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Abstract
The relationship between theatre and the Anthropocene remains an understudied topic. First, there appears to be a tension between the Anthropocene as a concept that, by radically foregrounding a host of non-human agencies, shifts the focus away from human agency, on the one hand, and the theatre as an all-too-human medium on the other. Second, the theatre as a here-and-now space seems irreconcilable with the vast temporal and spatial scale of the Anthropocene, which entails an almost unmanageable complexity and unpredictability. Staging the Anthropocene, then, remains a theatrical challenge because of the renegotiated assemblage of human and non-human agency and the subsequent spatio-temporal epistemological challenges. This essay examines the extent to which theatre is equipped to stage the Anthropocene by analyzing and critically assessing Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati’s Inside (2016) as a work of Anthropocene theatre. Via the experimental format of the lecture performance, the authors look for a new way to represent humanity’s place in the Anthropocene. This is most explicit in the way the performance breaks what I call the first wall, one of the affordances of the theatrical space, which is everything on stage that is thought to have no theatrical — and by extension moral and political — agency. As Inside renegotiates the relationship between human and non-human agency, the human loses its central position as protagonist and sole agent. The performance, however, never completely erases human agency from the stage but minimally salvages it, as such problematizing the modern scientific gaze of theoria.
Notes on Contributor
Amadeo Dierickx is a Belgian researcher currently working on a PhD proposal (KU Leuven) on the relationship between literature and the Anthropocene. As a philosophy and literature graduate, his main topics of interest are in the fields of Anthropocene theory, Actor Network Theory and ecocriticism, especially as they are given literary shape in genre fiction and theatre.
Notes
1. Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 8.
2. Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 171.
3. Bruno Latour, ‘On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications’, 2020, Soziale Welt 47, no. 4 (1996): 369-381 (373).
4. Mahlu Mertens, ‘Staging the Geological Archive: Ontroerend Goed’s World Without Us and Anthropocene Theater’, Literature, Interpretation, Theory 31, no. 1 (2020): 60-74 (60). There are, however, some works that have attended to Anthropocene theater, among which are Una Chaudhuri (2016), Adeline Johns-Putra (2016), Katherine Gillen (2018), Stef Craps & Mahlu Mertens (2018), Alexandra Arènes et al. (2018), Mohebat Ahmadi (2019), Mahlu Mertens (2020) and Liliane Campos (2020), among others.
5. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 43.
6. Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati, interview by Sébastien Hendrickx and Kristof van Baarle, ‘Decor as Protagonist: Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati on Theatre and the New Climate Regime’, Etcetera 155, January 7, 2019, https://e-tcetera.be/decor-is-not-decor-anymore/ (accessed October 4, 2022).
7. ‘The Blue Marble’ is a famous photograph taken by NASA’s Apollo 17 in 1972. It depicts the globe of planet Earth, which appears like a giant blue marble. For Latour, it is the default outside viewpoint.
8. These political repercussions of the new climatic regime fall beyond the scope of this essay.
9. Non-human scenery, such as décor or stage props, is of course not always positioned against the backdrop of the stage, the figurative ‘first wall’ (symmetrically opposing the fourth wall). The décor and the first wall often do not coincide completely, because the décor can be propped up against the second and third walls, across the stage or even in the fourth wall. However, the definition of the concept of the first wall as the backside of the stage might be too narrow. Not only the vertical wall at the backside of the stage, where the décor might be, but also every stage prop, scattered across the stage, or every other piece of scenery can be considered part of the first wall. In that sense, the term becomes a representation of everything on stage that is non-human and, in many cases, thought of as secondary, the object of human command. It also corresponds to Latour’s ideas on the background foregrounding itself (see infra).
10. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 60, 66, 100.
11. Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2006).
12. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, ed. Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse, trans. Minou Arjomand (London: Routledge, 2014), 39.
13. Ibid., 69. Timothy Clark, in addressing human agency in the Anthropocene, states: ‘One definitive feature of the Anthropocene is the emergence of the human species per se as a different form of “transpersonal agency”. It is an agency that must now, for the first time, be posited “as operating at the universal level of the human species as a whole – a super-subject beyond all possible subjective experience”’ (Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 14). Dipesh Chakrabarty problematizes this: ‘The figure of humanity differentiates itself from the “anthropos” (of the Anthropocene, say) at this point. We think of the political figure of humanity as having two, somewhat contradictory, characteristics. First, it is an entity that is capable of projecting itself into the future as a purposeful agency even though the purpose may not always be one that wins universal approval. But we also think of this humanity as always already divided by issues that in turn give rise to issues of justice. It is never an operative, singular agency’. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Human Condition in the Anthropocene (Yale: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 2015), 159.
