THE STAGE

The Stage: Hollow (Solid) Relations
by Richard Wehrenberg

How can the poor be made to work once their illusions have been shattered, and once force has been defeated?
- Guy Debord, Preface to The Society of the Spectacle (1995)

What do we mean by the word stage?  What are we to make of it, how are we to understand how we understand it and how it may understand us?  In the most evident way, the word signifies a distinguishing between 'real' and 'false' things, and in a more devious way, a différance ( = constructed difference that defers meaning) of relationship, of levels of power between participants, and of symbols in and of the stage.  The stage for our purposes will refer to any illusion, any thing that may 'falsify' relation; however, let us be heedful: when declaring some ways of being and existence false and others legitimate, one must differentiate, one must expound, one must delineate to the fullest extent why these ways of being are erroneous and pernicious, why they are undesirable.  It is not the facticity of their existence that needs to be addressed, but the how and why of it, particularly how and why staged relation continues to linger, disseminate, and latch onto our relations so unwaveringly.  It may be too difficult, arduous, or futile a task to assess and/or list all institutions, objects, persons, etc. that are part and parcel of the stage (that rely on some form of staged relation to exist), and to call them out and initiate yet another polemic in a text this condensed; however, let it be our task to look at a few forms of the stage, its phantoms and ancestors, its genealogy and various apparatuses, to better understand how the stage, as a way of organizing socially, politically, economically, et al., hinders our 'growth' ( = a growth we may not know the concrete of, whose goal might not be so easily stated, assessed, or reduced, but a growth which also is, at least, not in the terms of capitalistic ideology) and our relations (which as staged become solid and hollow, seemingly permanent and without depth nor compassion).