Performances of Capitalism, Crisis and Resistance: Inside/Outside Europe ed. by Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager (review)

In her essay “Staging the Others,” included in this new collection, Aylwyn Walsh remarks parenthetically that the word crisis in the European context “may now seem like an empty signifier” (144–45). Walsh involuntarily marks something about the volume as a whole: in the repetition throughout of this organizing principle of the work, it is the European for whom the crisis exists as an identifying factor of daily and extra-daily life and not the migrants, asylum-seekers, and “Others” whom it is most of the contributors’ concern to discuss. As I write this review, the word crisis has escalated exponentially as Europeans feel themselves inundated with Syrian refugees. This volume offers therefore a timely sense of how Europeans seek to identify what it now means to be European in a situation of crisis, but along with a self-referentiality that at times risks deferring questions of what crisis means for whom, for whom it is most useful as a central term of analysis, and to whom the analysis will be applied. Concerned with varied constructions of the inside and the outside in Europe, the volume contains essays that elegantly work at this important problem while perhaps unavoidably remaining Euro-centric.

The volume, edited by Marilena Zaroulia and Philip Hager, will be of interest to performance studies and theatre scholars interested specifically in diverse sites of artistic production, and in issues of alternative democracy and collectivities, and of the temporality, formations, and effects of neoliberalism, including its crises. It is also specifically intended to make a contribution to studies in performance and Europe, with a special eye to responding to the aftermath of the 2011 protest movements, the end of Occupy, and the ongoing development of the EU’s neoliberal economic policies. How, the editors ask, do performance and theatre function as a “disappearing borderline” that can develop new collectivities and forms of solidarity that contest existing formations of European identity (10)? Sourced in conversations and collaborative exchanges by a group of early-career academics, the book hinges on three cities: Athens, Berlin, and London. It retains its collaborative character through a shared citational field that circulates through most of the essays and that includes, most prominently, Henri Lefebvre, Judith Butler (and Butler’s work with Athena Athanasiou), the Situationists, Stuart Hall, and David Harvey.

Giulia Palladini’s excellent essay begins “Returns,” the first of the three sections of the book. Palladini argues that the return of the Weimar Republic is haunting Europe with a “projective temporality” in which the present has no future and yet heads irrevocably toward economic collapse. Deployed frequently by contemporary Germany against its debt-embroiled co-European nations as a warning of what can happen (again), the Weimar reference functions as an anticipatory fatalism, bound up with the German concept of schuld (debt and guilt). Palladini, however, points to a different anticipatory temporality that was also part of the Weimar period and can also be retrieved, this time for the Left rather than the Right: an “anticipatory logic of revolution” (20). Exploring a 2011 work by Red Channel in which the company worked with volunteers for a week on revisiting Kuhle Wampe, a 1932 collaboration among Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and others, Palladini points to a new revolutionary use of projective temporality where the present can be used as a joyful rehearsal for a revolution to come. Hager’s essay picks up the theme of debt, analyzing the performance of the Occupy movement and other themed protests in London, such as Project Knight, as instances in which performances of subjectivity refuse debt structures. Hager’s use of Lefebvre and the way that protests change the rhythms of the city participates in an urgency felt throughout the volume around the creation in the present of new kinds of spaces and identities.

Two essays in the second section, “Paradoxes,” are of particular note. In her essay on the UK theatre company...