My Sweet Disposability, Oh, Bury the Living and Unearth the Dead

Abstract

This essay examines object-driven performances from the perspective of disposability in order to detail threads of dark ecology that inform the complexities of performance practice in an era of anthropogenic climate change. I begin ‘at home’ with Geoff Sobelle's The Object Lesson (2015) in which the accumulation and disposability of objects becomes uniquely visible in human narratives and perceptual fields. In The Object Lesson, I examine the mode of disposability that occurs in everyday historical and memorial practices of storytelling that are invested in keeping and getting rid of STUFF. I build upon this foundation in a critique of performing plastics, which bend human perceptions of reality and subjectivity through pervasive encounters with familiar-strange, yet redundant, plastic entities that resist and promote disposability. I take up dark ecology in order to think through the contradictions of dispose-able realities that are shaped through sensuous inclusivity and withdrawal from human perceptibility. I ask: how does disposability demarcate and order the living and the dead within a grid of intelligibility; how do performances of waste disrupt human capacities to perceive and order the world; how might the ordering of these materials reconfigure the sensible in a singular materialization of Morton's (2016) dark ecology (depressing, sweet, and uncanny); and how might disposability and waste as geophysical forces—life that creates death—aid in reimagining performance practice beyond human spatiotemporal scales, within the bio and necropolitical, and against Jon McKenzie's (2001) performance mandate ‘perform or else’ reconfigured as ‘perform and else’ (perform and be discarded)?