Global Theatrics and Capitalism

David Boje

November 12, 2000

Proposed paper for Theatrics Symposium for 2001 Academy of Management

See Full Symposium of papers; Figure One; Definitions.

 

[on stage] the corporate director of PR paces around the board room wondering how to solve today's problem

[on stage] rehearsal lights glare as staff members scurry about.

CEO says, "what do you mean a report in the press about child labor, oh, not again?"

You hear the distant sound of factory sewing machines and reporters flashing photos and shouting questions. A fourteen-year-old girl is sewing logos on college apparel.

Reporter says, "Can any nation-state really control a transnational company?"

[on stage] rehearsal lights glare as the stage crew moves a table, chairs, cow and ax onto the stage.

Consumer says, "what do you mean I have to kill my own cow before I can eat it. What kind of fast food restaurant is this?"

A cow is screaming and the blood is spilling form the stage to the front row seats. Raincoats are being given out to those in the front rows, to keep the blood of the cow from ruining their clothes.

Thespians (of the World Unite): let the screams of suffering be heard and the conditions of the slaughterhouse and sweatshop be seen.

Applause all around!

 

Tamara and Global Theatrics - The purpose of this essay is to illustrate how the global stage of late capitalism is implicated in the Theatrics of the Tamara play. Tamara is experimental postmodern theater (Simard, 1984; Geis, 1993), a play in which wandering audiences divide and chase a dozen actors on a dozen simultaneous stages never able to see all the action at once (Boje, 1995). The Global Theater is a 'Tamara-land' of many stages, wandering audiences chasing characters from stage to stage, to trace the web of storylines. And off-stage there are characters that never seem to make it into the carefully scripted storylines, the animals in the slaughterhouse and the women and children in the apparel sweatshops. There is violence that interpenetrates postindustrial production that somehow is absent from the Global Theater of postmodern designer-lifestyle culture. And Tamara is a way to explain how this absence is sustained.

Postmodern theater is a Tamara of many stories and storylines, on many stages with a fragmenting audience participating on the stage of production and consumption in an examination of the spectacle illusions and mystifications of Global Theater. It is an inquiry into the fragmented network of fragmented performances that result in most people never seeing all the stages or all the characters, or the interconnections among the stages. And it is an inquiry into the spectacle sustained by the 'absent referent.'

Figure One presents the interplay of Spectacle, Festival, and Carnival truth claims.  Here are some summary definitions:

SPECTACLE - By spectacle I mean Debord’s (1967) the Society of the Spectacle, a theatrics that is often violent and oppressive social control that masquerades as a celebration of progress by recycling pseudo-reforms, false-desires, and selective sightings of progressive evolution, never devolution.

FESTIVAL - By festival I mean Victor Turner's theatrics that is more related to in-the-moment enjoyment of a thing for its own sake. In ancient times, festival transgressed the boundary of nature and culture.

CARNIVAL - By carnival I mean Bakhtin's theory of the theatrics of rant and madness seeking repair to separation and alienation, a call for help from corporate power, a cry of distress and repression mixed with laughter and humorous exhibition meant to jolt power into awareness of its psychic organization.

Absent Referent - Behind every spectacle is an absence: the material reality of production whose place we see the theatric performance. The "absent referent" described by Adams (2000) is that which separates the spectator or consumer from production or worker by substituting a simulated referent. For example in the meat industry "the function of the absent referent is to keep our 'meat' separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, keep the 'moo' or 'cluck' or 'baa' away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone" (Adams, 2000: 14). And it is not just the meat industry.

In the theatrics of advertising garments, Nike, Gap, and Wal-Mart do not display the suffering lives of women working in sweatshops to sell their goods. These women, the producers of the apparel, are the absent referents, while on the global stage, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Kathie Lee Gifford, or some Barbie-model delivers a substitute performance.

Once the production of goods and services is disconnected from the existence of people who are 'sweated' and animals who are 'killed' various free-floating images become the referent and substitute. Who could stare into the faces of women and children making garments or foxes about to become coats, or the lamb on its way to the dinner table -- and not identify with what they are about to consume? The referent must have a suitable substitute, so the play can go on. In Global Theatrics, the absent referent and the substitute referent are ubiquitous, a necessary condition for the illusion to continue. In the language substitutes for reality, sweat-work becomes wage-work, and animal slaughter becomes gourmet-cuisine. The spectacle presents plays with many reversals. The worker is presented as the obstacle, the animal is presented as the source of life, the savage is presented as the cannibal, the white man is presented as the enlightened, and the feminine is presented as the weaker.

