Tactical Dramaturgies: Media, the State, and the Performance of Place-Based Activism
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Tactical Dramaturgies: Media, the State, and the Performance of Place-Based Activism by Jeffrey Gagnon A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Jeff Gagnon 2021 Tactical Dramaturgies: Media, The State, And the Performance of Place-Based Activism Jeff Gagnon Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies University of Toronto 2021 Abstract This dissertation seeks to develop a theory of protest as it relates to the tactics and mobilizations of specific groups and the performance of their ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical responses to the contested relationships between state and space. In doing so, I make use of theoretical frameworks provided by performance, the social production of space, and media theories in order to develop a theoretical analysis of resistant practices of Idle No More, Occupy Wall Street, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). In these sites I explore moments of performative resistance that challenge the supremacy of state power, dominion over language and voice, control of the body, and agency over space. Primarily informed by Marxist spatial theory, supplemented by additional postcolonial and feminist theory and Indigenous knowledges, I examine digitally-enabled networks of solidarity and place-based activism that take up a critical stance towards digital networks, technologies, and cultures. My theoretical fusion of Henri Lefebvre, Brechtian performance traditions, and Glen Coulthard’s challenge to recognition politics, generates for me a form of critique that makes the case for an inclusive and empowering spatial ethics. I have, therefore, sought to highlight the threads that connect these different philosophies and to seek out some of those places where such ethics can be put into practice through radical performances of political ii resistance. These mobilized performances which enact the tensions between margins and centres, ephemerality and materiality, localism and international solidarity, become the elements of a tactical dramaturgy that reveals the precarity of those ideologies and mechanisms of oppressive power. Drawing on examples from these acts of political resistance, the sites and theory come together in my analysis under three broad themes: the voice as a challenge to the universal, the occupation of space as a challenge to state spatial supremacy, and the invocation of the mortified body as a rejection of the biopolitical state. iii Acknowledgments The completion of this project was achieved thanks to a great deal of support form a huge number of people. I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Barry Freeman, for taking me on and helping me work through many ideas and obstacles over the course of the past years. Professor Freeman’s mentorship, insight, and confidence in me were gifts that were instrumental to the completion of this project. I am deeply grateful for his enthusiastic support of my work. I would likewise like to thank my dissertation committee members: Professor Antje Budde and Professor Kanishka Goonewardena for engaging with and bringing their expertise to bear on my work and challenging me to seek out knowledge in places I may not have considered on my own. Every committee meeting was a joy to participate in. I am humbled and inspired by Professor Natalie Alvarez’s extremely generous, meaningful, and thorough feedback as external reader. I thank her for enacting this labour for me. I would like to thank Professor Tamara Trojanowska both for taking on the role of internal reader and for the many ways that her kindness, guidance, and generosity have contributed greatly to my success within the Centre. Thank you to Professor Rosalind Kerr, my longtime mentor and dear friend. For more things than I could ever list. I would also like to thank many others for their support and inspiration. My family: Rejean, Heather, Rachel, Colin, Oliver, and Pat. Suzanne Micallef, whose door was always open. My extended family from TSB: Charlie, Carey, Alex, Tommy, Lue, Matt, Joey, and Riku. And my dog, Grendel, for his companionship throughout these past years. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart. iv Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................v Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Origins .........................................................................................................................................3 Outline .........................................................................................................................................4 Contexts ......................................................................................................................................6 The Zapatista Army of National Liberation.........................................................................6 Occupy Wall Street ..............................................................................................................8 Idle No More ........................................................................................................................9 Chapter 1 Voicing Dissent .............................................................................................................12 1.1 Foundations ........................................................................................................................12 1.2 Frames ................................................................................................................................14 1.3 The Trap of Individualism .................................................................................................21 1.4 The EZLN – Performing the Contingent Self ....................................................................23 1.5 Frames of Protest – The Althusserian Dramaturgy of the EZLN ......................................29 1.6 Insurgent Performance – Centering the Marginal ..............................................................36 1.7 Citational Declarations.......................................................................................................44 1.8 Protest Finds its Voi(d)ce...................................................................................................49 Chapter 2 Autogestic Performance: Acts of Reoccupation and Cyber/Spatial Contestation ........59 2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................59 2.2 Lefebvre & Brecht – Autogestus as Tactical Performance in Reoccupied Space .............62 2.3 The Absolute Local – Ontogenetic Cyberspaces, and Grounded Normativity ..................76 2.4 Social Netwar and Indigenous Internationalism ................................................................89 v Chapter 3 Necrocriticism: The Mortified Body as Refusal of the Biopolitical State ....................98 3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................98 3.2 Bodies and States ...............................................................................................................99 3.3 The Apparatus as Insidious Relationality ........................................................................102 3.4 Necrocriticisms ................................................................................................................106 3.5 Subcomandante Marcos – The Walking Dead.................................................................112 3.6 Ogichidaakwe Spence – Hunger as Refusal ....................................................................117 3.7 Conclusion – Occupy Wall Street and Mimetic Fragility ................................................123 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................128 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................130 vi Introduction “So, do you find that the new realities of life under the pandemic undermine a lot of this work on space? Has the paradigm shifted?” The question was asked to me during my committee meeting for the third chapter of this dissertation. It was late April and jokes about how this was the most boring apocalypse imaginable (a joke the death of which one might be tempted to mark with its attribution to Charlie Booker one month later in The New York Times.) were giving way to emphatic shelter-in place recommendations, exhortations to “mask it or casket,” and reminders to keep two arms-lengths between oneself and others. On my computer monitor, each of my three committee members were neatly contained within their own parcel of screen real estate, all of us physically quarantined at home. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how we experience space. FaceTime drinking parties, YouTube live concerts, the opening of theatrical performance archives to the public, and the now-ubiquitous Zoom meetings have accelerated the already blurring