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  • Performance in a Time of Terror: Critical Mimesis and the Age of Uncertainty by Jenny Hughes
  • Wendy S. Hesford
Jenny Hughes. Performance in a Time of Terror: Critical Mimesis and the Age of Uncertainty. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Pp. 256. $24.95 (Pb).

In Performance in a Time of Terror: Critical Mimesis and the Age of Uncertainty, Jenny Hughes offers a cogent analysis of the political tactics of art activists’ anti-war protests and state-sponsored performances of violence. Taken together, the performances under consideration here reveal how radical and conservative cultural impulses cohere through the mimetic circulation of violence, decay, conditions of uncertainty, and increasing levels (and tropes) of waste resulting from late capitalism—“an economic system that sustains itself by exploitation, overproduction and overconsumption” (16).

For Hughes, performance is a broad category that includes cultural productions as well as the theatrics of war, terrorism, and counterterrorism, such as shock-and-awe tactics and torture scenarios (9). The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the state of exception drives Hughes’s critical analysis of the confluence of radical and conservative cultural impulses in state and non-state performances in a time of terror. Agamben argues that “an order born of the exception emerges not by tracing a simple line of inclusion and exclusion but including something through its exclusion” (Means without End ix–x). Put differently, “The state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather, insofar as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself, it defines law’s threshold or limit concept” (Agamben, State of Exception 4).

Among the items in Hughes’s twenty-first-century performance archive (which she limits to performances in Britain or those involving British citizens) is the video recording of the 2004 beheading of Kenneth Bigley, a British citizen, by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and its dissemination across mainstream media and militant web sites. The spectacular beheading was a part of Zarqawi’s terror campaign and a tactical ploy to draw greater attention to his demand that the United States release women detained at Abu Ghraib. Hughes interprets the beheading as a “miniaturized spectacle of exception” (38); that is, as an example of state-of-exception mechanisms deployed by nation states and non-state terrorist groups. She argues, and compellingly so, that “[t]he extreme violence of the beheading mirrors back to sovereign power the chaotic violence and illegality of the invasion, together with its abrogation of human rights and military norms” (38). As a rhetorical critic, I am most interested in the receptivity of the spectacle of violence and the ideological frameworks that delimit the public’s engagement with them. In highlighting how certain disciplinary modalities and expectations govern the public reception of the [End Page 562] “mimetic circulation of threat” (192), Hughes helps us understand why mainstream media framed the beheading as evidence of the “barbarism of the enemy” (52).

Hughes perceptively mobilizes mimesis as a descriptor and analytic category to highlight the tautology of liberal internationalism and the “political fictions of the democratic realm” (122). In chapter four, for instance, she turns to verbatim theatre as an illustration of cultural productions that foreground the decay of democracy by staging testimony from spaces of exception. Contra Agamben’s annulment of political resistance, Hughes offers an affirmative biopolitics that emphasizes the power of survivability and resilience within liminal zones created by state-of-exception mechanisms. She offers a compelling comparative analysis of three plays, each of which features “distinct dramatisations of voice” by presenting the testimony of different stakeholders in the war on terror: Guantanamo: Honour Bound to Defend Freedom, Talking to Terrorists, and My Name is Rachel Corrie (93). Although all three cultural productions may elicit hierarchical forms of recognition (self/other, inclusion/exclusion) from western audiences, certain aspects of each performance prompt audiences to interrogate these recognition paradigms by foregrounding the “interdependencies of self and other” (33).

Overall, Hughes seems most enthusiastic about the art created by activist protests and cultural performances that agitate the politics of exception by providing encounters that exist “outside habitual frames of recognition or appreciation...

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