DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 The Theatre of Migration, or: Gamification, Affect, and Biopolitics in Christoph Schlingensief’s Bitte liebt Österreich Irina Simova Reed College Abstract: The article reads Christoph Schlingensief ’s performance Bitte liebt Österreich (2000) as disclosing and critiquing a conundrum in the construction of human rights and exposing the biopolitical as a structural feature of the democratic dispositif and the classical public sphere� Schlingensief ’s ethically ambivalent strategy of over-identification traces the substitution of deliberative political models with forms of gamification, thus illuminating the production of “bare life” in the context of late-stage capitalism� The article maintains that Schlingensief investigates the emerging attention economies and their subjectification techniques, exposing the ways in which affect produces and organizes identities and publics under neoliberalism� Keywords: gamification, biopolitics, over-identification, affect, attention economy Christoph Schlingensief ’s performance Bitte liebt Österreich - organized as a response against the inclusion of the far-right Freedom Party in the Austrian government in early 2000 - has been read both as a generative critical intervention into the Austrian public sphere’s exclusionary politics and as an ethically ambivalent aesthetic experiment� Part of the Wiener Festwochen, the event consisted of housing twelve asylum seekers in a container camp on Vienna’s Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz and staging “a seven-day-long refugee elimination game/ multimedia installation” (Todorut 89) based on the reality TV show format of Big Brother with the goal of selecting one “contestant” to win Austrian citizenship� The performance artist, director, and provocateur Schlingensief centered his intervention on the figure of the asylum seeker as a key conceptual persona of the present as well as on the overdetermined history of the container city/ deportation camp� 168 Irina Simova DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 Examining Schlingensief ’s aesthetic strategies, scholars such as Silvija Jestrovic 1 and Ilinca Todorut have questioned the suspended agency of the asylum seekers within the performance, foregrounding the mechanisms of identity erasure deployed by the artist� Todorut succinctly describes the ambivalence of Schlingensief ’s intervention: on the one hand, “[t]he project glamorized the reductive label of ‘refugee’ stamped on a diversity of people whose rich lives and varied backgrounds get demoted to a short perfunctory bio on an Internet form” (97). Yet it also “highlighted the absurd imperial violence that forces people into the categories of ‘refugee,’ ‘foreigner,’ or ‘asylum seeker’” (97). Working within this ambivalence, I read Bitte liebt Österreich as targeting a conundrum in the construction of human rights by exposing this violence not as arbitrary or accidental, 2 but rather as a foundational feature of the democratic political dispositif � Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, I argue that the structuring of the performance critically mirrors the ways in which the deliberative democratic model constitutes the figure of the asylum seeker as always already politically non-agential� This feature of the democratic state positions individuals at a representational impasse, facilitating their reduction to “bare life.” By (violently) replicating the mechanisms through which the asylum seekers’ political and deliberative agency is obviated and curtailed, Schlingensief ’s performance becomes an “image disruption machine” ( Bildstörungsmaschin e) 3 not only in terms of the Freedom Party’s far-right rhetoric, but also with regard to deficiencies he locates in the classical categories of the public sphere� In other words, my argument highlights an undertheorized aspect of Schlingensief ’s performance - the exposure and critique of the biopolitical as structurally inherent in democratic models� As argued, a number of scholars have theorized the radically ambivalent ethics of Bitte liebt Österreich and have made a case for the performance’s critical potential� The artistic research collective BAVO 4 has read Schlingensief ’s intervention as a form of “over-identification” - an aesthetic strategy predicated on a calculated overalignment with what one seeks to critique, amplifying it “in its most extreme, dystopian form” (Boie and Pouwels, “Introduction” 7) and thereby “radically confront[ing] the current order with the ultimate consequences of its own principles” (8). 5 Verena Krieger has applied the concept of “subversive Affirmation” (171) to describe Schlingensief ’s performance, as in her estimation it is marked by the undecidability of a “Doppelstruktur von (scheinbarer) Affirmation und (tatsächlicher) Nicht-Affirmation” (175). Along similar lines, Ilinca Todorut has emphasized that Schlingensief was intentional in replicating the FPÖ’s anti-immigration rhetoric (“We produce the images that simply take seriously Jörg Haider and his words, ” he states in Paul Poet’s documentary about Bitte liebt Österreich, Ausländer raus! ) � Todorut builds DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 The Theatre of Migration 169 on philosopher Burghart Schmidt’s thesis in Poet’s documentary, which reads Schlingensief ’s method as an instantiation of the hermeneutic of citation defined by Benjamin in connection to the work of Karl Kraus. 