Affect and the Politics of Abstraction in British New Writing

Watkinson, Philip (2021) Affect and the Politics of Abstraction in British New Writing. In: Affects in 21st-Century British Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 171-189. ISBN 9783030584856

Abstract

This chapter examines the intimate relationship between affect and abstraction in contemporary performance. Though an analysis of debbie tucker green’s a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun) (2017) and Anders Lustgarten’s The Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie (2016), Watkinson explores the act of abstracting as an affective process that manifests formally in British new writing. By studying how abstraction is embedded into all aspects of the theatrical milieu, Watkinson argues that these plays express the negative affects (fear, anxiety) that proliferate in neoliberal capitalist contexts and gesture towards how well-placed spectators are to proactively respond to the conditions that produce these affects.