Abstract
This chapter explores two choreographic works that engage with nonhuman elements and objects in ways that aspire to a posthuman mode of togetherness, Rodrigo Sobarzo de Larraechea’s A P N E A (2013) and Sonja Jokiniemi’s Oh No (2013). Drawing on a critical investigation of Giorgio Agamben’s concept form-of-life and an analytical discussion of the two performances, it is suggested that the latter can be considered as articulations of the “new materialist” thinking currently taking place in philosophy, which seeks to reconfigure a non-anthropocentric and highly relational ecosystem in which human and nonhuman agents are immanently intertwined. Finally, the concept form-of-life extends to a posthuman plane, chiming with a “new metaphysics.”.
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Notes
- 1.
Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 1–12 (the essay was first published in Italian in 1993).
- 2.
As explained later in this article, this is especially demonstrated by his numerous writings on biopolitics and potentiality.
- 3.
Giorgio Agamben, “For a Theory of Destituent Power,” 2014, transcript of a public lecture given on Nov. 16, 2013 in Athens, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/02/05/theory-destituent-power/.
- 4.
In Agamben’s writings, ethos, thought and form-of-life are often used as synonyms since thinking and understanding are ethical and political faculties in themselves, according to him. Moreover, these notions need to be understood by means of potentiality, which refers to one’s experience of being in relation to one’s own lack and non-ability. As he writes, “Only if I’m not always already and solely enacted, but rather delivered to a possibility and a power, only if living and intending and apprehending themselves are at stake each time in what I live and intend and apprehend—only if, in other words, there is thought—only then can a form of life become, in its own factness and thingness, form-of-life […]” Agamben, “Form-of-Life.”
- 5.
The term appeared first in Italian as “Forma-di-vita” (Agamben 1993), however in some translations it is written as “form of life.” In this article, I am using “form-of-life” when referring to Agamben’s notion.
- 6.
Although Agamben’s seminal work The Open: Man and Animal (2002) is a critique of what he calls the “anthropological machine” of the Western thought, which has strategically produced a separation (a caesura, as Agamben writes) between man and animal, it is not taken into account in his discussion of the “form-of-life” in the sociopolitical context.
- 7.
This terminology is elucidated later in this article.
- 8.
Information retrieved from http://hetveemtheater.nl/en/maker/rodrigo-sobarzo-en/en/production/a-p-n-e-a-2/.
- 9.
- 10.
Several authors who critically analyse post-Fordist and neoliberal conditions of work and life have discussed this phenomenon, including Paolo Virno, Michael Harvey and Maurizio Lazzarato among others. Characteristically, in her recent investigation of the government of the precarious, where she convincingly defends social relationality and processes of becoming-common, Lorey writes, “Individualization means isolation, and this kind of separation is primarily a matter of constituting oneself by way of imaginary relationships, constituting one’s ‘own’ inner being, and only secondly and to a lesser extent by way of connections with others. Yet this interiority and self-reference is not an expression of independence, but rather the crucial element in the pastoral relationship to obedience.” Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, trans. Aileen Derieg, London: Verso, 2015.
- 11.
Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) is significant in this respect because she demonstrated that a state of precariousness, insecurity and terror defines life. As Butler has shown, however, precarious life cannot be detached from social and political conditions that historically enable life to be lived in particular ways, while being embedded in governmental and social conditions which imperil it. Butler investigated this phenomenon by looking into the dependency and vulnerability of life vis-à-vis US politics and the Israel–Palestine conflict.
- 12.
Martina Ruhsam, “Non-human Actors or the Political Implications of Contemporary Object-invested Choreographies,” Presented at the conference Does it Matter? Composite Bodies and Posthuman Prototypes in Contemporary Performing Arts, Ghent University (Mar. 17, 2015), courtesy of the author.
- 13.
I borrow the term intra-action from Karen Barad, who has shown that contrary to “interaction,” which assumes that there are separate entities interacting with each other, intra-action is pointing to the prioritization of the relationship between components that do not pre-exist the relation. This point is further discussed in the course of this article.
