Dramaturgies of Change

Abstract

This chapter introduces the idea of dramaturgies of change: actions that create ‘situations’ that are able to tilt social realities and reach deep points of leverage. Such dramaturgies should either lead to value shifts or set in motion incremental dynamics that change the system from the inside out and is radical in its consequences. Appreciating that political drama is about creating situations that symbolically reproduce or reorder political conditions also sheds light on the dramaturgies that may cause deeper cultural shifts. No discourse or imaginary will generate political effects without dramaturgical enactment. Enactment is rarely about any one particular event; instead, it is about creating a new understanding or political reality through a sequence of performances over time. Such performances can either reproduce a political reality (e.g. environmental summits) or they can challenge it (e.g. anticolonial and civil rights movements). This chapter discerns a range of new dramaturgies that problematize fossil mentalities and our captured politics, as well as dramaturgies that breathe life into new discourses and new ways of being in the world. It may be too soon to tell whether they will break the grip of ecological modernization, but they are already opening new stages for political debate beyond the sphere of policymaking. In sum, this chapter calls attention not so much to the new settings or stages of politics, but to the reconfiguration of the political dramaturgy—to the way in which political effects are generated.