Ryan Anthony Hatch
I am an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. My current research focuses on the politics of aesthetic forms, and aims to theorize the powers and limits of this conjuncture. I am especially interested in what contemporary philosophies of the event (Badiou) can teach us about the political "action" of aesthetic forms. My work traverses modern and contemporary drama, postdramatic theatre, contemporary art, aesthetic theory, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis. My book project, Anyone Who Trembles Now: Antitheatricality as a Political Factor, re-theorizes the concept of antitheatricality beyond the phobic and prejudicial (that is to say, psychologistic) terms in which it has historically been cast, and argues for a new understanding of antitheatricality as a relational form intrinsic to the event of emancipatory (communist) politics itself. I teach courses on modern drama, Brecht, postdramatic theatre, the American avant gardes, aesthetic theory, and psychoanalysis. For information about the MA in English at Cal Poly, please feel free to message me here.
Address: California State Polytechnic
English
San Luis Obispo, CA
93407
Address: California State Polytechnic
English
San Luis Obispo, CA
93407
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While progressive anti-racist movements have denounced social media activism as “performative allyship,” Anne Applebaum, writing in The Atlantic on behalf of the centrist liberal establishment, labeled the actions of the U.S. President and his enablers as “performative authoritarianism.” These developments signal a shift in our understanding of performativity. For rather than speech-acts that bring into being what they articulate (c.f. Austin, 1962), these performatives confront us with political actors whose discourse would at least appear to function precisely not to bring into being what it articulates. Have we shifted from Austinian performatives, to what Sarah Ahmed has more recently called “non-performatives” (2004)? If so, why, and what does this shift mean to critical theories and discourses on the Left in which the juncture of politics and performativity has for the last thirty years played such a decisive role?
Seminar members will present brief interventions at ACLA via Zoom.
We posit that theatricality, ultimately a mode of relation, precedes and exceeds the theatrical medium as such, and involves (as Michael Fried has argued) a blurring of boundaries between spectator and actor, subject and object. We likewise assert that “politics” names a relational mode that can contest “property” and “the proper” alike, interrupting regimes of perceptibility that render something sensible on the condition that something else is not (as Jacques Rancière has claimed). We wish to ask: as modes of relation, at what foundational levels do the theatrical and the political either intersect or fail to intersect? And which theoretical orientation(s) afford(s) us the most rigorous and productive account of this (non)encounter, and why?
Participants will read and discuss a shared set of texts prior to the conference. Papers topics might examine questions regarding: understudied genres or thinkers; counter-hegemony, subaltern positionality, and social death; senses other than the verbal and optical; non-presence, and post-dramatic poetics, among others.
While progressive anti-racist movements have denounced social media activism as “performative allyship,” Anne Applebaum, writing in The Atlantic on behalf of the centrist liberal establishment, labeled the actions of the U.S. President and his enablers as “performative authoritarianism.” These developments signal a shift in our understanding of performativity. For rather than speech-acts that bring into being what they articulate (c.f. Austin, 1962), these performatives confront us with political actors whose discourse would at least appear to function precisely not to bring into being what it articulates. Have we shifted from Austinian performatives, to what Sarah Ahmed has more recently called “non-performatives” (2004)? If so, why, and what does this shift mean to critical theories and discourses on the Left in which the juncture of politics and performativity has for the last thirty years played such a decisive role?
Seminar members will present brief interventions at ACLA via Zoom.
We posit that theatricality, ultimately a mode of relation, precedes and exceeds the theatrical medium as such, and involves (as Michael Fried has argued) a blurring of boundaries between spectator and actor, subject and object. We likewise assert that “politics” names a relational mode that can contest “property” and “the proper” alike, interrupting regimes of perceptibility that render something sensible on the condition that something else is not (as Jacques Rancière has claimed). We wish to ask: as modes of relation, at what foundational levels do the theatrical and the political either intersect or fail to intersect? And which theoretical orientation(s) afford(s) us the most rigorous and productive account of this (non)encounter, and why?
Participants will read and discuss a shared set of texts prior to the conference. Papers topics might examine questions regarding: understudied genres or thinkers; counter-hegemony, subaltern positionality, and social death; senses other than the verbal and optical; non-presence, and post-dramatic poetics, among others.