The art of making an appearance: towards a theatrical politics

The classical critique of theatre, from Plato to Rousseau to Debord, is that it only offers a world of appearances, a spectacle of ‘mere representation’ that distracts the viewer from seeing things as they really are. Indeed, in everyday commentary, machinations in the political realm that seem devoid of any substance are often derided as ‘pure theatre’ or ‘only theatre’. But rather than opposing ‘reality’ and ‘appearances’, a lineage of political thinkers have described politics as the domain of appearances – from Hannah Arendt’s description of ‘spaces of appearance’ that ‘come into being whenever [persons] are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm and the various forms of government’ (Arendt [1958] 1998, 199), to Judith Butler’s explicit invocation of Arendt in relation to the ‘movement of the squares’ and arguments for agency in plurality (Butler and Athanasiou 2013; Butler 2015). Making an appearance is a political act, revolving around ‘what is seen and what can be said about it’, according to Jacques Rancière ([2000] 2004, 13), such that ‘The task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear’ (Agamben [1995] 2000, 95). One of the lessons to be drawn from various social movements is that so long as the underlying conditions—the conditions that allow certain things to appear and others to remain hidden—are themselves hidden, then the possibility of politics will fail to appear. If theatre is the art of appearances, then, such an art might be useful for showing us ‘appearance itself’, to show us the act of showing, as Brecht and others have elaborated. That is, theatre might try to show itself, to see its own blind spot.