Powell, Henry (2020) Successful failures : undoing neoliberal representation through interpretations of clown. (PhD thesis), Kingston University, .
Abstract
Neoliberalism is by now understood as both an approach to government and also the defining political movement of the last fifty years. In both instances, neoliberalism is built on the assumption that the state is not ideally placed to create economic growth or provide a social safety net, and that instead private companies, private individuals, and, most importantly, unhindered markets are best placed to generate economic growth and provide optimum conditions for social equality. Rather than delivering on these promises, however, neoliberalism has fused individual self-interest with the most devastating effects of capitalism, thereby increasing inequalities, creating newly excluded populations, generating widespread precarity and delivering mass unemployment. This thesis utilises the practices and traditions of clown, as a means of critiquing neoliberal hegemony. In so doing it brings a traditional popular performance mode into conversation with politics. In particular, by examining neoliberal logic from the point of view of the clown, in practice and in theory, its intention is to rescue failure from its current condition as always and everywhere to be avoided. It argues that since neoliberalism celebrates only success, failure has been robbed of its productive potential in both social and political terms. The clown is ideally positioned to redeem failure, because of his expert skill in this area. Finally, this thesis maps the relationships between different discourses — politics and popular performance — with the aim of generating insights that have not yet been articulated.
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