Disaster Capitalism

Rick Mitchell

Description

Rick Mitchell is an award-winning dramatist of over twenty plays, Rick Mitchell teaches playwriting, performance studies and literature at California State University, Northridge, where he is professor of English. 

Introduction

Catastrophe everywhere: Apocalypse theater for the twenty-first century

 

The plays

Shadow Anthropology

Through the Roof

Celestial Flesh

Sujets

• Political Science
• Theater
• Performing Arts
• Theatre
• Performance art
• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841505787
• Langue: English

Extrait

Disaster Capitalis
This book is for two people who ve sparked my imagination and my heart in more ways than they ll ever know.
For Christopher Ryan Emily Caroline
Disaster Capitalism;
or Money Can t Buy You Love
Three Plays by Rick Mitchell
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
The essay and three plays contained herein are the sole property of Rick Mitchell. Applications for any use of the plays whatsoever, including performance rights, must be made, prior to any such use, to:
Rick Mitchell c/o Dramatists Guild of America 1501 Broadway, Suite 701 New York, NY 10036, USA
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Macmillan Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-430-8
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Catastrophe Everywhere: Apocalypse Theater for the Twenty-First Century
The Plays
Shadow Anthropology
Through the Roof
Celestial Flesh
Note: Each of the plays included herein is a work of ction. Names, characters, places, things, and incidents either are the products of the author s imagination or are used ctitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons or things - living or dead - events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
C alifornia State University, Northridge - where I teach playwriting in the Department of English - has generously provided me with a couple of sabbaticals from teaching (including a College of Humanities Research Fellowship) so that I could research, write, and develop two of this volume s three works, Shadow Anthropology and Through the Roof . Additionally, the Puffin Foundation has supported the production/development of a couple of the book s plays - Shadow Anthropology and Celestial Flesh - and the California Stories Program of the California Council for the Humanities funded several public readings of earlier versions of Through the Roof , as well as a radio broadcast of the play. I would also like to thank the astute students of my fall 2006 honors seminar, Weathering Modernity, which examined the cultural and political significance of natural disaster while the smoke from massive autumn fires (a more or less annual event around here, in San Fernando Valley) filled the surrounding skies. The students often inspiring engagement with the seminar s material - which was abetted by their intimate knowledge of everyday life in an apocalypse theme park (Mike Davis term for disaster-prone Los Angeles) - helped to sharpen my own understanding of disaster while I was researching/writing Through the Roof , a work that grapples with the social history of natural disaster in New Orleans and (to a lesser degree) California. Last but not least, my greatest thanks go to Caroline, who - during the long, long hours (and years!) of my research and writing, and rewriting, and rehearsing, and revising - has provided more support than I could ever possibly deserve.
Introduction
Catastrophe Everywhere: Apocalypse Theater for the Twenty-First Century
There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.
- Mao Zedong
T he three plays contained herein differ in both content and form, yet they are all connected by a dangling thematic thread, disaster capitalism, an increasingly relevant term coined by Naomi Klein which suggests that catastrophe has become a convenient rationale for gutting social and public programs, as well as for weakening safeguards meant to protect people and communities, such as union contracts, civil liberties, and environmental laws. In other words, disaster capitalists (and those who support them) embrace crises as opportunities to weaken restraints to unabashed capitalist profiteering and state-based repression which, according to Klein, go hand in hand. 1
Unfortunately, both the rate and intensity of disasters seem to be on the rise these days, and if you look closely enough you will find that capitalist exploitation often both leads to and follows a particular disaster, even (and perhaps especially) when the disaster is deemed natural. 2 As I write this essay in July of 2010, the April explosion of an offshore oil rig is causing 70,000 gallons of oil to spew into the Gulf of Mexico everyday (more or less; nobody knows the amount, nor how to stop the underwater leak!), a mile off the coast of Louisiana, which has yet to recover from Hurricane Katrina in spite of the oft-exploited labor of thousands of illegal Central American refugees who fled their own disasters only to find themselves ensnared in another one: the precarious position of being both a day laborer and an illegal immigrant in the United States. A couple of days away from New Orleans by ship, Haiti - long considered the Western hemisphere s poorest country - is still reeling from a 2010 earthquake that has pulverized its already decrepit infrastructure. And half-way across the world American troops are mounting an intense, anti-Taliban offensive in a densely populated area of Afghanistan, inadvertently killing many innocent Afghans while attempting to ferret out and destroy terrorists that the covert, pro-warlord US policy in 1980s Afghanistan and Pakistan helped to create in the first place. Surely, other disasters lurk just around the bend, as Americans were reminded (yet again) this past spring when a detonated car bomb quickly fizzled out in the middle of New York s bustling Times Square, thanks to the inept bomb-building skills of the Taliban-supported terrorist who just happened to be living in the now-rundown city of my birth, Bridgeport, Connecticut. 3 Fueled by the continuous post-9/11 hysteria of cable-TV news and intermittent government warnings, the terrorist threat continues to hang over our heads like a permanent dark cloud. 4
Nonetheless, I feel an odd affinity with the people who find themselves trapped within disaster capitalism s crisscrossing webs, perhaps because during the late 1990s I resided in South Louisiana (which has been rocked so terribly hard by disasters over the past few years), and I now make my home in the epicenter of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, in the City of Los Angeles, whose numerous, ongoing disasters - i.e., earthquakes, firestorms, mudslides, floods, family-busting deportations, and massive race riots - have led Mike Davis to call Los Angeles the apocalypse theme park. 5 While only one of the works within this volume s covers, Celestial Flesh , is actually set in Los Angeles, each play finds itself, at least during key moments, somewhere within one of disaster capitalism s sprawling global theme parks - or theaters, as the US military prefers to call them - whose catastrophic attractions have been piling up for longer than almost anyone can remember.
As Walter Benjamin suggests in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, catastrophic debris - now encroaching just about everywhere - has continually filled the historical past right before our eyes. 6 Beginning with a painting of an angel, Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, and a poem by his friend Gerhard Scholem, Gruss vom Angelus, Benjamin develops a thesis focusing on the Angel of History, who, with wings spread, desires to travel backward to repair the ruins of the past, and thereby redeem the world. Yet in spite of his determination to make whole what has been smashed (257), the Angel is unable to advance against the all-powerful storm that pushes him away from history, which he quickly realizes is a never-ending, single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet (257). As he desperately attempts to fly back into the past, the storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward (258).
Today, the piling up of historical wreckage, which the winds of progress both create and promise (less and less convincingly) to resolve, seems to be taking a turn for the worse, as more and more pollutants fill our waterways and fields while thousands of tons of uranium-dipped, US-built munitions detonate (or not) in foreign lands, and natural disasters devastate communities like never before. Indeed, history s pile of debris is growing at an alarming rate, although the recent wreckage should not come as a surprise since our long-running mode of production, capitalism, defines itself by constant disruption, rapid technological advances, and instability. No less than Marx and Engels pointed this out over 150 years ago, in The Manifesto of the Communist Party : Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epic from all earlier ones (Marx and Engels 476). 7 Echoing The Manifesto s authors, Slavoj i ek emphasizes in Living in the End Times that crisis is capital s innermost constituent (216). 8
Yet capitalism s never-ending wreckage remains much more visible to the Angel of History than to many people, particularly the privileged (i.e. the upper classes, the West). As Marx suggests in his 1856 Speech at the Anniversary of the People s Paper , 9 although our mode of production s charged atmosphere weighs upon every one with a 20,000 lb. force (577), most people within capitalist societies remain unable (or unwilling) to consciously recognize this force. And such lack of recognition remains most pronounced, I would argue, in the world s most privileged (and commodif