an objective and closed system of differ-
ences—antagonism, as a witness of the impossibility of a final suture, is the
‘experience’ of the limit of the social. Strictly speaking, antagonisms are not
internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of soci-
ety, the latter’s impossibility of fully constituting itself.15

It is precisely with regard to this ‘ontological’ approach to the problem, in

which antagonism becomes a limiting condition on the social, that a paral-
lelism can be established between dissenting art and performance practices
and performances of democratic dissent. What then becomes significant,
specifically for any attempt at grasping the tragic limits of the political as a
means of defining the ‘agonistic’ power of such performances, is not what
 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND THE TRAGIC POLITICS... 7

such practices explicitly say at the level of discursive statements, but what
they show (regarding the structures that produce those statements).
It is in light of this distinction between saying/showing that one final
book bears some mention at this point: Janelle Reinelt and Shirin M. Rai’s
edited volume The Grammar of Politics and Performance proposes to
‘bring practical political processes back into theatre and performance stud-
ies, from where they have been somewhat displaced in recent years’.16 This
is a proposition and sentiment with which, I think, most authors in the
present volume would entirely concur. It can also be agreed that politics
and performance share, at least on the face of it, many features in com-
mon: they are both ‘discursive’ and also ‘embodied practices’; neither can
take place without ‘actors’ and both indeed perform for ‘publics’—how-
ever loosely construed; historically both have employed performance as a
means of staging or procuring certain rhetorical effects, seeking either to
influence or to sway those publics in one way or another by directing the
passionate attachments of their respective audiences, thus changing the
existing affective relations between individuals and the wider world.
Where I would suggest the path taken by the contributions to the subject
in this volume differ from Reinelt and Rai is over the suggestion that poli-
tics and performance (theatre) thereby share a ‘grammar’—an underlying
structure in common, however open-ended one conceives it. At the very
least I would suggest we pause before embracing the idea that performance
and politics have a symmetrical morphology, or possess the same syntactical
operations, or function by means of the same discursive procedures, accord-
ing to which one can superimpose the communicational relays of one onto
the codifications of the other. One reason for resisting this proposal has to
do with acknowledging, as we have just seen, the considerable degree of
ambiguity in the very word ‘politics’ (one might equally say the same is true
for the word performance). What is questionable is whether there is any
‘one’ grammar of performance or theatre that is shared with the political
and not least because it is questionable whether there is any one grammar
that defines the performance of politics. This is not to deny the utility of
thinking about the grammar of politics in ­relation to performance. What is
important to recognise, however, is the need to displace the terrain of such
thinking by introducing the element of antagonism into the mix. In the field
of politics, for example, there are—I would suggest—multiple and oppos-
ing grammars in play. But in order to clarify this, let us ask, first, what is
meant by the term ‘grammar’ in this context? Following the lead of Chantal
Mouffe, a grammar is akin to what Wittgenstein terms a ‘language game’: it
8 T. FISHER

