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 Posthuman
Spiritualities in Politics, Ecologies
Contemporary and Perceptions

Performance

Silvia Battista
Posthuman Spiritualities in Contemporary
Performance
 Silvia Battista

Posthuman
Spiritualities in
Contemporary
Performance
Politics, Ecologies and Perceptions
Silvia Battista
Department of Drama, Dance
and Performance Studies
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-89757-8 ISBN 978-3-319-89758-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89758-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939732

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To Daisaku Ikeda
 Foreword

‘Look again: landscapes of the passage’

Ordinary human beings do not like mystery since you cannot put a bri-
dle on it, and therefore, in general they exclude it, they repress it, they
eliminate it—and it’s settled. But if on the contrary one remains open and
susceptible to all the phenomena of overflowing, beginning with natural
phenomena, one discovers the immense landscape of the trans-, of the pas-
sage. (Cixous 1997: 51–2)

Within the humanities and social sciences in British universities, a par-

ticular conception of material histories and practices, broadly post-Marx-
ist, has dominated discursive thinking, academic publishing and teaching
for the last forty years or so. Unquestionably, the invaluable array of con-
ceptual tools and languages these critical perspectives have afforded has
been enormously generative in diverse disciplinary contexts, providing
the ground for radical reconceptions of history and its occluded oth-
ers, and of power, knowledge, political agency, identity, representation,
and so on. It has seeded, and substantively informed, the development
of cultural studies, feminisms, post-colonialisms, and the proliferative
deployment of critical theory in areas from anthropology to film studies,
from geography to art history, theatre and performance studies. I con-
fess to being one of the products and perpetrators of such an intellec-
tual training, and I remain profoundly thankful for many of its enabling
critical optics, concepts, strategies, and, above all, for its dissident spirit

vii
viii    Foreword

of inquiry: its reflexive invitation to look again at the naturalized, the

received, the doxa, with a view to exposing what or who is overlooked or
concealed or silenced. In the words of the novelist David Malouf:

the very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known
and expected dulls our sensitivity to other forms, even with the most obvi-
ous. We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are
looking for to see what is there. (Malouf 1994: 130)

When I was starting out as a young academic in the 1980s, any men-
tion in such contexts of ‘spirituality’ or the ‘numinous’ was almost invar-
iably met with skepticism and suspicion, and a swift dismissal into the
benighted conceptual bin marked ‘new age’. Thinking and practices
claiming a relation to the spiritual, or to perceptions of the ineffable, the
unnameable, the metaphysical, the mystical were more often than not
collapsed into the religious or the delusional, and discredited accord-
ingly. Any ‘serious’ academic study of such practices and perceptions
seemed unthinkable. More recently, however, despite the lingering resil-
ience of this disenchanted partie prise towards the numinous, many such
blind spot zones of ‘unthinkability’ have been revisited and reconceived
from a diversity of critical domains, most notably deconstruction, new
materialisms, feminisms, radical ecologies, and their intersections with
post-quantum science and neurology. A number of widely influential phi-
losophers and thinkers have articulated the conceptual means through
which to open up to fresh critical attention areas of experience and con-
sciousness with direct implications and possibilities for a nuanced explo-
ration of the numinous: for example, Derrida’s negative epistemologies
(the apophatic); Donna Haraway’s cyborgian ‘affinities’; Karen Barad’s
post-human ‘agential realism’; Jane Bennett’s ‘vibrant materialism’;
Timothy Morton’s accounts of ‘humankind’ and of an ecology ‘without
nature’; and, in the area of performance studies, analyses of performance
epistemologies and ontologies by theorists including David George:

As an epistemology, performance offers: a rediscovery of the now, relocation

in the here; return to the primacy of experience, of the event; rediscovery
that facts are relations, that all knowledge exists on the threshold and in the
interaction between subject and object (which are themselves only hyposta-
tisations); a rediscover of ambiguity, of contradiction, of difference; a reas-
sertion that things—and people—are what they do… (George 1999: 34)
 Foreword    ix

