Kai van Eikels

The Incapacitated Spectator

A First, Weak Impression

Usually, when I am watching dance onstage, I experience the theatrical

regime that commands me to stay seated throughout the performance
as a restriction. Unlike in a club, where I find myself hesitating at the
edge of the dance floor, limbs rigid with resistance against mandatory
participation, in the audience of a theater, where dancing would be
sanctioned, the desire to get moving flares up. Sitting in a performance
of Disabled Theater, however, my body acquiesces in its deactivation.
I let the dances pass before my eyes, laughing along, more often than
not, with the crowd, clapping hands mechanically whenever there is
applause. I notice, oddly conscious of it, to what degree my behavior
imitates the behavior of other spectators, while what is taking place
in the spotlight mostly remains a series of non-events, regardless of
its dramaturgical transparency. My responsiveness fails to conceive of
the occurrences as a coherent whole asking me to be part of it; neither
do I manage to lean back and feel my shoulders rubbing against the
collective-singular body of the audience. And if I dare inquire into the
reasons for this handicap, the answer is: disabled people.1 After the

1 The correct expression, according to the present convention, is “people with dis-
abilities,” just as “depressive people” are now referred to as “people with (symptoms
of) depression” — a strategy of de-essentialization, the problems and paradoxes of
which Alain Ehrenberg has commented on very insightfully. See Alain Ehrenberg,
The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary
Age, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. In this text I will speak of
“disabled people,” as I will be concerned with a dimension of disabling that escapes
confinement in the definitions of (“physical” or “intellectual”) disabilities whose
connection to a person would be aptly represented by a with, as though there were
a solid human core and then some additional attributes in the case of certain indi-
viduals. As I hope will become clear, I have no intention to deny or downplay the
role of social construction in respect to notions of disabled and disability. Rather, my
aim is to return to that adjective “disabled,” which Jérôme Bel employs to a most
unsettling effect in Disabled Theater, the full social range of its pertinence. Which
starts with admitting that people can be disabled — and theater, too. Moreover, I
will navigate my argument moving around a we that extends from multiplications
of an I that so far has not been diagnosed with disabilities, through associations of
this I with other people whom I did not recognize as having disabilities, and associa-
tions with others that included people whom I did assume to have disabilities, to a
state of collectivity that remains indifferent to distinctions between people with and

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title and several other paratexts cared to inform me that the perform-
ers are disabled (a state of understanding that comes without further
knowledge about their disability, until they themselves name it, specify
it), the path of affective participation — of, for instance, sharing their
enthusiasm in dancing — proves blocked. Is this enthusiasm? Would
enthusiasm mean the same in their case as it would in mine? Does the
rhythm of the music, which coerces our heartbeats, breathing, muscle
tone and nerve frequencies to synchronize, refer to a structure whose
dynamism (and what it culturally and socially encodes) we have in
common? The absence of certainty with respect to all of these ques-
tions precludes disengagement as much as spontaneous sympathy.
This feels different from the boredom I know. The onstage disability
disables my projections, my cathexis, my affective investment in the
performers and in what they do or don’t do, or fail to do, or fail to
not do. I am observing the presentation of their dances from a weird
periphery: not involved, not at a distance.
Theater’s affect economy relies on the construct of normalcy. Based
on representation, it presupposes comparability between all persons
present, including the characters impersonated by actors, be they
humans, heroes or gods, living or dead, sane or insane. If an audi-
ence is moved by the performance, it happens through imaginary par-
allelization, including the deviations parallelism always provokes. It
works with fictitious characters because it is practiced every day with
the people I meet. In theater just as in real life, I keep ignoring that
every other human being is a black box for me, an opaque entity about
whose perception, feelings, thoughts I have no immediate knowledge
and will never assemble definitive evidence. I am forever forgetting
how much even the most vivid interaction leaves me immured in a
cell of conjectures. Without this state of oblivion, without the illusion
of a comparator between me and my conspecifics, society could barely
persist. Facing a person who has been labeled disabled interferes with
this routine, and even more so where the disabled-labeled come to
my attention as performers who may or may not be impersonating
themselves. My doubts as to what those dancers’ movements in Dis-
abled Theater communicate make me realize that I am entertaining
a dialogue with my image of them, and unlike in a situation with
normalcy-congruent performers, I detect my own imagination at work:
it becomes conspicuous due to its weakness, its failure to produce a
result up to the socio-imaginary state of the art.
without disabilities, while members of the collective may be affected by radical and
comprehensive disabling. Any reader is welcome (and challenged, actually) to claim
access to any of these we’s.
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Deprived of affective velocity in respect to the stage, I cannot bond
with the audience either, because in contrast to mine, the imagination
of some fellow spectators appears remarkably powerful. Two ladies
in the row before me explode into frantic ovations, whispering into
each other’s ears, stroking arms and shoulders as though looking for
excuses to fill up the kinesphere between them with tokens of hav-
ing been touched. On our way out after the show I overhear them
saying, “They had a matchless energy!”  — “Yes, matchless!” Obvi-
ously, what gets called “energy” resonates with a psychological ten-
sion inside these audience members (a feeling of guilt perhaps, which
forces them to name a more, an affluence that compensates for what
they may perceive as a deficiency in the dance performance). Oth-
ers, less sensitive or better versed at explaining away misdemeanor,
laugh heartily about the dance solos’ crude choreographies, the clumsy
execution, the corny music. With any of these statements, the specta-
tor’s imagination takes home the contract with the performance-event
unsigned, since the performers, missing the established benchmark
of majority, are not entitled to sign it. I and the others in the audi-
ence who normally consider ourselves normal, i.e. non-disabled, by
default, picture this or that has happened, liking or disliking it as we
are used to do. But this time we must do without the regular imagi-
nary supplement that warrants as legitimate what is being imagined;
and by consequence, without the self-assurance of a normalized we.
