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Employing Georges Bataille’s theories on non-productive expenditure as a framing device, this article considers Sam Shepard’s  States of Shock  (1991) under the hermeneutic framework of ‘performance of waste.’ This play contains a Surrealist anarchy in its subtextual impulse to overthrow the dominant hegemonic discourse at large in line with Bataille’s economic theories. In its symbolic dramaturgy, catastrophic spectacularized imagery and stratified layers of representation,  States of Shock  is unmistakably surreal. This play indicates the  productivity  of non-productive expenditure, a concept evident in the obsessive, hyperbolic rendering of experience created by the prismatic scenography, and in the compulsion to investigate one’s origins. In  States of Shock , the Colonel directs to Stubbs that “[a] catastrophe has to be examined from every possible angle” (152). Shepard has realised this in the surreal creation of climatic warfare that relies on multiple layers of spectacularized representation. This seemingly wasteful effort also incorporates Shepard’s continued interrogation of masculinized transgenerational trauma. Whether his men are at war with each other or themselves, the catastrophe of the present is traced back through the patrilineal line of ancestry and in  States of Shock , is compared to the fruitlessness of military warfare, perhaps the most wasteful endeavour of all.

Non-Productive Expenditure and Sam Shepard’s States of Shock : A Performance of Waste