Performance and Anti-performance

Critiquing Two Performances of Domestic Political Violence vs. Resistance As Counter-narrative Performative Intervention to Cruelty

“Collateral Damage” Aviva Rahmani September 2025

In this essay, I will sometimes refer to the current President of the United States as t.

Evgenia Emets of Eternal Forest recently described this series of articles as, "contemplative essays about how art mirrors and inspires life." In this essay, I will consider the current experience of t.’s administration as real life theater..

The premise of this essay is that we are witnessing two simultaneous performances. One performance is represented by this presidential administration. The other is led by a team of resistors. As in any good avante garde performance, the audience shares agency in the denouement of the outcome. Both present a narrative of cruelty. Antonin Artaud wrote about and performed work for what he called The Theatre of Cruelty. We are witnessing cruelty in both performances.

Here I will consider and attempt to analyze the competing narratives in both performances, and the effectiveness of the performative means in each. Each have a Sword of Damocles of time over the denouement of these performances. Will totalitarianism or democracy imminently prevail? What I know from my Trigger Point Theory is that 'there is always a small point of intervention in any chaotic system, that despite urgency there is time', and 'layering information will test perception.' Human history has a long arc. Accurate insight depends on consolidating data.

The first task is to name what we are witnessing.

Naming is one of the most powerful capacities of language. In a recent conversation between Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman, Freeman identified this historical moment in American politics as performative. She added that "performance matters."

I think Freeman is correct. In t.’s performance, he is the prime actor. I will argue here that he is acting as any addict would, to control the narrative about their experience of pain and relief from pain, regardless of cruelty inflicted. The other performance is by those who experience that deflected pain, victimized by cruelty and their demand for empathy.

The world is watching how an addict, this President, works his pathology on their environment. I conjecture that there is little difference between any narcissist, any a dictator at any scale, and any garden variety addict. The goal of any addict's behavior is to deflect their pain.

In this case, I am using the term addict broadly. Many researchers believe addiction can take many forms. In the case of this President and his enablers, I suggest both are addicted to cruelty.

If it's true that this president is an addict acting out flight from his own misery by cruelly inflicting pain on others, there are recovery programs, such as Al-Anon. Al-Anon is one of many programs to help those around addicts survive. In many cases, the literature of 12-step programs assert that they believe they can provide performative models for the rest of the world.

Step 1 in any recovery program is to admit that life has become unmanageable. That is as true for the addict as the community they inhabit. Community recovery requires that all involved must come to the point where they understand their lives depend on a counter-narrative to the addict, of voicing the extent of pain inflicted by the addict as an intervention. That is a performative process. The first audience is not the addict but the individuals in the community.

Arguably, the pain inflicted by an addict is involuntary. That is, the original pain was so intensely traumatic, that any rational response is impossible without the intervention of some outside agency. The intervening community must understand the pathetic helplessness of the addict.

I am not an addiction expert but as a layperson who has been interested in addiction, I think any addict lives in a performative universe. In that universe, the addict's world view is dependent on a false narrative (I feel, therefore I must- do this destructive behavior). That story is acted out to paper over their own misery and support a delusion of power over that misery.

I think we are witnessing an addictive performance by t. As with any addict, the performance has a supporting cast of enablers who are as committed to the addict’s false narrative as the addict. As in any addictive world, the cruelty of their personal misery validates for them how they justify acting out that cruelty on others. In the personal world of a narcissistic addict, sometimes the greatest cruelty is perpetrated on the self. as R. D. Laing proposed. In the global arena, the lead actor and addict is projecting and perpetrating cruelty on entire populations.

But we are also witnessing the emergence of a performative counter narrative, created by an audience writhing in the pain perpetrated by the addict. Actors such as Gavin Newsom and JB Prtizer have emerged as leads from the wings in this second performance.

As the competing narratives in these two performance have developed in the public eye, the audience at large has also watched the emergence of what Greek Theatre would call a Deus Ex Machina in the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein and his victims. As with Hamlet's ghost, the Epstein ghost and his chorus of victims, tell the horrific counter narrative story of the would-be-king on today's stage.

