The Theatre of Migration, or: Gamification, Affect, and Biopolitics in Christoph Schlingensief's Bitte liebt Österreich

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.