The Anthropo-scene as a Site of New Relationality

In his famous poem The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot portrayed not only the disintegration of the modern world and postwar societies, the social and psychological collapse of mankind, but also the irreversible destruction that humans have inflicted on nature, eradicating from it all spirituality, and devastating the surrounding landscape. Considering this modernist representation, I propose to re-evaluate the Wasteland as a concrete manifestation of “a profound mutation of our relation to the world,” rather than just a metaphor of an irreversible crisis. 1 Shifting the focus from modernity to the Anthropocene, as suggested by Bruno Latour, I would like to offer a critical perspective on these concepts through the lens of contemporary performative arts and theories. Using performativity as a methodology for studying human agency and anthropogenic environments highlights the potential of more-than-human corporealities to counterbalance entropy and the progressive disintegration of ecosystems. Thus, my article proposes interpreting the Wasteland as a performative archive of the Modern and a reservoir of new relationships between the Earth and its various inhabitants. From this perspective, I will examine the shifting significance of “common space” in the Anthropocene era by introducing the concept of the Anthropo-scene as a site of new forms of relationality. In light of current engagements with global climate change, extractivist exploitation and its consequences for humans and more-than-human ecosystems, I will explore the relationship between the anthropos (human) and scene as theoretical and political concepts.
The concept of the Anthropo-scene allows for a rethinking of the human agency that has been accountable for the deterioration of the Earth, as well as the agency of the Earth itself in responding to these destructive effects. The proposed model of the Earth as a living stage, or Anthropo-scene, raises questions about the position of humans among other beings and ultimately decentralizes the role of the anthropos in environmental interdependencies. Dipesh Chakrabarty explains the abstract figure of the human in the Anthropocene as follows: “There is no corresponding ’humanity’ that in its oneness can act as a political agent. A place thus remains for struggles around questions on intrahuman justice regarding the uneven impacts of climate change.” 2 Following Chakrabarty’s notion of collision between different representations and scales of the human, I approach the anthropos rather as a dynamic concept that evolves over historical and geological time, and also requires political investigation in non-Western contexts. This critical-affective model of the scene, I propose, raises issues surrounding the human as a diverse being in terms of culture, gender, ethnicity, and economics. Additionally, it considers humans as homo sapiens, possessing the ability for rational thought and moral responsibility, as well as biological entities coexisting with other species. Finally, it highlights the concept of the human as a organized machine responsible for the decomposition of nature and the disorganization of matter. Moreover, I understand the Anthropo-scene as a performative frame wherein the Anthropocene manifests in a self-conscious manner, and concurrently as a site that enables activation of what Jane Bennett refers to as vibrant matter. 3 Bennett’s theory of materiality, as a dynamic force that runs through both human and nonhuman bodies, enables the recognition of more-than-human agency in performative actions.
Based on the assumption that the main actor of contemporary change is not the human being, but rather the Earth itself, which has become a living stage seeking to interact with various entities in dramatic action, this text aims to examine the different forms of agency that create new interconnections and configurations of diverse terrestrial and oceanic actors. In summarizing the current situation as a radical destabilization of the modern condition, wherein the Earth has been taken for granted as “the ground on which their [the Moderns] history had always been played out,” Bruno Latour uses theatrical metaphors. He describes this change “as if the décor had gotten up on stage to share the drama with the actors.”4 Following his intuition, I would like to explore the potential of theatricality as a self-critical discourse on the role of human beings in their interdependence with the environment. Since the era of the Anthropocene has brought about the discovery of “a new dramatic connection between previously unknown agents,” the Anthropo-scene can be conceptualized as a method that allows us to focus on the imaginary dimension of the New Climate Regime and to analyze artistic practices in which agency is performatively redistributed among different actors.
The objective of my analysis is twofold: firstly, to examine the shifts in the concept of the Anthropocene and, secondly, to consider the implications of these shifts for onto-epistemological transformation. In addition, I will reflect on collective social, political, ecological, and technological processes as performative practices. The concept of the scene as a stage for the human, which has been central to theater and performance studies to date, will therefore be critically reconsidered in the context of Anthropocene discourses. With a newfound awareness of ecological, relational, and environmental contexts, I will explore the potential consequences of considering more-than-human entanglements for theater and performance, as well as for their main concepts of corporeality and embodiment. The exploration of the Anthropocene as an Anthropo-scene allows me to pose the question of which human and more-than-human instances gain visibility on the stage of ecological and decolonial debates and which do not.