This hypothesis is what results when I try to make sense of my weak,
half-hearted (and possibly half-minded) impression: Disabled Theater
dissolves a theatrical pact. It disables theater as a covenant between
performers and audience, by whose jurisdiction the members of both
collectives consent to the Vorstellung — a German word that means
both image/imagination and stage presentation, and without which
philosophical aesthetics and its concept of aesthetic community prob-
ably would not exist. A show, yes; spectators’ reactions, yes. But a
Vorstellung? Jérôme Bel does sign the imaginary contract, of course.
But what is his signature worth without those of the performers? And
what about the value of my impression, should no normal audience be
speaking through my voice?
A Brief History of Aesthetic Imagination
What are the issues a theatrical pact, normally, settles? Let us go
back to the point in history when some poets-turned-directors started
to suspect that theater might be art, and hence urged it should do
everything in its power to become art. Around 1800, subjectivist
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philosophy designs a theory of art that places the imagination (what
Immanuel Kant calls Einbildungskraft, the human capacity, power,
potency to form an image) at the core of appreciation and evaluation.
Imagination, it is inferred, helps elevate judgment from a mere reaction
to sensual input onto a level where I (re-)define myself in my response
to a work of art; and the aesthetic value of art will be the added
value of this (re-)definition.2 Imagination transforms the percept into
a Vorstellung, an image, preparing it for reflection. Preparation, first
of all, means filtering out the material until the form alone remains.
The empirical judgment of taste becomes entangled with the material
reality of what it assesses; similar to gourmandizing, delectation here
derives first-hand from physical sensation. The aesthetic judgment
of taste, according to Kant, finds the pleasure-worthy in the formal
qualities of the artwork, dispassionate about the functional value and
the sensational attraction of the materials used. Thence his famous,
often misinterpreted formula, “disinterested pleasure.”3
For the form to come to the fore, the perceiver-subject must replace
the perceived object with an image of it. This replacement has an
impact on what happens between people who are simultaneously
experiencing a work of art. If we understand by audience a multiplicity
of individuals engaged in formulating aesthetic judgments, then such
a collective does not resemble a dinner party where participants
collectively entertain a conversation about some topic of common
concern while they each savor the food idiosyncratically. Rather, the
audience members will have  — every one of them subjectively, by
virtue of their very subjectivity — mentally cultivated the percept in a
fashion that lets its form be the true source of their delight. Pleasure is
thus carried and conveyed by a process of reflection that connects the
sensual to the intellectual.4
Being essentially subjective, taste tolerates no mediating middle
between one spectator and another. The revolutionary thought hidden
in the cumbersome classifications of Kant’s Critique of the Power of
Judgment is that art aggregates people without any common ground.
2 On the difference between added value and surplus value, and its consequences
for art, see Diedrich Diederichsen, On (Surplus) Value In Art, Rotterdam: Sternberg,
2008.
3 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002, §5.
4 Unlike cognition judgments, where the connection between sensual data and
concept (Begriff) established with the help of the imagination arrives at a definite
result, imagination, in aesthetic judgments, operates in its reflexive mode, i.e., it
initiates a temporal interrelation between the sensual and the intellectual, which
creates its own (time) perspective of infinite approximation.
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The individuals marooned in an audience, unlike those at a social
convention of the dinner-party type, may not rely on standards of
what to feel and think in regard to certain things or occurrences. Or
more exactly, an assemblage of theatergoers in the audience will at
any moment be a precarious coincidence of two collectivities: one a
gathering on occasion of a social event, whereas the other celebrates
subjectivity in its breaking away from society, suspending the assump-
tion of having-in-common that facilitates social intercourse. Follow-
ing Kant’s line of thought, this suspension of interaction does not kill
the social impetus of art but instead levels the ground for a different,
more refined and decent sociability to flourish. Although judgments
based on taste will neither bow to the authority of norms nor welcome
attempts to negotiate compromise, Kant posits a communicability of
aesthetic judgments among audience members insofar as they are the
authors of their imagination — and inasmuch as the communication
effectively takes place from image to image, within the sphere of the
imaginary.
The crucial operation to bring this about is projecting myself into the
other’s perspective. The same capacity, power, potency of imagination
that enables me to replace the object with an image also allows me to
adopt someone else’s position without actually being in that someone’s
place. Before I ask any particular other about their judgment, my imagi-
nation will have anticipated (ideally, all) the conceivable approaches to
the work. The precedence of a suppositious stance transfer over actual
interaction is key here. In the absence of commutuality, I must identify
with the other, escaping ahead, as it were.
Has that roundtrip through the loop of possible positions been suc-
cessfully performed — and performed by everybody — we may even
start talking. For now our conversation is free to disagree, scurrying
along over a net of virtual identifications. No matter how diverse the
opinions we express, I can never point out anything in arguing art that
will not pay respect to my fellow citizens by verifying an image of
something-different-but-equally-fine in a world of free, equal human
beings. The better I perform the leap into the imaginary, and the more
expertly the artwork collaborates with that resolution of my imagina-
tion, the better for the aesthetic community. The concept of aesthetic
community introduces a state of togetherness that gains by a diminu-
tion of intensity in favor of imaginative volume. It gathers momentum
thanks to a lessening of the core event, a downscaling of its presence
that takes place not through diversion but through co-creative detach-
ment: a shift not away from what’s on display, but between what is
and what that may be for anyone. While aesthetics maintains that visi-
tors should devote their attention wholeheartedly to the work, it calls
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for a retreat from being-there well within the act of ultra-focused per-
ception. An aesthetic community is a collective constellation of those
individually devoted. Rather than interact directly, we communicate
via the work, through our imaginative appreciation of the art object.