Silvia Battista’s timely and invaluable book, which draws productively

on a number of these scholars, forms part of a recent and growing reap-
praisal in contemporary academia’s critical relations with the numinous
in art and performance. Battista shapes her book around detailed dis-
cussions of work by five international artists—Marina Abramovic, James
Turrell, Ansuman Biswas, Marcus Coates, Wolfgang Laib—in order
to clarify the perceptual propositions and effects/affects each of these
practices trigger; the associational hermeneutic fields active in the par-
ticular works; and the shifts in consciousness and epistemologies they
produce that might be deemed to be of a numinous order. The choice
of artists and works necessarily represents a sample, outlining an initial
mapping of certain typologies of contemporary performances of the
­numinous, rather than endeavouring to offer any exhaustive listing of
such practices.1
It is important to note that, in this context, Battista conceives of
spirituality and numinous experience as outside the parameters of organ-
ized religion. The works of the contemporary artists she includes here
offer instances of a (post-)secular sacred activated by embodied events
of perception, each of them generating manifestations beyond the cog-
nitive emprise of the ego. Battista suggests that these extra-ordinary
and ex-centric events, in some ways akin to Walter Benjamin’s notion
of ‘profane illumination’, can be provoked by particular disciplines and
performative structural configurations (Foucault’s ‘technologies of the
self’) to produce a palpable flaring into presentness and consciousness
of dynamic processes, entanglements, interconnections, pulsing materi-
alities and plural agencies. So, for example, Battista analyses the labour
intensive and painstaking gathering, placement and framing of pollen
by means of which the German artist Wolfgang Laib creates the condi-
tions for the pollen itself to take (a) place, to happen in its specificity as
auratic event entangled in myriad other processes of emergence, collec-
tion and dispersal; and in this way, the pollen itself mysteriously ‘comes
to matter’. In themselves, these events of inter-/intra-action implicitly
challenge mechanistic models of science—and conventional conceptions
of knowledge—characterized by binary cleftings, immutable boundaries,
the narrowly causal and instrumental, the ‘ego-logical’. Moreover, as
Battista goes on to propose, apprehension of this motile, relational mesh
of intersecting forces furnishes the potential for a post-human, ecologi-
cal critique of received ideas about hierarchies of agency, authorship, and
species.
x    Foreword

The performative tools employed by the five artists under consideration

here, mobilised to decentre and displace habitual modes of perception,
invite other less familiar qualities of receptive attention that can give rise to
unsettling, mysterious ‘landscapes of the passage’ as described by Hélène
Cixous at the very beginning of this text. As Cixous goes on to insist, an
openness and susceptibility to ‘the phenomena of overflowing, beginning
with natural phenomena’ (i.e. an openness to the numinous):

does not mean that everything will be adrift, our thinking, our choices, etc.
But it means that the factor of instability, the factor of uncertainty, or what
Derrida calls the undecidable, is indissociable from human life. This ought to
oblige us to have an attitude that is at once rigorous and tolerant and doubly
so on each side: all the more rigorous than open, all the more demanding
since it must lead to openness, leave passage: all the more mobile and rapid
as the ground will always give way, always. (Cixous 1997: 52)

Instability, rigour, tolerance, openness, mobility, speed (and slowness, its

shadow, out of and into which it unfolds), and dissolution into renewed
uncertainty: the cyclical trajectory of an engagement with the unmas-
terable spaces of ‘the passage’ as traced by Cixous—and Battista in her
book—proposes an ongoing ethical disposition towards the in-excess,
the not-known, the not-yet-known, the unthinkable, the radically other,
the fleetingly glimpsed, the profoundly paradoxical. And at the heart
of what follows in this book is an invitation to an active porosity and
receptivity to non-mastery in the face of the encounter event with the
other-than-oneself, which one might usefully conceive of in terms of an
opening to the ‘eco-logical’. For we are always already implicated—lit-
erally, ‘en-folded’—in other subjectivities, agencies, forces, phenomena,
realities.
In order to give a future to the virtual space of the future (l’avenir)
and to the others that are us, we need practices and philosophies of
inter-located passage rather than of fixed ground or territory, in the pres-
ent unfolding of a democracy that is, as Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe
and others have suggested, always provisional, insufficient, in process,
always ‘to come’ (l’à-venir). It is apparent that identity and location,
for example, are produced as much through narration as through what
already exists: they are more a matter of doing than knowing. As Battista
demonstrates, certain kinds of art and performance provide opportuni-
ties to unsettle and refashion those heterogeneous personal mappings
 Foreword    xi

