Theatricality as an Interdisciplinary Problem

Peetz, Julia

doi:10.1080/13528165.2019.1641325

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…I frame these DVAs and their promotion as a form of theatre, by turning to studies on theatricality (Peetz, 2019) and dramaturgical sociology (Goffman, 1956). As theatre, technological interaction assigns specific character roles to both humans and machines.…”

Section: Case Study and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Platform Visions and Invasions: Spatial (Re)imaginations in Big Tech Discourse

Niessen

Atalaia

Luchs

et al. 2023

SPIR

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This panel analyzes the textual and audiovisual discourses in which big tech companies envision social spaces and their platforms’ roles in relation to those spaces. The panel asks: What are the visions of human life and technology that big tech companies narrate in relation to public and social spaces? And how do these tech-generated visions compare to current insights in and critiques of how these companies intervene in and disrupt social spaces? Situated within the field of critical platform studies, the panel’s premise is that the discourses produced by tech companies form an integral part of these companies’ interventions in people’s relations with themselves, others, and their environments. In order to develop a critical understanding of the platform society, it is crucial to examine those discourses through which tech companies present themselves almost as state-like powers that can be trusted with “public” services. Employing methods of textual and visual analysis, this panel offers such perspective. In its analysis of big tech’s spatial visions, the panel moves between different scales of spaces (domestic, educational, urban, extraterrestrial). In relation to these spaces, the panel articulates a discrepancy between the visions of life produced by tech companies and big tech’s invasive, perhaps even extractivist and colonial logic.

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Section: Case Study and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Platform Visions and Invasions: Spatial (Re)imaginations in Big Tech Discourse

Niessen

Atalaia

Luchs

et al. 2023

SPIR

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“…I have argued elsewhere that audiences' distrust is ineradicable from the theatrical situation that defines US presidential politics (Peetz 2019a(Peetz , 2019c, since the audiences of presidential performances will be aware on some level of the theatrical constructedness of the president's public performances. Audiences will understand, in other words, that politicians always exist in public in response to a particular gaze and with a particular agenda: as audiences, it is that consciously constructed agenda that they are exposed to, not any supposedly unguarded presidential self.…”

Section: 'Everybody Else Is Listening': the Conventional Theatricality Of The Us Presidencymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather than arguing against the usage of the term 'theatrical' as a label denoting ineffectuality or a lack of material consequences, the present article makes the more expansive argument that it is necessary to view all of US presidential politics as 'theatrical' in a specific sense (see Féral 2002;Nield 2014;Peetz 2019c), one that stipulates that public performance constructs the presidential self and the president's national audience as abstract, quasi-fictional entities. The article draws on a corpus of 20 in-depth interviews I conducted with US speechwriters that encompasses the perspectives of a broad span of speechwriters from the last five pre-Trump presidencies and focuses particularly on presidential speechwriters spanning administrations and campaigns from Reagan to Obama.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

The counter-theatricality of right-wing populist performance

Peetz

2021

Studies in Theatre and Performance

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This article investigates Donald Trump's performances of right-wing populism, contrasting these with the professional theatrical practice of US political speechwriting. The public performances of US presidents are theatrical constructions in a broad conceptual interpretation of the term: as speechwriters work to construct the presidential persona and the national audience, they abstract and fictionalize both the presidential self and the national public. The resulting presidential persona is a theatrical construction designed to appeal to an idealized national community. Much of the appeal of Trump's populism, this article posits, lies in his efforts to eschew the professionalized theatricality of US presidential performance. Drawing on in-depth interviews the author conducted with US political speechwriters -primarily presidential speechwriters spanning administrations and campaigns from Reagan to Obama -the article seeks to account for the counter-theatrical appeal of the Trump presidency and of performances of right-wing populism more broadly. Building on the speechwriters' specialist knowledge, the historical conditions that have allowed performances of rightwing populism to flourish are explored. The article interrogates right-wing populism's exploitation of institutional distrust as a dominant political affect and its undermining of integrative concepts of the nation in favour of a definition of 'the people' in terms of white, patriarchal nativism.

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Gezi’s Many Women in Red: A genealogy of an icon from street to stage

Verstraete¹

2022

Performance Research

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Theatricality as an Interdisciplinary Problem

Cited by 4 publications

References 16 publications

Platform Visions and Invasions: Spatial (Re)imaginations in Big Tech Discourse

Platform Visions and Invasions: Spatial (Re)imaginations in Big Tech Discourse

The counter-theatricality of right-wing populist performance

Gezi’s Many Women in Red: A genealogy of an icon from street to stage

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