For the relation with the work to result not in splendid isolation but in
aesthetically exhilarated commitment, it is important that experiencing
art provides me with a chance to lo(o)se(n) myself to just about the
extent that a sort of second-order social pleasure needs to slip into the
aesthetic pleasure I am taking in the form. Artistic presentation has a
very delicate task in letting this happen.
This is why the performing arts, especially theater, have always
remained precarious concerning their aesthetic status. The live perfor-
mance with its stream of occurrences perpetually gets in the way of the
subject’s retreat into itself. Working for aesthetic perception, imagina-
tion generates a semi-autonomous spatio-temporality; and if the “arts
of time,” as Lessing called them in his Laocoon, want to embrace aes-
thetic experience, their own temporal organization must go into part-
nership with this different determination of space and time. In a late
eighteenth and nineteenth-century context, the novel accomplishes
this task most favorably: narration composes a horizontal movement
in passing time and simultaneously, the poetic, self-reflective employ-
ment of language unfolds a vertical dimension, a virtually infinite depth
of every single moment. While the technique of narrating manages an
ongoing (or ever-changing) present, the poetic quality of each instant
makes room for the imagination to sink in and pursue its business of
creating moves within the instantaneous. In a performance, in con-
trast, the obstinate present of executed action opposes the poetic. Most
theater performances are characterized by synchronization and its flat,
vulgar time of going-on, and the more synchronization coordinates
collective dynamics, the less of a chance there is for the imagination
to transfigure the physical facts of contiguous bodies into oblique aes-
thetic togetherness.
Disable Performers, Disable Spectators
(but Paraplegia Won’t Be Enough)
In a performative event, the relation between what people marked as
performers do and what people marked as spectators do depends on
agreements, as the essentially inconsistent situation of many people
scattered throughout an auditorium or across the premises of a venue
will prevent anyone from figuring out what exactly has a bearing on
what, and who influences whom. Turning performative events into
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scenes of singular-plural aesthetic experience makes high demands on
such an explicit and implicit agreement. Spectators must be conceded
a great deal of independence from the spectacle and its impressive
attacks on their attention. They must almost lose and then find them-
selves again in the active-passive process of perception, disbanding
as a crowd for the refined co-subjectivity empowered by imagination
to evolve. The performance, in respect to aesthetic collectivity, is but
a retrospectively constructed source of enriched sociability. Despite
the utter indirectness of our communication, the event will register as
something we all were in together, with the intention of constituting,
for the time of the event, a temporary community. Hence, every person
who conceivably had any part in the event must be in a position to sign
the imaginary contract that seals the theatrical pact. If one party — a
performer, for example  — lacks the ability to contract, the form of
aesthetic community dissolves into thin air. For this reason, disabled
people as performers present a problem.
To witness how disabled people on stage threaten to render the
theatrical pact inoperative is all the more intriguing since, if we look at
how the institution of theater has worked towards giving the dubious
construct of the theater performance as an aesthetic event higher
credibility, we see strategies of systematic disabling — a disabling of the
performer and a disabling of the spectator. From Goethe to Brecht and
beyond, initiatives to reorganize the theater performance according to
the special needs of aesthetic perception have inspired acting methods
that curb the presence of the actor-character unit in appearing on the
stage. But the quandary remains until today: for an approach to theater
that is faithful to aesthetics, the actor always occupies too much of
the space and time of the spectacle. Whether (s)he presses to the fore
as a fascinating individual or a virtuoso performer at the cost of the
character, or whether the synthesis of actor’s personality and character
creates a real-fictional hybrid of excessive, radiant presence, the
spectator’s imagination will have a hard time finding an entry point.
Theatergoers, for their part, haven’t proved any more qualified for a
true art of performance. As the theater laws, the existence of a theater
police in some cities around 1800, and other forceful measures taken to
suppress the social event of going to a show for the benefit of aesthetic
perception suggest, the two collectivities mentioned above are far from
naturally coexisting in harmonious symbiosis. They are at odds, and
sometimes openly at war, with each other. A process of disciplining,
which started in the late eighteenth century and continued well into
the twentieth, enforced a new set of rules on how to behave in a
theater audience, compelling spectators to arrive in time before the
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performance starts, sit quietly throughout its entire duration and pay
full attention to the stage.
Jacques Rancière has stressed the political message of equality inher-
ent in reducing the subject of aesthetic experience to nothing but the
elementary faculties, which every human supposedly possesses. Stim-
ulated by the pleasure I derive from the art event to open up to the free
play of my own imagination, I will, at some point, have left behind
everything that specifies me as a particular person: my distinguished
knowledge and skills, shaped by education and professional activities;
my social status, my belonging to certain formal and informal groups,
the power and prestige resulting therefrom; my income, my estate, my
creditworthiness … The subject of aesthetic experience, says Rancière,
is an anybody, an indefinite one.5 This corroborates a core proposition
from Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man: rendered
indefinite, liberated from the specifics of competent social existence,
man will be enabled to define himself; and this new, different defini-
tion will infinitely enrich him.6 Aesthetic experience thus triggers an
equal distribution of riches, by introducing every single human being
to an aggrandizing process that, once under way, knows no loss and
neither stipulates terms nor conditions. Yet, to embark on its way, I
must allow for the event to rid me of those abilities that spell me out
as an (inter-)active member of society, i.e. as a socio-economic per-
former whose profile compresses a history of direct reactions. With
every artistic genre this translates into a differently configured set of
losses. In the case of theater it means that, physically, I mutate into
a creature whose legs have gone limp as though severed or palsied
from paraplegia. Arms won’t escape paralysis either, except for the
applause. My tongue’s been anaesthetized as well for the hours I spend
in the audience: I may utter brief, compact sounds that testify to my
being affected, but not articulate ones. Avant-garde theater’s critique
of bourgeois theater has concentrated on these physical restraints, and
at times tried to lift them without giving up on the reward.
