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Coda: The Complex and the Rupture RECKONING WITH THE COLD WAR ASSEMBLAGES of power, discourse, and spectacles as a “performance complex” highlights not only those networks ’ elaborate and far-reaching breadth and control, but also the tenuousness of their stability and the vulnerability of power at a key site of contest: performance. This book has traced the lines that connect interests and power whose intersectionality is often denied, as well as the nodes of performance where these interests converge. But the performance complex , constituted by compulsory and disciplinary enactments, nevertheless continues to demand command performances. Those performances can gum up the works of the smooth functioning of power. As seen in the performance of work songs and spirituals by slaves, they can function as a work slowdown or a walkout. As in the case of Robeson’s performance at HUAC, they can describe and contest the connections that constitute the performance complex as such. These performances, in their interruption and impeding of power, constitute ruptural performances. Ruptural performances take advantage of the staging of the event of performance, but do so in such a way that wreaks havoc on disciplinary mechanisms and by restaging the theatricality of power. As there is no “the performance complex,” but only performance complexes that compel and are sometimes contested by myriad other performance complexes, their meaning and efficacy is never settled. But part of what constitutes the radical possibilities of ruptural performances is the way in which they name the intertwining of forces and interests at the juncture of performance. While Robeson’s linking of anticommunism, racism, and postwar capitalism is judged by some as paranoiac, it is in the contesting of the complexity of power in the moment and mode of performance that Robeson interrupts and highlights the state’s conjoined use of antitheatrical discourse and disavowed performance practice. Ruptural performances, though they are characterized by the suddenness , immediacy, and jerkiness that interruption implies, are also born of performance complexes, and thus share the dispersed connectivity to 160 other ruptural performances. Robeson consciously worked the performance complexity of the rupture in his activist renderings of slave songs that emphasized the practical political utility slaves put them to. Robeson ’s theorizing and performing of a “universal body” of folk music was similarly intended to embody the organizing force of performances that ruptured the attempt to align Third World peoples with the two “great powers” of the day. The contemporary neoliberal performance complex is, itself, connected to the Cold War performance complex in numerous ways. It restages the same disavowed connection of race, capital, and dissent. One might trace the neoliberal performance complex along those lines at the convergent nodes of the performances of the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad, President Bush’s landing on the USS Lincoln, the staging of torture at Abu Ghraib, and the “see something, say something” practice of a resurgence of egalitarian panopticism. But the neoliberal performance complex, based as it is on hyperconsumption and superexploitation of labor , also links the militaristic performances of the “Global War on Terror” to the triumph of the society of the spectacle at the moment of the latest Apple product release, the economic crisis that “suddenly” announced itself on 2008, or sweatshop labor that must be perpetually and theatrically masked. Ruptural performance, though, has emerged with such impact that its interruptive force makes it seem to have come suddenly from out of nowhere and with no history or organization. The Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, as well as protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, for example, embodied the insurgent confluence of the multitude in the face of the neoliberal performance complex. The possibilities of ruptural performance as a form that emerges from within, but not of, the performance complex, is perhaps best exemplified by the EZLN, or the Zapatista National Army of Liberation. With their charismatic and ski-masked spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, this group of indigenous rebels in Chiapas, Mexico, has responded to the privatization of previously collectively held land with a war not only against neoliberal capital and the Mexican government, but also for the possibilities of poeticism and the imagination. Having mostly given up working guns for clearly artificial wooden ones, the Zapatistas link their contemporary complaints against the injustices of neoliberalism to the spectacular violence of colonialism, as well as to a sense of traditional history. Though based in the Lacandon Jungle in southernmost Mexico, the Zapatistas have been communicating with the world via the...

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