From Social to Institutional Dramaturgy: Archive Policy and the Defeat of the Public

The notion of the public sphere, as coined by Jürgen Habermas, is premised on distinctions between private individuals and the state. Nancy Fraser alerts that any typology of public sphere is inherently a structured set of rules of social inclusion and exclusion. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge analyse the way in which the mediatised public sphere of the twentieth century absorbed the proletarian experience into a negation of their identity. Finally, according to Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović, in neoliberal capitalism, what is repressed is no longer the private individual but the public itself. The abundant use of theatrical concepts in these studies points to theatricality and performativity as constituent parts of any form of public sphere. Through the methods of social dramaturgy and institutional dramaturgy, I propose in this essay that digital archival technologies (social media) produced new forms of social choreography that negate the commons.