describes the ways of doing, saying and speaking that account for the ‘rules’
governing a specific—that is, ‘context dependent’ performance (as well
as the coalescing of forms of political identification around those rules).17
Every politics has its ‘grammar’; yet no grammar is so set in stone, or so free
from overdetermination, as to entirely preclude its articulation with alterna-
tive and sometimes contradictory and even inconsistent grammars. Thus the
grammar of liberalism—at least until fairly recently—must be seen as oppos-
ing the grammar of democracy; while, conversely, the grammatical rules that
determine the performance of nationalist politics have, at times, been com-
patible with the grammar of democracy—even if both of these relations can
be (and have been) reversed. Turning to the theatre, one can no doubt also
speak albeit in a different way of the grammars that demarcate forms and
genres of performance. For instance, one can speak of a grammar of natural-
ism, or realism, or expressionism, and perhaps, even, of the ‘post-idiomatic’
grammar that is ‘postdramatic’ theatre. What cannot be said, however, is
that there is a grammar of performance as such. For if ‘grammar’ refers here
to the set of contingent rules and context-bound principles that govern
the performance of a certain ‘politics’, specifying what can and cannot be
said, then performance itself is not a ‘grammar’ but the mode by which a
specific grammar is articulated in relation to other possible grammars; and
this performance will occur in conjunction with and in opposition to those
grammars (whether in the fields of politics or performance).18
And it is this problem of articulation rather than grammar per se that
allows the possibility of entertaining a certain type of radical intervention
through grasping performance as antagonism. What is at stake in that
problem can be related to the phenomenon Antonio Gramsci identified
with the question of ‘hegemony’.19 Thus, in terms of the practices invoked
in the chapters that follow, the relation between performance and poli-
tics is not simply a matter of grammar, but of the performatives involved
in the hegemonic struggle between contesting grammars of the political.
The role of theatre and performance, however, serves a further function
in this argument—and this testifies to a second problem that I would like
to briefly mention and which arises from the attempt to identify ‘gram-
matically’ the communicative dimension of politics with that of theatre.
For it is not, in my view, particularly helpful to draw together too tightly
the tenuous threads that connect the forms of representation involved in
theatre and performance with those of representative politics. Rather, I
would suggest that the appearance of any similitude between the space of
the theatrical and that of the political should be understood precisely in
 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND THE TRAGIC POLITICS... 9

terms of what separates theatre from politics, and what, concerning the-
atre’s peculiar effects, is consequently most threatening (about theatre) to
the ‘politics of dispersion’ (as Plato and Rousseau understood full well).
Namely, that theatre possesses a power of ventriloquism that—to borrow a
term from the French philosopher François Laruelle—‘clones’ the space of
politics without thereby reproducing its effects.20 As I shall shortly argue,
this power of cloning is, properly considered, a non-power since what it
exposes through its gestures and specifically through the gestures that it
clones, is the limit of the political domination of the social. But before I
get to more fully flesh out this idea, first a short digression, since I would
like to examine in a little more detail the problem of the agōn that lies at
the heart of the tragic conception of the political.

Agonism and ‘Tragic’ Conception

the
of the Political

I remarked earlier that the tragic conception of the political is both very
new and at the same time very old. To reflect on its provenance is invari-
ably to invite a return to the time of the tragic age of the Greeks, where
the agōn was first imbricated with athletic, political, legal and theatrical
forms of display. This was a culture entirely saturated, if I may borrow
Paul Cartledge’s luminous expression, by the ‘mentality of agonia’.21 The
words agonia (meaning ‘contest’ or competition) and agōn (connoting
various forms of ‘struggle’) had originally celebrated athletic contests but
later came to be applied to non-athletic striving and non-physical forms
of struggle.22 Agonia is, of course, linked etymologically to the English
word ‘agony’, indicating the affective dimension of struggle; that politics,
for instance, is not reducible to the tinder-dry stuff of reasoned delibera-
tion but involves complex emotional and affective forms of identification,
of passions and desires that animate political commitments. Wherever the
agōn expresses itself, it is invariably accompanied by agonia. In all spheres
of adversarial rivalry, intense forms of attachment are experienced (erotic
in the case of the symposium) as well as the kinds of visceral animosity—
hatred even—inspired by more combative confrontations.
Setting aside, for a moment, the problem of affect, it should be observed
that these multiple forms of struggle, contest, debate, combat and compe-
tition were identified exclusively with the public realm. Displays of conflict
were always held in the open: in the gymnasium—an arena for competitive
demonstrations of masculine prowess; in the symposium, as dramatised in
10 T. FISHER

