The current ecological context has prompted a resurgence in debate about the concept of ‘humanness’. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012), for example, has argued for a re- conception of our understanding of humans as geophysical forces, to recognise the influence of humans on the physical and geological processes of the earth. ‘Humans, collectively,’ Chakrabarty writes, ‘now have an agency in determining the climate of the planet as a whole, a privilege reserved in the past only for very large-scale geophysical forces’ (9). The anthropogenic effect on the climate is profound and this influence has been termed the age of the Anthropocene, the geological period of the human. What does this reconfiguration of the human do then to the supposedly humanist discipline of theatre and performance? I will suggest that it requires a re-thinking towards a nuanced non-anthropocentrism, which does not dismiss the uniqueness of human agency, but rather acknowledges the range of agencies of the more-than-human and the complex interplay between them.
Garrard (2004) claims, ‘much ecocriticism has taken for granted that its task is to overcome anthropocentrism’ (176). I suggest this is also the task of performance and ecology. If
the current state of the climate creates an imperative to turn towards the ecological in all disciplines, then a non-anthropocentric aesthetic of performance is needed to acknowledge the geological agency of the human and the affective agency of the more-than-human. Throughout this thesis I suggest that performance can and should open up new ways of thinking about ecological relationships. In this section, I build on my earlier interpretation of ecomaterialism (see Chapter I) and propose it as a starting point for thinking critically about a non-anthropocentric aesthetic of ecological performance. I contend that ecomaterialism, because of the immanent acknowledgement of the agency of the more-than-human, can provide a theoretical proposal for overcoming anthropocentrism.
Ecomaterialism asserts that our current conception of the nonhuman as inanimate or instrumental hinders us from engaging with the range of sensible forces, actants and agents that operate in relation to us and obstructs the development of a more ecological sensibility. In Vibrant Matter, Bennett suggests that all matter has life or vibrancy and recognition of this vibrancy may change our relationship to the world, as I have discussed in Chapter I. I also draw on Barad’s (2003) concept of ecomaterialism, or what she refers to as ‘agential realism’, positioned in relation to matter. For Barad, matter is not a passive entity awaiting meaning, nor is it a static and uncontested site for theory and discourse. It is not a blank slate awaiting completion and signification from human constructions such as culture or history because ‘matter is always already an ongoing historicity’ (821). Matter has immanent qualities, such as the capacity of agency, that can be recognised and acknowledged by external forces but cannot be imbued because they are already there. Agential realism positions agency as flowing through dynamic matter and is concerned with the discursive modes of constructing categories and binaries (such as human/nature, animate/inanimate).
Both Barad and Bennett configure matter as having the capacity for agency as embedded in the cultural and historical unfolding of human/more-than-human life61. Other theorists have
also argued against agency as an exclusively human quality. For example, Donna Haraway (1991) suggests the world is comprised of active agency, and acknowledging that agency in productions of knowledge ‘makes room for some unsettling possibilities’ (199). As I’ve mentioned in Chapter I, such theoretical arguments are open to debate and contention; however, I utilise them here to theorise the way in which non-anthropocentrism might be conceived within performance.
The beginning of the anthropocentric hierarchy, which separates humans from nature, has been traced back to the Great Chain of Being or scala naturae (Soper 1995). The centring of the human at the apex of life (just below God and other celestial beings) informed a broadly
61 Both Bennett and Barad are influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages and
geophilosophy (1994), which takes the earth as the subject of philosophical concern. Deleuze and Guattari also consider material as matter-energy ([1987] 2013), an influential idea to vital materialist, agential realism and ecomaterialism in general.
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western view of the natural world as a resource for man. I suggest thinking through the agency of human-nonhuman assemblages is needed to counter the anthropocentric egoism that has led to unprecedented environmental change. Instead of a vertical chain of being, ecomaterialism proposes a horizontality of distributive agency that reconfigures historic anthropocentrism and recognises the ecological materiality of the more-than-human.
How then do we think through distributive more-than-human agency within an aesthetic of theatre and performance? As Wendy Arons (2012) suggests, theatre and performance, because of their imaginative capacity, are ideal forms for challenging the long-established binaries that lead to faulty understandings of our relationship to the more-than-human world (566). Ecomaterialism calls for recognition of the way the more-than-human creates effects, a radical openness to the ways in which we are materially interconnected to the lively ‘matter’ that surrounds us. This is the ethical imperative of ecomaterialism, to open up our perception to recognise and discern the way in which the more-than-human has the capacity for agency. Performance can expose, dissect and magnify the ecological agency of the more-than-human, fostering ecological thought through perceptual openness. This openness to the capacity of the more-than-human resists anthropocentrism and challenges dominant worldviews of human hubris.
For Bennett, an ecological sensibility is one that redraws human/more-than-human relationships horizontally, acknowledging that distributive agency is usually constituted by some form of human-nonhuman confederation. Latour’s (2004) concept of actant, echoes this more-than-human agency as he describes an actant as ‘a term from semiotics covering both humans and nonhumans’ (237). Actant, then, is used to resist the anthropocentric implications of ‘actor’, implying the material agency of the more-than-human as something efficacious. Actant also resists the bifurcation of human and nonhuman ontological distinctions. The differences between human and nonhuman, according to cultural theorist John Frow, need to be ‘read horizontally as a juxtaposition rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being’ as we live in a world where the human and the more-than-human can ‘exchange properties’ (Frow in Bennett 9–10). The acknowledgement of this exchangeability and decentred agency leads to a non-anthropocentric way of thinking that is, I suggest, key to an ecological performance aesthetic.
Arons and May (2012) call for a theorisation of theatre and performance that is non- anthropocentric62 in that it does not reinscribe reductive binaries, since a performance
paradigm is in a way ‘always already a cultural interpretation of and overlay onto the “natural” world’ (1). Therefore, any theorisation of ecological performance necessitates a re-conception of the human relationship to ‘nature’, engaging with the more-than-human in performance
62 Kershaw (2007) similarly theorises biocentric performance as an alternative non-anthropocentric
in a way that does not simply replicate anthropocentric binaries. This theorisation, they suggest, is urgent if performance is going to contribute to the reframing of ecological relationships in light of the timely ecological challenges posed by current conditions (2). This echoes Chaudhuri’s (1994) assertion of the inefficacy of ecological performances which ‘try to exist within a theatre aesthetic and ideology (namely, again, 19th-century humanism) that is…programmatically anti-ecological’ (24). However, she also situates a productive tension between perceptions of nature and culture, ‘identifying the theatre as the site of both ecological alienation and potential ecological consciousness’ (25) because it is a space where conflicts between nature and culture are played out. More recently, she has argued for theatre that does not represent relationships to nature, such as climate change, but literalises and materialises the figure of the human and more-than-human in the Anthropocene (drawing on Chakrabarty) and the ‘porousness and diversity of the ecological world’ (Chaudhuri and Enelow 2014: 29). By contrast, I am suggesting that performance can interact with ecology through a non-anthropocentric configuration of material agency. My argument in this chapter is that this way of thinking is specifically made manifest in performance through ecological anthropomorphism and through the disclosure and amplification of human geological agency (as detailed in a further section of this chapter).