But the transition to a state of indefiniteness will not just drive a
wedge into my spine. The mastered part of reason, too, must go. And
here I find myself taxed with an altogether different quality of disabling.
5 The subject of aesthetic experience is “not the population in its entirety, the
intermingling of all classes, but a subject without particular identity, whose name
is ‘anybody.’” Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Art and Its Paradoxes, (translation
modified by author), Brumaria 9, (2007), pp. 331–32, p. 331.
6 See Friedrich Schiller, On The Aesthetic Education of Man. In a Series of Letters,
Elizabeth M. Wilkinsons and L. A. Willoughby, eds., London: Oxford University
Press, 1967, p. 147.
112
In The Emancipated Spectator, the adaptation of his egalitarian take
on teaching in The Ignorant Schoolmaster to the performing arts,
Rancière claims that the audience need not be “activated” through
either invitations to enter the stage or didactic imperatives, because an
audience engaged in aesthetic experience already makes active use of
their intelligence:
The spectator is active, just like the student or the scientist: He observes,
he selects, he compares, he interprets. He connects what he observes with
many other things he has observed on other stages, in other kinds of spaces.
He makes his poem with the poem that is performed in front of him.7
What kind of intelligence will lend itself so willingly to (an) any-
body? The intelligence that pertains to aesthetic experience appears
like a counter-concept to the General Intellect, which Marx saw as
the immanent antipole to the extreme division of industrial labor,
and which Paolo Virno customized for the post-Fordist performance
economy where every work performer acquires a certain virtuosity in
communicating. The General Intellect consists of topoi koinoi, com-
monplaces, i.e. objectified know-how. The generality in question here
is not that of mankind, but that of people: individuals have access to
that common sphere insofar as their specialization, both social and
economic, involves a twist towards the non-specific, effectively con-
necting them through the generalizations implied in divided labor
where this labor becomes essentially performative.8 Rancière, in con-
trast, seems to have an uncommon intelligence in mind, which would
be at the command of anyone, but whose accessibility depends on an
extraordinary situation. Normally, this intelligence is barred, because
normal life has social institutions and internalized settings stupefy us,
teaching us to stupefy ourselves. Normally, the conventional wisdom
of inequality rules. Art, Rancière echoes Adorno, has the potential to
bypass the ideological homeostatic of subjection justifying itself with
the deficient subjectivity it produces. Thanks to its obstinate fixation
on form, on something less contentful than interaction, the encounter
with art is apt to acquaint us with our power to know what we want
to know, to be who we want to be, to do what we want to do, like the
7 Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” Artforum 3, (2007), pp. 271–
280, p. 277.
8 Cf. Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,”
Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Theory Out of Bounds, vol. 7: Radical Thought
in Italy. A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.
189–212.
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ignorant schoolmaster whose pupils excelled in poetic French after a
short time of learning, although the teacher could not speak to them
and therefore couldn’t pass on anything he knew. Form, in respect to
intelligence, means: what you will not be able to inform me about,
unless I comprehend it myself, while you are here, yet without com-
monplace — with a medium, but one that is external to both of us, no
common place between us.
The Ignorant Schoolmaster mentions the “retarded son” of the
master’s printer whom the master taught Hebrew and who became an
excellent lithographer.9 In The Emancipated Spectator, where Rancière
makes a similarly unreserved pledge to the equality of human faculties,
the mentally disabled are absent. Will the theater work for them as the
non-didactic instruction did for that boy? Much as I understand the
importance of form, the analogy between the ignorant schoolmaster’s
class and the theater mystifies, rather than clarifies, the nature of the
spectator’s intelligence for me. Selecting, comparing, interpreting,
connecting, making one’s own poem — in the case of Joseph Jacotot’s
Dutch students who composed essays on Fénelon’s Télémaque without
prior introduction to French grammar and vocabulary, the philosopher
did not present their documents as evidence either, and I didn’t bother
then, but the projection of that egalitarian teaching method onto a
theater performance makes me want proof. I demand examples of
the spectator’s poetry, since I cannot remember leaving a theater
performance with a poem of my own that verified an uncommon, if
general, intelligence. If something intelligent came out, it did so because
I resisted aesthetic experience, mobilizing all citizenhood I could
muster to keep me from plunging into anybody-ness. “In the aesthetic
state, then, man is Nought [Null],” Schiller infers.10 More than once
did the thought cross my mind that what theater really wanted was an
exceptional dumbness: a zero-point stupidity that would not register on
the common scale of intellectual performance; a non-social stupidity,
not due to unsatisfactory education or lack of personal ambition, but
entirely and essentially human. The institution of theater does what it
can to help me zero out, but ultimately I am left alone with this task:
to experience, i.e. to apply myself to an undercutting of all, which the
world (including me, its inhabitant) expects in terms of an appropriate
9 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual
Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 18.
10 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, p. 145. “Zero” would be a more
precise translation here, as the German “Null” does not imply that man is nothing
or invalid, but rather that one’s personal account is being set back to zero, which
creates the chance of a fresh start anytime, even at an advanced age.
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reaction, in favor of a response more inarticulate, more mushy, more
distorted, in short, more idiotic than a reaction.