the Socratic dialogues, in the contest between debaters (it is worth recall-
ing the context of the Symposium, which takes place during the ‘tragic
agon’ where Agathon is celebrating his victory during the contest of the
tragedians held at the Dionysia festival); as well as in the law courts, politi-
cal assembly and in the theatres themselves. Each constituted a site in
which the agōn was revealed, performed, audited and thus collectively
experienced. Greek culture was fundamentally a ‘performance culture’, as
Simon Goldhill has pointed out, that ‘valorised competitive public display
across a vast range of social institutions and spheres of behaviour’.23 The
public realm was thus understood, in a pre-eminent sense, as an agonis-
tic space activated by and promoting an ethic of ‘agonic’ participation
(excluding metics—resident foreigners—women, children and slaves, who
were not counted as citizens of the polis). But it was also understood as a
spectatorial realm—the verb agonizomai signifying the act of fighting and
struggling before a public and of speaking and debating in public—a fact
that led the historian, Thucydides, to write sardonically that the Athenians
were ‘theātai tōn logōn’—mere ‘spectators of speeches’. Nevertheless,
the Athenian democracy understood itself as structured around a specific
commitment to the idea that public affairs should be placed ‘es mesai’—‘in
the public domain to be contested’.24
But in another sense, the distinction between participant and spectator
does not hold in the case of the Athenian culture. This is exemplified per-
haps nowhere more prominently than on the theatre stage, which was not
separate from but continuous with the audience, in both literal and meta-
phorical terms. The classicist Peter Arnott has suggested that both tragic
and comic theatre laid bare an ‘argumentative disposition’ that ‘springs
naturally from the temperament of the people’.25 For Arnott, if the average
Greek was illiterate—and if reading was an exception—Greek audiences
were nevertheless ‘trained to listen’.26 But perhaps more than simply lis-
ten, they were trained to listen conflictually—they were active spectators:
hence Plato’s complaint that the theatre audiences were a nuisance to the
good government of the polis. We find this in the Laws: audiences are sim-
ply incapable of quietly sitting back, of knowing their place, or of dutifully
attending to the poetry. A veritable democratic rabble, this participative
and unruly audience, stirred by the argumentative dynamics of the theatre,
perhaps nowhere more so than before the Aristophanic comedy with its
satirical invective and opinionated proclamations levelled at prominent cit-
izens. But the theatres also exemplified the formality with which the agōn
was inscribed within the social structures that reflected the Athenian men-
 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND THE TRAGIC POLITICS... 11

tality. In both tragedy and comedy, for example, the agōn took the form of
the ‘debate scene’, frequently employing well-defined tropes and formal
rhetorical figures derived from legal processes—leading Edith Hall to pro-
claim that ‘the stage is virtually turned into a court of law’.27 Polymester—
for example—is ‘prosecuted’ by Hecuba in an impromptu trial for the
murder of Polydorus; the trial of Orestes is presided over by Athena in the
court of the Areopagos, with Orestes defended by Apollo and prosecuted
by the Chorus of the Furies; Helen is tried by Hecabe in Women of Troy,
who explicitly frames the agōn in legal terms of indictment, accusation,
defence and condemnation: ‘Let her speak, Menelaus; she must not die
without a hearing. And let me undertake in turn to speak against her’;28
and—a final example—in Aristophanes’ The Frogs, the dispute between
Aeschylus and Euripides, over which is the better tragedian, has the setting
of a formal trial presided over by Dionysus. ‘We are dealing here,’ writes
Arnott, ‘with a theatre whose main weapon is words.’29
While far more could be said on this topic I hope this brief account
will suffice to give a sense of the extent to which Greek society, during the
age of the tragic drama, produced a political imaginary that defined itself
in every sense as agonistic. But in what way does this description of an
agonistic culture provide us with any insight into the tragic nature of the
political as such, understanding the question now not at a historical but at
a conceptual level? Here I would like to return to the earlier claim that the
political is essentially tragic. It is not simply that Greek culture understood
itself as agonistic—and it is not my aim to valorise that culture here—but
rather to understand it in the following terms: that during this period we
find a culture that committed itself to the idea that its social being was
permeated by the agōn. One might go so far as to say that for the Greeks
being itself was experienced in wholly agonistic terms. In Olympiodorus’s
commentary on Plato’s ‘First Alcibiades’—to give an example—the cathar-
sis induced by the trial of tragic drama, as intended by Aristotle, is grasped
precisely as an agonic trial: one must experience ‘the conflict of opposites’,
one must learn that to ‘cure an evil’ one must employ ‘evil’—for only in
this way can the spectator learn to mitigate its effects, and be led to a sense
of ‘due proportion’.30 This does not entail that Aristotle believed that
the agonic dimension of social being was thereby vitiated: catharsis aims
to produce a transfiguration, not the elimination of the agōn. Cornelius
Castoriadis provides a useful way of understanding this problem. Within
the polis, he writes, ‘the agonistic element was channelled toward forms
that no longer were destructive of the collectivity but on the contrary were
12 T. FISHER

