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In echoing the title of A. Sivanadan’s (1991) examination of Black cultural-political strategies of resistance to the ‘epistemic violence’ (Fanon 1986) governing the construction of colonial identities and power relations, this essay argues that the racialized regime of representation continues to support the social production of global hunger and sustain its operation. It examines how the biopolitics of food security and distribution practices serve to ‘endorse the permanent state of emergency that enables the world to continue as it is’ (Edkins 2019); with established ways of seeking to end hunger effectively functioning to ensure its reproduction. In this context, it argues that hunger must be seen as an act of exteriorized violence directed against specific populations in order to maintain the necropolitical neo-colonial settlement, producing hunger and famine as a ‘permanent emergency’ enabling global governmentality and the reproduction of an inside/outside topographical binary. Within this ‘theatre of appearing’, the emaciated figure of the suffering, silent other seems be continually forced to re-enact and ‘relive the traumatic scene’ (Mbembe 2017) of their own disappearance into the space of the image in order to fulfil a spectatorial desire to see and to be subjectivated through seeing. How can a cultural politics of hunger activism disrupt this scene, and resist the theatrical regime of representation which it supports and sustains? How can performance de-centre the spectator’s frame? It is important to caution against positioning hunger as an object ‘outside’ reflexive critical consideration of it. There is no simple ‘out there’ of material reality that pre-exists our imagination and desire to know; no objective correlate for our hunger for political and social change. In order to understand this ‘different hunger’, we must recognise that academics, artists and activists are part of the world, not separate from it – and we cannot hold the world at a remo

In echoing the title of A. Sivanadan’s (1991) examination of Black cultural-political strategies of resistance to the ‘epistemic violence’ (Fanon 1986) governing the construction of colonial identities and power relations, this essay argues that the racialized regime of representation continues to support the social production of global hunger and sustain its operation. It examines how the biopolitics of food security and distribution practices serve to ‘endorse the permanent state of emergency that enables the world to continue as it is’ (Edkins 2019); with established ways of seeking to end hunger effectively functioning to ensure its reproduction. In this context, it argues that hunger must be seen as an act of exteriorized violence directed against specific populations in order to maintain the necropolitical neo-colonial settlement, producing hunger and famine as a ‘permanent emergency’ enabling global governmentality and the reproduction of an inside/outside topographical binary. Within this ‘theatre of appearing’, the emaciated figure of the suffering, silent other seems be continually forced to re-enact and ‘relive the traumatic scene’ (Mbembe 2017) of their own disappearance into the space of the image in order to fulfil a spectatorial desire to see and to be subjectivated through seeing. How can a cultural politics of hunger activism disrupt this scene, and resist the theatrical regime of representation which it supports and sustains? How can performance de-centre the spectator’s frame? It is important to caution against positioning hunger as an object ‘outside’ reflexive critical consideration of it. There is no simple ‘out there’ of material reality that pre-exists our imagination and desire to know; no objective correlate for our hunger for political and social change. In order to understand this ‘different hunger’, we must recognise that academics, artists and activists are part of the world, not separate from it – and we cannot hold the world at a remo

In echoing the title of A. Sivanadan’s (1991) examination of Black cultural-political strategies of resistance to the ‘epistemic violence’ (Fanon 1986) governing the construction of colonial identities and power relations, this essay argues that the racialized regime of representation continues to support the social production of global hunger and sustain its operation. It examines how the biopolitics of food security and distribution practices serve to ‘endorse the permanent state of emergency that enables the world to continue as it is’ (Edkins 2019); with established ways of seeking to end hunger effectively functioning to ensure its reproduction. In this context, it argues that hunger must be seen as an act of exteriorized violence directed against specific populations in order to maintain the necropolitical neo-colonial settlement, producing hunger and famine as a ‘permanent emergency’ enabling global governmentality and the reproduction of an inside/outside topographical binary. Within this ‘theatre of appearing’, the emaciated figure of the suffering, silent other seems be continually forced to re-enact and ‘relive the traumatic scene’ (Mbembe 2017) of their own disappearance into the space of the image in order to fulfil a spectatorial desire to see and to be subjectivated through seeing. How can a cultural politics of hunger activism disrupt this scene, and resist the theatrical regime of representation which it supports and sustains? How can performance de-centre the spectator’s frame? It is important to caution against positioning hunger as an object ‘outside’ reflexive critical consideration of it. There is no simple ‘out there’ of material reality that pre-exists our imagination and desire to know; no objective correlate for our hunger for political and social change. In order to understand this ‘different hunger’, we must recognise that academics, artists and activists are part of the world, not separate from it – and we cannot hold the world at a remo

