Posthuman relations in performance studies

Although speech, as Aristotle thought, is perhaps a capacity distinct to the human species, “communication” is not. The prominence of communication as a description for our life with each other marks the breaking open of the dyke to admit the floods of the inhuman. The chief challenge to communication in the twentieth century is contact with beings that lack mortal form. Communication is something we share with animals and computers, extraterrestrials and angels. As beings who not only speak but communicate, we reveal our mechanical, bestial, and ethereal affinities. The concept respects none of the metaphysical barriers that once protected human uniqueness. (Peters 227–28)

As Communication Studies-oriented Performance Studies scholars, we watched closely as Peters engaged in a theoretical departure from humanism during the final moments of the twentieth century. It is our vision with this special issue that we in Performance Studies would do well to follow his lead. The term “posthumanism,” the theoretical juncture at which we locate Peters’s insight, marks a suite of interrelated philosophical commitments that represent a deviation from our standing disciplinary condition, in which the tenets of humanism serve as the axis of the study of performance as communication. In particular, a posthumanist perspective takes umbrage with humanist philosophy’s contention that there is a rarified or privileged quality intrinsic to humanity that marks it as the referential center of Being. The human, humanist philosophy contends, is to be understood to be the measure of all things, a fraternal unity with shared defining characteristics that include reason, empiricism, and a position of ultimate development (via refinement and mastery) when contrasted with the rest of the world’s inhabitants and processes. This speciesist exceptionalism, ostensibly embodied by all humans as a matter of birthright, is proposed to cohere around a unified “self” that – even if understood to be a construction of culture – nevertheless embodies some fundamental reflection of the Truth of an individual’s existence. A posthuman perspective, on the other hand, marks the decentering of humanity from the central position of authority; we are no longer the ideal against which all comparisons are to be set. The posthumanist proposition is that our lives are a complicated material set of relationships between human and non-human animals and materials. Consequently, we are irreducible to an “essential” and omnipresent humanity. The articulation of the world as a matrix of interaction, rather than a series of distinct spheres that comprise “nature” and “culture,” fractures the delicate fantasy that enables humanity’s comfortable isolation. Our ahistorical claims of sovereignty and mastery of the Earth are hereby revealed to be a mirage, a twisted refraction of the uncertainty and contingency that undergirds our relationship with the rest of Being.

It should be noted at the outset that this issue of Text and Performance Quarterly regarding posthumanist thought is “speaking French” (Soper 11). This is to say that we are proposing a specific genealogical reference to humanism as an ideological paradigm. Rather than an “English” analytical tradition, which regards humanism as an irenic, progressive and rationalist alternative to religion, the authors in this issue are embracing a Continental terminology, which characterizes humanism as an anthropocentric philosophy of essentials that is (ironically) both mythological and avowedly “scientific.” This Continental definition of humanism names a philosophy that “appeals (positively) to the notion of a core humanity or common essential features in terms of which human beings can be defined and understood … and thus claims that the categories of ‘consciousness,’ ‘agency,’ ‘choice,’ ‘responsibility,’ ‘moral value,’ etc. are indispensable” (Soper 11) in our efforts to understand human thought and action. A posthumanist perspective is therefore one which rejects an essentialized and atomized view of human life, and replaces it with a broadly elaborated concern for materiality, interdependence, and alterity.