creative of positive works for the community’.31 What this signifies is the
fundamental way in which the agōn held sway over the Greek mentality,
producing a consciousness of the necessity of sublimating antagonism—
socially, culturally and politically. The issue is perhaps nowhere more suc-
cinctly expressed than in the aphorism of the pre-Socratic philosopher
Heraclitus, who wrote: ‘It is necessary to realise that war is common, and
strife is justice, and that everything happens in accordance with strife and
necessity.’32 If I may offer a rather barbaric interpretation of this frag-
ment—barbaric in the literal sense that I speak as an ‘outsider’—to say
that war is common is already to alert us to the fact of the insuperability of
antagonism as a permanent existential threat to the security of the polis—
of course, the Greeks were no strangers to the calamities of war. Yet to say
that strife is justice is to point, I think, to something equally if not more
fundamental in our experience of political life: that because everything hap-
pens in accordance with strife and necessity, war is a constitutive possibility.
This means that, contrary to the kinds of view elaborated by philosophers
such as Jürgen Habermas, for whom the ultimate political aim of what he
calls ‘communicative action’ is the rational harmonisation of ‘individual
plans of action’33 (on which basis one must assert that the ideal of delib-
erative forms of justice requires the decisive elimination of antagonism),
by contrast, according to a tragic conception of politics, no such harmon-
isation is possible. One cannot eradicate antagonism through reasoned
debate, and the necessity of which Heraclitus speaks here recognises that
justice is a matter of ongoing struggle—a struggle that is permeated by the
acknowledgement that no final reconciliation of the social is possible.
This, then, is what is meant by a tragic conception of the political—
incarnated in the form of an ‘agōn tragikos’: a properly democratic politics
understands the constitutive lack upon which it is founded. In the case of
Athenian Greece, as Castoriadis explains, democracy consists of an exit
‘from a sacred world, from the imaginary signification of a transcendent
foundation for law and of an extra social norm for social norms’ raising
thereby ‘the crucial problem of self-legitimation’. The task bequeathed
by such an exit, for a properly democratic society, is precisely that it must
‘posit its own norms, and it has to posit them without being able to lean
on another form for support’. If a democratic society is a society that
understands itself as a social order, constituted without any possibility of a
final closure, or any reconciliation that would put an end to social conflict,
then ‘democracy’, Castoriadis concludes, ‘is certainly a tragic regime’.34
 INTRODUCTION: PERFORMANCE AND THE TRAGIC POLITICS... 13