14. Una Chaudhuri, ‘Anthropo-Scenes: Staging Climate Chaos in the Drama of Bad Ideas’, in Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now, eds. Siân Adiseshiah and Louise LePage (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016), 312.
15. Una Chaudhuri, ‘The Fifth Wall: Climate Change Dramaturgy’, HowlRound, April 17, 2016, https://howlround.com/fifth-wall (accessed November 2020).
16. That the Anthropocene is in essence about the end of humankind is one of the theoretical premises of this essay. Customarily, it is seen as the apex of human capacity. From this perspective, many researchers question its viability as a concept since it seems to depict the pinnacle of human arrogance. This terminological dissatisfaction has sparked an array of alternative terms. Among the most popular are Donna Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ (2016) and Jason W. Moore’s ‘Capitalocene’ (2016), the latter of which points to capitalism as the primary force that shapes the human geological stratum. This essay chooses to keep the term Anthropocene but chooses not to focus on the extent to which it emphasizes human mastery but to which this absolute dominance has rendered the human’s control ineffective.
17. Sascha Bru, The European Avant-gardes, 1905-1935: A Portable Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Tommaso Marinetti’s futurist serate, notably, functioned as hybrid amalgams of lecture, music and art analysis. Antonin Artaud’s lecture performance ‘Theater and the Plague’, first performed in 1933 at the Sorbonne and later published in his famous essay collection The Theatre and Its Double, is also an early example of the genre.
18. Patricia Milder, ‘Teaching as Art: The Contemporary Lecture-Performance’ PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 33, no. 1 (2011): 13-27 (13).
19. Ibid., 16.
20. Latour and Aït-Touati, interview by Hendrickx and van Baarle.
21. Jasper Delbecke, ‘The Essay, the Maligned’, Performance Research 25, no. 4 (2020): 136-144 (141).
22. Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 182.
23. Delbecke, ‘The Essay, the Maligned’, 141.
24. Alexandra Arènes, Bruno Latour and Jérôme Gaillardet, ‘Giving Depth to the Surface: An Exercise in the Gaia-graphy of Critical Zones’, The Anthropocene Review 5, no. 2 (2018): (120-135) 122.
25. Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touai, interview by Festival Les Giboulées, ‘Bruno Latour & Frédérique Ait Touati | Inside | Festival Les Giboulées 20218 | szenik.eu’, YouTube, April 6, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K36BttxD_h4 (accessed October 4, 2022). This is the original French citation: ‘C’est Bruno parlant comme en conférence et c’est Bruno jouant son propre rôle ne jouant pas […] mais c’est essayer de pousser un peu plus loin cette question de la diapositive de conférences, de la diapositive scientifique et se dire finalement si on construits non pas simplement une image mais un espace nouveau, si on fait une scénographie immersive […] avec la musique acousmatique, avec des nouveaux types de dessin, avec des architectes, des artistes’. The English version in the text is the author’s own translation.
26. The scrim, a fine woven fabric, is in this case see-through, which allows a projection in front of Latour, while he remains discernible.
27. Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati, Interview by Hugues Le Tanneur, ‘Entretien avec Bruno Latour et Frédérique Aït-Touati’, Théâtre Contemporain, September 2019, https://nanterre-amandiers.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/05/entretien, (accessed October 4, 2022).
28. Latour, Down to Earth, 68.
29. Liliane Campos, ‘The Paradox of Anthropocene Spectatorship in Latour and Aït-Touati’s Inside and Moving Earths’, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60280bec9383f12c78aabc32/t/61fab9bbe730604c02053049/1643821500645/Anthropocene+Spectatorship+with+revisions.pdf (accessed October 4, 2022).
30. Representing the inside position is directly linked to the representation of the Anthropocene: ‘The main reason we insist on the importance of an alternative localization system is that it is crucial to situate the human role at the time of the Anthropocene’ (Arènes et al., ‘Giving Depth to the Surface’, 133).
31. Ibid., 122.
32. Latour, Down to Earth, 74.
33. Arènes et al., ‘Giving Depth to the Surface’, 121. In Down to Earth Latour makes this same point: “From the fact that one can, from the vantage point of the earth, grasp the planet as a falling body among other falling bodies in the infinite universe, some thinkers go on to conclude that it is necessary to occupy, virtually, the vantage point of the universe to understand what is happening on this planet” (Latour 2018, 67).
34. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 182.
35. Bruno Latour, ‘Agency at the time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History 45 (2014): 1-18 (13).
36. Latour and Aït-Touati, interview by Hendrickx and van Baarle. Latour describes his experience in an essay: ‘je m’insère à l’intérieur d’un diapositive qui devient un diapositive artistique’. Bruno Latour, ‘Bruno Latour tracks down Gaia’, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 3, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bruno-latour-tracks-down-gaia/ (accessed October 4, 2022). The importance of the background is an idea, moreover, that Latour borrows from Michel Serres, who, in commenting on a painting by Goya in which two enemies are fighting, remarks: ‘But aren’t we forgetting the world of things themselves, the sand, the water, the mud, the reeds of the marsh?’ Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan press, 1995), 2.
