…which is further to say that such momentum as performance picks up from critical theory is fixed at the subrepresentational stage of performance itself, theatre always being first and foremost its own best diagnostician. (This is why bad theatre really tells you how bad things can get, that they can get worse, i.e. ATC’s production of God of Carnage.) Theatre’s power as metaphor, its virtual immanence derives from theatricality and the Kantian theatricalised conscience of the image of thought, its moral huing and crying, gives rise to a critique which however solid and stately cannot get behind the curtain. Hence, a critical theory exacerbating a movement already incepted, intercepting it with a shrill scepticism, like a whistle on the sideline. If the performance is already the diagnostic, these ‘reflective intricacies’ are already in its affect, made mobile in the fix of it, affixed or inflected, and ‘those intricacies’ effect performance such that the image of thought is the extrapolation, makes representation. So the theatricalisation of everyday life may be the sum effect of the sinking of every metanarrative – even to and including that of the transcendental subject – below the surface of representation, with its critique. I.e. the critique is not critical enough.
‘Please return me to context,’ you say.