- 14.
Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 28, no. 3 (2003), 801–831.
- 15.
Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012, 85.
- 16.
I am thinking here of the works: Prelude (Sickle 2014), Built to Last (Stuart 2012), La Substance, but in English (Spångberg 2014), Allege, Things that Surround Us (Layes 2010, 2012).
- 17.
For instance, in the essay “Form-of-Life,” and in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
- 18.
Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” 5.
- 19.
Agamben acknowledges that Hannah Arendt was the first to detect how biological life (zoē) has been rendered primary to political action. Later, Foucault, without reference to Arendt’s work, showed that natural life has been included in the modern State’s calculations and mechanisms, transforming politics into biopolitics. Agamben has shown that the concentration camp is the exemplary case of modern biopolitics. In his view, the politicization of life is what has caused the concealment of political thought and action.
- 20.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, 119.
- 21.
Giorgio Agamben, “For a Theory of Destituent Power.”
- 22.
Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” 7.
- 23.
Ibid., 11.
- 24.
For a more in-depth analysis of the notion of potentiality, see Agamben’s Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Also, in my PhD dissertation Konstantina Georgelou, perFormless: The Operation of l’informe in postdramatic theatre, Utrecht University, 2011, I studied the ethical implications of this notion extensively.
- 25.
Giorgio Agamben, “Form-of-Life,” 10.
- 26.
André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, New York: Routledge, 2006, 4.
- 27.
Information drawn from the website of the event http://www.macba.cat/en/expanded-choreography-situations.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement.
- 30.
Information drawn from the website of the event: http://www.macba.cat/en/expanded-choreography-situations.
- 31.
For more information, see http://www.jeromebel.fr/performances/detailArticle?idArticle=38#.
- 32.
Rudi Laermans, “‘Dance in General’ or Choreographing the Public, Making Assemblages,” Performance Research, Vol. 13, no. 1 (2008), 7–14.
- 33.
Laermans also discussed the performance closer (2003) by the Brussels-based collective deepblue, which he analysed in more detail than other examples, focusing on the relationship with the audience and the experience evoked through the involvement of the audience in the performance.
- 34.
The term “phenomena” is used here similarly to Barad’s approach, for whom “phenomena are ontologically primitive relations—relations without preexisting relata.” Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 815.
- 35.
Barad acknowledges that other science studies scholars, such as Latour and Haraway, have propounded performative understandings of scientific practices in their work. Ibid., 807.
- 36.
According to Barad, “Relata are would-be antecedent components of relations. According to metaphysical atomism, individual relata always preexist any relations that may hold between them.” Ibid., 812.
- 37.
Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 28, no. 3 (2003), 815.
- 38.
Maaike Bleeker and Iris van der Tuin, “Science in the Performance Stratum: Hunting for Higgs and Nature as Performance,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Vol. 10, no. 2 (2014), 240.
- 39.
Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 817.
- 40.
Nevertheless, it could be argued that A P N E A’s programme notes address ecological concerns since they create awareness of an eventual lack of oxygen and water on Earth. Although this aspect is not explored within the frame of this article, and is also not concretely manifested in the performance, it could extend the argument made here towards political matters on ecology.
- 41.
Quoted in Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, 68.
- 42.
Jokiniemi’s quotes in this article come from the text she wrote as part of her Master of Theatre studies at DasArts, Amsterdam, undertaken after her undergraduate studies in dance and choreography. Oh No was the final performance (the master proof presentation) that Jokiniemi presented for the master’s degree. The work has since been presented elsewhere, such as at the Dampfzentrale in Bern (December 2014).
- 43.
Quoted in Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, 68.
- 44.
Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 818.
- 45.
David Kishik, The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012, 74.
- 46.
In Dolphijn and van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, 90.
- 47.
Ibid., 161.
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Georgelou, K. (2018). Form-of-Life as Radical Togetherness: “New Materialist” Expansions of Choreography. In: Gržinić, M., Stojnić, A. (eds) Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance. Avant-Gardes in Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78343-7_16
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