In order to address the effectiveness of this performative exchange, we need to investigate success by the criteria of any performance: what are the tropes? What is the audience response? In this performance, the audience, as in any avante garde or Noh theater, are actors as much as anyone on stage. The basic performance today depends on a routine normalization of cruelty. In Hamlet, the cruelty is that families could treat each other so badly. In Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, the intention is to shock the audience into seeing a reality that was hitherto obscured.

In a family system, there may be a sub-narrative beneath a facade of normalcy. A facade of normalcy often supports What is most hidden are the dynamics of emotional domestic violence, in which a perpetrator, male or female, controls the behavior and feelings of others, by degradation, intimidation and gaslighting to escape the narrative of their own pain and helplessness. Often, the clarity of that dynamic is veiled by the reactive behavior of others, as R.D, Laing analyzed in "The Divided Self." Laing's contribution to psychotherapy was to support the expression of misery in people named as insane or schizophrenic. The response of victims to name and resist violence is what breaks that pattern. The caveat is the question of whom is creating the most wreckage.

In any theater critique, we must consider the elements of any event: in the house, the stage, and the backstage. That is where we witness how the stories and metaphors, the staging, the choreography, the sound, costumes, the architecture of the proscenium and the historical context of those elements unfold. History is part of the backstage and is particularly important to understanding what we witness. As Mark Twain noted, history may not replicate but it sure can rhyme. The rhyming is part of the house. What is significant about the counter addict's narrative story and metaphors and the historical counter-narrative performances is how awareness goes to national and international policy.

I would critique the President's narrative as tragicomic. His story centers on a false perception of threat that requires cruel totalitarian dominance. The dominant counternarrative is that that false narrative is cruelly terrorizing the entire world. In the house, we must find empathy within ourselves that the victims of cruelty deserve. The Greek chorus of victims in both performances reflect another narrative about addiction and enabling unfolding simulataenously on the stage and in the house.

Many critics of this American administration have noted that as in all authoritarian regimes, a pre-eminent goal, going back in the West to the apocryphal Game of feeding Roman Christians to hungry lions, is to not only to normalize sadistic cruelty but to reify it's entertainment value.

" (as) part of a day-long festival of violence and slaughter ... usually scheduled during the lunchtime interval to provide some light relief. During the birthday celebrations for the emperor’s son at Carthage, it was evidently thought amusing to match the female martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas with a maddened heifer, who tossed them in the air and crushed them." -Shushma Malik, The University of Queensland and Caillan Davenport, The University of Queensland 2016

In accounts of domestic violence between partners today, emotional abuse is not seen as damaging as physical abuse. However, the effects on the victim’s physical health and safety can be even more extensive than a physical beating. I think we are witnessing both physical and emotional abuse on the world stage. In popular literature since t.'s second administration there has been a great deal of discussion about narcissism, it's lure and it's dynamics. I have written about what I call the "culture of narcissism," in this country. However, I have come to believe that the more accurate diagnosis of the situation, is to identify t. as a raging addict. If so, the antidote might be seen in a number of 12-step programs that address how to thrive in the home of an addict. In any 12-step program, family and friends are encouraged to stage an "intervention," to honestly and even lovingly, describe the harm caused by the addict.

An intervention for an addict is a performative solution to an intolerable and often fatal situation. In any situation where a drastic measure is taken, like an intervention, it is a good idea to have some clarity about causes and effects. I am arguing that an aspect to the counternarrative is how it functions as intervention at an international scale.

It is useful to create an accurate diagnosis of causation, which does reference back to narcissistic patterns. But if one solution is in recovery programs for the victims, then there are a number of subplots to follow.

Before we track how the subplots converge, first, we must recognize the extent of the harm. Legally that goes to questions of liability. Personally, that requires owning one's own experience. The difficulty there, is to separate what is specific to the situation from what the victim may bring to the experience. For example, what messages predated the addict about entitlement and an open expression of feelings? Does the victim feel entitled to respect and kindness? The addict has their own ideas about entitlement, respect and kindness. That exchange often depends on the good will of all parties to come to a healthy resolution. Does a child want to deny the parent love? Does a parent want to harm their child? In the end, it all goes to how the culture, whether in an intimate setting or in the political arena chooses to define justice. My focus is on the relative sophistication of how well each performance dramatizes the conflict between empathy and cruelty.