Our call for this issue asked participants to submit scholarly articles and aesthetic texts that foregrounded a “relational” perspective on performance, ciphered through a posthumanist lens. In emphasizing relationality, we sought works that embraced a vision of communication that did not hinge upon the presence (or absence) of language as a mechanism of conveying signs. Instead, the articles that comprise this issue are aligned with Condit’s claim that “communication is the weaving and reweaving of visible and invisible four-dimensional webs, which constitute and reconstitute matter and ideation as humans, discourse, and other beings within a dynamic field of many forces” (3). Pertinent to the context of this journal, we would furthermore add that this conception of communication-as-relation forwards an active, repetitious, and referential ontological process-theory, one that occurs both before and within an audience of participant-observers. The emergent process of relating to one another (variously as performer and audience) in the context of a particular moment (an event) through the particularities of our myriad and multimodal affects (texts and beyond): this formulation lays bare the relevance of performance theory for understanding communication as an evocative and generative mode. The task of understanding communication as performance, and vice versa, is the prerequisite for conceiving of a performance theory that is capable of bringing culture and entities into being, rather than simply describing them ex post facto. A posthumanist Performance Studies must be a projective enterprise, rather than a descriptive one, if it is to enact the fullest manifestation of its disruption to the anthropocentric and abusive cultural practices – rooted in the legacy of humanist ideation – of contemporary Western capitalism. The practice of performance, by “engaging languages of emotion and images, of passion and fervor as part of a necessary, crucial representational counter discourse” (Dolan 23), may hold the key to unshackling our lived relationship with the rest of Being from dominating, unequal, and abusive instrumentalizations rooted in the “logic” of human exceptionalism.

This issue marks the journal’s first sustained engagement with the materialist and relational wing of posthumanist philosophy. There have been a number of articles published in the last decade that are explicitly aligned with the so-called “technological” aspect of posthumanism (MacDonald, Gingrich-Philbrook & Simmons, Gray), insofar as they are analyses of the increasingly complex and convoluted relationships between live bodies and technological mediation and augmentation. It is surprising to us that relational posthumanist scholarship has not been more forthcoming in the field. More to the point, the lack of print scholarship is shocking given the ideological commitments of performance scholars to materiality, to bodies (writ large), situated knowledges and intricate genealogical investigations, all tendencies of thought and action that would seemingly lead scholar-artists to adopt this posthumanist perspective. Partially, we would suggest, this absence reflects a disciplinary reticence to engage with philosophies that complicate the (relatively) tidy account of cultural production and personal agency rooted in the dictates of social constructivism. According to this line of concerned thought, as posthumanist philosophies decenter humankind from the axis of world-making, reassert the importance of biological and chemical processes, and highlight the co-dependence of humanity on the so-called “Earth Others” (Plumwood 154), we risk embracing a revivified scientism. This perspective would ostensibly inaugurate an era defined by the positivist reduction of culture, wherein the deterministic laws under which matter operate and quantitatively derived social policy would come, in tandem, to replace a more agential and liberatory metaphysics rooted in the indeterminate outcomes of performance. It is, in short, a suspicion of the rise of what Latour has dubbed “natureculture,” wherein “nature” is equated with a rhetoric of fixity that might serve to facilitate the captivity, censure, or domestication of the subject, all in the name of biological or deterministic “fact,” by hegemonic forces.

We believe that this concern is unfounded¹ in that it neglects the fashion in which the posthumanist turn both enlarges the arena wherein performance serves as a useful heuristic, as well as incites exciting new aesthetic and cultural productions. In the first case, the recognition of a fundamental and processual relationality at the root of Being emphasizes the constructed and contingent nature of our bodily and social formations. Rather than an autonomous and elevated entity, posthumanist thought renders humanity via a more honest assessment: one more animal, utterly dependent upon a host of other plants, animals, and inanimate matter to survive, precariously balanced on a finite world slowly coming undone under the weight of environmental degradation. As more complex, ecological, networked and/or relational models of communication rise in prominence to address this reality, the utility of highly regimented and prefigured rationalist and scientific schemata begin to falter. Performance, on the other hand, thrives in concert with these process-oriented perspectives precisely because, as Turner notes, the very structure of performance is process: “ … [performance’s] structure is not that of an abstract system; it is generated out of the dialectical oppositions of processes and of levels of processes” (“Process” 70). Practically, this means that that as scholars and philosophers come to embrace the realization that matter (and life) is self-organizing and agential² – “vibrant,” in Jane Bennett’s terminology – scholars of performance may suddenly find themselves in familiar territory. Accounting for “the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett viii) becomes much easier, for example, when approached from the perspective of a field already dedicated to tracking the various material affects of bodies, attending closely to the social impacts of repetitious patterns of behavior and force, and trained to consider the representations of objects and persons not as happenstance but rather as meaningful sites of inquiry. That a process-oriented perspective on the social and natural world would seem to propose an ontology of ephemerality – a cycle of constant interactive emergences and disappearances – only heightens its affinity with Performance Studies. An interaction, a moment of relationality – like performance’s being – “becomes itself through disappearance” (Phelan 146). It is a becoming, reborn anew and slightly changed by each preceding moment. Just as performance scholars have previously sought a “genuine understanding of others” (Conquergood, “Performing” 9) via dialogical and aestheticized modes of inquiry, so too must we now be willing to seek a genuine understanding of other-than-human Others via related methods.³