Idiocy — in the literal sense of a state of being confined to one’s own
place, enclosed in one’s privacy, limited to what one knows without
access to specialist communication, dissociated from institutional
authority — is inherent in the concept of aesthetic form. Idiocy does
not per se equal stupidity, except in the case of theater it does. For
a performance, be it acting or dancing, to become theatrical art, the
situation must disable interaction. If the type of co-presence that has
form as its summit, its high point of singular-plural communion, shall
prevail over the co-presence of ordinary exchange, everything will
depend on a power that incapacitates that part of the social being
I am, which clings to socio-economic intelligence, to the wisdom of
citizenship. The only weapon against the stupefying plausibility of that
intelligence, whose power arises from the joined forces of competition
and collaboration (the cunning division of labor), is a more powerful,
indeed more comprehensive stupidity, whose origin is idiocy, i.e.
disabled man. A specific human creature may be more or less endowed
with whatever ability its species boasts; but the idea of mankind, of
a human nature, includes the possibility of man without qualities, of
zero man, of man in outright disability. What is commonly referred to
as aesthetic experience denotes a moment of identification between me
and mankind in a state of unknowing apprehension, where form, the
object of aesthetic pleasure, is different from any recognizable shape
(from the product of bestimmende Einbildungskraft, of imagination in
its determining function) because I am too much of a total idiot to have
any particular recognition of it. And theater stands for a layout that
tells me, Here, sit down — do that experiencing, you moron!
Idiocy makes for the difference between taste as a social competence
(knowing what is appropriate and what isn’t) and taste as a sense of
form that belongs to a transitory identity between me and mankind,
unmediated by social knowledge and skills. Idiocy may translate into
ignorance in a situation of teaching, or into dilettantism in a situation
of performing. But in a theater audience, each member will have to
embody idiocy. My body must become the form of apprehension of
aesthetic form; it must be correspondent, not with other spectators and
not with the performers as other human beings who, through some
twist of fate, appear on stage while I am down here watching them, but
with what turns them into an aesthetic phenomenon. Theater’s subject
of aesthetic perception is an any-body jilted in the midst of countless
anybodies. That body simultaneously lags behind and stays ahead of
reaction. Could it be looked at, it would look like the meaning of play
carved into flesh. How to obtain such a body?
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 Schiller distinguished a state of indetermination inclined to-­
wards active, autonomous self-definition from a state of “mere
indetermination.”11 Were he asked today about what he thought of
mental disability, he would perhaps reply that it belonged to the cat-
egory of mere indetermination, since the disabled mind knows no lim-
its because it is “without reality,” and so does not present much of
a chance for the person to reappear from a zeroed-out state with the
face of someone whose “freedom to be what he should be is com-
pletely restored to him.”12 One may, however, doubt if a person with
a socially recognized intellectual disability will ever be given the right
to enter such a state of being zero for the sake of coming back a fresh
subject. Are persons, once others who recognize each other as non-
disabled recognize them as disabled, not too thoroughly defined in
view of what they should be, too urgently completed by those others
for the reason that they assume intellectually disabled persons are not
able to define themselves properly, and need assistance in produc-
ing a meaningful and appreciable personality just like the physically
disabled need someone to help them move and do things? Disability
Studies assert that disabled is a social construction, applied to certain
individuals whose behavior fails to comply with notions of normalcy,
which attracts attention and subsequently leads to their getting tested
for, and confirmed of, biological anomalies (with biological research
findings often passing for a simple, clear, uncontestable truth despite
the ongoing debates among researchers about the genetic origin of
defects and the impact of genes on an organism’s development in
general).13 This holds some additional truth in respect to the social
work that, from that point on, will be performed in order to model
them into persons. While personality is, of course, always influenced
by a social environment’s responses, in case of the disabled person the
environment takes over a majority of those duties we subsume under
the heading of self-definition.
This doesn’t spare spectatorship. During a performance of Regie, a
production by the German collective Monster Truck, which I attended
11 Ibid. — I am not suggesting that Schiller had cognitive disability in mind when
speaking of “Nought,” of course. Indeed, disability seems exactly what was not
on his mind, as he was presupposing that art recipients had a standard faculty of
reason, which could then slip into graceful balance with the sensual.
12 Ibid., p. 147.
13 See Lennard J. Davis, “The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismod-
ernism,” id., Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism & Other Difficult
Positions, New York: New York University Press, 2002, pp. 9–32, esp. pp. 12 and
23, where the author distinguishes between impairment and disability.
116
at Sophiensaele in Berlin, in May 2014, a woman in the first row was
incessantly being caressed by a care worker sitting next to her. Every
time she emitted sounds, started to make a remark, or gestured in
reaction to three members of a disabled theater group performing
onstage together with a cast of other actors and people from the
audience, he would calm her down using his hands in the fashion of
a potter who moulds clay into the shape of a vase. I witnessed there,
I think, how within the normalcy of a theater audience, persons with
intellectual disabilities cannot be idiotic in the manner aesthetics call
for idiocy: they cannot give themselves over to a state of inarticulate,
mushy, distorted presence, because other people who consider
themselves able will hasten to assist them with definition. Once the
disabled label has been attached, access to the aesthetic disability of
anybody-ness will become, if not impossible, extremely difficult for
them. Stupid though they may appear with their reactions, we  —
who cannot help noticing their presence in the audience, and who
feel irritated by the deviant nature of that presence, hampered in our
cultivated process of becoming one with disabled man — will be most
reluctant to grant them the same identification. This we, the social
agent of aesthetic community, wards off the problematic mirror image
of the community’s ideal member.