that we are continuously making up and over, and out of which we con-
stitute our-‘selves’ and/in the world. The art practices that form the
focus of her book elaborate structures for perceptual and existential rea-
lignments, amplificatory re-attunements that can enable a kind of fluid,
performative ‘auto-topography’; this, in turn, encourages and activates
shifting senses of self, space, place and reality—rather than the ‘self’ or
the ‘world’ occurring preformed, as if they were pre-existent entities
rubbing up against each other. When space, time, self are conceived as
‘a multiple foldable diversity’ (Serres and Latour 1995: 59), a field of
flows and intensities—spacing, timing, selfing—then perhaps a dynami-
cally porous self-in-process and in-relation can fray just a little the dualist
territorial imaginaries of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, of self-identity in binary
opposition to radical alterity. If one can accept the paradox that the
continuity of identity is secured through movement and the capacity to
change rather than the ability to cling on to what is already established,
as Zygmunt Bauman has suggested (1999: xiv), then one’s responsibility
is to abandon the logics of mastery, to ‘look again’ and listen otherwise,
and let untimely, numinous elements of all sorts of ‘outsides’ in-here. In
this way, identity can become ‘a point of departure for a voyage without
guarantees, and not a port of arrival’ (Chambers 2001: 25); and ‘home’
(oikos, the eco-, and the self itself) can be considered no longer as a ‘fixed
structure’, but as ‘a contingent passage, a way that literally carries [one]
elsewhere’ (ibid: 26).

Frome, Somerset David Williams

November 2017

Note
1. Other artists whose work would seem to be of potential relevance in this
context might include, for example, Joseph Beuys, Tehching Hsieh, Yoko
Ono, Hermann Nitsch, Bill Viola, Francis Alÿs, Susan Hiller, Olafur
Eliasson, John Newling and Lindsay Sears, as well as the recent perfor-
mance work of British artists Abigail Conway (An Evening with Primrose,
2017) and Florence Peake.
xii    Foreword

References
Bauman, Zygmunt. 1999. Culture as Praxis. London: Sage.
Chambers, Iain. 2001. “A Question of History.” In Culture After Humanism:
History, Culture, Subjectivity, 7–46. London: Routledge.
Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. 1997. Rootprints: Memory and Life
Writing. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. London: Routledge.
George, David E. R. 1999. Buddhism as/in Performance. New Delhi: DK
Printworld.
Malouf, David. 1994. Remembering Babylon. London: Vintage.
Serres, Michel, and Latour Bruno. 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture and
Time. Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
 Acknowledgements

It is impossible to acknowledge in few words all the people, encounters

and influences that have contributed to shaping the form that this book
has eventually taken. There are, however, some people to whom I owe a
particular debt of gratitude for their effort, patience and generosity.
First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Raouf Tajvidi for inspiring
me to start this research project. It is, however, thanks to Dr. Emma
Brodzinsky and Prof. Helen Nicholson of the Department of Drama
and Theatre of the Royal Holloway University that this prospect became
reality. And eventually, I thank the Department of Drama, Dance and
Performance Studies of Liverpool Hope University for supporting the
final stage of the project.
My most felt gratitude goes to Prof. David Williams. I am unable to
consider how I could have completed this challenging task without his
insightful, critical perspective and understanding. He has been an inspir-
ing and respectful guide; an invaluable, lucid, unambiguous voice in the
midst of sometimes complex methodological uncertainties and philo-
sophical doubts.
The writing of this book was a process that touched on both theory
and practice, and therefore relied also on all the people, organizations
and institutions that shared their time and knowledge of technologies of
the self with me. I thank Regina Rex for showing me how to use visuali-
zation epistemologically; Terry George for teaching me how to play and
manipulate the breath; Zoe Bran and Dr. Brian Bates for teaching me
how to journey and Sandra Gillespie for supporting my most dramatic

