Tragic practice: Participatory democracy and activist theatre in the U.S., 2006--2010.

摘要

In this dissertation, I develop a theory of inclusive democratic communication, partly by studying contemporary activist performances such as Poverty Simulation, a role-playing game in which social service and government workers switch places with the poor people who are their clients; and Iraq Veterans Against the War's "Operation First Casualty," in which soldiers perform the drills they have enacted in Iraq in public spaces in the U.S., such as Penn Station. I see these performances as exceptions within national discourse, in which poor people and soldiers are more often represented than represent themselves. In exploring the contributions that performances such as these could make to public perceptions of political and ethical issues, I develop a model of democratic communication based upon inclusion, self-representation, and equal interpretive authority.;I analyze the performances I study as acts of democratic communication even though, in political science, scholarship on democratic communication excludes theatre and other expressive forms. I argue that the ethos and representational practices of liberal humanitarianism that undergird deliberative democracy explain its limits, and so I, following theorists such as Soren Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, Cornelius Castoriadis, Vaclav Havel, and others, "pearl dive" to tragedy as a pre-modern model of collective interpretation. I develop a concept of tragic political discourse, connecting scholarship on tragedy with scholarship on democracy. I draw upon Hannah Arendt's description of political speech and action, placing her values and criteria in dialogue with Jurgen Habermas and a legacy of exclusionary categories in theories of democracy and civic republicanism. Throughout the project, I develop a model of communication in which participants share equal interpretive authority and equal vulnerability to critique. Along with a theory of democratic communicative practice, I develop a model of judgment as processual, hinging upon an awareness of the partialness of one's own understanding.