What Doesn’t Work with Disabled
To the extent that form, as an aesthetic category, has no pre-fixed or
pre-agreed standing in respect to what a particular spectator may be
able to like, the implicit contract that frames the scene of the encounter
with the work takes on the role of providing some orientation. Through
its institutional framing, an object of modern art signals to me just
about how much effort it would take to appreciate it. I will need to get
a sense of this magnitude, because, as Adorno frequently reminds the
readers of his Aesthetic Theory, it is the preciousness accrued through
objective resistance against simple enjoyment that distinguishes the
artwork from the object of consumption or from the “battery of tests” in
the behavioral experiment.14 Anybody’s pleasure is not tantamount to
everyone’s affective consent. Aesthetic subjectivity must be defended
against attempts to produce the objectively pleasurable, wherefore a
work’s degree of unwieldiness matters a lot. Theater that claims to be
art formulates its own version of such an aesthetic estimate, which the
14 See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann,
eds., New York: Continuum, 1997, p. 264.
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recipient receives as an attachment to the theatrical pact’s contract.
Alain Badiou has written a manifesto encouraging such a demanding
theater, conceding that the difference between “theater” (a spectacle
that is intended to titillate our senses) and “Theater” (an aesthetic,
and potentially political, event) will have no other reality than that
of an impertinent request: asking for so-and-so-much more attention,
time, energy, emotional and intellectual investment than popular
entertainment would.15
In The Show Must Go On, Jérôme Bel made something happen on the
theater stage that drove members of the audience to a fierce protest, as
it stripped reception of its established proportions between effort and
experience-as-a-reward. The theater machine and a cast of performers,
with their actions or movements, illustrated a list of popular songs.
While a DJ played “Tonight, Tonight” from a CD, the stage was cast
in darkness. When he changed to “Let the Sunshine In,” the stage
lamps faded in. At the cue of “Come Together,” 20 performers gathered
center-stage, shaking their legs to “I Like to Move It, Move It,” etc. The
performance offered nothing to meet an educated audience’s expecta-
tion of hard, resistant artwork objectivity,16 and this hit the trouble
spot of modern aesthetics: essentially measureless, because defined
in deviation from the measurable, surplus value-driven growth, the
added value of aesthetic experience needs the too much, the excessive
demand on the part of the work.
Theater HORA had requested Bel’s permission to produce The Show
Must Go On. Bel declined. In a discussion after a Disabled Theater
show at the Ruhrtriennale Festival in Essen, in 2013, he justified
his decision with an argument that (irony notwithstanding) claimed
irreconcilability between one stupidity and another. “The Show Must
Go On is about professional performers doing stupid things,” he said.
“If they had performed the piece, it would have been stupid people
doing stupid things, and that, you know, doesn’t work.”17 The stupid
things in The Show Must Go On seem directed at driving the theatrical
pact close to a point of invalidity by conceiving a work that affirms
the anybody-subjectivity of aesthetic experience too literally: a work
nobody will (be able to) find difficult, and yet pronouncedly a work,
15 See Alain Badiou, “Rhapsody for the Theater: A Short Philosophical Treatise,”
Theatre Survey 49, (2008), pp. 187–238.
16 Or maybe it did if one had tried hard enough to receive it as a present. See Gerald
Siegmund, Abwesenheit. Eine performative Ästhetik des Tanzes. William Forsythe,
Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Meg Stuart, Bielefeld: transcript, 2006, pp. 352–368.
17 I am quoting from my own minutes of the conversation. The Theater HORA
members are professional performers, which Bel was certainly aware of.
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an opus of theatrical art, a stage spectacle with a clear form. Like a
lawyer who uses the scope for interpretative latitude between legal
text and spirit of the law in order to twist a paragraph around, the
artist-and-director Bel adjusts the performance to the embodied idiocy
of incapacitated spectatorship in a fashion that, although heeding
the protocol of theater-as-art, ridicules its morale. That strategy of
matching the theater of disabled man with its proper objectivity does,
if we believe Bel’s explanation, not work with cognitively disabled
performers.18
Bel then did work with the HORA members. Disabled Theater is a
consequence of, but no follow-up to The Show Must Go On. Instead
of referring me to my idiosyncratic subjective nullity, this time the
dumbness of the spectacle points to a common insecurity re: how
to deal with disabled people’s behavior, reduplicated in respect to
how they behave as elements of a theatrical work. Ought the stage
appearances of performers with Down’s syndrome to be difficult or
easy to read? Should I pay close attention to the moves for judging their
dance presentations adequately, or would not observing the details
too sharply be more appropriate? If I have the impression that the
dancing is merely flailing limbs, does that reveal a lack of diligence in
my perception and interpretation — in constructing my own poem —
or rather exaggerated scrutiny? Such are the questions that continue
to occupy my mind, and the occupation establishes a pattern of
psychosocial hysteria, which feeds on guilt and hope, and downright
numbs me where I try to resist its injunctions. Speculations on their
inhibitions, sedulously incited by the performance, inhibit the radical
self-inhibition of aesthetic experience that would open me up for a
freer, easier living together in an aesthetic state whose equilibrium
depends less on people acting as each other’s inhibitors than it does in
our normal(izing) society. The social or socio-economic logic of value,
left intact by the mock-respect paid to the difference between aesthetic
and social event in The Show Must Go On, now strikes back. Instead of
separation and identification, there rules the terror of integration. What
should be neutrality, a moment of zero reality and infinite potential, is
filled to the brim with sappy contradictions, informed by the bigotry of
my society that wants and does not want a barrier-free world.
Drawing on the pre-modern inclusiveness of the stultifera navis,
which had the insane and retarded wave from the same deck, Foucault,
in Folie et déraison, defined madness as that which lacks a work or the
18 In the meantime Bel has apparently changed his opinion and includes performers
with disabilities in The Show Must Go On performances.
