The Slow Emergency of the Future

Abstract

This article explores The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (2019) by Back to Back Theatre, an ensemble based in Geelong, Australia, whose members are perceived to have intellectual disabilities – a unique position from which Back to Back comment on the categories of identity and modes of perception of ableist society. Shadow is, in part, a response to the launch of the Australian Royal Commission into the Violence, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability in 2019, which has since confirmed that these conditions are widespread, systemic and of urgent attention. Shadow positions the typically able-bodied spectator as the subject of a negated future in which their fate cannot be disentangled from that of those with whom they believe to have little in common. A group of activists warn spectators of an apocalypse brought about by the invasion of artificial intelligence, wherein the spectators’ survival will be threatened by precisely the same circumstances that those who live with disability currently endure. Such a circumstance is the apotheosis and stakes of what Theodor Adorno calls ‘identity-thinking’ – the reduction of a heterogenous world to knowable and finite concepts and categories at the expense of, and respect for, difference, or the nonidentical. I consider how identity-thinking is a form of ‘slow violence’ (Rob Nixon (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) that manifests in the forms of intolerance and oppression Shadow engages with. I employ negative dialectics, conceived by Adorno as way of resisting such violence, to examine how Back to Back reveal the urgent stakes of identity-thinking and grapple with the possibility of a future in which survival is a collective pursuit.

This research has been supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

I am grateful to the peer reviewers and editiors of this journal for feedback on drafts of this article, as well as to my supervisors, Drs Meg Mumford, Theron Schmidt and Caroline Wake, for their feedback on a version of this paper.

Notes

1 The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes premiered at Carriageworks in Sydney on 25 September 2019. In this article, I refer to a version of the playscript provided by the company (2019a) as well as my own thick descriptions of a performance during the 2019 run in Sydney.

2 Henceforth I will refer to The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes as Shadow.

3 The traditional owners of the land on which Carriageworks stands are the Gadigal people of Eora nation. Michael mispronounces Wadawurrung, the traditional custodians of lands near Geelong, where the company is based.

4 For Adorno’s contemporary Walter Benjamin, the marriage of art and technology in the twentieth century heralded new hope for the politicization of the masses. For Adorno, however, the advancement of technology signalled the progressive domination of humanity over the natural world. For more on the debate between Benjamin and Adorno see Kurlyo (2020: 619–36).