37. This emphasis on the non-human agency of the projection does not undercut the absolute importance of theatre technicians and, by extension, directors, and designers (who actually designed the projection). This essay focuses on non-human agency, but that is not to downplay the other humans’ agency as part of the actor network.
38. Campos, ‘The Paradox of Anthropocene Spectatorship’, 3.
39. Arènes et al., ‘Giving Depth to the Surface’, 121.
40. The fact that the projection is an inanimate entity is not relevant: ‘On the CZ that we wish to foreground, it’s clear that the difference between biotic and abiotic processes has become moot’. Arènes et al., ‘Giving Depth to the Surface’, 129. Interestingly, Inside performs what Delbecke argues is essential to the essay format: ‘The intention to disturb the subjective position […] and to test the limits of the self is the cornerstone of the essay genre’. Jasper Delbecke, ‘Tracing the Essay in Contemporary Performing Arts’, Performance Research 23, no. 2 (2018): 5-12 (6). The performance literally tests the limits of Latour by engulfing him inside, blurring (the borders of) his body.
41. Latour, Down to Earth, 83.
42. Campos, ‘The Paradox of Anthropocene Spectatorship’, 1-2.
43. Campos analyzes the production’s renegotiation of this outside theoria position: ‘I argue that the philosopher on stage functions as a figure for a particular form of enquiry, theoria, in which knowledge is based on distanced spectatorship, and that this position is put into question by the science and ethics explored by Inside and Moving Earths’. Ibid., 2.
44. Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati, ‘INSIDE’, YouTube, February 14, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzPROcd1MuE (accessed October 4, 2022).
45. Latour conjures up many different images to represent this zone and especially its thinness: a cork, a skin, a crust, a layer of varnish, a parchment, a tapestry, a pellicle, a film. Latour evokes a rich imagery to describe it: ‘A biofilm, a varnish, a skin, a few infinitely folded layers’. Latour, Down to Earth, 78. ‘a helix, a vortex, or, […] a series of nested merry-go-rounds’. Arènes et al., ‘Giving Depth to the Surface’, 127.
46. His explicit mentioning of the video experts and colleague researchers, who made the production possible and with effort tried to come up with new maps and diagrams, further shows the scientific product as an interplay of different social factors in the scientific community. It also emphasizes the labour and agency of off stage workers.
47. Arènes et al., ‘Giving Depth to the Surface’, 124.
48. depicts the map of an animal park in the East of France, a critical zone observatory: ‘That would be the movement of a park ranger, that would be the wild boar moving around, the fox […], the scientist studying forest animals […], the marten […], the gps-tracking of forest animals […], the owl, the crows […], the water is an actor […], a hunter […], farmers, even the woodworms, the badgers, the bats, the woodpeckers, the deer’. Latour and Aït-Touati, Inside.
49. Campos, ‘The Paradox of Anthropocene Spectatorship’, 3.
50. Ibid., 4.
51. Ibid., 6.
52. Arènes et al., ‘Giving Depth to the Surface’, 122.
53. In his theoretical essay Down to Earth, Latour draws a parallel between geology and the theater: in the Holocene ‘one can forget the building and the wings to concentrate on the plot. That is no longer the case in the Anthropocene’. Latour, Down to Earth, 43.
54. Latour and Aït-Touati, interview by Hendrickx and van Baarle.
55. Campos stresses that ‘their focus on the gaze also suggests that the theatre is a particularly appropriate space in which to face the ethical and intellectual challenge of the Anthropocene’. Campos, ‘The Paradox of Anthropocene Spectatorship’, 2.
56. Milder, ‘Teaching as Art’, 18.
57. Campos, ‘The Paradox of Anthropocene Spectatorship’, 5.
58. Claire Colebrook, ‘Introduction: Framing the End of the Species: Images without Bodies’, in Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction 1, ed. Claire Colebrook (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 9-28 (25).
59. When Latour describes the concept of the Anthropocene in Inside, he emphasizes this, stating that the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene is not a reference to all people, but to a specific subset living mostly in North-America and Western-Europe (in the first world). In addition, the performance does not merely take this Eurocentric perspective, but specifically focuses on the outlook of the philosopher and social scientist, which is typical of Latour.
60. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2018); Steve Mentz, Break Up the Anthropocene ((Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2019).
61. Latour and Aït-Touati, interview by Hendrickx and van Baarle.
62. Ibid.
63. Arènes et al., ‘Giving Depth to the Surface’, 124.