ABSTRACT
This study of postdramatic theatre does not aim to trace the new theatrical modes of creation to sociologically determined causes and circumstances. For one thing, such deductions normally fall short, even in the case of subject matter to which scholars have more of a historical distance. They can be trusted even less when it comes to the confusing and ‘unsurveyable’ present (Habermas) in which highly contradictory – but therefore no less ambitious – large-scale analyses of the state of the world are chasing each other. Nevertheless, in a reality brimming with social and political conflicts, civil wars, oppression, growing poverty and social injustice, it seems appropriate to conclude with a few general reflections on the way in which one could theorize the relationship of postdramatic theatre to the political. Issues that we call ‘political’ have to do with social power. For a long time issues of power have been conceived in the domain of law, with its borderline phenomena of revolution, anarchy, state of emergency (Ausnahmezustand) and war. In spite of the noticeable tendency towards a juridification of all areas of life, however, ‘power’ is increasingly organized as a micro-physics, as a web, in which even the leading political elite – not to mention single individuals – hardly have any real power over economicopolitical processes any more. Therefore, political conflicts increasingly elude intuitive perception and cognition and consequently scenic representation. There are hardly any visible representatives of legal positions confronting each other as political opponents any more. What still attains an intuitable quality, by contrast, is the momentary suspension of normative, legal and political modes of behaviour, i.e. the plainly non-political terror, anarchy, madness, despair, laughter, revolt, antisocial behaviour – and inherent in it the already latently posited fanatical or fundamentalist negation of immanently secular, rationally founded criteria of action in general. Since Machiavelli, however, the modern demarcation of the political as an autonomous plane of argumentation has been based exactly on the immanence of these criteria.