6 Benjamin identified citation as Kraus’s “basic polemic procedure” (453), an approach Todorut sees continued in Schlingensief ’s work whereby positioning citations strategically outside of their original context constitutes a gesture of critique and estrangement. Schlingensief, Todorut claims, “quoted what was already there - slogans, images, and TV formats - but detourned them through jolting juxtapositions following a principle of collage” (92). Drawing on these arguments, I claim that Schlingensief works through a form of redoubling of reification to mirror the mechanisms through which the political slips into the biopolitical, thus pointing to a blind spot in the makeup of political and social rights� What is more, Bitte liebt Österreich reveals the contemporary public sphere as implicated not only in structural biopolitics, but also in newer, neoliberal mandates for organizing and managing life � In her discussion of contemporary performance, 7 Claire Bishop observes a shift since the 1990s toward what she calls “delegated performance,” i�e�, “the act of hiring non-professionals or specialists in other fields to undertake the job of being present and performing at a particular time and a particular place on behalf of the artist, and following his/ her instructions” (219). 8 This shift has generated heated debates about the ethics of representation that subtend this “outsourcing” and “management” of other subjects as carriers of meaning in a performance� 9 Bitte liebt Österreich engages in such strategic ambiguity as an intervention designed to “reify precisely in order to discuss reification” (239) in the context of late-stage capitalism. Schlingensief ’s experiment in “outsourcing” and “management” of the asylum seekers, I argue, exposes the proliferation of the language of capital into the performance itself not only in its form, but also in its content� Bitte liebt Österreich becomes an exploration of the marketization of the political 10 and the resulting restructuring of classical categories of agency and representation� To be sure, by (parodically) replicating the format of Big Brother in Bitte liebt Österreich , Schlingensief critically reflects forms of gamification and surveillance culture that, as Gilles Deleuze argues, define neoliberalism’s new forms of control and “immanentize game dynamics into every-day life” (Bratich 70). Schlingensief ’s intervention mirrors the ways in which categories such as “justice (and its subelements, such as liberty, equality, fairness), individual and popular sovereignty, and the rule of law” become “economized” (Brown, Undoing the Demos 22)� Faced with the political impasse of their status, the asylum seekers are invited to overcome it through competition, ingenuity, and self-disclosure in the context of game dynamics� Bitte liebt Österreich , however, does not participate in the mediatic illusion of self-expression and autonomy (it remains 170 Irina Simova DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 unclear if the presented biographies of the participants in the performance were authentic or not 11 ), but rather foregrounds the disquieting possibility that the non-agential status of “bare life” is increasingly fused with and conducive to forms of gamification. In other words, the performance critically replicates shifts in the public sphere in which the acquisition of rights is supplanted by neoliberal principles and their competitive/ survivalist performance scripts� Through its structure, Bitte liebt Österreich also presciently captures latestage capitalism’s emerging attention economy, which monetizes self-commodification and emotional engagement. Focusing on the recruitment of negative affect in this context, Schlingensief explicitly calls the mobilization of far-right rhetoric by the Freedom Party and the (Neue) Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s largest newspaper, “neue Währung” (“new currency”). 12 My intervention thus claims that Schlingensief ’s work moves beyond Frederic Jameson’s verdict of postmodernity’s disinvestment in affect 13 and is, in fact, heavily interested in investigating the production and co-option of affective resources via the restructuring of personal and political agency. In addition to repurposing negative affect in the context of over-identification and subversive affirmation, Bitte liebt Österreich , I contend, reveals the ways in which affect functions as a mechanism of subjectification and an instrument in the shift away from deliberation models in the public sphere under late-stage capitalism� In order to unpack the complex structure of Schlingensief ’s performance, this article is divided into four sections. The first one sketches briefly the performance itself� The second focuses on the container form as a political space and the aporia of political rights at the core of Bitte liebt Österreich (as theorized by Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben)� The third addresses Schlingensief ’s media aesthetics and the principle of gamification that circumscribes the agency of the asylum seeker-performers. The fourth and final part turns to the attention economy and the politics of affect. In February 2000, Wolfgang Schüssel, the leader of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei or ÖVP) formed a governing coalition with Jörg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs or FPÖ)� This decision incorporated a right-wing, populist, and anti-immigrant party into a European government for the first time since World War II� 14 In response, weekly demonstrations were organized in Austria, and the European Union de facto ostracized the Austrian government (while no official legal sanctions could be imposed, the member states enacted a cordon sanitaire around the country, freezing diplomatic relations)� That summer, from June 11-17, Christoph Schlingensief staged his action Bitte liebt Österreich (Please Love Austria) as part of the annual Vienna festival (Wiener Festwochen). In interviews, Schlingensief described his project in vi- DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 The Theatre of Migration 171 sual terms as a “Bild an der Wand” (“picture on the wall” 15 ), claiming that he and his team were “[…] producing images that simply take FPÖ leader Jörg Haider and his slogans at their word” (qtd. in Langston 235). Schlingensief ’s art installation was erected on Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz and consisted of a number of steel containers and a courtyard surrounded by a fence, which separated the performance compound from the rest of the