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purposefulness of work.19 For the social capitalism of our twenty-­first
century societies we may modify this formula: the stigmatized disabled
today is the one with whom living together can never take on the
meaning of co-operation. Whereas adolescent irksomeness forebodes
a future of working together, the co-presence of disabled people drags
along an economic NO FUTURE. Whatever the advantages and dis-
advantages of an integrated society, it will fail to convert life into the
shared venture of working, of creating a work and creating a commu-
nity as a work. We know we must want that society anyway, but after
centuries of capitalism and bourgeois culture have dressed our desire
to be for the more-than-life, particularly so in respect to togetherness,
we are near unable to appreciate mere living side by side.
Whether its director intended it or not, Disabled Theater confirms
that conclusion: by presenting itself as an event, i.e. an encounter that
will be over soon. The bourgeois affect of compassion, which puts the
disabled in one corner with poor children, victims of war and abuse, is
honest in not even considering the possibility of a relation that would
outlast the instant of being moved. Because it will have been brief and
limited to a here-and-now, and leave me relatively secure from further
meetings with disabled people once I have passed the venue’s exit, the
time spent together in one room may offer intensity in exchange for
my agreement to imperil myself: I will shudder to see the dissimilar in
what looks almost like me (the epiphany of how little a difference there
is). I will fear an irregular directness when staring into troubled faces.
I will sigh with relief when one of them does something funny and my
nerves get flooded with the warm, comforting fancy that the two of us
can understand each other, if not in discourse then in our laughing.
Emotionally, this makes for sufficient revenue; it is almost too much,
really, as betrayed by my excessive gratitude for having been granted
the opportunity of such an encounter, now that it is over. But all this
accounting is done without assuming a corporate future, and therefore
the dividends of being over in no sense remember the finiteness of a
work. Announcing that which might qualify the performance as the
perfect aesthetic event (a time span whose finiteness is elevating,
liberating a collective) makes it a non-starter as a work. There is
nothing to be transformed by the event in-coming. The transformation
of the socio-economic work, i.e. the project to be realized by way of
unequally dividing labor and then reassembling it in structures of
19 “What then is madness, in its most general, but most concrete form …? Nothing
else, without doubt, but the absence of (the) work.” Author’s translation from the
preface to the 1st edition of Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à
l’âge classique, Paris: Plon, 1961, p. III.
120
co-operation, into the aesthetic work, in which we all would equally
participate in our extraordinary state of singular plurality  — it has
been cancelled with the disabled, simply for the absence of a socio-
economic perspective.
What Does Work with Disabled (Material)
And yet, integration, on another level, may also be the reason why
the disabled performers work — and why Disabled Theater works as
some work of theatrical art. Adorno discerned in the art of his time a
tendency of the details to self-integrate, to surrender to the whole, “not
under the pressure of planning, but rather because they are themselves
drawn to their annihilation.”20 After form-finding has been freed from
the totalitarianism of the concetto and modello, the perfectly controlled
implementation of an idea, integration becomes a total aesthetic fact.
Form, at best, evolves from the material. As Schiller was beginning to
realize, the brutish, voluntary (or, even worse, involuntary) artistic
invention violates the ethics implied in the aesthetic concept of form.
If its pleasurable experience shall help me access my egalitarian self,
form ought to verify the truth of equality as well through its own gen-
esis — all the more so where the artwork conveys the genetic process
to the beholder. The reality bequeathed to us by twentieth-century’s
expansion and multiplication of artistic genres, namely that art may
use anything as its material, seems ethically acceptable only insofar
as it translates into the maxim that producing a work, should subject
the snippets of the world it turns into fabric when fashioning form to
no more than the absolutely necessary, inevitable violence. An artist’s
attention must be trained to search for the lesser violence, as Derrida
called it in an essay on Lévinas.21 One strategy of traveling this path
has been making the material talk, letting it display its intrinsic formal
qualities. What the visitors witness then is, at once, the form of the
20 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 303.
21 See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thoughts of
Emmanuel Lévinas,” id., Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1978, pp. 79–153, endnote, p. 313. That does not mean art will be soft, peace-
ful, etc. Modern art has every right to be on the side of war against a deceiving peace,
or to band with industrial production against the nostalgia of handicraft. But the
violence implicit in the artwork’s being produced will count as a factor pertaining
to its aesthetic value; and aesthetic perception will develop criteria for evaluating
relations between what had to be broken and bent in order to give a work of art its
form, and what that work has to say about the forces the artist conjured and com-
manded.
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work and an inventory of the material’s inclinations and disinclina-
tions.
Despite the headlock of social contradictions I described above,
my recollection of watching Disabled Theater comprises moments
when the performance acquired a great formal precision — or more
adequately, one such moment pulses throughout the entire ninety
minutes memorized, proffering itself as an alternative time measure.
At this moment, the performers are human matter, which moves and
makes sounds: some of the movements reminding me of actions,
others of movements I know; some of the sounds unfolding into
language, others remaining cluttered, incomprehensible. The form
adopted by that matter originates in responses to directions, in which
we spectators may recognize choreographic instructions. “And then
Jérôme Bel asked the performers …,” the woman on the right says
repeatedly, and the reconstruction of the command in narrative
grammar (third person, past tense) functions as a cue for the cast to
perform what might be a repetition of the original response in reaction
to the repetition of the instruction, a renewal, or a representation,
a quote maybe, a parody. The lacuna, the possible hiatus between
conception and presentation, between past(s) and present, process
and product, to which the performance keeps alerting us, discloses
a second origin of its form: a material origin. Again, the perception,
interpretation, and evaluation of the performers’ performance depend
on the assumption that they are disabled. In respect to the status of
the director’s speech acts, this has the effect of transforming those
utterances from elements of communication into means of composition,
choreography. Unlike in the case with non-disabled actors, it does not
matter for the performance if the performers show themselves willing
or unwilling to meet Bel’s requests; nor does it matter if their level
of understanding and self-command allows them to carry out what
has been asked of them, and if the result satisfies the director or
not. The source of deviations remains as soundless to the audience
as the source of obedience, since the show actively bonds with the
spectators’ disinterest in the performers’ motivation to do or not do
something in an expected manner. And therefore all constellations that
emanate, without compromise, qualify as components of the form.
