Democracy, like Freedom, Hope, and Happiness,
is a big idea. Even where Democracy is not a
lived reality, it promises a humane society, and,
where it does exist, however imperfectly, it is an
ethical gesture toward a just society. In recent
decades, however, Democracy has been displaced
as an ideal form of social organisation by the
Market, which is radically unconcerned with social
justice. For a market society to function as a just
society, it must be regulated by robust democratic
institutions which “empower community-wide
standards in all aspects of public life and policy,
operating on the basis of a system of popular
influence that constrains the discretion of
government, denies the majority the right to
impose on any enduring minority, and contains
the power of various elites to exploit or usurp
government power in the service of their private
interests.” (1)
Freedom is not a negative – laissez faire – but a
social condition of being protected by democracy
to participate in public life. “The republican ideal of
the free person or citizen requires that you enjoy
non-domination in such a range of choices and on
the basis of such public protection and resourcing
that you can stand on a par with others.” (2)
And democratic freedom’s inseparable twin is
justice, by means of which, “problems of dominium
or private power are eradicated [and] problems of
imperium or public power are removed.” (3)
Against those criteria it is difficult to argue that
Austerity Britain is a functioning democratic
society because “our rights are no longer secured
by our collective power as voters, but are subject
to the logic of the financial market. Voters can
change governments, yet it is nearly impossible for
them to change economic policies.” (4) This is the
crisis of Western, liberal democracy.
The public institutions embodying the post-
1945 Welfare State included the National Health
Service, Royal Mail, British Steel, British Airways,
British Aerospace, British Telecom, British Gas,
National Coal Board, British Rail, as pillars of social
democratic political economy. Of these institutions,
state-funded and directed by public servants
toward the common good, only the NHS remains,
hollowed out and demoralised, not only by lack of
money, but by the dilution of public accountability
by a culture of managerialism and marketisation.
Elite tolerance of social democratic values of the
Welfare State lasted only thirty years, until the
election to the leadership of the Conservative
Party of Margaret Thatcher in 1975. Since 1975, and
especially in the years 1979-1997, the Welfare State
has been subjected to intense ‘market’ pressures,
and is now, in any meaningful sense, finished. In
cataloguing the sudden destruction caused by her
governments’ interventions, it is easy to overlook
Thatcher’s real interest – altering how people
imagined, and lived, their lives.
“I set out really to change the approach, and
changing the economics is the means of changing
that approach. If you change the approach you
really are after the heart and soul of the nation.
Economics are the method; the object is to change
the heart and soul.” (5)
Neoliberalism’s value system is personal, private,
and individualistic, framing all human interactions
as transactions in which each party competes with
the other, to secure personal advantage. One of
the features of this social regime is the narrowness
of its scope – ‘me’ – and the shortness of its social
imagination – restricted to perceived self-interest
as deals are struck. Short-termism is a defining
feature of British commercial thinking – causing
cyclical problems and crises – but, since 1979, it
has been imposed upon public institutions and
the services they provide, breaking Britain in the
process.
Cultural work, formerly funded to sustainable
levels, is now a micro-managed disaster area, in
which bloated bureaucracies are overwhelmingly
staffed by administrators, PR and marketing
workers. Artists are pushed from pillar to post to
satisfy demands wholly incompatible with making
art.
Yet, here lies one of Austerity’s principal
paradoxes – it could not have achieved its success
as a shaper of reality and degrader of dreams
without a persuasive cultural strategy. State
moulding of Deficit Culture was intensified by a
‘symbolic shift when the chief whips were kicked
out of Downing Street and replaced by a PR
machine – government becoming an exercise in
public relations rather than a search for truths
and solutions.’ (6) The playwright, James Graham
recorded a shift toward ‘politics as a performance’
(7), as the ‘PR machine’ began generating
social dramas in which a beleaguered national
state confronted multiple adversaries. In these
scenarios, the state’s longstanding protective
responsibilities were ‘downsized’ and projected as
a set of duties to a fictional figure: the Taxpayer
(T). Mrs Thatcher’s TINA – There Is No Alternative
– is T’s consort, co-star in a long-running, crisisdriven
soap opera, UK plc, which plays out daily in
hysterical full-page tabloid headlines recycled in
broadcast media and cited in official statements.
T is horrified by actual human diversity: variety of
aspiration, ethnicity, experience, gender, history,
and social class must be shouted down by Deficit
Culture’s ‘white noise.’ In any given episode of
UK plc, T is beset by ‘benefit cheats’, who have
reduced T’s cosy, comfortable world to a postapocalyptic
desert, Broken Britain (8).
Pity T; turmoil is everywhere around, but help,
in the form of real solutions to false problems, is at
hand in a strategy to which there is, naturally, no
alternative. On 27 September 2014, on the eve of
the Conservative Party conference, the Daily Mail
reported that the Secretary of State for Work and
Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith had stated,
“We’re not just getting people back to work,
we’re making real inroads into that stubborn part
of the out-of-work group who are in housing
estates and unwilling to work. We are beginning
to change this dependency culture that Labour
so bred and are turning it into an independence
culture where people see they can take control of
their own lives.” (9)
In reality, Britain’s lived crisis is one of
widespread poverty caused by low pay,
underemployment, and unemployment, though
no regular viewer of UK plc would ever come to
that conclusion. This social drama played a central
role in enabling Project Austerity, which, ten years
on, has drastically reduced economic growth and
social cohesion. In Britain, the state’s calculated
diversion of public resources into private hands
produced a crisis it purported to be managing.
If this seems hard to imagine, it makes perfect
sense in the context of neoliberal shock doctrine:
“The coalition government isn’t as stupid or
stubborn as it appears […] because spending
cuts are not about deficits but about rolling back
the welfare state. So no amount of evidence is
going to change its position on cuts.” (10) In the
words of the General Secretary of Unite, Britain’s
largest trade union, its people have been set by its
government on ‘a path to poverty’ (11).
