The application in the theatre of ‘Non-Human Agency’ – attribution of agency for entities that fall outside a definition of human – is approached through the tendency for anti-humanist works to reproduce misanthropic outcomes within posthumanist, ecofeminist, and transhumanist thought. Yet the problem of ‘decentring’ the human remains, and specifically, how to engage that which is outside of the confines of human limits. Can theatre be a useful tool for this endeavour?
Alternatives to human supremacy suggest a role for theatre in reconciling questions of agency, specifically with reference to Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and its invention of the Übermensch, and with the end goal of overcoming human limits. Considering the advantages of the theatre, the individualist fantasy of transhumanism should be rejected in favour of a different set of questions more focused on collectivity and theatre’s capacity for assembly – what collective limits might be overcome through the act of spectatorship?
This lecture proposes an answer contained in ‘theatrical presence’ as defined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and elaborated on by Suzanne M. Jaeger (2008), a type of attention to being that is specific to the theatre. Extending this into social and political spheres, leading to what is called ‘superhumanism’ in this paper as a new set of relations for theatrical spectatorship – in close reference to fandom in superhuman films and specific modes of critical viewing discussed by Will Brooker (Using the Force, 2002). Modes of playful spectatorship and discursive viewing may lead the spectator into an engaged relationship with text, producing collective identification that goes beyond that based in gender, race, class, or other category.
Richard Pettifer (GER/AUS) is an Australian theatre director, theorist, and critic based in Berlin. His work approaches the subject of climate change and technology as key battlegrounds for the ethics of human intervention, seeking a re-centring of ‘the human’ as a collective social being in a context where misanthropy, individualism, alienation, and cynicism are dominant cultural traits. His work aspires to a global collective theatre that activates spaces for social change through cross-cultural collaboration, research-based approaches, philosophy and art-activism, advocating anti-oppression through culture-building and direct intervention, and emphasising a critical perspective on our complicity with global capitalist systems of exploitation and disempowerment.
Criticism: https://theaterstuck.blogspot.com/