The spectacle illusion depends upon fragmenting the relation between consumer and producer. In Tamara, we as spectators to the global economy, do not follow our consumption habits, from the stage of the mall displays, backstage to the warehouse, along the truck routes to the manufacturer, to China, where most manufacturers are settling, to the shop floor where forced overtime and poverty wages and even a beating are part of the daily reality of production. Spectators are not able to confirm with their own eyes, hearing, touch, and smell the oppression of animals or women, and instead their attention is drawn to the thousands of daily advertisements that say the exploitation is not real. And it is an attention sustained in the Business College.

By now you know I am an activist opposed to sweatshops, global racism, corporate colonization, meat-eating, the animal slaughter and human terror that sustains late global capitalism. My theory and my practice are connected: I am a vegetarian and I refuse wear clothing that comes from factory houses of terror. Through spectacle, the majority of the world who are primarily vegetarian or who live on poverty wages making the products (over) consumed by the First World remain hidden backstage, the conspicuously absent referents to global capitalism. On stage the spectacle presents the path to health and wealth as total and self-determined, and the belief that meat equals health and sweatshop is a necessary condition of economic development. This script is an addiction, entrenched in the attitudes of the spectators to Global Theater. The consumer is in denial, but so is the Business College.

Postmodern Theater and the Global Performance - Postmodern Theater is about restoring a poly-historical, multi-perspective, and ideological critique of coherence (Currie, 1998; Geis, 1993; Simard, 1984). In postmodern Organization Theater, the spectator becomes the center of spectacle, instead of a detached, passive and distant spectator, estranged from the theater of cruelty of late capitalism. The spectator is now the 'spec-actor' (in Augusto Boal's terms) deciphering acts of consumption, tracing foods and apparel through the house of spectacle mirrors to the hidden systems of their production. Nike, for example, says it keeps the location of some 700 factories a secret to protect its competitive advantage. Yet, many activists contend that the factories are hidden for other reasons (Boje et al., 2000). Blurring the line between audience and actor places spectator more directly into a self-reflective gaze at production and consumption to observe the violence to self and others. Hiding the factories prevents spectators from making emancipatory choices.

The sexual and racial politics of manufacturing, the movement of resources from the women of Third World to the closets of the First World, is an Off-Off Broadway production (Saner, 1999). It is Off-Broadway, Street Theater, that bound the diverse activist groups in combined protest against the WTO. The problem I would like to pose is as follows: there are fewer Global Theaters performing the kinds of theatrics that include the absent referents, that place the backstage performers center stage, so the spectators can see their reality and then pronounce the spectacle performances to be fallacious and mythic. In the nation by nation and race by race segregation of work tasks, spectators and workers, animals and consumers do not meet face to face.

Postmodern Organization Theater transforms the act, agency, scene, agency, and purpose of organization-as-theater into festive improvisations that disrupt the coherent theatrics of modern organizations. The slow food movement, a reaction to McDonaldization of fast food, is known an Italy as the Convivia movement. Convivia celebrates the festival of life. To remove McDonalds from the center stage is to threaten the structure of capitalism and patriarchal culture. The meat and apparel industry is threatened by bringing production onto the center stage and horrified at removing the veil from eyes of the spectator. Acts of self-reflection on the manner in which products are made, the ingredients, and the conditions of labor and ecology must remain mysteries the spectator is unable to resolve.

References

Adams, Carol J. (2000) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. 10th Anniversary Edition. NY: The Continuum Publishing Company.

Boje, David M. (1995) "Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of Disney as "Tamara-land." Academy of Management Journal. 38 (4), 997-1035.

Boje, D. M. (2000a) Leadership in and Out of The Box: The Leadership of Princes, Heroes, Bureaucrats, and Supermen & Superwomen.

Boje, D. M. (2000a) "Merchant of Venice: The Clash of Feudal and Commercial global Capitalism." Update of paper presented to 1999 Academy of Management meetings in symposium on "Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge."

Currie, Mark (1998) Postmodern Narrative Theory. NY: St. martin’s Press.

Firat, Fuat A. and Nikhilesh Dholakia (1998) Consuming People: from Political economy to Theaters of Consumption. London/NY: Routledge.

Geis, Deborah R. (1993) Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Saner, Raymond (1999) "Organizational consulting: What a Gestalt approach can learn from Off-Off-Broadway Theater." Gestalt Review 3 (1): 6-21.

Simard, Rodney (1984) Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrights in America and Britain. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

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