This approach also enables me to reformulate fundamental questions of theater/performance studies in the context of the ecological crisis, colonial history, and current relations of inequality.
As part of my examination of the Anthropo-scene and its impact on contemporary performative arts, I will discuss the performative practice of Tejal Shah, which intersects with dance, video and performance arts, queer activism, and ecofeminism. I will examine Shah’s project, Between the Waves (2012), with a particular focus on two parts of it—the videos Between the Waves and Landfill Dance—to unveil novel connections between bodies and materials within the framework of environmental shifts. The project’s focus on the intersection of ecology and performativity creates opportunities for a hybrid corporeality that transcends the distinction between organic and inorganic matter, allowing a new relationality based on queer ecologies and racial passing. 6 The entire project consists of a five-channel immersive video installation and a series of mixed-media collages. It is inspired by “the multiple swarms of vitalities surrounding us” and investigates “posthuman relations in which queer futures and intimacies may be embodied and all forms of life and nonlife are interdependent.” 7 Using hybrid aesthetics, Between the Waves problematizes new forms of commonality among bodies and matter in the context of environmental change. The resulting network of relationships extends to other systems, thereby creating eco-, geo- and techno-cooperations.
The first part of the installation, also called Between the Waves, consists of five episodes (chapters). In these episodes, hybrid beings navigate multiple situations within a global post-ecological apocalypse and in a new geo-technological future. These settings, including polluted oceans, disappearing coral reefs, archaeological sites, swimming pools, and urban landscapes, allow viewers to immerse themselves in the experiences of these hybrid beings. Here, Shah depicts the emergence of monstrous beings that are thrown onto the shore of a sea littered with plastic waste. Their bodies seem to have amalgamated with bubble wrap, CDs, screws, and other bits and pieces from the polluted water. The creatures are a collage of human bodies and anthropogenic remains, evoking the mythical figure of the unicorn. In one of the first scenes, we see a humanoid figure lying on the desiccated ground in a white corset composed of thick straps, tightened like a bandage around the shoulders, breasts, back, and hips, and with a huge plastic horn centrally affixed to its head. Subsequent scenes unfold in a wetland and a rocky desert landscape where these creatures multiply, first in twos, then in fours, fives, and more—or perhaps it is just an illusion, an optical mirage, a Fata Morgana? The two hybrid figures are initially positioned in a tender embrace, then they utilize the horn integrated into their bodies for prosthetic and non-reproductive sexual intercourse. In the final scene of this video, a similar depiction of desire and pleasure occurs, but in a different setting. Here, the more-than-human protagonists continue their sexual games on the balcony of a high-rise building in an unspecified metropolis bathed in a mixture of rain and smog. Exploring non-organic forms of desire and pleasure and prosthetic non-reproductive sexuality, Shah’s unicorns perform on the Anthropo-scene the idea of the Artaudian body without organs. This concept imagines an unproductive and unfertilized, inorganic, and disorganized structure, allowing for the reconfiguration of both corporeality and freedom. As Artaud expressed, “When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom. Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real place.” 8
The unicorn plays a key symbolic role in this part of the installation. It represents, in a way, the incarnation of hybridity through its physical constitution as a composite of different animals and also through a series of—often mutually exclusive—cultural references. In Shah’s work, these references take the form of a dialogue between Indian culture and Western European art. On the one hand, the unicorn, as a creature to which Greek historians and philosophers attributed Indian origins 9 , appears on the ancient steatite seal, a capture of which opens every chapter in the first video Between the Waves. As Bindu Bhadana notes, “These pictographic seals are deemed to be the earliest known symbolic representations (5000–2000 BC) of this single horned animal and have been excavated from an Indus Valley archeological site in Western India in 1967–68.” 10 This particular object refers to the “origins” of the Indian-born artist Tejal Shah, the tradition that will be quoted, deconstructed and mutated in this artistic work. On the other hand, the mythological figure can be considered as a perverse and subversive interpretation of medieval images of purity and innocence, where the unicorn was an allegory for Jesus, who, upon encountering the Virgin Mary, lays his head on her lap and falls asleep. 11 At the same time, according to many medieval accounts, powdered unicorn horns were said to have a purifying power—against heart disease, poisoning, plague, epilepsy, and male impotence. 12 In the context of Shah’s video, this could be interpreted as a means of neutralizing the toxins found in the organisms and landscape, and of reconfiguring sexual desire. The unicorns in the video cannot be clearly defined in terms of gender and sexuality; their desire can be realized regardless of the potency of biologically understood organs, since the unicorn’s horn is used here as a penetrating organ.