Practically, a disciplinary embrace of posthumanist philosophies signals the need to make room for discussions of performance that include animals, plants, inanimate matter, technological actors and more in a fashion that engages both the ontological question of what performance “is,” as well as questions about how we document the material specifics and processes of performance “as.” Fashioning a perspective that accounts for these Others (which might be usefully summed up as “actants,” in acknowledgment of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and his work documenting these “ensembles” of human and non-human agents) allows performance scholars to begin altering familiar considerations and concepts to suit new topics and areas of inquiry. For example, actants, Law establishes, exist in networked relationships with one another that depend both upon relational materiality and performativity. Relational materiality describes the ways in which “actors” (rather than the more customary distinction between “subjects” and “objects”) both “take their form and acquire their attributes as a result of their relations to other entities” (Law 3). Performativity, already a concept familiar to performance scholars, is hereby recast as the mechanism whereby those actants are “performed in, by, and through those relations” (Law 4). The privileging of “acting” in this formulation establishes performance – as a “doing and a thing done” (Diamond 1) – as a fundamental and undeniable component in the very coming-into-Being of the world. Certainly the field could stand to benefit both conceptually and materially were it able to begin assuming such a position as a “first philosophy.”

We may initially embrace this first philosophy position by making some axiological shifts in our long-standing commitments to humanism in Performance Studies. We may consider the ecological benefits of embracing the posthumanist concern with materiality, the rejection of telos and essence, and the rejection of some “favored” or “chosen” status of humankind. We are cognizant of the reality that doing so might strike a skeptical impulse for critics, in that a view of performance that entertains an even broader framework of inclusion may result in a slippery slope toward an all-encompassing chaos. However, the worry that we are embracing too glibly the “problematic understanding that “performance is everything” (Battaglia and Simmons 15) may be avoided through an articulation of performance as an epistemic ordering force rooted in materiality. The role of performance scholarship in understanding the posthuman – as both a genealogically derived temporal situation and a descriptor of a lived predicament – stems from a disciplinary commitment to the sublunary actualities of embodiment. As Conquergood notes, “for performing researchers the body becomes the porous boundary of exchange, the interface” (“Victor” 53). This “interface,” between two (and many more) subjects, entities, environments, or technologies is not a merely a metaphor: it is very much a material nexus, a transversal and transitive medial medium from which life emerges, and which emerges from life itself. Interfacing, that is, is just another word for living by, and through, relationality.

If all of this sounds a bit familiar to long-time scholars of Communication, it should. These ideas have a precedent within the discipline, albeit one that’s under-appreciated. Much of the “theoretical turn” of the last three decades has been a flirtation with posthumanist ideas. As Gunn pointed out 10 years ago, the overlap between the purview of the more familiar term “postmodernism” and the seemingly newer “posthumanism” is significant. Many of the prominent “postmodern” deconstructions worked to undo the unreflexive belief in – and adulation of – the autonomous, Cartesian, humanist subject. The anxious lamentations of social conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s, attempting to finger “postmodern” theory as an agent of cultural unraveling, were an indirect acknowledgment of the challenge to the supremacy, autonomy, and coherence of “the human.” “Attacking the ‘postmodern,’” writes Gunn, “is the symptom of a theoretical impasse regarding the humanist subject; that which has passed as postmodernism is actually posthumanism” (78). At this juncture, however, it has become apparent that our understanding and interest in the theories of posthumanism have diverged from the linguistically oriented theories of postmodernist deconstruction. We believe that the future of Performance Studies, with regards to posthumanist theory, is “materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded, firmly located somewhere, [and] according to the feminist ‘politics of location’” (Braidotti 51).