xiii
xiv    Acknowledgements

shamanic journey; Alejandro Jodorowsky for prescribing me a personal

‘psychomagic act’; the Dhamma Dipa Vipassana centre in Hertford
for teaching me Vipassana meditation; the Soka Gakkay International
for supporting my thirty years of Buddhist practice in the tradition of
Nichiren Daishonin.
During the long years of reflection, studying and writing that this
book required, I have received heartfelt encouragement and expressions
of interest from friends, family members and colleagues whose words and
actions have been an inspiration. I thank Dr. Annalaura Alifuoco, Dr. Gary
Anderson, Debbie Anzalone, Maurizio Anzieri, Giovanni Battista, Claudia
Battista, Sarah Black, Dr. John Bennett, Dr. Max Carrocci, Carmel Cleary,
Dr. Kris Darby, Dr. Chris De Selincourt, Massimiliano Ferraina, Dr. Stephe
Harrop, Silke Klinnert, Dr. Timothy Keenan, Dr. Niamh Malone, Lorenza
Madonna, Eleonora Morisi, Salvatore Monte, Dr. Deaclan Patrick, Prof.
Simon Piasecki, Simona Pianteri, Dr. Giovanni Porfido, Mimma Spinelli,
Dr. Rachel Sweeney, and Dr. Zoe Zontou.
A very special thank you goes to my husband, Angelo Madonna, for
having constantly challenged my weaknesses and for making me laugh
in moments of intellectual and personal crisis; and to Karma, our very
special cat, who taught me the value of patience and, of course, the art of
stretching.
My last words of gratitude go to Marina Abramović, Ansuman Biswas,
Marcus Coates, Wolfgang Laib and James Turrell for having created
thought provoking, challenging and inspiring works without which my
thinking could have not developed.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Performance and Spirituality 3
The Un-known, the Body and the Script 5
Technologies of the Self and How the Self Acknowledges
the Non-self 9
Theatrical Apparatuses of Experimentation 14
Creativity and the Numen Praesens 17
References 24

2 Reciprocating the Gaze of Others: The Artist

Is Present by Marina Abramović 29
Introduction 29
How to Transform the Atrium of a Museum into a Sacred
Place of Worship 33
The Paradoxical Coexistence of Both Embodiment and
Disembodiment in Abramović’s Presence 43
Reciprocating the Gaze of the Other 50
References 63

3 The Quaker Meditative Room and the Performing Eye:

Deer Shelter Skyspace by James Turrell 69
Introduction 69
The Chamber, the Quaker Meditative Room, the Observatory
and the Theatre of Vulnerability 72

xv
xvi    Contents

The Performance of Light and the Art of Receiving 81

Contemplating Light as No/Thing and the Art of Staying 88
References 95

4 Vipassana Meditation as an Introspective Theatre: CAT

by Ansuman Biswas 99
Introduction 99
Meditation Cell and Performance Space 101
What the Schrödinger’s Cat’s Thought Experiment Reveals
About CAT 107
Who Is Performing? 112
What Is ‘Really’ Happening Inside the Box? Vipassana
Meditation and Introspective Theatre 118
References 134

5 When the Spirits Are Socially Engaged:

Journey to the Lower World by Marcus Coates 139
Introduction 139
Marcus Coates and Shamanism 141
Ordinary Space, Performance Space and the Shamanic
Cosmology 143
Spectating a Shamanic Journey 150
When Spirits Are Socially Engaged 158
References 166

6 The Ecological Implications of Spiritual Gestures:

Work with Pollen by Wolfgang Laib 169
Introduction 169
The Open Field of the Meadow and the Onto-Politics
of a Praying Gesture 173
Collecting the Pollen as a Technology of the Self 178
The Performativity of Pollen in Culture 181
References 186

7 Concluding Thoughts 189

Introduction 189
Spirituality as the Undefined Field of Matter 190
Problematizing Visibility 193
 Contents    xvii

Are These Performances and Their Apparatuses Useful

Interpretative Frameworks for Spirituality
in the Twenty-First Century? 196
References 199

