Abstract
Through an analysis of Kate Tempest’s highly innovative play Wasted (Latitude Festival, 2011; published 2013), this chapter examines the relation between affect, aesthetic form and power, focusing on the protagonists’ attempts to resist the neoliberal discourses of resilience and self-development. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s understanding of the present as a mediated affect and on Sarah Ahmed’s concept of the stickiness of affects, Escoda explores the clash between the positive affects that enable mutual care and increase the protagonists’ power to act on their lives and in the world, and the negative affects of fear, anxiety and dejection that proliferate in their neoliberal capitalist context, and ponders the spectators’ own potential to engage in positive affects of mutual trust and responsibility for others.
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Notes
- 1.
Commissioned by Paines Plough, the play premiered at Latitude Festival on 15 July 2011, directed by James Grieve.
- 2.
Like Stuart Hall, I use the term “neoliberal” to refer to an economic model grounded “in the idea of the ‘free, possessive individual’” where “[s]tate-led ‘social engineering’ must never prevail over corporate and private interests” (2011, 706), while also taking into account that it is a reductive term, that sacrifices “attention to internal complexities and geo-historical specificity” (2011, 706). For a summary of the main theoretical approaches to neoliberalism and an attempt to come to terms with the blanket applicability of the term, see also Clarke (2008). Like Berlant, I also believe that the present, neoliberal conjuncture is perceived affectively, and that neoliberalism’s “mediated affective responses exemplify a shared historical sense” (2011, 3; italics in the original).
- 3.
Even though this chapter carries out an essentially textual analysis of the play, occasional references are made to Iván Morales’s 2017 production at Barcelona’s Sala Beckett (17 February-12 March 2017). Morales’s Wasted was the first production of a play by Tempest to take place in Catalonia (as well as in Spain).
- 4.
- 5.
The 2011 England riots, more widely known as the London Riots, started when thousands of people rioted in cities and towns across England, resulting in the deaths of five people. As Paul Lewis puts it, “[w]hat began as a gathering of around 200 protesters demanding answers over the death of Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by police on Thursday, culminated twelve hours later in a full-scale riot that saw looting spread across north-London suburbs” (2011).
- 6.
The Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia with Mohamed Bouazizi’s decision to set fire to himself in order to protest against police officers shutting down his business, was “a wave of pro-democracy protests and uprisings that took place in the Middle East and North Africa beginning in 2010 and 2011, challenging some of the region’s entrenched authoritarian regimes” (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020). In all cases, the protests were violently repressed, and “demonstrators expressing political and economic grievances faced violent crackdowns by their countries’ security forces” (Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020). With protests against authoritarianism and exploitation continuing to take place globally—e.g., in Chile as recently as October 2019–February 2020—Wasted may indeed be described as uncannily prescient. In both these cases, too, empathy is seen as the key to constructing a mutually caring society—Chilean protesters asking for more empathy on the part of the financial elites resonates with the chorus in scene one of Tempest’s play claiming that “[w]e’re less empathetic and more / Selfish, / Less independent and more / Helpless” (9).
- 7.
My translation from the Catalan source, which reads: “Gràcies per venir. La vida és una merda. La vida és collonuda. Encara aguantem hòsties a les cames? Ben drets, aquí? Haurem de tornar a confiar? Posar-nos al davant? Això és casa nostra? De qui és el món ara? Qui s’abraça tan fort ara? Qui cony ens salvarà? Per què vull somiar? Somiar tan fort fa mal.”
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Escoda, C. (2021). Affects and the Development of Political Subjectivity: From Resilience to Agency in Kae Tempest’s Wasted. In: Aragay, M., Delgado-García, C., Middeke, M. (eds) Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58486-3_13
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