The Performer Without Qualities. Empathetic Signification, Non-Performative Performance and Mimesis in Artistic Practice and Populist Politics

Abstract

This article reports on instances of my performance practice developed through strategies of over-identification, while establishing a parallel relation with certain types of right-wing populist performance and their theatrical processes (of identification). By doing so, I question the ethics of these theatrical processes when applied to politics. Departing from Lacan and Laclau’s notions of signifiers, I introduce the term empathetic signification, to reflect on the process by which populists re-signify signifiers to construct provisional and multiple political identities. I then draw on iterability and the performative to reflect on how the non-performativity of populist performance constructs a mouldable subjectivity. Finally, situating this subjectivity within the framework of mimesis and plasticity, I examine populists’ relationships with their audiences and environments, showing how they strategically acquire power by making themselves sufficiently plastique to be shaped by their audiences’ affects, and subsequently imprinting a newly created form upon them.