Index 201
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Susan Sontag, in the book Styles of Radical Will, calls for a revision
of ‘the project of “spirituality”’ for our era, encouraging intellectual
engagement with the reinterpretation of this term through contempo-
rary lenses, new thinking and innovative practices (Sontag 2002, 5).
This book engages with this challenge and proposes an interpretation
of spirituality through performance and the theoretical lenses of perfor-
mance studies, post-human theories, religious studies, radical hermeneu-
tics and phenomenology. It proposes performance as an inclusive lens of
interpretation able to blur the boundaries culturally set for artistic, reli-
gious and scientific planes of existence, to ground the ‘project of “spirit-
uality’’’ in materiality, experimentation, creativity, imagination and the
paradoxical.
This is an operation aimed at opening the concept of religion to the
‘study [of] the wide range of experiences to which religious significance
has been attributed’ (Taves 2009, 8); in other words, to what is deemed
to be religious within the non-religious rather than what is religious
because it has been institutionalised as such. As the religious studies
scholar Ann Taves argues:

we need to turn our attention to the processes whereby people sometimes

ascribe the special characteristics to things that we (scholars) associate with
terms such as “religious”, “magical”, “mystical”, “spiritual”, etcetera. (ibid.)

© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. Battista, Posthuman Spiritualities in Contemporary Performance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89758-5_1
2 S. BATTISTA

Hence, by inverting the paradigm, it is conceivable to explore ‘the inter-

action between psychobiological, social, and cultural-linguistic processes
in relation to carefully specified types of experiences’ (ibid.), and consider
what else within the spectrum of human behaviour can reveal insights
into what we understand as spiritual, religious, mystical, numinous,
sacred and so on.
I consider theatre and performance to be significant in this regard,
as there is a history of artistic experimentation with those areas of prac-
tical investigation. This is certainly a vast territory that might include,
to mention only a few: the theatre of cruelty as envisaged by Antonin
Artaud; the psychomagic rituals conceived by Alejandro Jodorowsky;
Michael Harner’s core-shamanism; the Panic Theatre of Fernando
Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor; Jerzy Grotowski’s
para-theatre; Richard Schechner’s environmental theatre; the ritual-
istic practices of Anna Halprin; performance artists such as Marina
Abramović, Joseph Beuys, Marcus Coates, John Cage, Linda Montano,
Tehching Hsieh, and visual artists such as James Turrell, Wolfgang Laib
as well as many others.
Within this broad landscape, I propose to look at performances/
installations inspired and devised specifically around spiritual practices
with their origins in religious traditions. So, for example, Chapter 1
focuses on the performance The Artist is Present (2010) by Marina
Abramović, devised around the mystical practice of reciprocal gazing;
Chapter 2 looks at the performance CAT by Ansuman Biswas (1998),
devised around the practice of Vipassana meditation of the Theravada
Buddhist tradition; Chapter 3 focuses on the installation piece Deer
Shelter Skyspace (2007) by James Turrell, that recalls the architecture of
the Quakers’ prayer room; Chapter 4 explores the performance Journey
to the Lower World (2004) by Marcus Coates, devised around shamanic
journey practices; and finally, Chapter 5 analyses the pieces Pollen from
Hazelnut (1986) by Wolfgang Laib, who has been inspired by Asian reli-
gions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism, and has developed a
practice for collecting and presenting pollen in gallery spaces.1
These artistic interventions are representative of a loose category
of practices that I associate with what Susan Sontag, in the essay ‘The
Aesthetics of Silence’, identifies as the via negativa in art or a negative
‘theology’ of art’s absence in art (2002, 5). They resonate with reli-
gious and mystical literature, but also paradoxically with science and its
experimental paradigms. This is due to the artists’ engagement with the
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

creative process not as a means of self-expression, but rather, and to dif-

ferent extents, as a means of self-restraint and experimentation with levels
of consciousness often associated with spiritual experiences. Art is there-
fore viewed as ‘a vehicle’2 for involving spectators/participants in levels
of experiences that touch on that liminal space between discovery, expe-
rience, creativity and imagination, revealing the performance of those
invisible, intangible human and non-human ‘others’ which are usually
excluded from our perceptive fields. These ‘others’ emerge and enter the
perceptive horizon due to a change of practices that by irrupting and dis-
rupting perception, reveal the paradoxical numinosity of reality, leaving
spectators and researchers alike puzzled and disconcerted.
This is an artistic attitude that looks at ‘sketching out new prescrip-
tions for looking [and] hearing’; at delivering ‘a more sensuous expe-
rience of art’; and, more generally, at offering modalities for focusing
attention on overlooked aspects of reality (Sontag 2002, VI).