A central aspect of democracy-building is the
development of forms of public dialogue by means
of which, “conflict is not avoided but takes place
agonistically (as opposed to antagonistically).”
(12) In the Global South, there is a long history
among socially progressive groups of tackling
common problems by building solidarities through
deliberation and collective action. Popular
mobilisation in El Alto city, Bolivia, shows that,
where citizens accrue democratic capacity over
time, ‘it is indeed possible to build a political city
out of the debilitating processes of neoliberal
urbanisation’. (13)
Closer to home, on Saturday 27 October 2018,
Michael D Higgins was re-elected President of
Ireland, with a record total of votes. During his
first term of office (2011-18), Higgins set out an
alternative to neoliberal Austerity inflicted on the
Irish people by the EU and IMF, after the collapse
of the Irish banking system (2008). He sought ‘to
develop an ethical discourse that places human
flourishing at the heart of public action’, (14)
and identified a set of central questions for that
project, including,
“What constitutes a good life? What is
necessary to human flourishing? What kinds of
human capabilities do particular societies value,
encourage, genuinely enable, or block? What
conceptions of human nature and the good society
underpin our contemporary economic discourse?
Can we, as ordinary citizens, enter the discourse on
economic policy issues, or are we too economically
illiterate for that? Are the issues so complex as to
require their being lifted out of the democratic
parliamentary system?” (15)
His challenge – both to artists and intellectuals
– is to go “beyond critical analysis in order to
think positively about a set of principles by which
we might live and explore the contemporary
possibilities for developing ethical arts of economic
government.” (16) This sets before performers
and scholars a context for mobilising what
performance is demonstrably capable of doing to
enable human flourishing.
In a similar vein, Hilary Wainwright set out to
map a new British politics of “material and cultural
creativity, emerging beneath the political class
[…] and to ask what political institutions, of state,
party and economy, would be like if the practical
knowledge of working and would-be working
people were built into their decision-making.” (17)
What does this mean for performers?
Performance is a means of imagining life-incommon
as the ethical underpinning of public life.
Acts of performance are, but are not reducible
to, forms of social dialogue. At their core is the
capacity to imagine public life, and to inspire
public deliberation, toward action for democratic
change. Because performance is made, and
happens among and between people, it is a
radically collective achievement. Because it is
unthinkable without the presence of others, it
models democratic practice, and more effectively
than purely rational argument, because it engages
both the senses and human ethical capacities.
Dramaturgy and choreography grapple not
only with ideas but with embodied moral and
ethical states. Their currency is as much emotion
as reason – hence their capacity to grip, as Bertolt
Brecht argued in advocating for epic dramaturgical
strategies to enable ‘complex seeing’. Embodied
fictional worlds can enact, and therefore generate
discussion on ‘how things ought to be’, beyond the
tyranny of ‘the way things are’. Thus, they enable
conversations to start beyond the limit situations
of Deficit Culture.
In writing Austerity and the Public Role of
Drama: performing lives-in-common (18), I didn’t
want simply to add to the ‘ain’t it awful’ literature
on the undoubted cruelty of Deficit Culture. My
manifesto for a public role for Drama is grounded
in the work of One Hour Theatre Company (OHTC)
(19), supported by Edge Hill University, which
imagines and rehearses strategies to enable human
flourishing. An OHTC event involves both a short
play and a discussion of the ethical encounters it
involves. By working both on the dramatic world
and the actual worlds inhabited by audience
members, OHTC strives to reveal the elephant in
the room, while ensuring that those who would
rather not see it remain in the space with those
who see little else. I was inspired by responses to
Michael Sandel’s ‘public philosophy’, which provide
clear evidence, both of popular interest in ‘what
democracies need’ (20), and people’s willingness
to deliberate on pressing problems in public.
Our common crisis is one of sustaining
peaceable, humane, sustainable co-existence.
My 10-point Critical Performance Manifesto (21)
attempts to show how performance might expose
this, and, in so doing, enable a shared Dance
Democracy.
Info
victor.merriman@edgehill.ac.uk
References
1. Philip Pettit, Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a
Complex World (New York and London: W. W. Norton &
Co., 2014): 207
2,3. Pettit (2014): 199 and 201
4. Ivan Krastev, In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy
Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders? qtd. in Mark
Leonard, ‘Rage Against the Machine’ (New Statesman, 30
May- 5 June 2014): 27
5. www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475
6,7. James Graham, (https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/may/06/david-hare-james-graham-drama-politics-labour-party)
8. www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/08/us-vs-them-the-sinister-techniques-of-othering-and-how-to-avoid-them
9. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2771696/Torybenefits-crackdown-breaking-Britain-s-Shamelesshousing-estates-says-Iain-Duncan-Smith.html
10. Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Britain, a Nation in Decline’ (www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/08/britaineconomy-long-term-fix)
11. www.scotsman.com/news/uk/unite-union-chief-sayspension-cuts-will-trigger-more-strikes-1-2512264
12. Brendon Burns, “These aren’t the targets you’re
looking for: Inequality, Displacement and Anti-immigration
hostility” (2017): 37
13. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City
to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2013): 147
14. Michael D. Higgins, ‘Toward an ethical economy’
(Dublin City University, 11th September 2013): 2
15,16. Higgins (2013): 1 and 2
17. Hilary Wainwright, A New Politics from the Left
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018): 35-36
18. Victor Merriman, Austerity and the Public Role of
Drama: performing lives-in-common (Palgrave Macmillan,
2019)
19,21. Merriman (2019): 101-125 and 163-167
20. Michael Sandel (www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXEKOr5SPCA)