This essay on Black Smoke Rising (Tim Shaw, 2014), returns to some of the core political and ethical questions concerning the inter-relationship between representation and repetition in the aesthetic experience of images of suffering: What's at stake in looking at images of suffering, and how is the spectator - and the cultural politics of spectatorship - implicated in the image as integral to its construction and operation? What's the relationship between the content of the image, its material tracing of historical presence, and its mode of representation? What's at stake in representation as a making present again of historical trauma and social suffering? Why do we keep on looking, long after the passing of the event represented, as if looking keeps open the wound of suffering through its repetition and circulation in the form of the image? These questions, prompted by Shaw's return to the images of torture emanating from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as resources for further image-making, 10 years after the event, are investigated through a double-handed reading of both Black Smoke Rising as a performative/scenographic event, and a staged return to the author's own writing on the Abu Ghraib image-event, 'The Anxiety of the Image', ten years after its publication in Parallax’s special issue ‘Visceral Reason’ (Vol. 10, No. 1). The essay thereby aims to question the aesthetic-politics of repetition - and the cultural anxiety about repetition - integral to the theatrical temporality of the logic of representation. It examines how the continuous circulation of the iconic image – the image of ‘The Hooded Man’ most especially -- reinforces the ideologically anticipatory mode of anxiety and explores the extent to which Shaw's aesthetic event re-deploys and re-stages the spectatorial experience of anxiety in a politically critical visual economy.

This essay on Black Smoke Rising (Tim Shaw, 2014), returns to some of the core political and ethical questions concerning the inter-relationship between representation and repetition in the aesthetic experience of images of suffering: What's at stake in looking at images of suffering, and how is the spectator - and the cultural politics of spectatorship - implicated in the image as integral to its construction and operation? What's the relationship between the content of the image, its material tracing of historical presence, and its mode of representation? What's at stake in representation as a making present again of historical trauma and social suffering? Why do we keep on looking, long after the passing of the event represented, as if looking keeps open the wound of suffering through its repetition and circulation in the form of the image? These questions, prompted by Shaw's return to the images of torture emanating from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as resources for further image-making, 10 years after the event, are investigated through a double-handed reading of both Black Smoke Rising as a performative/scenographic event, and a staged return to the author's own writing on the Abu Ghraib image-event, 'The Anxiety of the Image', ten years after its publication in Parallax’s special issue ‘Visceral Reason’ (Vol. 10, No. 1). The essay thereby aims to question the aesthetic-politics of repetition - and the cultural anxiety about repetition - integral to the theatrical temporality of the logic of representation. It examines how the continuous circulation of the iconic image – the image of ‘The Hooded Man’ most especially -- reinforces the ideologically anticipatory mode of anxiety and explores the extent to which Shaw's aesthetic event re-deploys and re-stages the spectatorial experience of anxiety in a politically critical visual economy.

This essay on Black Smoke Rising (Tim Shaw, 2014), returns to some of the core political and ethical questions concerning the inter-relationship between representation and repetition in the aesthetic experience of images of suffering: What's at stake in looking at images of suffering, and how is the spectator - and the cultural politics of spectatorship - implicated in the image as integral to its construction and operation? What's the relationship between the content of the image, its material tracing of historical presence, and its mode of representation? What's at stake in representation as a making present again of historical trauma and social suffering? Why do we keep on looking, long after the passing of the event represented, as if looking keeps open the wound of suffering through its repetition and circulation in the form of the image? These questions, prompted by Shaw's return to the images of torture emanating from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as resources for further image-making, 10 years after the event, are investigated through a double-handed reading of both Black Smoke Rising as a performative/scenographic event, and a staged return to the author's own writing on the Abu Ghraib image-event, 'The Anxiety of the Image', ten years after its publication in Parallax’s special issue ‘Visceral Reason’ (Vol. 10, No. 1). The essay thereby aims to question the aesthetic-politics of repetition - and the cultural anxiety about repetition - integral to the theatrical temporality of the logic of representation. It examines how the continuous circulation of the iconic image – the image of ‘The Hooded Man’ most especially -- reinforces the ideologically anticipatory mode of anxiety and explores the extent to which Shaw's aesthetic event re-deploys and re-stages the spectatorial experience of anxiety in a politically critical visual economy.