But if social being is constituted by a ‘lack’—an irreconcilable con-

flictuality and insecurity, which requires vigilance against the ever-­present
pressure of war—in short, if its very being consists of a ceaseless play of
antagonistic pressures, forces, densities and compressions—then how
plausible, let alone desirable, is democratic society? To answer this ques-
tion is to face up to the fundamental challenge of democratic politics:
the task, namely, not of suppressing antagonism, but of acknowledging—
in Chantal Mouffe’s pronouncement—its ‘ever-present possibility’.35 To
embrace this basic insight—something that eludes liberal theorists—is to
also accept the consequent: that ‘consensus without exclusion’36 is simply
impossible. This fundamental insight—that antagonism defines the politi-
cal—has its origin in the work of Carl Schmitt who argued that political
motives cannot be reduced to moral distinctions (good versus evil), aes-
thetic distinctions (beautiful versus ugly), or even economic distinctions
(profitable versus unprofitable); the criterion of the political rests on a
distinction between ‘friend and enemy’—that is to say, fundamentally, all
politics rests on a decision about who should be included and who should
be excluded from a particular association:

The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need
not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to
engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other,
the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense
way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case
conflicts with him are possible. These can never be decided by a previously
determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and there-
fore neutral third party.37

Properly political relations are antagonistic, then, for the simple reason
that political identities are forged around the differential that allows a ‘we’
to demarcate itself from a ‘they’. And because identity is essentially the
expression of this fundamental differential, the agōn becomes the invariant
feature of all politics. It is for this reason that a ‘consensus without exclu-
sion’ is impossible. Indeed, to imagine such a non-conflictual world is to
entertain—in the words of Daniel Bensaïd—the ‘pretension that the social
might absorb the political completely, that a mythical “great society”, a
primordial Gemeinschaft, might be regained’. But this is to presuppose
‘a homogenous society that contrasts with the irreducible heterogene-
ity of the social’.38 The task confronting an agonistic or ‘radical’ demo-
14 T. FISHER

cratic politics therefore rests on heeding the lesson of Schmitt, but to

work—in contrast to Schmitt—towards the sublimation of fundamental
antagonisms: not to suppress them, in other words, but to defuse their
potential to erupt in pathological forms. To seek to suppress antagonisms,
as consensus models try to do, is to risk precisely their emergence in the
form of political pathologies. What is meant by pathology in this con-
text? To return to Schmitt momentarily, if war—as he points out—is the
extreme expression of the political distinction of friend and enemy, then
politics becomes pathological when it aims at ‘the existential negation of
the enemy’.39 The desire to eliminate the other, in this extreme instance,
expresses what might be termed as the possibility of the ultimate impossi-
bility of the political—for in seeking to eliminate the enemy, inadvertently
one seeks the eradication of the very difference that makes one’s own
identity what it is.
To return to Chantal Mouffe, the solution to the problem of antago-
nism lies not in its subdual but rather in the possibility of translating the
relation of friend and enemy into what she terms an ‘adversarial’ relation,
where the adversary is not an enemy to be destroyed, where antagonism
takes the modified form of agonism, and where politics is grasped as a
continual process of hegemonic struggle. In order to achieve such a poli-
tics, she proposes a minimal form of consensus—not over the content of
the substantive identity of the political (it is precisely over this ‘identity’ and
specifically the claim it makes on the space of universality that antagonisms
are played out) but over the formal rules by which political disagreement
can be expressed publicly: a ‘set of democratic procedures accepted by the
adversaries’40 that support, as she expresses it, a ‘conflictual consensus’.

Dissensual Gestures and Radical Aesthetics

If a ‘tragic politics’ of the agōn (as I have tried to summarise it here)
provides the general horizon which, in various ways, informs the political
thinking behind each of the chapters brought together in this volume,
there is also a more specific problem that merits some discussion, however
briefly, which will permit me to pick up some of the threads of the discus-
sion left hanging in thin air earlier concerning the rather vexed relation
(in contemporary debates) between theatre and performance studies and
political theatre. In recent years, we have grown accustomed to a paradox-
ical idea: if theatre and performance are at all capable of political resistance
(capable of opposing, that is, the general consensus—as Kelleher puts it
Another random document with
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struggled to keep his footing. Between them the girl uncomplainingly
picked her way upward.
And then they came to a place, as Stephen had hoped, where it was
necessary to scale a sheer scarp of six or seven feet in order to gain
a shelf near the summit. He had to kneel in order to help the girl up.
Turpan, not tall enough to pull himself up with his arms, cursed as his
boots slipped.
"Extend the barrel of your rifle to me," Stephen said, "and I will pull
you up until you are able to reach that overhanging bush. It will
support your weight."
Turpan nodded curtly. He was not happy about this. He was never
happy when playing a minor role, but he appreciated the urgency of
the moment.
Stephen pulled and the Bedchamber Assassin strained upward. Then
he grasped at the bush, and at the same moment Stephen gave a
sharp, Herculean tug.
Turpan snatched for the bush with both hands. "Got it," he said, and
swung himself upon the ledge.
"Yes," agreed Stephen, "but I have the rifle."

