6 Performing cosmopolitics Most people have some kind of experience of motion sickness from travelling as a child in a stuffy car, staying on a swing or roundabout too long, being in a boat on a rough sea or on a turbulent flight. It grows as a feeling of nausea, perhaps with a slight headache and clammy skin and leads to feelings of weakness, drowsiness or apathy. It is perhaps slightly puzzling that people do not usually develop motion sickness from walking or running. While it has a long history, the possibilities of motion sickness seem to have proliferated
This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from the spectacle of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony to Broadway musicals, from experimental contemporary performance and opera to educational theatre, Somali poetic drama and grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. It documents important examples of collaborative practice with extended discussion of the Theatre of Debate process developed by Y Touring theatre company, exploration of bilingual theatre-making in East London and an account of how grime MCs and dermatologists ended up making a film together in Birmingham. The interdisciplinary approach draws on contemporary research in theatre and performance studies in combination with key ideas from science studies. It shows how theatre can offer important perspectives on what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called ‘cosmopolitics’. The book argues that theatre can flatten knowledge hierarchies and hold together different ways of knowing.
chapter10 21/12/04 11:25 am Page 157 10 ‘The Killer That Doesn’t Pay Back’: Chinua Achebe’s critique of cosmopolitics ‘Cosmopolitics’ is a neologism of recent invention. A response to the proliferation of ethnic-based nationalisms, and to the post-Fordist restructuring of global capitalism, ‘cosmopolitics’ is what a number of liberal thinkers now advocate: a freely created, cosmopolitan cultural identity based on notions of ‘global’ citizenship.1 This worldly sensibility may express itself through voluntary exile from one’s homeland; it may construe the act
biomedicine, climate sciences and artificial intelligence, reflect the major socio-scientific concerns of the era. Through the performance practices discussed though, these national and international concerns are relocated in relation to the particular stories and locations of diverse groups. Cosmopolitics, theatre and idiocy The somewhat partial focus of national science policies, as exemplified in the 2000 report, and indeed the sometimes narrow outlook of the institutions of civil society, has prompted a series of systemic political critiques of technoscience. These
suggestive, as I argue in this book; it asks us to ask more questions about the relation of imperialism, neo-imperialism, violence, and the project of ‘cosmopolitics’.43 These chapters have emerged from a number of professional institutional contexts and occasions. Most of them were produced within Britain, while I was lecturer in English at the School of African and Asian Studies, University of Sussex. Since 1999 I have worked as Associate Professor in the USA, at Brown University’s departments of Modern Culture/Media and English; at The Ohio State University’s department
, Sex and Power (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1983); and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), especially pp. 116–22; 5 Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 5–7. See Laura Chrisman’s reading of Achebe’s critique of contemporary ‘cosmopolitical’ thought in ‘The killer that doesn’t pay back’, Postcolonial Contraventions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 157–63. 6 On the problematics of a feminist politics
a civilising process which started in the West after the Second World War and by 1999 had resulted in a definition of Europe as a cosmopolitan political system. The Kosovo war was therefore not a way of drawing the line between this cosmo-political Europe and the ‘barbarians’ (the ‘other’). On the contrary, the Kosovo war was undertaken to secure the civilising process in Central and Eastern Europe
-layered architectonic of legal and political forms, as well as a complex re-invigoration of cosmo-political ways of thinking and acting in the world. Habermas presented the postnational constellation both as a desirable idea for the future and as a contested but tangible social reality in the present. We see it as a response both to the top-down forms of state socialism advanced within orthodox Marxism, and to the populist principle that all political life must derive
those who authorise the court. This argument has been raised to question the legitimacy of existing international criminal courts and tribunals (David Chandler, ‘International Justice’ in Daniele Archibugi (ed.), Debating Cosmopolitics (London: Verso, 2003), 27–39). However, the fact that some offenders are not prosecuted does not invalidate the prosecution of others in this sphere of law, any more than the fact that some speeding offences
, Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers took inspiration from the cry heard at the Seattle protests in 1999: ‘another 66 Science in performance world is possible’. The link that Stengers draws between anti-globalisation movements and her cosmopolitical philosophy of science is rooted in an impulse to speculate about the possibility of another world. With Pignarre she attempts to assemble diverse and sometimes divergent practices to revive a sense of futurity and speculation as a political practice: ‘propositions that attempt to transmit effectively – affectively – a