square� Within the compound, Schlingensief confined twelve disguised asylum seekers from Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe� The organizational principle of the performance mimicked the structure of the then very popular reality television show Big Brother � The containers constituted a panopticon, in which six cameras transmitted the life of the asylum seekers 24/ 7 online� CCTV also fed footage from the containers to monitors viewable on site� Schlingensief invited the Austrian public to vote daily, either online or by phone, for two participants who were then expelled from the container and symbolically deported from the country in a public ceremony� The advertised prize for the winner was an opportunity to obtain citizenship through an arranged marriage with an “Austrian who would volunteer for the task” (Todorut 90) as well as 35,000 schillings (the equivalent of about 2,500 euro)� In addition to the video and online surveillance, the audience on the square was actively encouraged to take advantage of peepholes in the compound fencing to observe the “life” of the asylum seekers firsthand. The container city/ deportation camp focused the attention of the Austrian public sphere, drawing daily crowds to Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz and initiating spontaneous, often combative exchanges between members of the audience� The compound was attacked multiple times and set on fire once. Left-wing protestors “liberated” the asylum seekers on the fourth day, taking down the billboard with the inscription Ausländer Raus! ( Foreigners Out! ) which had stood over the compound. Yet Schlingensief declared that “nothing had been won” through this gesture and continued the performance as planned until the announcement of the winner on the seventh day� To be sure, Schlingensief ’s choice of the container form is overdetermined: it indexes the vectors of globalization as “the crowning element of a logic of modularization and optimized distribution” (Klose 5) that defines transnational logistics in late-stage capitalism. Yet Schlingensief juxtaposes this spatial and temporal regime of uninterrupted mobility and availability with a different figuration of the container form - one of immobility and spatial containment. As Alexander Klose has argued, the container has become a universal unit for the “quick preparation of functional spaces” (61) since the 1970s. From housing for asylum seekers and on-site laborers to guardhouses to university and administrative facilities, the anonymity and functionality of the container has permeated “the most varied social fields and areas of function” (62). Schlingensief ’s 172 Irina Simova DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 choice of spatial arrangement for the performance thus immediately questions the myth of uninterrupted flows of globalization and foregrounds the constant production of places of confinement in an economy that is predicated on purportedly seamless transnational exchange� Denise Varney underscores another dimension of Bitte liebt Österreich ’s overdetermined form. In her account, Schlingensief ’s performance fleshes out the coterminous nature of both liberal multinational democracies and totalitarian states in “which the processes of elimination, of inclusion and exclusion define the boundaries of modern life” (117). The container compound is a cipher simultaneously referencing “the transnational flows of human cargo - immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees - that were but the latest wave of displaced peoples impounded in ships, detention centres and other places of transient life” as well as “the spectre of Nazi concentration camps” (117). Varney reads Schlingensief ’s choice of the container form as bearing witness to Agamben’s argument that “the camp is ‘the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living’” (117), thus “materializ[ing] the link between Hitler and Haider” (117). Building on these insights, I claim that Schlingensief goes beyond merely registering the continuity between the container and the concentration camp� Instead, his aesthetic strategy critically mirrors, refracts and thereby estranges the mechanisms through which the biopolitical itself emerges� Schlingensief ’s choice to organize the performance around the conceptual persona of the asylum seeker centers a foundational problem of political modernity� As Giorgio Agamben argues in Homo Sacer (1998), “[i]f refugees […] represent such a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state, this is above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality , they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis” (131). Agamben’s argument builds on Hannah Arendt’s insights in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Arendt famously questions the ideological presumption that the rights associated with belonging to a national political community, i�e�, the rights of the citizen, are a secondary construct building on a set of universal rights of the person� Theorizing the proliferation of stateless refugees and displaced people after World War II, Arendt claims that paradoxically the opposite is true: the abolition of the civic rights of individuals de facto annihilates their human rights as well� It is only via the full membership in a sovereign state that humans are afforded access to the “right to have rights” (Arendt, Origins 296—97). In fact, it is precisely this reversed dependency that opens up the space for the production of “bare life�” 16 The ultimate sleight of hand of political modernity, as Agamben argues, is that “[r]ights are attributed to man (or originate in him) solely to the extent that man is the immediately vanishing ground (who must never come to light as such) of the citizen” (128) . DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 The Theatre of Migration 173 For Agamben and Arendt the refugee thus emerges as the figure par excellence defined by the split between “man” and “political subject”: “Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presupposition of the political domain - bare life - to appear for an instant within that domain” (Agamben 131). Schlingensief ’s focus on the asylum seeker discloses the non-agential status of the refugee not just within the exclusionary scripts of far-right ideology; it highlights the foundational place of biopolitical structures in the democratic makeup of social and political rights� If Nazism’s own biopolitical program is predicated precisely on killing “the juridical person in man” (see Arendt, Origins 447) by abrogating subjects’ civic rights and thus reducing them to “bare life,” Schlingensief points to the fissure between “man” and “political subject” which continues to structure the contemporary body politic� Bitte liebt Österreich makes this separation legible by refusing to engage the asylum seekers as political agents: throughout the performance, the contestants are construed as voyeuristic objects of political provocation, but never as part of a community endowed with the right to political action and speech� The container form replicates the barrier to the space of the agora/ polis that their status entails� The performance thus foregrounds the regulatory architectures (from concentration to deportation camps) that organize their existence as “bare life�” Bringing the concentration camp and its colonial history 17 together with contemporary homines sacri - stowaways, refugees, labor migrants, victims of human trafficking, and stateless minorities - Schlingensief ’s container both evokes and subverts the way in which biopolitics defines the boundaries of modern life. The question of the “container order” at the center of Bitte liebt Österreich also maps out the tension between national and transnational public spheres� Nancy Fraser has discussed the connection between deliberative democracy models (famously theorized by Jürgen Habermas) and a “Westphalian political imaginary” (10), contending that the classic public sphere model “tacitly identifie[s] members of the public with the citizenry of a democratic Westphalian state” (12). In other words, Fraser argues that the historical development of modern publicity as coinciding with the rise of the nation-state has in fact naturalized the merger of social structure, national identity, and territory, such that the Westphalian state has become “fused with the imagined community of the nation” (13). 18 However, global phenomena such as climate change, the securitization paradigm, and the “war on terror” disclose the clear discrepancy between transnational spheres of mobilization of public opinion and the borders of territorial states� This incongruity underwrites Fraser’s skepticism about the applicability of the deliberative model to the contemporary state of the public sphere: 174 Irina Simova DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 […] the equation of citizenship, nationality, and territorial residence is belied by such phenomena as migrations, diasporas, dualand triple citizenship arrangements, indigenous community membership, and patterns of multiple residency� Every state now has non-citizens on its territory; most are multicultural and/ or multinational; and every nationality is territorially dispersed� Equally confounding, however, is the fact that public spheres today are not coextensive with political membership� Often the interlocutors are neither co-nationals nor fellow citizens� The opinion they generate, therefore, represents neither the common interest nor the general will of any demos � Far from institutionalizing debate among citizens who share a common status as political equals, post-Westphalian publicity appears in the eyes of many observers to empower transnational elites, who possess the material and symbolic prerequisites for global networking. (22) Fraser’s argument questions the validity of equating the demos with the citizenry, which goes against the actual production of publics and counterpublics not only in a transnational frame, but also within the (ever more putative) confines of the nation-state� In other words, Fraser’s approach points to the incompatibility of a nationality-based set of rights with democratic representation (on which the criteria of legitimacy and efficacy of the public sphere are grounded). Against this background, Schlingensief ’s container form indexes the globalizing dynamics that in fact accelerate the production of “bare life” by multiplying public spheres that are not “coextensive with political membership” (Fraser 22). Schlingensief not only stages the contradictions of the national and transnational public sphere spatially by juxtaposing the “life zone” of the agora and the “death zone” of the deportation/ detention camp but also replicates in his performance the basic mechanisms of exclusion that are at the core of Fraser’s critique� While the mediatic characteristics of Bitte liebt Österreich have been the center of sustained scholarly debate, one specific feature of the performance has received little to no attention: the exclusion of the asylum seekers from any public deliberations about their status and agency� If the political realm, as Arendt argues, “arises out of acting and speaking together” ( The Human Condition 198), then the performance precludes precisely such possibility� The contestants did not (and could not) take part in the intense and volatile exchanges in which members of the public engaged throughout the event and, as Denise Varney notes, neither have they “to date, spoken in public about their experience” (112). This lack of political self-representation is a structural feature of Bitte liebt Österreich that mirrors both Fraser’s critique of the incongruity between public spheres and political membership and Arendt and Agamben’s discussion of the limits of political rights� By mobilizing the ethically ambiguous form of delegated performance, Schlingensief redoubles on a formal level the reduction of DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 The Theatre of Migration 