Theatricality as a Political Paradigm (Theatre and Drama as Epistemological and Analytical Tools in Political Theory)

Theatricality as a Political Paradigm Theatre and Drama as Epistemological and Analytical Tools in Political Theory In 1984, at the opening of the Republican Convention in Dallas, Pesident Ronald Reagan makes his (digital) entry on a gigantic screen. He is welcomed by his wife Nancy, standing on the speakers’ platform, and he overlooks the assembly of delegates. This image actualizes the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, where the Sovereign, dressed in a hauberk composed of minuscule representations of his subjects, looks over a landscape showing mountains, villages and the city. Reagan’s virtual apparition in Dallas, 1984, was of course quite different from Hobbes’ allegory: at the end of the 20th century, society at large is completely dramatized itself, as Raymond Williams put it, due to the omnipresence of mass media. Hobbes’ image emblematized a historical development in political representation of which Reagan’s screened presence is a (provisional) highpoint. The intertwinement between the representation of sovereign power – absolutist or popular/democratic – and theatrical forms characterizes the politics of Modernity: the ballets of Louis XIV at Versailles the public performances of the ‘libertine’ court of Charles II in the UK, the autonomy of the parliamentary hemisphere, marked by the abolition of the mandat imperatif of the representatives by the revolutionary Assemblée Nationale in 1789 – to mention but a few milestones. This history of ‘theatrical politics’ starts of course, in the western world, with performed tragedy as an integral part of the political discourse in ancient Athens. But my paper will focus on its Modern versions, ranging from Hobbes’ notion of the citizen-author and the Sovereign-actor to the politics of ‘aggregation’ exemplified in Aaron Sorkin’s television series The West Wing. My approach concentrates on the epistemological and paradigmatical possibilities of this connection between artistic and public stage.