One can compare the performers in Disabled Theater to the tones of a
twelve-tone row. The artist, Jérôme Bel, employs them according to a
technique that makes whatever their melodic succession and harmonic
simultaneity produces sound right. Their stage appearances need not
observe any laws of harmony, of structure, of dynamics. As long as
the performers figure as tones whose alternation endorses the row, any
behavior will be fine — not because this is a production of a disabled
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theater company intended primarily for the players to have fun, but
quite differently, because it will relate to us a form, one form that
human matter can take on when used as a material, and that form
will be beautiful in the most idealistic, Winckelmannian sense of that
word.22
Making disabled people the material of the work takes place including
their organization as a theater company. In the talk in Essen referred to
above, Bel confessed he’d tried out many things with the HORA per-
formers, yet “nothing worked,” until he finally reverted to the elemen-
tal mechanisms that now make up the dramaturgy: to walk on stage,
to say one’s name; to name one’s disability; to perform a rehearsed
dance solo … Thanks to this reduction (and regression) the performers
are aglow with an aura. Where somebody’s steps upon crossing the
stage are like vibrations of a string that’s being bowed, or a jig saw cut
through a wood block, the movement will be credited an added-value
without having to qualify as a histrionic gesture or a dance movement.
Bel does not continue the tradition of the Judson Church group, who
enlarged the concept of dance to encompass the most common, col-
loquial movements, making walking the epitome of democratic dance
aesthetics. His move in Disabled Theater is more conservative, and at
the same time perhaps more radical. It really concerns the theater, i.e.
the arrangement of experiencing what is performed. While he refuses
to abandon the authority of the artist-as-creator-and-director, insist-
ing on a classic definition of work, he never takes the aesthetic cred-
ibility of that work for granted. Twentieth-century avant-garde artists
who were committed to an agenda of taking art (back) to the formerly
overlooked or despised regions of everyday life, were capable of doing
what they did because they did not doubt for one second the power
of aesthetic perception. The stability of the aesthetic regime enabled
artistic practice to question the frames, the scope, and the very nature
of art. Bel’s work acknowledges a situation where, on the contrary,
the aesthetic mode has become extremely unstable. And in Disabled
Theater he goes to great lengths to reconstruct it under unlikely condi-
tions, succeeding, if he does, thanks to a deliberately cynical horse-
trade with the audience’s inability to take a disabled performer for
anything but a disabled performer — a horse-trade that surreptitiously
re-establishes the theatrical pact, covering its shady dealings with lay-
22 This is perhaps the extreme opposite of what Lennard J. Davis has in mind
when he proposes “Form follows dysfunction” as a maxim for “Dismodernism,”
a re-evaluation and possibly transvaluation of modernism that acknowledges dis-
ability’s share in the modernist project. See Davis, Bending over Backwards, p. 27.
123
ers of raving applause that eventually has relief about the aesthetic the motto. Only the stakes for what counts as agreeing in respect to
value get the better of double-bind guilt. being matter are conveniently lower than those for signing a theatrical
The marginalized is fully integrated in the aesthetic discourse here, pact. It’s enough that they looked good on the stage, says my imaginary
and Disabled Theater thoroughly presents this integration as a potential account-keeping. And here’s a chance to close the book, and let the
pertaining to the special cast of performers, which they themselves performance be over, and do we want to or not?
actualize. Were it only for the impression that the people in front of us
follow the commands of the creator-director, and at times dismiss or
fail to execute them correctly, the material would become visible in the
familiar modernist image of resistance against form. But the conceptual
freedom in Bel’s arrangement leaves enough ease for the performers to
lend their bodies unanimously to the detail’s tendency towards integra-
tion into the whole. Through one of its most conspicuous details, the
spectacle even stages this crux of its aesthetic genesis as a social pro-
cedure. After four dance solos had at first been considered too bad and
sorted out by the director, they are finally shown, too — due to protest
from the group against Bel’s “unjust” decision, as one performer read
to the audience in the version I saw at PACT Zollverein. Bel’s perform-
ers provide the evidence of an intrinsically egalitarian artistic matter:
it does not tolerate selection; it condemns privilege and exclusion; it
obeys orders from the composer, but only as long as he respects mate-
rial equality; it displays a genuinely integrative behavior. Isn’t that
nice, in addition to their matchless energy? Who would deny inclusion
to disabled performers who integrate themselves so eagerly into a work
of art, teaching us how to be one another’s equals?
It would not be difficult to contradict this scene with reference to
others, for example from Monster Truck’s Regie, that show us disabled
persons as tyrants and exploiters, as less adept in feigning benevolence,
more permeable for the worst of socio-economic inequality to spill
out. In those cases, too, we could trace the outcome back to some
non-disabled artists’ strategy. Still, a critique of inclusion and (self-)
integration, which currently are guiding principles of both artistic
and social efforts dealing with disability, ought to reach out beyond
informing us on the conditions of their impossibility. If inclusion and
integration are to mean something to us — and not end up as buzzwords
of populist rhetoric  — we will need a critical investigation into the
conditions of their possibility. Rather than expect from Disabled Theater
a lesson about better interaction with disabled people (and then hate it
because Bel obviously neither delivers this, nor wants to), we can see
in this work the price of integration where it has been taking place:
in aesthetic form. For an unreserved appreciation of disability to keep
an integrative profile, art must turn its power of making anybody its
material into a kind of aesthetic salvation for the bio-socio-economic
disorders. Only those who agree to be matter can be saved — such is

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