Turpan, fettered like a common criminal, lay upon his couch in the
tent where he had sat not long ago, a conqueror. The powerful
floodlight that shone in his face did nothing to sooth his raw temper.
Someone entered the tent and he strained in his bonds to see who it
was. Stephen came and stood over him.
Turpan licked his dry lips. "What time is it?" he asked.
"It is almost midnight. They have destroyed your rifle, but it has been
decided that, in view of your predatory nature, it would be dangerous
to release you again upon this colony. Are you prepared to meet your
fate?"
Turpan sneered. "Destroy me, fool—eunuch! It will not change your
lot here. You will remain an untouchable—an odd man out. May your
books comfort your cold bed for the rest of your life. I prefer death."
Stephen removed the hypodermic needle from the kit which they had
furnished him and filled it. He bared Turpan's arm. The muscles of
that arm were tense, like cords of steel. Turpan was lying. He was
frightened of death.
Stephen smiled a little. He looked a good deal younger when he
smiled. "Please relax," he said. "I am only a biological technician; not
an executioner."

Two hours later Stephen emerged from the tent, perspiring, and
found that the revel in the encampment continued unabated even at
this time of morning. Few suspected what had been going on in
Turpan's tent. These few now anxiously awaited his verdict.
"How did it go?" the former Planner of Flight One asked. "Was—the
equipment satisfactory? The drugs and chalones sufficient?"
He nodded wearily. "The character change appears to have been
complete enough. The passivity will grow, of course." A group of men
and women were playing a variety of hide-and-seek, with piercing
shouts and screams, among the shadows of the tents, and it was no
child's game.
"Don't worry about them," the Planner said. "They'll be over it in the
morning. Most of them have never had anything to drink before. Our
dictator's methods may have been cruder than we intended, but
they've certainly broken the ice."
"When will we see—Turpan?" someone asked. It was Ellen.
Stephen had not known that she was waiting. "Any moment now, I
believe," he said. "I will go in and see what is keeping him."
He returned in a few seconds. "A matter of clothing," he said with a
smile. "I warned you that there would be a complete character
change."
The garments were supplied. Stephen took them in. The floodlight
had been turned off now, and it was fairly dark in the tent.
"Hurry up," Stephen said gently.
"I can't—I cannot do it!"
"Oh, but you can. You can start all over now. Few of the colonists
ever knew you by sight. I am sure that you will be warmly enough
received."
Stephen came out. Ellen searched his face. "It will not be much
longer now," he told her.
"And to think that I doubted you!"
"I am only a technician," he said.
"There are one hundred and sixty-two male high scientists upon this
island," she said, coming forward and putting her arms around him,
"but only one, solid, unimaginative, blessed technician. It makes a
nice, even arrangement for us women, don't you think?"
"Even enough," he said. And at that moment Turpan stepped out of
the tent, and all of them looked. And looked. And Turpan, unable to
face that battery of eyes, ran.
Ran lightly and gracefully through the tent village toward the cliffs
beyond. And all along that gauntlet there were catcalls and wolf
whistles.
"Don't worry," the Planner said. "She will come back to us. After all,
there is a biological need."
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