Rather than simply another “post” in a long line of “post”-theories – postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postsecularism, etc. – our contention is that efforts to exceed philosophical humanism (and antihumanism) mark a qualitative shift within the study of performance, as illustrated by the phenomenal range of methodological inquiry the authors who contribute to this issue demonstrate. Humanity – Homo performans, Turner’s “performing [hu]man” (81) – is rendered an active part of cosmos performans: a performing universe. Cosmos – in its Pythagorean genesis – was a term that signaled an ordering principle within the universe, and therefore a rebuttal of chaos, understood to represent the undifferentiated mass of “everythingness.” A posthuman approach to performance scholarship should be one, therefore, that offers the ordering logic of performance not only to human affairs, but also to those entities and processes that contribute to the symbolic and material emergence of our shared world.

As the twenty-first century directions in Performance Studies begin to crystallize, it appears that the “East meets Midwest” convergence mapped by Jon McKenzie, wherein “[Eastern] theater-based scholars have shifted more of their attention to discourse while the [Midwestern] literature-based scholars have turned toward embodiment,” (47) grows increasingly convoluted. What is shared is an acknowledgment that the study and practice of performance is a means of simultaneously acknowledging and manufacturing situated knowledge, while developing an ethics of participant observation. The relationship between theory and practice, while not conflated to the extent than neither persists as an independent approach to knowledge production, is an engagement of what Pollock characterizes as a “project of interanimation” (1). Theory – in this case, posthumanist theory – is not introduced into some established or stable realm of performance praxis; it is not simply new grist for the mill of performance technique. Conversely, the current state of global precarity – the persistence and escalation of socioecological crises such as climate change, violence-derived mass migration, economic stratification, etc. – does not allow one to imagine a performance praxis that might be introduced into the world of social thought (theory) without regard for its context or implications. To do so would be the height of academic and critical malfeasance, the production of “art for art’s sake” in an era of deadly stakes and limited resources. Instead, we must understand the introduction of posthumanist theories into performance as poiesis that embraces a mode Timothy Morton has dubbed “the ecological thought” (7). This style of research and creation – tracking the processes of radical interconnection, between both material humanity and the rest of Being, as well as between the thinking of humanity and the rest of Being – is a task for which the Gordian knot of performance epistemology is well-suited. A posthuman performance is therefore less of an interpretive frame than an entry into a modus operandi, a way of working within the newly heightened constraints of wordly belonging after humanist sovereignty falters.

If communication is, as John Durham Peters characterizes it, “a registry of modern longings,” (2) we believe that it is a worthwhile effort to map the longings of a posthumanist Performance Studies. To that end, the six essays selected for this special issue include several varieties of aspiration. First, there is an effort at renegotiating the dealings between humans and Earth Others within an expanded ethical frame. Second, we find accounts of a desire to produce aesthetic works that highlight complexity and interaction without presuming an a priori role for humanity. Finally, we witness efforts to think and write critically that do not fall back on the unreflexive pursuit of abstract knowledge, as if the world were nothing more than a vast library of metonymic fragments. In all cases, these authors demonstrate a desire to attend to the importance of both microsocial and macrosocial ordering processes of embodiment, repetition, and unicity that exceed a sole focus on the efforts and effects of humanity.

We begin this issue with Craig Gingrich-Philbrook’s essay “On the Execution of the Young Giraffe Marius, by the Copenhagen Zoo: Conquergood’s ‘Lethal Theatre’ and Posthumanism.” In this article, Gingrich-Philbrook considers the execution of a “nonbreeding” giraffe as an incitement to scholarly action, “a condensation of analysis, artistic energies, and activism” (204). Perhaps most prominently, the essay is an admiring, elaborative reading of two of Dwight Conquergood’s lasting contributions to the study of performance: the metaphor of performance as “concerted caravan,” as well as the notion of “lethal theatre.” In both cases, Gingrich-Philbrook leverages close readings of Conquergood’s research and supporting evidence from Conquergood’s life to highlight the resonances between performance theory and posthumanist theory. The essay is not merely an extrapolation of existing frames however, as Gingrich-Philbrook goes on to offer a posthumanist account of efforts to resist domination and predestination in one of the core arenas of biopolitical control: reproduction. In Gingrich-Philbrook’s hands, the justification offered by zookeepers for the execution of Marius is revealed to be the same delegitimizing rhetoric used to assault and manipulate those human individuals who resist the heteronormative social codes of validation via reproduction.

