In this context history may represent change yet remain the same. 30) The open reader accepts his/her status as a political subject with all this may imply. 38) Open reading may assist the promotion of critical education. 39) Critical education may become education for criticism. Operative art In a number of texts, beginning in the early 1980s, Barber has considered the potential for performance work to avoid its ossification into a genre category. Clearly, the type of conceptual performance art that was common in the late sixties and early seventies had run its course. While emerging forms of postmodern performance were appropriating mainstream forms of entertainment, their critical function was often weakened or altogether abandoned. Performance could possibly withstand becoming affirmative culture (Herbert Marcuse) by rediscovering its sources in avant-garde theatre. Bertolt Brecht, for instance, echoed Karl Marx's critique of philosophy when he wrote: "The theatre became an affair for philosophers, but only for those philosophers as wished not just to explain the world, but also to change it." Brecht coined the term umfunctionierung (functional transformation) to enable theatre to become an instrument to serve the interests of class struggle. And in his famous essay, "The Author as Producer," Walter Benjamin extolled the virtues of the "operative" artist, providing as his example the communist author Sergei Tretyakov, who thought of his work not merely as descriptive reporting on reality, but an active intervention. Benjamin believed that cultural practice should refuse modish commerce and should give work a revolutionary use value. This meant the avoidance of the impulse to aestheticize and the ordination of critical agency as a post-aesthetic strategy, one that can contain values that are nominally subsumed under several progressive political/aesthetic ideologies. In an implicit effort to politicize advanced forms of performance, Barber placed the term performance under erasure with the formulation of [performance]. Since the publication of "Towards and Adequate Interventionist [Performance] Practice" (1985), Barber has explored the radical potential of performance. The table of binary oppositions below represents general differences between two types of political action, configured as acts of protest or resistance. Depending on the circumstances and the type of event, intervention can become an exemplary action, and thus devolve into a form of political posturing, closely implicated in extreme versions of behaviour characterized by violence, anarchic rejection or destructive nihilism. While exemplary actions are usually without theoretical support, interventions attempt to put theory into action.