In the visual staging and corporeal performance of the unicorn figure, however, Shah refers to two artistic works from the twentieth century: Frida Kahlo’s painting The Broken Column (La Columna Rota, 1944) and Rebecca Horn’s performance Unicorn (Einhorn, 1970–1972). Kahlo’s piece of art was created as a reaction to the trauma of the artist’s severe traffic accident, which she suffered at the age of eighteen, and the resulting spinal surgery. Her painting shows a naked woman’s torso with an ionic column inserted in place of her spine and nails stuck into her face and body, symbolically alluding to the crucifixion of Christ or Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows. However, the representation of suffering is overpowered by the strength of the woman, who, although condemned to wear a corset of bandages, proudly directs her gaze towards the viewer of the painting. The second reference, Horn’s Unicorn, seems even more important, as it is a performance of a transformed female body interacting with nature. Dressed in a white corset with a huge horn attached to the center of her head, the performer moves across fields for twelve hours, trying to keep her balance under the weight of the costume, which in turn alters her body movements and measures the limits of her physical endurance. In terms of the visual representation of the unicorn, Shah’s hybrid beings are an almost-faithful reconstruction of the figure created by Rebecca Horn. However, despite this obvious reference, there is a significant shift in the performance of corporeality and sexuality in Shah’s installation. As Friederike Nastold aptly notes: “They are women of color who act in a changing cosmos (desert, beach/ocean, swimming pool, balcony), who refer to Rebecca Horn’s white, slim performer in the cornfield and yet tell a new narrative: The prosthesis opens up a relational, playful space of possibilities that opens up (sexual) connections instead of following an externalized death drive.” 13 In Shah’s project, the combination of ecology, feminism, queer practices, and performativity sets the stage for a hybrid corporeality that is characterized by profound changes in bodily matter, brought about by geological and technological interventions. Furthermore, the installation introduces a decolonial perspective, in which the brown bodies of the unicorn performers, who can be read here as marginalized voices from the so-called Global South, draw attention to the re-essentialization of a seemingly homogenous humanity in discourse on the Anthropocene.
The immersive installation by Tejal Shah proposes a shift in the understanding of the anthropos as a hierarchical idea that is based on the gendered and racialized oppositions between nature and culture, environment and human, human and earth. However, it also enables the understanding of the scene as a fragment of a larger context—ecological, infrastructural, technological—and thus serves as a bridge between performance, media, and cultural studies, as well as anthropology and decolonial practices. The scene is consciously used in various forms of media and arts—literature, painting, photography, film, and video—to frame events, processes, and performative situations, and can be recognized againand again in a reality permeated by the mass dissemination of images. The framing, which seems fundamental to the establishment of a scene, takes place both at the moment of production and at the moment of reception, so that both areas must always be considered in a reciprocal relationship. The scene thus resembles what W. J. T. Mitchell calls a metapicture: “The scene is a metapicture of what pictures want, and how people help them get it. Perhaps it is a Deleuzian assemblage, showing the possibility of (for a moment) eating one’s cake and having it too.” 14 The scene is thus viewed as a dynamic structure of virtual, material, and symbolic elements that unfold their performative power at the moment of perception and are aimed at eliciting a specific reaction.
In the entire project Between the Waves, Tejal Shah focuses on Wastelands as scenes of forgetting and refuse, where toxic residues of the Racial Capitalocene are dumped. 15 Such Wastelands include terrestrial and oceanic landfills, polluted industrial landscapes, and digital waste, which constitutes remnants of digital procedures. I consider these interwoven environments, the un-places of the Capitalocene, as Anthropo-scenes that contain both material and immaterial archives of our present, and require a new approach to thinking and performing the future. A crucial role is played by the imagination which, as Bindu Bhadana states, “offers us new sites of agency and also globally defined fields of possibility in this new global cultural economy.” 16 Both the ocean and the earth are revealed as sites of deterritorialization, creating the idea of a stage that has no clear association with a particular culture or nationality. The Anthropo-scenes in Shah’s work foster a sense of global interconnectedness, which in turn allows for creative exploration beyond the constraints of identity-based categorization.