We are pleased to include an interview between philosopher and aesthetics scholar/artist Jay Miller and the famed contemporary artist Mel Chin. In the course of their conversation, Miller and Chin discuss works and trends from Chin’s oeuvre that highlight the relational and interactional dimensions of one strain of contemporary aesthetic practice. Chin’s work demonstrates a long-standing commitment to examining the collaborative, decentralized role of the artist in producing works. In the case of Revival Field, for example, Chin and Miller discuss Chin’s collaboration not only with other humans (Dr Rufus Chaney), but also Chin’s concern with employing metal-accumulating plants (and a landscape more generally) across a timeframe that exceeds the artist’s life. It is through these interactions with his audience, his collaborators, and the elements that comprise his work that Chin comes to understand the deeply lived role of materiality in aesthetic creation. After witnessing the violent, unceremonious slaughter of a goat whose blood was to serve as an element of his work, Chin reflects on his sense that the loftiness of art (and the special rarified status of “artist”) is an illusion. “No, I am a human being, and I am united in this world and this and in other ways as well” (Miller 221), muses Chin. “I’m actually not special or rarified. I’m common. And I’m common and I’m linked with the cruelty of the world,” (Miller 221) he concludes. This is, in many ways, one of the fundamental tenets of a posthumanist perspective.

Alys Longley’s “Skeleton Boat on an Ocean of Organs  … ” details three performance research projects, each of which engages a slightly different approach to the relationship between embodiment and materiality. They are examples of deeply considered somatic experience, the recounted perceptions of a person attuned to the aggregative micro-impacts and interrelations of material becoming. For Longely, these shifts in embodied philosophy are not a perspective into which we may incidentally slip, only to later resume our established, quotidian practices. They are – to the degree that movement is thought, and thought movement – radical interventions into the social corpus during an era of ecological precarity (corpus being a word, it should be noted, that shares a germane root with both “corporeal” and, more presciently troubling, with “corpse”). Longley’s work is an account of inhabiting a posthumanist perspective through embodied scholarship and movement practice, as well as an exercise in attempting to call awareness to writing as bodily practice. The notion that performance practices may be understood as “site specific” is hardly a new one; what is new in Longely’s approach, however, is the location of agency within the entities (both animate and inanimate) that comprise those sites. Thus, site-specificity is revealed as relational practice and a co-constitutive avenue for aesthetic knowledge production.

In “We Kill Our Own: Towards a Material Ecology of Farm Life,” Michael Broderick and Sean Gleason weave evocative, sensual prose with posthumanist theory in search of an elusive prize: a more complete frame – a lyrical “view from someplace” – within which to ground calls for ethical relations in the food system. Theirs is a piece that is rippled with contrasts: the earthy, Proustian terroir of a goat cheese, and later, the chemical bath of bleach that makes possible its creation. In so writing, the authors stake a claim on the thorny, “messy materiality of life” (Broderick and Gleason 262) that is foregrounded in our dealings with Earth Others. The task of inhabiting the contrasts detailed in this piece, between caretaker and killer, producer and consumer, and human and animal, exists within a complicated material plenum. In this border landscape between the (agri)cultural and the wild, the authors set out to limn the lives of things, animate and inanimate, humble and spectacular. This piece is an account of performers – the weeds in roadside verges, myriad animal lives, buildings under the sway of gravity and neglect, human dreamers – living and dying together, interwoven lives arcing through time in one small corner of Appalachia.

