Amsterdam University Press

Chapter Title: Posthumanism

Chapter Author(s): Ralf Remshardt

Book Title: Mapping Intermediality in Performance

Book Editor(s): Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender, Robin Nelson
Published by: Amsterdam University Press. (2010)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mwjd.24

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Posthumanism
Ralf Remshardt

Mapping Posthuman
In spite of its many inflections by intermedia and digital technology, performance
as a centrally human practice remains anchored in the humanities, and it might
be expected that a term whose meanings are as shifting and occasionally contra-
dictory as “posthumanism” can do little except adumbrate the debate about its
nature and future.33 Carefully unfolded, however, the term can become an inter-
pretive matrix – there is no singular ‘posthuman condition’ – that resonates con-
structively with the multiplicity of intermedial performances and allows for a lib-
eratory sensibility that can serve to reimagine the body, spectation, and
performance. In a posthuman performance paradigm, spectator and performer
both relinquish their positionally determinate (dialectical) claims to presence and
reconfigure themselves as dynamic, interdependent parts of an emergent system.
The term derives its provocative potential partially from its contested seman-
tics. In the discourse of robotics and cybernetics (theorised for instance by Marvin
Minsky or Hans Moravec), posthuman designates an evolutionary or morphologi-
cal step towards a synthesis of the organic and mechanical/digital, and may in-
deed portend an apocalyptic and deterministic techno-scientism culminating in
the subsumption of human consciousness into the binary code of cyberspace so
that, as Katherine Hayles paraphrases this position, it will no longer be “possible
to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informa-
tional circuits in which it is enmeshed” (1999, 35). Against this teleological and
dystopian view of posthumanism, Hayles posits an open one:

[T]he posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead
the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have
applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and
leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will
through individual agency and choice” (Hayles 1999, 286).

As a term of cultural criticism, posthuman aims at dismantling the many binaries

endorsed by Western dualism: body/mind, self/other, culture/nature, gobal/local,
and so forth. Such a view is indebted not least to Donna Haraway’s bold “Cyborg
Manifesto,” in which she envisions adopting the “ironic mythology” of the cyborg
in order to cut through the “maze of dualisms” that structure and entrap us; to-
day, she argues, “we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of ma-
chine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives

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us our politics” (1991, 150). It may also give us our performance, to the degree
that we extend Haraway’s boundary-dissolving cyborg metaphor to the stubborn
binaries of performance discourse: presence/absence; fiction/reality; performer/
spectator; liveness/mediation. Deployed in performance theory – as for instance
by Steve Dixon (2007) and others – posthumanism signals the new confluence of
physical materiality with performative consciousness resulting from immersive
virtual reality environments, telepresence, distributed performance and so on,
which increasingly trouble the traditional notions of embodiment and presence
(! portal: corporeal literacy).

Performance and the Posthuman Body

Given the discursive appropriations to which it is subjected (psychoanalytic, post-
structuralist, constructionist), it is tempting to try and salvage a kind of pure body
out of the white noise of mediated transmission, a body phenomenologically ‘in-
the-world’ whose salient feature, if not quite freedom from signifying practices, is
at least an elision of the economy of reproduction and circulation. So Peggy Phe-
lan: “In performance, the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of
‘presence.’ But in the plenitude of its apparent visibility and availability, the per-
former actually disappears and represents something else – dance, movement,
sound, character, ‘art’” (150). In such a formula, even if marked by disappear-
ance, the body still has its determined place in an operation of metonymic ‘trans-
lation’.
But intermedial practice, especially if it involves some manner of feeding back
the living body through digital representation, telepresence, or virtual reality, de-
stabilizes the spatial, temporal and communicative relationships implied by such
a translation. The performer’s body (as indeed the observer’s) already exists in-
side what Anja Klöck has referred to as “a conceptual a priori mediality of all
representational practices” (117) for which there is no longer a natural or natura-
lised body as external referent. If we indeed have entered what Roy Ascott calls
the “post-biological era” then bodies not only no longer represent some ‘natural’
fixed point of the real, but on the contrary the very place (or scene) at which the
real comes undone: “the site of bionic transformation at which we can recreate
ourselves and redefine what it is to be human” (376).
One of the performers who has most radically explored these bionic transfor-
mations is Australian performance artist Stelarc who in works such as Fractal Flesh
(1995) and Exoskeleton (1998-) has created robotic extensions of his limbs or sur-
rendered control over his body to remote manipulation via the internet, in some
cases himself becoming the avatar of a dispersed, often chaotic, sometimes self-
regulating system. Insisting that “the body is obsolete,” he writes: “We have al-
ways been prosthetic bodies. We fear the involuntary and we are becoming in-
creasingly automated and extended. But we fear what we have always been and
what we have already become – Zombies and Cyborgs” (Stelarc).

