Theatre and the public

Badiou, Rancière, Virno

Simon Bayly

The theatre has always carried a special and contested significance for thinking about ways in which the polis, collective or community might symbolically grasp its elusive self-actualization. Yet, in the late twentieth century, considerations of the theatre as the place where something like ‘the public’ is made present – or fails to be made present – were eclipsed by the imperatives of performance and performativity, in which ‘theatre’ was often occluded as both philosophically and politically retrograde. Nonetheless, the theatre is still perhaps one of the cultural venues to which the philosophically inclined might turn for a thought-provoking encounter, echoing Roland Barthes (an ardent supporter of the theatre in his early career) when he remarked that ‘I’ve always liked the theatre, yet I hardly go there any more.’1 Moreover, the theatrical – rather than increasingly banal conceptions of performance – has resurfaced in some of the most influential contemporary philosophy (the writings of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière are the examples considered here) not simply as a specific object of attention but as the source of both a conceptual apparatus and a series of metaphors that are once again deployed to think not just about the politics and aesthetics of collective activity, but about the advent of political subjectivization tout court.

In selecting the problematic term ‘public’ to denote a form of the collective, my intention is to refer not to the diverse set of partial publics that might make up any particular occasion of assembly, but to the fact that the theatre constitutes a collective as a public and, more specifically, as an audience. This fact – that the very notion of the public is dependent on a theatrical division of actor and spectator – would still seem to be profoundly and problematically connected with the etiolated political conceptions of the public currently in circulation. Throughout political, philosophical and artistic history, the production of spectators – the theatre’s constitutive function – has been regularly condemned, from Rousseau to Situationism to the current and ‘relational’ turn in contemporary art practice. The claim restaged here is that the theatrical is still what makes a political problem of something like ‘the public’, which in many contemporary philosophical understandings no longer appears at all.

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