A Theatrical Critique of Resilience in Culture John Yves Pinder Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Performance and Cultural Industries and School of English November 2018 2 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of John Yves Pinder to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by John Yves Pinder in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. 3 Acknowledgements I thank the numerous people who helped me develop and/or supported this project in different ways and at different stages of its gestation. These include Sarah Jane Bailes, Simon Bayly, Anil Biltoo, Steve Bottoms, Jen Harvie, Adrian Kear, Louise Owen, Parvathi Raman, Alan Read, Theron Schmidt, and Nicholas Wood. I also thank all of the staff and students at PCI and Workshop Theatre for having supported me throughout. I would also like to thank all the people who took part in the research and without whom my work would not have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank my supervisors Tony Gardner and Lourdes Orozco for their invaluable advice, guidance and patience as well as Anna Fenemore and Calvin Taylor. Finally, I thank my family, friends and, above all my partner, Michelle Outram, for her loving support throughout. 4 Abstract Discourses of resilience rose to prominence in the field of culture in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In this thesis, the history of discourses and practices of resilience will be examined in order to understand how and why resilience became important in the field. I will argue that resilience discourses and practices, which concern the management of crises and risks, legitimise and effect the subsumption of semi-marketised spheres of activity and production, including that of culture. The history of resilience in culture will also reveal that its discourses and practices bear a close relationship to ecological rationales and environmental concerns. After performing a critique of dominant liberal resilience discourses and practices in cultural policy and administration through a reference to Yúdice’s idea of ‘culture-as-resource’, I examine alternative resiliences in art and culture using Balibar’s notion of ‘civility’. I argue that these alternatives are more explicitly concerned with limiting the reproduction of extremes of violence tied to an intensified subsumption of culture and the different historical crises of capitalism (socio-economic and environmental). Finally, I explore the extent to which art conceived in a post-Adornoian fashion negates the subsumption that resilience discourses legitimise and that resilience practices effect, on account of its capacity to theatrically present capitalism’s transgression of the social limits of the market (subsumption). This idea of art will complement the discussion of civility and will be contrasted to the ideologically legitimasing or what I call, after Marcuse, the ‘affirmative’ role that art plays in relation to economic and political power. The main contribution to knowledge I make in this thesis is to recontextualise current critiques of resilience in culture and to offer a field-specific framework for this critique, which also contributes to recodify recent debates about art, performance and neoliberalism in the UK, notably through an integration of environmental perspectives. Finally, this research also contributes to clarifying the scope of practical and cultural materialist methodology in performance research. It does so by offering a critique of a policy rationale through art and criticism conceived as post-romantic and conceptual practices. 5 Table of content Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................. p.3 Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... p.4 Table of content .................................................................................................................................. p.5 List of figures. ....................................................................................................................................... p.8 List of abreviations ............................................................................................................................ p.9 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... p.10 1.1 A brief history of resilience and neoliberalism .......................................................... p.10 1.1.1 The story of the flood .......................................................................................................... p.10 1.1.2 Resilience, crisis management and ecological rationality. ............................... p.17 1.2 Resilience in culture ................................................................................................................ p.21 1.2.1 Antecedents, research gap and approach ................................................................. p.21 1.2.2 Culture as topic and research questions ................................................................... p.28 1.3 A theatrical critique: between civility and art ............................................................ p.35 1.3.1 Critique, subsumption, creative destruction, crisis .............................................. p.35 1.3.2 Violence and civility............................................................................................................. p.40 1.3.3 Art................................................................................................................................................. p.42 1.4 Cases, methods and ethics .................................................................................................... p.46 1.4.1 Design, rationale and outline .......................................................................................... p.46 1.4.2 Literature, participation, interviews and ethics .................................................... p.51 2. Resilience, crisis and the changing culture of administration ................ p.56 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ p.56 2.2 Pre-histories of resilience in culture ............................................................................... p.59 2.2.1 Rethinking cultural value and the Valuing Culture conference ...................... p.59 2.2.2 Mission Models Money and the art of organisational resilience. .................. p.62 2.3 National policy, crisis management and resilience .................................................. p.70 2.3.1 Stability, recovery, thrive, sustain? .............................................................................. p.70 2.3.2 Mark Robinson and northern grit ................................................................................. p.73 2.3.3 The cuts and the containment of the flood. .............................................................. p.80 6 2.4 Resilience in policy practice. .............................................................................................. p.87 2.4.1 New environmental policies and eco-art .................................................................. p.87 2.4.2 Building resilience through philanthropy and fundraising ............................. p.92 2.4.2.1 Philanthropy in historical perspective ................................................................... p.92 2.4.2.2 Catalyst .................................................................................................................................. p.97 2.4.2.3 Resilience training ....................................................................................................... p.104 2.4.3 Alternative resiliences in the administration of culture ................................ p.112 2.4.3.1 Live Art philanthropy .................................................................................................. p.112 2.4.3.2 Building resilience and the (in)civilities of culture ....................................... p.119 2.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ p.132 3. The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and C.R.A.S.H. ........... p.136 3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. p.136 3.2 Trajectories and contexts .................................................................................................. p.140 3.2.1 The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination ................................................ p.140 3.2.2 Imagine 2020 and Two Degrees ............................................................................... p.145 3.3 C.R.A.S.H ..................................................................................................................................... p.148 3.3.1 Art, activism