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Comment by Michael Shane Boyle on September 10, 2012 at 5:22

I agree with Tavia. As much as I appreciate McKenzie's work, I would hesitate to call him a Marxist. His account seems much more closely aligned with a post-structuralist project, loosely informed as it may be by Marcuse. The performance principle is more a psychoanalytic category than an actual Marxist category (in that for Marcuse it historicized social life according to the reality principle). That's not to say that post-structuralism (or psychoanalysis for that matter) is necessarily mutually exclusive to historical materialism, but in Performance Studies this does often seem the case. Among senior scholars in the field, Randy Martin's work seems the closest to offering a materialist analysis of performance and social life. I think the place to start integrating performance with Marxism (beyond the Frankfurt School) is Raymond Williams.

Comment by Tavia Nyong’o on September 10, 2012 at 4:05

McKenzie leans heavily on Lyotard's account of the performance principle in The Postmodern Condition. I would also suggest Randy Martin's work -- he is definitely working along the Marxist grain, and has interesting things to say about performance in relation to both art and political economy.

Comment by Drew Milne on September 9, 2012 at 23:01

I'll check that out, sounds interesting. Thanks.

Comment by Drew Milne on September 5, 2012 at 9:36

I'm not sure if it is of interest, but I published an essay on Adorno and performance which includes some thoughts on Marxism and performance in:

Drew Milne, 'Processual Performance: Critical Notes on Adorno's Autonomous Artwork', in As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century, eds. Matthew Beaumont, Andrew Hemingway, Esther Leslie and John Roberts (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 347-366. I'd be grateful for any suggestions of relevant reading.

Comment by Drew Milne on September 3, 2012 at 12:19

One critical question for any contemporary Marxist approach to performance, or so it seems to me, is the distinction between a) performance as an orientation in and through artistic praxis, versus b) performance as a criteria within economic calculi, labour management and audit praxis. What would it mean to audit performance without implicitly engaging in capitalist rationality?

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