Performance and Spirituality
Although there is an increasing body of scholarly work engaging with the
question of spirituality and religion in contemporary art, these terms, as
the historian Tomoko Masuzawa points out, are still largely treated within
these disciplines as self-evident categories, remaining peculiarly ‘essential-
ized, un-historicized and un-analyzed’ (Bordowitz et al. 2009, 124).3
As Lance Gharavi explains in his introduction to the book Religion,
Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith (2012), in performance and the-
atre studies, the question of religion remains an uncomfortable subject
of inquiry (2012, 7). Although historically there is an intimate relation-
ship between performance and religion, the same relationship has also
been characterized ‘by long stretches of hostility and mutual suspicion’
(ibid.). In performance, theatre and cultural studies, although religions
as we know them are cultural constructs that came into being at a certain
time and under certain social and political conditions, the study of what
constitutes ‘the religious’ and ‘the spiritual’ in contemporary culture
remains a sui generis subject of inquiry (Gharavi 2012, 15). Therefore,
in broad terms, this book proposes to contribute to the project of study-
ing the ‘religious’ within the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘numinous’ in contempo-
rary culture, employing performance as its hermeneutic lens. This entails
articulating terminologies and developing ideas on certain ways of doing
things, particular processes of apprehension and attitudes that, although
4 S. BATTISTA

often associated with the sphere of religious creeds, when contextualized

and conceptualized in terms of performance might reveal a broader and
more complex landscape: the horizon of the non-human.
The hypothesis proposed is that certain performative artistic practices
encourage an interpretation of spirituality and religion that is highly par-
adoxical and often subversive of unified, monotheistic approaches to how
reality is apprehended and perceived, and of binary categorizations of
reality that separate matter from spirit, body from soul in discrete, fixed
dividing boundaries. In other words, the strategies employed by the art-
ists under scrutiny here are not directed toward the rhetoric of attain-
ing ‘an absolute state of being’ (Sontag 2002, 4), but rather toward a
sense of spirituality propelled toward the experience and exploration of
the condition of the paradox, understood as a ‘form of speech [or] an
element in (…) dialogue’ (Sontag 2002, 11) that resists the reductive
simplifications of fixed binary thinking.
From this perspective, it is conceivable to think of a type of perfor-
mance constructed strategically as theatrical apparatuses resembling
both a scientific laboratory and a sacred space within which to experi-
ment with the complex processes of human perception and the multi-
ple layers that the material world seems to reveal to different approaches
and instruments of investigation. It is, however, in theatre that Biswas
proposes the performative contradiction of an invisible performer; that
Abramović plays a multiplicity of presences, which are embodied and at
the same time disembodied; that Turrell allows spectators to conceive
light in both its physicality and immateriality; that Laib renders pollen
agentic; and where Coates conceives the immanence of animal spirits. It
is therefore in theatre that the technologies of the self employed poten-
tially disintegrate in perception ‘the ancient notions of solid matter and
clear and distinct reason’ (Paz 1978, 15–16), creating space for hold-
ing their indeterminacy, and the immanence of something ‘other’ in the
unfolding categories set in our daily life. And it is, again, in theatre that
the binary opposition between the spiritual and the material is problem-
atized, allowing the possibility of considering a vision of objectivity that
is embodied and situated and an idea of transcendence that is immanent
and creative.
Thus, the objective is to interpret the notion of spirituality in and
through performance, in and through the performativity of ‘the body/ies’
in theatre, in and through a self torn between aspirations and illusions; in
other words, in that space between fiction and reality, chaos and order, the
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