175 the asylum seekers to a juridically and politically non-agential collective body bound within externally imposed scripts for action� The asylum seekers are construed as objects of surveillance and entertainment, not as stakeholders and interlocutors in the construction of public opinion� The impasse of inclusion through the means of the public sphere is solved via market principles - aligning Schlingensief ’s performance with Wendy Brown’s critique of neoliberal dynamics which supplant key aspects of the legal and political order� 19 The refugees are invited to engage in competition and self-exposure as a pathway to (potentially) transition from “bare life” to political agency� Their presence, rights, and identities are mediated through gamification. Richard Langston has drawn attention to the complex mediatic structure of Schlingensief ’s performance� While “[c]omprehensive surveillance and the promise of total transparency” define “television’s reproduction of postmodern society’s phantasmagoria of authenticity, transparency, and agency” (239), Bitte liebt Österreich ’s reality TV format does not give access to the unmediated real� Drawing on the work of media scholar Mark Andrejevic, Langston underscores reality TV’s production of a short circuit between the imaginary and the real, sublating the “abstract nature of representation” in the viewer’s mind “so that representation now becomes all of real experience” (237—38). Just as reality TV strives to “cast off what is believed to be its material ideological apparatus” (238), so too does Schlingensief ’s performance purport to circumvent the veil of mediation� In both cases, however, the search for access to the real reveals nothing but the “reality of mediation” (Andrejevic 215), i.e., the overdetermined scripts of a highly constructed format� Like Big Brother , Bitte liebt Österreich stages the “transparency” of a “scripted art event masterminded by a notorious provocateur and performed in conjunction with an arts fest” (Langston 238). Yet, while the container does not produce transparency, Schlingensief ’s performance, I argue, renders legible the mechanisms of reduced agency that organize late-stage capitalism and its effects on the public sphere in a different way: through the principle of gamification. In his book Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), Patrick Jagoda maintains that “[g]amification […] marks a condition of seepage or doubling through which game mechanics and activities influence work, leisure, thought, and social relations - key ways people interface with reality today” (12). Jagoda links the preponderance of gamification in contemporary culture to the logic of late capital, claiming that “[t]he games that inundate the present are action-oriented mediations that shape everyday experience through neoliberal principles” (12). New media formats such as reality TV and video games reflect this process, as they are organized around “competition, repetition and quantified objectives” 176 Irina Simova DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 ( Jagoda 12) which replicate and “correspond with” (12) late-stage capitalism’s performative logic� Jagoda concludes that “games simultaneously index and drive the development of neoliberalism” (12) and the agential scripts imposed on its subjects� In his prescient article “Postscript on the Societies of Control” from the early 1990s, Gilles Deleuze also famously identifies game shows as a symptom of a shift in power from the disciplinary confines of enclosures to a system of continuous modulations of incentives for behavioral decisions� In this sense, he argues, games mirror social reality: “If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision� […] [T]he corporation constantly presents brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within”. (4—5) In other words, in an environment that sees the market as the sole regulator of relationships, 20 individuals have to maintain a “competitive edge” in a game that, as Jagoda argues, “transforms the other into a rival with whom one does not communicate directly but rather, via playful or predatory means, defeats in order to maximize self-interest” (22). Neoliberalism thus substitutes the production of public opinion and homo politicus with the principle of competition and homo oeconomicus � 21 The Other is not structured as a communicative partner, but an adversary in a system that is constructed around maximized outcomes� In this sense, reality TV reflects late-stage capitalism’s “Real.” It organizes an experience, which, albeit scripted, replicates the current conditions of social production� Reality TV shows function as experiments in mastering challenges and meeting objectives� In their more extreme versions, they probe the limits of bios , i�e�, of survival through competition and strategizing� In their less extreme versions, they show the infiltration of capital into the spheres of human intimacy where the “soft skills” of self-branding, emotion management, the performance of “authenticity,” “relatability,” and “likeability” become assets in the production of human capital� Bitte liebt Österreich exists precisely in this continuum� Competitive testing and self-fashioning define the parameters of Schlingensief ’s delegated performance� Schlingensief ’s container experience choreographs and critiques assimilation and integration scripts� The contestants are awoken every morning by the sound of Jörg Haider’s anti-immigration speeches, which are projected through loudspeakers throughout the container, and take daily language courses in German� In a disturbing sequence captured by the Paul Poet documentary, the asylum seekers dance to a racist Viennese song� Locked into the imperative for competing in and mastering non-transparent and alienating environments, DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 The Theatre of Migration 177 the contestants continuously probe the conditions of their agency as well the limits of the commodifying structure of the