THEATRE AFTER LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Many of the artistic works in this edition engage with questions surrounding democracy and community. They vividly illustrate how fragile democratic structures can be, but also the potential of collective action. The Belgian sociologist, art theorist and author Pascal Gielen has long explored the relationship between art, politics and society. In his essay, he describes democracy not as a fixed, unified system, but as a dynamic interplay of different practices. Gielen attributes a particular role to theatre – provided it no longer sees itself solely as a space for the free arts, but as a space of the common, as a «commonist» practice.

Essay by Pascal Gielen

Something peculiar is happening today. Each time a new illiberal wave breaks ashore, each time Trump re-enters the White House, a strange convergence overcomes intellectuals: despair and longing for liberal democracy. I think this is a mistake.

Liberal democracy carries within its own architecture the seed of what it claims to resist. Between liberalism and democracy exists a fundamental paradox. Democracy requires a demos, a people that governs itself as a community with shared substance. Liberalism distrusts that collective subject and installs in its place the sovereign individual and her rights. That tension is not resolved within liberal democracy but frozen, and what is frozen can also crack. When freedom is redefined as individual market autonomy, when public institutions are absorbed into the logic of performance indicators, the result is a social atomization so thorough that it generates longing for precisely what liberal democracy claimed to prevent: a strong hand, a protective leader. The illiberal regime is not the opposite of liberal democracy. It is its dark heir.

Whoever defends liberal democracy defends at the same time a particular model of formation and civilization: the liberal arts model. The first appearance of the word liberal in its modern sense describes the liberal arts as the formation befitting a freeborn man. The artes liberales: the instruments with which a man participated in public life. Not in any public life. In the life of one who was already free and who owned property. Slaves and women had a different education. The liberal arts were never a universal project.

The question then is whether theatre confirms that line or breaks it. Whether it places the singular artist on the stage as the last genius displaying his soul to a paying audience, or whether it dares to go beyond the liberal ego in order to imagine another democracy, a social democracy.

Three Democracies

Democracy is not a singular entity. It is a plural given, a coexistence of at least three simultaneous practices and logics that ceaselessly contest one another.

Representative democracy determines power by quantity: whoever wins the most votes governs. Its cultural logic flows from above downwards, and the theatre that belongs to it is the great bourgeois theatre: the national company, the canonized repertoire.

Deliberative democracy shifts the weight from quantity to quality: not the number of votes but their quality matters, the well-considered argument. The public sphere becomes a space of rational exchange, and the theatre that belongs to it is community theatre, the listening collective, the voice given to the previously unheard. But it systematically favours whoever commands its register: whoever has education, rhetorical skill, the correct language and cultural capital – the white middle class.

The third form is agonistic democracy. It does not proceed from consensus but from conflict as a constitutive given: the logic of adversaries who share a common space but contest its meaning. It trusts affect and corporeality over deliberation. And it is no coincidence that the rise of illiberal regimes coincides with an aesthetic turn in politics. Trump, Orban, Meloni: all operate in the same register. But so did the early Gay Prides of the 1980s: bodies in public space, visibility as a political act. Agonistic politics belongs to both right and left.

None of the three democracies is adequate. Social democracy is the political outcome of a genuine equilibrium between all three: a representative structure that counts and weighs; a deliberative culture that debates and recognises; and an agonistic practice that gives voice to all without a voice while ceaselessly asking for whom the consensus exists and for whom it does not. Theatre can play a constitutive role in this field of forces. But for that, it would do well to exchange its liberal arts model for a commonist one.

Commonist Theatre

You read that correctly. With an «o», not a «u». Commonism differs profoundly from communism and stands equally far from prevailing neoliberalism. Despite being ideologically miles apart, communism and neoliberalism share something central: both regard economics as the base of society. The difference with commonism is that it locates the base not in economics but in culture. Not in contracts and competition but in social relations and mutual trust. It uses words and ideas to imagine and try out new economies, political and social models. And commoners know that energy comes not from trade and labour, but from collective life, collaboration and – of course – celebration.

According to the rules of the commons, people come together not because they share the same identity or class, but because they share the same needs: drinkable water, affordable energy, decent education, an affordable rehearsal space, a healthy working and living environment, or the right forms to express themselves and lead a meaningful life. Commoners respond to what a government neglects and where a market sees no profit, but where a genuine need exists. They gather around shared vulnerabilities. They do not look to an authoritarian Leviathan to solve it for them but look to each other for a self-devised way out. Looking to each other means acknowledging mutual dependence. It also means the necessity of finding solutions with people one does not know, sometimes does not like, with whom one does not share ideological or religious conviction, but with whom one must nevertheless, in that dissensus, reach a consensus about what matters.

Could theatre contribute something here? What particular quality does the theatrical space possess that makes it suitable for constituting social democracy? The media sphere and other public spheres can certainly contribute, but theatre has something that distinguishes it: the physical proximity of bodies in a shared space, the immediacy of presence, the shared vulnerability of people who withdraw for a moment from their private life and public mask to share something that belongs to no one and to everyone at once.

Even a state theatre or a commercial musical always generates a surplus that is neither public nor private. It is quasi-public. It belongs to that third domain between market logic and state power that constitutes civil society but is rarely named as such. The difficult-to-measure and difficult-to-grasp atmosphere that mingles among the audience and the theatre-makers. Whoever enters a theatre does so on the basis of a shared interest, what might be called a common third. That shared interest makes it possible for the intimacy of the private sphere to touch the anonymity of the public sphere. Urban intimacy: one sits beside people one does not know and will perhaps never know, yet with whom one feels briefly connected in something greater than one’s own life. That is not sentimental. It is political.

Three Aesthetics

Three aesthetics give commonist theatre its form. The first is beautiful thinking: art that makes the invisible visible, that gives sound to those absent from the official narrative of the community. The second is situational in-situ art: practice that listens from within a place rather than representing it from without, that transforms what is already there into an aesthetic experience that displaces who has the right to be heard. The third is depth aesthetics: work that names the repressed traumas that a community has silenced, and which continue to shape its present.

Not liberal democracy, but social democracy was built on the insight that freedom only becomes real when it is equally distributed, that solidarity is the ground on which freedom and equality flourish. Theatre that practises commoning aesthetics reminds us of that insight, not through a political manifesto but through the experience of being together in a room, beside people we do not know, before stories that are not only recognizable to us, the white middle class.

That is the democratic potential of theatre after liberal democracy. And it feels rather urgent now, as darkness advances and the temptation grows to retreat into the private sphere. Theatre is by nature the opposite of that retreat. It is the art that physically draws you from your home, that places you in the dark beside people you do not know, and in that dark lights something: not the certainty that things will be all right, but the memory that we have been here before, that people before us found the courage to be together and to dream together of what could be otherwise.

The curtain that rises each evening is a small act of revolt against the thought that the world is as it is and cannot be otherwise. That the darkness is the last word. It never is.