This essay on Black Smoke Rising (Tim Shaw, 2014), returns to some of the core political and ethical questions concerning the inter-relationship between representation and repetition in the aesthetic experience of images of suffering: What's at stake in looking at images of suffering, and how is the spectator - and the cultural politics of spectatorship - implicated in the image as integral to its construction and operation? What's the relationship between the content of the image, its material tracing of historical presence, and its mode of representation? What's at stake in representation as a making present again of historical trauma and social suffering? Why do we keep on looking, long after the passing of the event represented, as if looking keeps open the wound of suffering through its repetition and circulation in the form of the image? These questions, prompted by Shaw's return to the images of torture emanating from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq as resources for further image-making, 10 years after the event, are investigated through a double-handed reading of both Black Smoke Rising as a performative/scenographic event, and a staged return to the author's own writing on the Abu Ghraib image-event, 'The Anxiety of the Image', ten years after its publication in Parallax’s special issue ‘Visceral Reason’ (Vol. 10, No. 1). The essay thereby aims to question the aesthetic-politics of repetition - and the cultural anxiety about repetition - integral to the theatrical temporality of the logic of representation. It examines how the continuous circulation of the iconic image – the image of ‘The Hooded Man’ most especially -- reinforces the ideologically anticipatory mode of anxiety and explores the extent to which Shaw's aesthetic event re-deploys and re-stages the spectatorial experience of anxiety in a politically critical visual economy.

In a recent interview for Mouvement, the theatre-maker Richard Maxwell notes that: ‘In theatre, we are faced by a paradox. There is the reality of the story and the reality of the place where the play unfolds. It operates within this paradox. Between these two elements … This paradox is present in everything I do’ (2011: 21). Maxwell's words here seem to signal an investment in both the recognition of the materiality of the stage environment as a specific location—whose specificity resides precisely in the audience relation—and an awareness of the ways in which what takes place there—representation in one form or another, however presentational it may appear—constructs an ‘elsewhere’ in the landscape of the spectator's imagination at the very least. This paper investigates the ways in which Neutral Hero seeks to combine an aesthetic of rigorous material subtraction in which the locus of the stage is inhabited as nothing other than the place it is with a dramaturgical ethic of ‘emancipated’ spectatorship that enables it to invoke an exhibitive and relational understanding of ontology and identity. It examines how, in Neutral Hero, the ‘dramatic’ is constructed and eschewed, arguing that it is in the materiality of the exchange of speech—rather than simply the embodied presence of the performer on stage—that the specificity of the theatre as location resides, in that ‘the voice is always for the ear, it is always relational’ (Cavarero 2005: 169). At the same time, it explores how the prosodic foot is always to be found in the actor's mouth—the Oedipal foot grounding the contemporary in the archaic form of tragedy—acting as a dramatic impediment to the movement of the theatrical.

In a recent interview for Mouvement, the theatre-maker Richard Maxwell notes that: ‘In theatre, we are faced by a paradox. There is the reality of the story and the reality of the place where the play unfolds. It operates within this paradox. Between these two elements … This paradox is present in everything I do’ (2011: 21). Maxwell's words here seem to signal an investment in both the recognition of the materiality of the stage environment as a specific location—whose specificity resides precisely in the audience relation—and an awareness of the ways in which what takes place there—representation in one form or another, however presentational it may appear—constructs an ‘elsewhere’ in the landscape of the spectator's imagination at the very least. This paper investigates the ways in which Neutral Hero seeks to combine an aesthetic of rigorous material subtraction in which the locus of the stage is inhabited as nothing other than the place it is with a dramaturgical ethic of ‘emancipated’ spectatorship that enables it to invoke an exhibitive and relational understanding of ontology and identity. It examines how, in Neutral Hero, the ‘dramatic’ is constructed and eschewed, arguing that it is in the materiality of the exchange of speech—rather than simply the embodied presence of the performer on stage—that the specificity of the theatre as location resides, in that ‘the voice is always for the ear, it is always relational’ (Cavarero 2005: 169). At the same time, it explores how the prosodic foot is always to be found in the actor's mouth—the Oedipal foot grounding the contemporary in the archaic form of tragedy—acting as a dramatic impediment to the movement of the theatrical.

