waging theatre on class symptoms where class symptoms now invoke the redistribution of wealth from the middle to the top which has become capitalism’s only recourse in finding an inner limit now that the outer limit of resource exploitation has been surpassed.
taking theatre out of the class war equation where it plays the mediating role because at the same time that class symptoms now invoke the redistribution of wealth from the middle to the top, the ever-thinner, ever-spikier top, this redistribution itself has become the theatre of the haves against the have-nots and the drama of the increasing gulf between rich and poor: theatre is in the middle. Theatre has replaced the middle class. Yet it remains a theatre of operations, this divide between, this widening crack or barranca separating, the super-rich from the service class of servants; it remains a war in so far as there is a war effort and a propaganda machine which dramatizes the battles and brings them to our screens; the spectacular machine and the actual evisceration of the middle go together. The middle becomes the empty space for the performance – and celebratory spectacularization – of the death of the middle class and the value crisis it suffers as it dies: the middle becomes an empty space of negotiation without a voice because it is merely the rich and the poor who matter – who matter as the dramatic poles of a conflict which is only about them in so far as it increases the numbers of poor and decreases the numbers of rich.