The next essay, “Ballerina-pointe shoe becoming, fluid multiplicities, and The Red Shoes,” by Mara Mandradjieff, is an example of the possibilities offered by a posthumanist performance criticism that is concerned with the implications of materialist theories for the performing body. Mandradjieff tracks the co-disciplining of the dancer and the pointe shoe as they undergo a mutual process of becoming, one that results in the emergence of an autopoetic system for artistic expression. To this end, she provides an account of the 1948 ballet film “The Red Shoes,” wherein she reads the canonical story of shoes with a life of their own as a model for examining embodiment through aesthetics. Her essay is more broadly an effort at putting posthumanist theory to work in an applied fashion, cultivating a better understanding of the intra-active relationship between dancer and shoe. This understanding is an opportunity to potentially become a more comfortable, expressive, accomplished dancer through increased awareness of the dancing body’s material relations and intra-actions with both the environment and technologies. With this complication of the logic of prosthesis, Mandradjieff’s work is as much a paean to the achievement of corporeal extension beyond the individual as it is an account of the dancerly processes of mutual deterioration.

Fittingly, we conclude this special issue with Benjamin Haas’s “Hopeless Activism: Performance in the Anthropocene.” Haas confronts the troubling prospect of doing activist work in an era of seemingly insurmountable global environmental crises. In particular, Haas ciphers his account of activist performance through his experience working with the organization Sea Shepherd, as he documented the hunting and slaughter of wild marine mammals in Taiji, Japan. Through this prolonged, daily act of witnessing death, Haas begins to question the shared, implicitly optimistic narratives of continuance, rebirth, and renewal that underpin both environmental activism and aesthetic creation. Which is not to say, of course, that Haas counsels nihilism or complacency. Instead – and pertinent to the conclusion of this issue – he recasts hopelessness not as the absence of hope, but as a lived ethical stance that evokes a dialectical relationship with hope. In other words, an informed calculus that concludes with the appraisal of irrevocable loss is not, for Haas, an excuse to turn away or abandon one’s efforts. It is a perpetually renewing call to presence, with an attendant responsibility to witness a parade of worldly finales. To this end, Haas offers a final sense of the “posthuman”: a temporal assessment of what it will mean to live (and die) as humans after the era of humanity. A posthuman world may not be a world wherein humanity exceeds itself or its limitations, but rather a world so altered as to be wholly regarded as lost, a diminished place in which we must make due and mourn after our current impacts have run their course.

We are indebted to these authors for their gifts to the readership of Text and Performance Quarterly; gifts necessarily divergent from the humanist framework in which the field has thrived over the past century. Each author provided a phenomenal example of the unique philosophical, aesthetic, and compositional opportunities afforded by focusing intently on the relational, posthuman turn in Performance Studies. In keeping with the relational dynamic established in Performance Studies through talk-back sessions and the like, we ask that you go beyond the page in reaching out to discuss the essays you encounter in this issue. Expand the interface to engage the posthuman turn with each other, with the authors of the following essays, and with us. Explore opportunities for engagement on the page and the stage, in the classroom and digital networks, and at festivals and conferences. And in so doing, embrace the opportunities and obligations of an expanded field of collaborators, actors, and Others that surround you in these posthuman times. The threads of relationality that connect the lot of us are everywhere, both the perpetual state of shared precarity – a hawser mooring life to death – as well as an ephemeral gossamer of affiliation, encounter, and attention. It is a worldy tissue that is spun and respun, performed anew with the dawn of each moment.

Notes

1. This concern is founded, we would argue, in Transhumanist philosophy. The conflation between Transhumanism and Posthumanism still troubles the posthumanist project in that uninformed differentiations between the two philosophies reduce the latter to the game of the former: a scientific and aesthetic project located in advances toward super-human immortality. The axiological concerns of the two “isms” are, in a number of ways, diametrically opposed. To use an analogy, Transhumanism is to Futurism (ardent, unapologetic progress) as Posthumanism is to Surrealism (radical connection).

2. See Gunn and Cloud and Battaglia and Simmons for arguments about posthuman agency as distributed as opposed to self-willed.

3. If we are to take Peters’s approach to communication theory as dissemination (as opposed to dialogue) seriously, and we do, a revisionary analysis of Conquergood’s dialogic performance is in order. This is not to say Conquergood’s dialogic performance model is no longer useful within a posthumanist framework. It is instead to argue that dialogue may not be the best initial approach when collaborating with nonhuman others.