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 Such profound cultural anxiety arises any time posthuman hybridities are
brought into play because they potentially put performance itself and its cognates,
the (human) body and (organic) presence, into doubt. The question “who per-
forms?” leads directly to “what is human?” Current practices range from the
mere digital doubling of the live performer – which some critics have described
as “uncanny” – to experiments along the bionic/cybernetic continuum. Perth-
based collective Tissue Culture & Art fashions human and non-human cell cul-
tures into objects called “semi-livings” which “purposely subvert binary positions
such as human/animal, life/death, nature/culture as well as performer/per-
formed” (Catts and Zurr 2006, 155). Conversely, the digital avatar in Susan Broad-
hurst’s Blue Bloodshot Flowers (2001) was programmed with an “emotion engine”
that called forth a range of autogenic performative behaviors. In investigating
how each of these is present and embodied in their respective performance con-
texts, it helps to recall that in the posthuman analysis, as Hayles remarks, the
conceptual dyad of presence and absence in the material sphere is complemented
(and potentially substituted) by the informational dyad of “pattern” and “random-
ness” (1999, 247-9).

The Experiencer as Cyborg

Today a spectator, or experiencer (! term: experiencer), of digital perfor-
mance comes into the realm, site, or space of the performance already as a thor-
oughly initiated citizen of the cyberworld, conversant with the raft of devices she
owns and/or manages, some of which are still attached to her body, steeped in
the mythology of techno-culture (is she Mac or PC?), flexible in extending herself
locally and globally, practiced in dividing her attention simultaneously between
screened and non-screened versions of reality. That is, even without being fitted
with any prosthetic gear connected to the specific performance at hand – a walkie-
talkie, VR helmet, datagloves, and so on – the experiencer is already a cyborg.
This is literally true to the extent she relies substantially on any portable technol-
ogy to fulfill social functions of locomotion and communication, and figuratively
inasmuch as she has incorporated Haraway’s cyborgian ethos (now mutated from
an ironic-resistive stance to one of necessity). “In our cyber-universe,” writes Rosi
Braidotti, “the link between the flesh and the machine is symbiotic, creating a
bond of mutual dependence” (2009, 249). Not only has her life as social cyborg
habituated her to shifting her perceptual focus from representation to simulation
and from mimesis to the play of signifiers (to cite only two performance-relevant
categories of “transitions” Haraway enunciates [1991, 161]), it is likely that tech-
nology has even changed how she embodies her encounter with the performance
in many subtle ways (I am thinking here of my students whose reflexive texting
has made them physically a fundamentally different kind of audience). Thus any
theatrical production running today, intermedial or not, already contends with

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the posthuman subjectivity of its audience, a dislocated and distributed subjectiv-
ity Braidotti has called “nomadic.”
The gradual “becoming-cyborg” of the audience (as well as powerful commer-
cial interests vying for dominance in communications and entertainment) are per-
haps what will push immersive (! term: immersion) technology out of the
mode of a separate and solitary novelty-driven experience and shape a new com-
munal posthuman sense of performance experience. Even though experiments
with technologically mediated immersion and augmented or virtual reality envir-
onments in performance date back to at least the 1980s (see the histories provided
by Giannacchi and Dixon), the concurrent presence of an audience whose identity
is at least partly constituted by a digitally hybridised or nomadic subjectivity, a
techno-self that habitually extends itself through a multitude of channels, from
social networking sites to 3-D simulated environments with avatars (!
instance: Second Life), is a recent phenomenon. Blast Theory in the UK is
one performance group that uses a quasi-cyborgian model for its participants/
experiencers and whose imaginative locative media projects are acutely concerned
with the social transformations occurring at the intersection of urban space, its
virtual mappings, the ambulatory human body, and communication technology.
In Blast Theory performances (which are structured similarly to games), partici-
pants are typically equipped with prosthetic extensions, both low-tech (bicycles)
and high-tech (hand-held computers and GPS systems), and appear simulta-
neously as avatars on screen to other participants. The often simple quest narra-
tives Blast Theory initiates (for example in Uncle Roy All Around You, 2003 or Rider
Spoke, 2007) trigger potentially complex meditations on reality, orientation, mem-
ory, trust, surveillance, and the limits of performance. In this very contemporary
iteration they seem to fulfil a definition of posthumanism given more than a dec-
ade ago by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston: “Posthuman bodies are not
slaves to master discourses but emerge at nodes where bodies, bodies of dis-
course, and discourses of bodies intersect to foreclose any easy distinction be-
tween actor and stage, between sender/receiver, channel, code, message, context”
(Halberstam and Livingston 2).

Emergent Performance
How does a posthuman ethos function in the creation and reception of perfor-
mance? Posthumanism dispenses with categorical separations that constituted an
older model of performance premised simply on presence, or what Robert Pep-
perell calls the “boxed body fallacy” (Pepperell 13). In fact, if the body was the
locus sine qua non of a performative fallacy that privileges notions of agency,
semiotic transactions, and being present to, the locus for posthuman performance
theory is consciousness. Performance, especially in mediated events, is not so
much the result of a clearly defined transaction as an emergent structure that be-
comes extant under certain conditions. Writing on virtual reality performance,

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Johannes Birringer contends that human performers are not separate from the
software system or programming environment; “the entire interface environment
can be understood as digital performance process, as emergent system” (Birrin-
ger 44). The transition into posthuman performance is to be found where digital
media are transformed from simply providing channels streaming a version of
physical reality, or being a vehicle for digital doubling and representation, to
being constituents of a new “condition of virtuality”, to invoke another of Kather-
ine Hayles’ coinages. Seen this way, a posthuman reading of performance allows
for the raising of an emergent consciousness, for a new performance ecology.
Posthuman refuses to close down the available connections, intersections, and
nodes; rather it insists on making them visible and articulating the need to (re)
connect with them.

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