How does spectatorship pertain to capitalism? One answer, according to Nicholas Ridout, is that it offers an alibi. In the act of suggesting that suffering matters, the theatre – as with a range of media – risks telling you ‘that there is nothing, really nothing you can do about it’ (p. 11). For Ridout, this risk derives from a bourgeois worldview predicated on a valorization of distance that has roots in eighteenth-century Britain, and that traverses the lofty irony of right-leaning journalism as much as the critical dispositions celebrated in Western Marxism. However, unsurprisingly for one of the discipline's most erudite Marxists, Ridout offers an alternative: one that considers the culpability of a bourgeoisie as yet unaware, but potentially aware, of their complicity in producing and sustaining the suffering of others.

This is Ridout's reckoning with the fact that he, too, is bourgeois – albeit reluctantly, like many fellow travellers, for whom this book is written, and who may take for granted the value of ‘distance’ as a tool in the critical-theory war chest (as I did). Rather than finding contentment in detached interpretation, how might our apprehension of the contingencies of historical circumstance and outlook be unsettled? Even the structure can be seen as a response to this question, which incorporates a trio of prologues, each composed in a different style – a distancing effect of sorts – including a footnote-strewn scene description, a thesis statement, and an account of Milo Rau's performance Mitleid (Compassion) (2016). Three of the four essays that follow are similarly idiosyncratic, each burrowing into deliberately marginal indices of the conditions underpinning bourgeois spectatorship. The first is the expansive exception, which includes a brilliant reflection on bourgeois disidentification, and makes a convincing case for the continued relevance of the terms ‘bourgeois’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ as protean points of reference. This is followed by a couplet of essays that treat articles published in The Spectator between 1711 and 1712 as windows into the development and staging of bourgeois values and subjectivity in ways that effaced, while at the same time relying upon, the reproductive labour of women in Britain, and slavery in the colonies. At the heart of this discussion is an obscure passage from The Spectator that describes how ‘a large black Man, whom nobody knows’, expressed appreciation by thwacking a wooden staff against benches in the upper gallery of a playhouse (p. 103). It presents him as an ideal critic, capable of shaping opinion by garnering cheers – although its irony reduces his approbation to the gabbling of ‘a thing most brutish’, to cite Miranda's perception of the enslaved Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest (p. 115). In this example, Ridout finds black anonymity serving as an instrumentalized corollary of the bourgeois subject's whiteness – present yet anonymous, and inflected by constructions of race gleaned from the journalistic depiction of distant colonies.

A book of this quality makes you hungry for more, which I felt when journeying from the world of our bourgeois spectator in the eighteenth century to a consideration of Western Marxism's entrenched whiteness in the final essay, which dwells on those imported cigars famously extolled in Bertolt Brecht's theories. Ridout justifies this temporal leap on the grounds that it lands his analysis in a historical moment – 1930s Berlin – at which the bourgeois subject was making itself the object of its own inquiry and disdain, which is fair enough; however, I was eager to know what Ridout would have made of late nineteenth-century precedents who also, perhaps more so, epitomized ‘the bourgeois against the bourgeoisie’ (p. 150), albeit not in a strictly Marxist vein. I am thinking of writers and dandies associated with aestheticism and decadence (and orientalism, for that matter), such as Oscar Wilde, noting especially his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), which art historian Dave Beech has recently scrutinized in some wonderfully resonant ways in a concurrently published book, Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production (2019). But this is less a criticism than curiosity. Scenes from Bourgeois Life is a stunning piece of scholarship, and one of the most enjoyable texts to be published on the politics of spectatorship in recent years. In challenging the privileged position of a disinterested observer, what it offers is a prompt and a methodology for appreciating and potentially acting upon the contingent circumstances of our own historical moment, in which the ‘distance’ of suffering from bourgeois subjecthood risks serving as an alibi for silence.