game� Even within the parodic premise of Bitte liebt Österreich , performative decisions and agency must be confined within the rules and conventions of the Big Brother format� Read through Claire Bishop’s theoretical framework, the reification of the performers is thus not just limited to their reduction to executors of an artistic scheme according to preestablished constraints. It also mirrors neoliberal forms of gamified self-commodification. Schlingensief ’s container simulates the reality of what the Austrian philosopher and architect Georg Franck has called the “attention economy�” 22 With the shift towards the information society and “mental capitalism” (“Mental Capitalism” 100), Franck argues, attention becomes a key currency in the organization of the social and economic order, as the relations of production transition from the manufacture of goods to the production of perception, consumption models, and branding� The identity-constituting relationship of seeing and being seen thus becomes reconfigured in the reality TV format as an imperative for self-disclosure as a form of self-authentication� Exposure is presented as a key instrument of individuation in this context: “Getting real - attaining authenticity - means being seen” (Andrejevic 187). In this sense, Bitte liebt Österreich both engages and subverts the ideological scripts of reality TV. By staging different tasks and allowing for the self-exposure of the asylum seekers, Schlingensief provides space for the performance of “authenticity,” yet the constructed framework of this self-expression continuously destabilizes its claim to veracity� It remains unclear who the asylum seekers “really” are and to what extent they are complicit or instrumentalized in the production of the spectacle� What Schlingensief achieves is thus not necessarily a humanistic plea for the recognition of “bare life,” but the creation of a critical space for the identification of the mediatic and neoliberal (self-commodifying) scripts that circumscribe the agency of the asylum seekers and their possibilities of self-expression� In fact, Birgit Tautz rightfully criticizes Paul Poet’s mediated and deindividualized representation of the contestants in his documentary about Bitte liebt Österreich � She maintains that instead of producing a Brechtian distancing effect, Poet’s work slides into conventional codes of voyeuristic consumption and instrumentalizes the “idea” of asylum seekers for the sake of empathic and spectatorial identification: By using particular cinematic codes and conventions (e.g., voyeuristic image-making; documentary film) as well as alluding to - and borrowing from - a wide range of media (e.g., television series, the holistic, eighteenth-century image of an artist enshrined 178 Irina Simova DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 in “high” art and philosophy, visualized stereotypes) the film testifies to a culture of scopophilia that records and filters through a chaos of perception and circulating empathy� The visual as substrate of existence is uncontested, making the spectator less willing and able to distance her-/ himself than the pure, ethical gestures of a Brechtian aesthetic demand. (62) In contrast to Poet’s documentary, Schlingensief ’s performance employs multiple scopic modes and technologies (see Langston 239), continuously drawing attention to the process of producing the image (and the illusion of full transparency) and thus foregrounding the construction of the asylum seekers as exemplary figures and types 23 (rather than individuals and political agents). The Big Brother format is a particularly apt medium to disclose the performativity of Schlingensief ’s premise: the asylum seekers are cast as asylum seekers and therefore “media-made,” thus exposing the operation of self-presentation as positioned at the intersection of voyeurism, capital, and the attention economy� To be sure, Big Brother commodifies the scopic drive and sanctions voyeurism as entertainment� What its format makes particularly legible is that performative self-exposure and surveillance become normalized as conditions of possibility for self-expression� 24 In this context, Schlingensief ’s container replicates the ubiquity of surveillance-enabled self-presentation and its voyeuristic consumption, yet also disturbs its seamless functioning by employing the figure of the asylum seeker to index the biopolitical uses of such practices� Countering the 24/ 7 surveillance cameras with a peep show accessible through the hole in the container fencing, Schlingensief denaturalizes the omnipresent gaze of the surveillance apparatus by foregrounding a specific and limited vantage point, thus rendering visible not so much the events in the container (in fact, even the 24/ 7 surveillance was plagued by interruptions and blind spots), but the conditions of production of the gaze� The mobilization of the pre-cinematic apparatus, as Langston argues, makes the voyeuristic aspect of the purportedly omniscient point of view legible and reminds viewers that they are complicit in the production of the spectacle and the commodification of the asylum seekers (239). The interactive aspect of Bitte liebt Österreich reveals that the agency of the audience is also circumscribed by the performance’s gamified mediatic nature. Reflecting the ruse of social media and reality TV as a participatory public sphere, Schlingensief ’s intervention shows that the promise of spectators’ action, be it through voting or through direct debate on the square, is always already thwarted by the mediated framework of the spectacle� Both the supporters of Haider who tuned in to vote against the asylum speakers and the left-wing protesters who “liberated” the asylum seekers from the container DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 The Theatre of Migration 179 misrecognize content customization (their ability to change the performance) as agency� Bitte liebt Österreich therefore debunks the equation of interactivity with action. Yet the libidinal