A particular role in creating new forms of relationality on the Anthropo-scene is given to another video entitled Landfill Dance. This work stages a post-apocalyptic setting of the rubbish dump as a dance parable, depicting the destructive relationship between humans and nature and imagining new technologies of survival. A group of performers with an unidentifiable gender, ethnic, or class identity, wearing costumes constructed entirely from found objects, perform a dance on the fringe of Pune, one of India’s leading industrial and manufacturing centers. They are dancing in futuristic costumes that mask their possibly human faces and performing choreography inspired by the movements of insects. The setting for these actions is a landfill site, where piles of trash become the “natural” environment for the dancing entities and serve as a clear toxic reminder of capitalism. Landfill Dance appears to be a fitting representation of what Jack Halberstam terms “the aesthetics of collapse.” 17 In various aesthetic experiments exploring devastation and ruins, Halberstam seeks to identify irreversible changes in nature and infrastructure resulting from human activity. The search also extends to the pursuit of utopian thought forms and alternative modes of survival. To reinvent the future, the author proposes replacing the concepts of progress and development, along with the associated need for world-making with the concept of unworlding. This term refers to a change in the hierarchy for ordering and valuing forms of existence.
Jack Halberstam provides a reminder that the word collapse in English originates from the Latin word collapsus, which is derived from collabi meaning “to fall, to fall together.” This is the result of the combination of the prefix com, meaning “with, together,” and the verb labi, meaning “to fall, to slip.” Halberstam sees this falling together as an indication of the breakdown of the entire capitalist and patriarchal system, while simultaneously seeing it as a promise of a new alternative world. This envisioned future, where human bodies, as more-than-humans, would no longer be recognized as binary, materializes in Landfill Dance as an already existing reality. The Wasteland here can be perceived as an “archaeological site of the future with its accumulation of refuse,” as a place of entangled temporalities and materialities. 18 To demonstrate a distinct shift in the conceptualization of the body, as characterized in Landfill Dance, I suggest substituting the notion of the body with the concept of corporeality. In Performance and Corporeality: Suspending the Human, dance scholar André Lepecki claims that corporeality, as opposed to the stable body, enables the expression of “a series of transient, unfolding assemblages made up of different components—more or less organic, more or less tangible, more or less linguistic, more or less sexual, more or less technological, more or less object, more or less subject, more or less anatomical, and always political.” 19 From this perspective, corporeality becomes dissociated from the subject, presenting itself as a range of potential manifestations of matter, politics, and desire. Furthermore, it holds the potential to suspend the division between the human and more-than-human, thereby subverting the anthropocentric view of the body.
In Landfill Dance, Tejal Shah challenges the monohumanist perspective of corporeality, which not only assumes exclusive human interpretations of the body but also racializes it through white supremacy over otherness. As a result, the Anthropo-scene offers a performative critique of the concept of the Anthropocene, which erases colonial history and solely concentrates on the destruction of ecosystems by universalist humans. From this perspective, both humans and the human body—which I argue are limited and bounded entities—are constructions of Western epistemology. Shah’s work exemplifies this, particularly with their portrayal of the remnants of the human idea as a garbage dump on the periphery of the Western world. The landfill in India not only points back to the impact of Western civilization and capitalism as its driving force, but also reveals the true face of “human nature” as an ideology that allows white people to treat other people as Cheap Nature, as disposable commodities. 20 Thus, Shah’s perspective challenges the narrative of collapse, which reflects white modernism and the white Anthropocene. If we accept, as Malcom Ferdinand suggests, “the ecological crisis and the Anthropocene are new expressions of the ’white man’s burden’ to save ’humanity’ from itself,” 21 then Shah’s futuristic installation demonstrates its critical potential to both homo and anthropos by emphasizing “the double fracture of modernity,” that “refers to the thick wall between the two environmental and colonial fractures.” 22
While it is evident that ecosystems are progressively disintegrating, Shah’s critique extends beyond the Anthropocene and its fundamental reliance on ethnic discrimination. Instead, the artist transforms the Wasteland into a stage where new forms of corporeality and relationality manifest themselves. It is unsurprising, then, that in this landscape of a rubbish dump on the edge of global capitalism, hard-to-identify figures in futuristic costumes appear reminiscent of visitors from an alien planet. The moving entities rhythmically traverse the garbage pile while their movement conveys messages that are indecipherable to humans. Their motion seems to invite interaction from the deserted and abandoned place while simultaneously suggesting that they are an innate part of it. Seen from this perspective, this seemingly lifeless area reveals itself to be an ever-living stage, a perpetually active platform that generates new entities in a post-apocalyptic world while also destroying them, exemplified by the dancing remains. This specifically animated Anthropo-scene thus acquires a causality independent of any living being, including humans.
