Defense Claim
The dissertation uses theatrical and scenographic analysis not to aestheticize politics, but to identify the public forms through which authority becomes visible, credible, contestable, and judgeable.
1. Methodological position
The method is interpretive political theory. It reads institutional scenes as sites where power becomes publicly intelligible. A courtroom, benefits portal, disaster briefing, tax form, border checkpoint, constitutional oath, school ritual, or police encounter is not merely an example appended to a theory. It is a site where the theory must prove itself.
The dissertation therefore combines conceptual analysis, institutional observation, legal and constitutional interpretation, infrastructural reading, and historically bounded examples. Its claims should be framed as diagnostic rather than totalizing. It does not argue that all legitimacy is performance. It argues that legitimacy becomes publicly available through performed and staged forms.
2. The use of fictional and theatrical scenarios
Fictionalized constitutional scenarios, theatrical examples, and imagined institutional scenes can generate legitimate scholarly insight when they clarify the conditions under which authority is recognized. Political theory has long used stylized scenes: the state of nature, the original position, the public sphere, the constituent assembly, the emergency, the trial, the oath, the founding, and the revolution. Such scenes are not substitutes for history. They are analytic devices that isolate features of political life otherwise dispersed across institutions.
The dissertation should use these scenarios under three constraints. First, they must be marked as thought experiments rather than historical claims. Second, they must be tested against actual institutional practices. Third, they must disclose what they clarify: recognition, role assignment, jurisdiction, coercion, narrative authority, public memory, or judgment.
3. Distinguishing staging from adjacent concepts
Staging is not simply theatrical metaphor. Metaphor says governance is like theater. This dissertation argues that governance actually depends on arranged spaces, scripts, props, platforms, audiences, and repeated acts of recognition.
Staging is not identical to Goffman's dramaturgy. Goffman clarifies the presentation of self in everyday interaction; this project studies the public intelligibility of institutions, offices, records, infrastructures, and constitutional forms.
Staging is not reducible to performance studies. Performance studies helps explain enactment, embodiment, ritual, and repetition; this dissertation uses those insights for a narrower question about political authority and constitutional restraint.
Staging overlaps with rhetoric and ritual but is not exhausted by either. Rhetoric emphasizes persuasion through language. Ritual emphasizes repeated symbolic form. Staging includes language and ritual while also foregrounding objects, infrastructures, interfaces, spatial arrangements, documents, enforcement mechanisms, and audience recognition.
4. Literature map
Hannah Arendt supplies the dissertation's account of appearance, plurality, public worldliness, and judgment. The project should use Arendt most directly in the introduction and conclusion, while avoiding any claim that appearance is automatically emancipatory.
Jurgen Habermas supplies the problem of public legitimacy, law, and communicative justification. The dissertation departs from Habermas by emphasizing material scenes, infrastructures, and non-deliberative forms of recognition.
Robert Bellah clarifies civil religion and the danger that constitutional ritual can become state theology. Bellah belongs in the church-state interlude and conclusion.
Jeffrey Alexander helps theorize social performance, cultural scripts, and audience reception. The dissertation distinguishes its institutional and constitutional focus from Alexander's broader sociology of cultural performance.
Clifford Geertz's theatre state is essential but must be bounded. Geertz shows that political power can be organized through display and ceremony; this dissertation extends the problem to modern constitutional, administrative, and infrastructural governance.
Erving Goffman provides the dramaturgical vocabulary the project must explicitly exceed. Robert Cover and James Boyd White belong in the legal theory frame: law creates worlds through narrative and rhetoric, but is also tied to violence, interpretation, and institutional force.
Judith Butler helps explain performativity, speech acts, and assembly. Philip Pettit gives the project a vocabulary of domination and freedom. John Rawls supplies public reason and legitimacy as a foil. Carl Schmitt provides the hardest counterpoint: sovereignty as decision and exception, not staged recognition.
5. Defense posture
The dissertation should present itself as a theory of public intelligibility rather than a complete causal account of state power. Its defensible contribution is to show that law, administration, and coercion require staged forms in order to appear as authority; that those forms can fail; and that democratic judgment depends on seeing both the power and the limits of the stage.