investment in the performance by the protesters on both sides of the political spectrum discloses affect as a key semiotic regime mobilized in the economy of attention� In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989), Frederic Jameson declares “the waning of affect” (10) a key feature of postmodernity. The dissolution of the centered subject, he argues, “may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling” (15). “The end of the bourgeois ego,” he declares, “[…] brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego” (15). More recent aesthetic works, however, including Schlingensief ’s own oeuvre , trace a shift back to an aesthetics of affect which both marshals emotions as a critical resource and targets their commodification and instrumentalization. After all, as art historian Jennifer Doyle observes, affect is where “ideology does its most devastating work� […] where we come to know the contours of our selves, our bodies, our sense of soul - and this zone is always under constant policing and negotiation” (qtd. in Jagoda 27). In this sense, through the phenomenology of gamification, Bitte liebt Österreich investigates how subjects are produced when media environments mobilize attentional resources to organize and create new audiences� Schlingensief ’s subversive staging of self-disclosure paired with the principle of performativity replicates the ways in which the attention economy becomes internalized� Schlingensief identifies the work of the Kronen Zeitung as an exemplary test case for the form of organization of affect at the core of the attention economy. Mirroring the rhetoric of the Kronen Zeitung and the FPÖ, Schlingensief presciently shows how present-day attention economies mold subjects, publics, and their agential resources, moving them away from deliberation toward the modulation of affect. In this context, as Schlingensief argues in an interview, xenophobia becomes a new currency (“eine neue Währung”). Against this background, channeling the FPÖ and Krone’s far-right rhetoric, Schlingensief not only performatively reproduces the prevalent mechanisms of commodifying and othering migrant subjects, putting FPÖ and Krone’s slogans in quotation marks and defamiliarizing them, as Verena Krieger and BAVO’s concepts of subversive affirmation and over-identification suggest. He also critically replicates the ways in which the FPÖ and Krone curate affect and organize publics. Identifying affect as the proper space of intervention, Schlingensief meets affect with affect, countering the production of anti-immigrant hysteria with an aesthetics of irritation, which makes the hysteria reproduce itself on the square and become itself a spectacle� This cycle exposes the short circuits 180 Irina Simova DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 and the self-reinforcing loops of the politics of affect that Schlingensief seeks to critique� In this sense, the final revelation of Bitte liebt Österreich is that its game cannot really be won� Schlingensief ’s performance discloses the mediatic, social, and political technologies that structure “bare life,” yet the solution to the problem of bios cannot be located within the mediated reality of the performance� This, it would seem, is what Schlingensief meant when he declared that there cannot be a successful outcome for either side in the game of Bitte liebt Österreich � In her discussion of performance art, Claire Bishop addresses precisely the erroneous equation of artistic space and political agency: “challenging works of art,” she argues, “do not follow this schema, because models of democracy in art do not have an intrinsic relationship to models of democracy in society� The equation is misleading and does not recognise art’s ability to generate other, more paradoxical criteria” (279). Bishop sees the abiding meaning of Schlingensief ’s performance in the “disturbing lesson of Please Love Austria ” that “an artistic representation of detention has more power to attract dissensus than an actual institution of detention” (282). She reads Schlingensief ’s “model of ‘undemocratic’ behaviour” as an exact parallel to “‘democracy’ as practiced in reality” (282). My contention is that Schlingensief ’s performance makes an even more disquieting discovery - it exposes the inherent conundrum of rights and agency in the deliberative model of democracy and reveals democracy itself to be biopolitical and gamified. In this sense, Bitte liebt Österreich as a delegated and citational artistic project succeeds precisely in (re)producing the ethical dissonances and contradictions of the marketization of authenticity, affect, self-disclosure, and human rights� Yet it is only by attending to the political impasse that Arendt, Agamben, and Fraser illuminate that the game and the agential and representational structures it entails can truly be changed� While Schlingensief ’s performance itself purposefully does not transcend its strategies of over-identification and reification, it is precisely its overdetermined structure that opens up space for deliberation on the incongruence of public spheres and political membership that defines the production of “bare life�” Exposing the lethal intersection of biopolitics, spectacle, and attention economies, Bitte liebt Österreich invites further interventions and strategies for interrupting and supplanting the gamification of life and affect� Schlingensief ’s work ultimately asks ex negativo if democracy can cease to be biopolitical� Notes 1 See Jestrovic, “Performing Like an Asylum Seeker�” DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 The Theatre of Migration 181 2 Todorut remarks on the “random criteria for granting or withdrawing rights” (93). 3 Quoted in an interview in Paul Poet’s documentary Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container (18: 16). 