On my Facebook I got a great essay by performance artist Phil Smith (Crab Man):
some thoughts on events in Salisbury: this year, teaching a short module on site-specific performance, I introduced to the students the idea of a-symmetricality (I will post the text of my short introduction below).
I was trying to give to the students the idea that in making performance interventions in public spaces that it is possible to recruit the everyday actions, residents and possibilities of any space to their performance.
How one kind of performance can bring the space to a halt and neutralise its life, or be so 'theatrical' as to sit inside its own box and thus be set apart from the space, but how another kind of small and subtle action can command resources and direct players so much greater than its initial input.
That is the nature of the (almost certainly FSB/Russian) dramaturgy at Salisbury. The use of traceable nerve agent, ostensibly to do harm to one agent or former agent was always intended to spill far beyond that, given how easily it can spread, even if only very weak traces. The power and planned outcome of the intervention is thus, mostly (and intended this way), in the response of others. The sight of hundreds of uniformed military, some in balaclavas moving into the centre of a small cathedral city, of weapons experts in hazard suits (in scenes like a 1950s Quatermass dystopian sci fi movie) are all consistent with the intended asymmetricality of the initial intervention. The response to this very localised attack models the authoritarian dreams of its planners, and the implied 'infection' of an ever widening terrain (with ambulances and items from villages far away being wrapped up and taken away for 'decontamination', days after the attack locals being told to wash their clothes and possessions), creating a landscape of fear and anxiety in what have been, for many, terrains of relative comfort and complacency.
When one's clothes, phone, handbag or walking stick become a weapon of the FSB, as the UK authorities now imply, an atmosphere of negative paranoia is enhanced, and from which fear-based responses may come.
So, yes, a criminal action took place, probably by a state, but the unfolding responses are the greater part of the intention of the attack (indeed they are still part of the attack, which is ongoing) and the British state is playing its part now in a dramaturgy which serves its own authoritarian interests and those of others. As this 'drama' unfolds we need to understand it as being just as much about an authoritarian performance which at times transcends states as a poisonous chemistry.