We saw the beginning of the performative strategy to normalize cruelty in the separations of parents and children in the first t. administration. It continues in the current project to export Guatamalan children. These projects are narratives. Weirdly, Steven Miller, the child of survivors of antisemitism, has emerged as the most enthusiastic advocate for these games. The dissonant narrative is that the child of victims of persecution became the perpetrator.

In an earlier essay in this series, I referenced the phenomena of reactive abuse. That is when victims are pushed past all forbearance to the point where their reactivity replicates or even exceeds the original brutality that victimized them. This is called the cycle of violence. Tragically, we can observe patterns of reactive abuse across the planet as an exercise of a lethal choreography as nations compete for territory and power.

Empathy for the perpetrators is not the same as condoning. Victims of violence litter the prisons of every country for extreme acts. Very often, when the police are called in incidents of domestic violence, it is the victim who is arrested, because the victims have been pushed to the point of retaliation. Treatment for a perpetrator of emotional abuse is spotty in both recommendations and success. One reason treatment often doesn't work to change the behavior of a perpetrator is that change often requires deeply considering faulty assumptions about what are normal expectations in relationship. We don't live in a culture that encourages emotional accountability, but we know from extensive research, that empathy is as essential to the efficient functioning of any human civilization as any animal pack. And there is a growing demand for effect programs to treat abusive behavior.

I have argued that we still live in a narcissistic cultural environment that has a limited capacity for empathy. That is why intervention, as we see in the second anti-performance is critical. The consensus in treatment literature is that the first step towards change is to admit the extent of harm. That acknowledgement requires courage from both the addict and the community. There is little in this culture today that supports the courage required to face liability for harm. Unless harm cannot be obviously quantified in financial terms, it is often dismissed. It is routinely recognized, for example, that victims of abuse and rape who go to court, even when very prominent, as in the case of t. or his notorious confederate, Epstein, rarely experience justice.

To follow the parallel in recovery programs as dramatic leitmotif, the answer is not to get inside the head of the addict. The answer is to distance oneself with love. That doesn't necessarily mean physically leaving. Many of the privileged sectors of the American population have been leaving. But many are staying, believing that true patriotism means entering the coliseum with hungry beasts rather than sacrificing to Nero's Roman gods. The caveat is that the murdered Christians didn't see justice, albeit they did inspire another point of view. And even that has a caveat, in the millennia of horrors perpetrated in the name of Christianity across the globe. The shadenfreude. is in how authoritarian regimes quench a thirst for revenge in their enablers.

So, how good/ effective/powerful are the two performances we are witnessing today? Certainly, they are both engaging. Judging by audience reaction to the President and his cohort, house approval is not very high, as in how people feel about tariffs and ICE. But "feeling good" isn't a criterion for performative brilliance. How good are the anti-performances of competitive takedowns embodied in the recent actions of Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Governors, of marching protestors and many pundits. Perhaps better than the doomsayers might think. The jury of critics is still out for the final outcomes.

I have not only a personal but a professional interest in waiting for the house to decide outcomes. I see parallels to ideas I have struggled with my entire career: in this performative exchange when must the private become public? How relevant are Mary Trump's perceptions of her uncle? Where are the boundaries of the commons when transparency is evoked? I look for those answers in my own history. About my own performative work, Mary Mattingly recently remarked about my contribution to a book-in-progress, "your work engages a community of people ("The Blued Trees Symphony", for example) and also nonhumans ("Ghost Nets," for example) - these works are more active than other work covered that are representational or material-focused. Also, it's also often public, so people don't have to be in a museum or gallery to take part in it."

Shortly before I began "Ghost Nets," I was engaged in an intense exchange with Linda Cunningham about the nature of public art. My argument was essentially that an idea can be public art, that introducing an idea into the private imagination of an individual can be as grand an act of public sculpture as the physical scale of a completed event in a physical proscenium or on a material site. I think that is where we are right now: ideas, narratives and stories competing in a public debate as dueling performances. Another tragicomedy, along with the role of Steven Miller in the dramatic sense of Greek Theater in this performance is the collateral damage amongst the audience. The House is forced to experience the horror of witnessing events on the stage of a public coliseum as victims are fed to metaphorical lions with very real torture and death for the cruel amusement of a small circle of very very powerful people.

It seems that now is the time for the audience to become far more responsive to the messages in these spectacles.