4 BAVO is a research collective founded by art scholars Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels in 2001� Their work focuses on “the political dimension of art, architecture and urban planning�” For more information, see: https: / / www�bavo�biz/ about)� 5 BAVO borrow the term ‘over-identification’ from Slavoj Zizek’s discussion of the subversive strategies of the Slovenian avant-garde group Laibach in communist Yugoslavia and connect it to Soren Kirkegaard’s concept of the ‘emetic’ “which entails deliberately swallowing too much of the loved poison - overdoing it - so as to be able to break with it for good, to cut the ties with the ambivalent love object” (“Artistic Resistance” 32). 6 See Benjamin, “Karl Kraus” ( Selected Writings 453—54). 7 See “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity” in Bishop’s 2012 book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (219— 41)� 8 Rather than being undertaken by the artists themselves, these projects are predicated on the premise that the participants enact their own socio-economic identities as defined by gender, class, ethnicity, age, disability, or profession� According to Bishop, this shift in performance with its focus on “the phenomenological immediacy of the live body and specific socio-economic identities” (223) can trace its genealogy to the body art tradition of the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, as Bishop contends, the emphasis on immediacy and transgression is also complicated in examples of delegated performance by the perception of the performance artists as reifying, exploiting, and constricting the performers, their agency, and identity� 9 See Bishop 223—30. 10 Building on Michel Foucault’s work in The Birth of Biopolitics (1978), a number of theorists from Wendy Brown ( In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019) and Undoing the Demos (2015)) to Ulrich Bröckling ( The Entrepreneurial Self (2015)) have traced neoliberalism’s mandate to shape human identity, habits, choices, and behaviors according to market principles� Subjects are invited to organize themselves in an entrepreneurial fashion, maximizing their human capital and resources� 11 As Todorut argues, Bitte liebt Österreich never clearly differentiated between “staged and actual, theater and real” (96): “It remains unclear to this day if the foreigners’ biographies - listing ethnicities such as Chinese, Kosovan, and Nigerian, and professions ranging from student and beautician to psy- 182 Irina Simova DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 chologist, journalist, and marine biologist - listed on the project’s website had any factual basis” (97). However, the problem Schlingensief addresses is structural - similarly to the Big Brother format, the question of genuine self-disclosure in Bitte liebt Österreich is overdetermined, as the participants’ self-presentation is always already part of a gamified format that does not so much guarantee authenticity, but a valorization of performed authenticity� What Schlingensief ’s framework foregrounds is that once within the constraints of the Big Brother format or a delegated performance, the participants and their agency are bound by the preestablished rules of the game whether they are competing in a reality TV format or playing the role of competing in a reality TV format� It is the “management” of Schlingensief ’s performers (be it true refugees or not) that critically recreates the reification and diminished political agency of the figure of the asylum seeker. 12 Quoted in an interview in Paul Poet’s documentary Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container (11: 10). 13 See Jameson, Postmodernism 10—15. 14 Information from Paul Poet’s documentary Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container as well as Denise Varney’s article “‘Right Now Austria Looks Ridiculous’: Please Love Austria! - Reforging the Interaction Between Art and Politics” and Richard Langston’s chapter “Phantasmagorias of Normalcy” in Visions of Violence: German Avant-Gardes After Fascism (2007) serve as the basis for the reconstruction of Schlingensief ’s performance here� 15 Quoted in Paul Poet’s documentary Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container (23: 37). 16 In fact, Agamben argues in Homo Sacer that with the institution of human rights, life becomes incorporated in the political: “Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state” (127). 17 Concentration camps were originally established in the context of the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa as internment for enemy non-combatants (some arguments have been made about earlier precedents in Cuba and the Philippines) and were later adopted by the German colonial authorities in German Southwest Africa. See Stone 11—33. 18 For a detailed discussion of the deliberative model’s limits in a transnational framework, see Fraser 13� 19 See Brown, Undoing the Demos 22� 20 Since neoliberalism is defined by the privatization of risk, the proliferation of precarity, and the dominance of market principles in all spheres of human life, competition gains unprecedented centrality. Jagoda defines this transformation succinctly: “If liberalism seeks to mitigate (if not elim- DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0011 The Theatre of Migration 183 inate) a state of nature in which homo homini lupus (“man is wolf to man”) then neoliberalism pursues a different end, altering the naturalist is of this famous saying into a new constructivist imperative in which man must become wolf to man in order to thrive” (22). 21 See Brown, Undoing the Demos 28—45. 22 See Franck, Ökonomie 53—81. 23 For a discussion of Schlingensief ’s use of “typical” subjects and his performance as an expression of the Brechtian Gestus see Varney 111—13. 24 For an incisive commentary on the convergence of surveillance regimes and self-exposure mediated by the Big Brother format, see Mark Andrejevic’s book chapter “The Kinder, Gentler Gaze of Big Brother” in Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (2004). Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio� Homo Sacer. 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