Although the hieroglyphic gestures of the figures in the dump cannot be deciphered—or in other words, reduced to meanings that can be expressed in language—they enable a sensual experience of corporeality. This involves contemplating individual movements, observing the physicality of the materials, transmitting affects, and sensing the relationship between the figures and the surroundings. The artist discusses the choreography produced in this work as follows: “The movements and gestures of the dancers are seemingly futile, and with humour, they point to the challenges of sense-making in the age of the Anthropocene.” 23 This construction of meaning transpires beyond rationality, in an extended and unstable corporeality. Tejal Shah achieves a sense of communication with more-than-human bodies by obscuring the dancers’ faces with masks and fragmenting their bodies. This is enhanced by choreographically juxtaposing them with each other, or the landscape of the landfill, or the living remains of nature. One shot features a silhouette cut off at waist height. The figure, whose head and chest are obscured by the frame, stands precariously on a crumbling wall. To the right lies a rubbish dump, while to the left, an abyss. The ground around it is covered with copper-colored grass that visually blends with the rubbish. This contrasting, yet harmonious, composition creates a sense of relationality on the Anthropo-scene, which preserves the memory of human civilization’s inhabitation of the Earth and its responsibility for ecological decline. At the same time, the Anthropo-scene becomes a site for the performance of capitalism’s toxic remnants and corporeality that is no longer of human origin. It reveals a hybrid corporeality that transcends the dichotomy of organic and inorganic matter and manifests itself as a network of relations with other systems—ecological, geological, and technological. Referring to Shah’s idea of dance in Landfill Dance and aiming to overcome the binary between organic and inorganic, I propose the concept of organological dance to describe the changes that have occurred in contemporary performative practices problematizing hybrid corporeality at the end of the Anthropocene.
This new corporeality emerges from the entanglement of matter and technology, and at the same time transcends the idea of an organizing center, and thus the centralized organization of the body. It is a corporeality that is not limited to the human body and its relationship to its shaping environment, but is part of matter, which, following Karen Barad, is to be considered “an active agent participating in the very process of materialisation.” 24 From this perspective, organological dance should be understood not so much as a particular genre of artistic practice, but rather as a performance of the body on an Anthropo-scene that is neither its own, nor individual, nor simply social. Instead, it is an emergent matter independent of human subjects. Organological dance is the movement of entangled corporealities, and thus the kind of relationality that Barad calls intra-action. Unlike interaction, which presupposes the existence of preceding subjects or objects, intra-action implies “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies.” 25 Intra-actions, in and through which various forms of agency are manifested, “are not the result of human intervention; rather, humans themselves emerge through specific intra-actions.” 26 It is precisely through the intra-actions that performative encounters between bodies and matter occur.
