Towards an Ethics of Hybrid Agency in Performance

Abstract

In the late 1980s, Jean-Luc Nancy brought together nineteen leading thinkers to consider ‘Who comes after the subject?’, in the wake of major historical and philosophical developments that had radically destabilized modern understandings of selfhood and agency. Several of the respondents addressed ideas in their work that have contributed to fundamental reconfigurations of subjectivity in performance research, as well as to expansive, cross-disciplinary discourses that have since emerged on posthumanism and performativity.

Some three decades after Nancy’s provocation, the shifting social, cultural, political, environmental, technological and research landscapes have prompted pervasive re-imaginings of agential relations and behaviour. Nevertheless, with human and other biological life now being tracked, evaluated, quantified, mediated, anticipated, exploited and placed in situations to perform in unprecedented ways, and according to often-opaque processes or criteria, the ethical imperative to return to the question of the (post)subject—and its increasingly hybridized manifestations—arguably resonates even more profoundly today.

Offering its own response to Nancy, this article takes steps towards a metaethical framework for investigating the vastly expanded scope of hybrid agency in contemporary performance. Who comes after ‘the subject’ in performance research? How are diverse modes of human and nonhuman perception, representation, decision-making and engagement with the world bound up with performance, performativity and the ‘performatic’? To what extent does thinking about such questions coincide across communities and disciplinary boundaries? How do numerous individual choices and criteria about what is ‘good’ and how to act shape particular instances of practice, especially in everyday life? Who or what performs them, and to what ends? What harms might they cause? Building on philosopher Simon Critchley’s ‘fundamental question of ethics’, the article proposes we step back, to explore how—across different fields—various agential configurations materialize and seek to perform or bind themselves by means of performance to whatever they determine as ‘the good’.