In a recent interview for Mouvement, the theatre-maker Richard Maxwell notes that: ‘In theatre, we are faced by a paradox. There is the reality of the story and the reality of the place where the play unfolds. It operates within this paradox. Between these two elements … This paradox is present in everything I do’ (2011: 21). Maxwell's words here seem to signal an investment in both the recognition of the materiality of the stage environment as a specific location—whose specificity resides precisely in the audience relation—and an awareness of the ways in which what takes place there—representation in one form or another, however presentational it may appear—constructs an ‘elsewhere’ in the landscape of the spectator's imagination at the very least. This paper investigates the ways in which Neutral Hero seeks to combine an aesthetic of rigorous material subtraction in which the locus of the stage is inhabited as nothing other than the place it is with a dramaturgical ethic of ‘emancipated’ spectatorship that enables it to invoke an exhibitive and relational understanding of ontology and identity. It examines how, in Neutral Hero, the ‘dramatic’ is constructed and eschewed, arguing that it is in the materiality of the exchange of speech—rather than simply the embodied presence of the performer on stage—that the specificity of the theatre as location resides, in that ‘the voice is always for the ear, it is always relational’ (Cavarero 2005: 169). At the same time, it explores how the prosodic foot is always to be found in the actor's mouth—the Oedipal foot grounding the contemporary in the archaic form of tragedy—acting as a dramatic impediment to the movement of the theatrical.

In a recent interview for Mouvement, the theatre-maker Richard Maxwell notes that: ‘In theatre, we are faced by a paradox. There is the reality of the story and the reality of the place where the play unfolds. It operates within this paradox. Between these two elements … This paradox is present in everything I do’ (2011: 21). Maxwell's words here seem to signal an investment in both the recognition of the materiality of the stage environment as a specific location—whose specificity resides precisely in the audience relation—and an awareness of the ways in which what takes place there—representation in one form or another, however presentational it may appear—constructs an ‘elsewhere’ in the landscape of the spectator's imagination at the very least. This paper investigates the ways in which Neutral Hero seeks to combine an aesthetic of rigorous material subtraction in which the locus of the stage is inhabited as nothing other than the place it is with a dramaturgical ethic of ‘emancipated’ spectatorship that enables it to invoke an exhibitive and relational understanding of ontology and identity. It examines how, in Neutral Hero, the ‘dramatic’ is constructed and eschewed, arguing that it is in the materiality of the exchange of speech—rather than simply the embodied presence of the performer on stage—that the specificity of the theatre as location resides, in that ‘the voice is always for the ear, it is always relational’ (Cavarero 2005: 169). At the same time, it explores how the prosodic foot is always to be found in the actor's mouth—the Oedipal foot grounding the contemporary in the archaic form of tragedy—acting as a dramatic impediment to the movement of the theatrical.

The Wolf Man was staged at the Brixton Art Room, in 1996. The piece took its title and terms of reference from the subject of Sigmund Freud's 1918 case study, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1991: 233–366). The performance, constructed through an analysis of this text and related critiques, was a collaboration between performance researchers living and working in London. It was devised and performed by Ernst Fischer, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, Maggie Pittard and Helen Spackman in Ernst's ‘living room theatre’ in Brixton. The text, written by Joe on behalf of the company, was a condensation and critical collage of the psychoanalytic texts studied. It was counterpointed by a series of visual images that alternately contested and confirmed the vocal score.

The Wolf Man was staged at the Brixton Art Room, in 1996. The piece took its title and terms of reference from the subject of Sigmund Freud's 1918 case study, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1991: 233–366). The performance, constructed through an analysis of this text and related critiques, was a collaboration between performance researchers living and working in London. It was devised and performed by Ernst Fischer, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, Maggie Pittard and Helen Spackman in Ernst's ‘living room theatre’ in Brixton. The text, written by Joe on behalf of the company, was a condensation and critical collage of the psychoanalytic texts studied. It was counterpointed by a series of visual images that alternately contested and confirmed the vocal score.

The Wolf Man was staged at the Brixton Art Room, in 1996. The piece took its title and terms of reference from the subject of Sigmund Freud's 1918 case study, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1991: 233–366). The performance, constructed through an analysis of this text and related critiques, was a collaboration between performance researchers living and working in London. It was devised and performed by Ernst Fischer, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, Maggie Pittard and Helen Spackman in Ernst's ‘living room theatre’ in Brixton. The text, written by Joe on behalf of the company, was a condensation and critical collage of the psychoanalytic texts studied. It was counterpointed by a series of visual images that alternately contested and confirmed the vocal score.

The Wolf Man was staged at the Brixton Art Room, in 1996. The piece took its title and terms of reference from the subject of Sigmund Freud's 1918 case study, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1991: 233–366). The performance, constructed through an analysis of this text and related critiques, was a collaboration between performance researchers living and working in London. It was devised and performed by Ernst Fischer, Adrian Kear, Joe Kelleher, Maggie Pittard and Helen Spackman in Ernst's ‘living room theatre’ in Brixton. The text, written by Joe on behalf of the company, was a condensation and critical collage of the psychoanalytic texts studied. It was counterpointed by a series of visual images that alternately contested and confirmed the vocal score.