(Re)Imagining the Polis: Audience Participation as Postdramatic Discourse

Abstract

How much is enough? The relevance of this question comes from individual expectations regarding value. What is value and how does it manifest through our daily interactions? There is a qualitative difference between the concept of value and individual and collective values. Is there such a thing as a common good when it comes to either? Values are a social construct formed through a process of analysis, dialogue, and assessment within any given community. Though each individual's value system has varying degrees of difference, an agreed-upon system of values is created within and through communication, communion, and coalition. In contemporary societies, it seems the importance of unified community values has diminished in favor of the individual due to the rise of late capitalism, consumer culture, mediatization, political polarization, and the various signposts of neoliberalism. Postdramatic scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann states, “It is a fundamental fact of today's Western societies that all human experiences (life, eroticism, happiness, recognition) are tied to commodities or more precisely their consumption and possession (and not to a discourse).” Lehmann's assertion leads me to ask some striking questions relating to the theatrical practices that guide this essay. Namely, how have large-scale social systems of the contemporary era increasingly divested from community values, instead opting for smaller and smaller factions of identification? Without belief in a larger community good, what use is democracy?