By proposing the concept of organological dance, I want to show the performative act of establishing the inorganicity of the body as a realized project of the future. In order to describe corporeality and movement in the context of technological development and in relation to irreversible environmental transformations, I utilize the neologism proposed by philosopher Bernard Stiegler. His theory of organology problematizes the organization of inorganic matter, treating it as the basis for the existence of all organisms. 27 Thus, Stiegler proposes an exosomatic conception of technical life forms, which is of particular interest to me. In an excellent essay, “The Anthropocene and Neganthropology,” he engages in a discussion with the father of anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss, borrowing the category of entropology from him, only to transform it into neganthropology—the knowledge of an epoch that might come after the Anthropocene. 28
The concept of entropology was introduced by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques, translated into English as A World on the Wane.29 Here he wrote about the beginning and end of the world as moments without humans. At the same time, he characterized a “Man” as a perfectly organized machine, “whose activity hastens the disintegration of the initial order and precipitates powerfully organised Matter towards a condition of inertia […],” 30 making man responsible for progressive and irreversible disintegration in the world. From this perspective, human civilization is doomed to ultimate annihilation and “can be described as a prodigiously complicated mechanism: tempting as it would be to regard it as our universe’s best hope of survival, its true function is to produce what physicists call entropy: inertia, that is to say. […] ’Entropology’, not anthropology, should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of this process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms.”31
Thus, on the one hand, Stiegler recognizes anthropology in the Anthropocene as entropology, suggesting that the radical disruption of the order of Nature occurred as a result of entropy, which progresses through the production and use of information technologies. On the other hand, he rejects Lévi-Strauss’s ­melancholic-nihilistic attitude, as it neither allows us to counteract the forces of inertia nor to imagine the future: “If we were to take this profoundly nihilistic statement by Lévi-Strauss literally […], we would be forced to assume that very little time separates us from the ’end times’. We would be forced to reduce this time to nothing, to annihilate it, and to discount negentropy on the grounds of its being ephemeral: we would have to dissolve the future into becoming, to assess it as null and void [non avenu], as never coming, that is, as having ultimately never happened, the outcome of having no future—as becoming without future. And we would be forced to conclude that what is ephemeral, because it is ephemeral, is merely nothing.” 32

Stiegler therefore proposes that the only way out of the trap of annihilation is a focus on the ways in which the future can happen. Moreover—and this seems interesting from the perspective of a new take on performativity—he emphasizes the non-ephemeral character of this future. What happens does not have to disappear; rather, it can remain in a relational arrangement with that from which it was born, just as negentropy always remains in relationship to entropy—it decreases when entropy increases and increases when the system’s level of organization increases. To envision, under the conditions of destruction and disorganization (which characterize the Anthropocene), the possibility of the future happening, it is necessary, according to Stiegler, to make two preliminary assumptions: first, to recognize that life is always negentropy, or negative entropy, because it originates from and returns to entropy; and, second, that an enhanced form of negentropy is “technical life.”33 This second aspect, in turn, allows for a new conception of corporeality, which is to be understood not as that which is organic but as organological—encompassing not only biological but also technical life, not only organic matter but also organized inorganic matter. This corporeality of a new kind is described by Stiegler as exosomatic, thus combining the biological with the technological, the individual with the collective, and the external with the internal. “General organology posits that the organological—understood in the sense of the technical and technological supplement—is what modifies the organic […].” 34 At the same time, it does not reject the biological forms of the body’s existence, but also points to the process of its transformation by means of modern technologies. The organic is therefore not external to corporeality but is an integral component of it, dynamically and permanently modifying human bodies. Thus, organology seeks to find a Derridean différance in this process of modification of the organic into the inorganic, a process of “its differentiation and its delay [temporisation], its spacing and its temporalization, and in such a way that from it a new process of individuation emerges, that is, a new form of life.” 35
Starting from the premise that “the relation entropy/negentropy is really the question of life par excellence,” 36 Stiegler argues for an end to the Anthropocene—understood as a toxic and destructive period—in order to initiate the Neganthropocene, a healing era of care. To find a new way of living, involving the transformation of entropy into negentropy, Stiegler proposes an organological approach whose object is not the “becoming” (devenir) responsible for entropy, but the transformation of becoming into a “coming future” (avenir). For an organology that subjects collective and technological processes to reflection, performative practices turn out to be crucial. For, according to Stiegler, we must learn not so much to understand but, above all, to design artificial organs intertwined with human bodies and use them in such a way as to find new forms of relationality in the future. Stiegler puts it as follows: “It is thus a question of how exteriorization can, today, in an epoch when it becomes digital, and in an epoch that produces vast amounts of entropy at the thermodynamic, biological and noetic levels, still possibly produce new forms of interiorization, that is, new forms of thought, care and desire, amounting to so many chances to struggle against the planetary scale pharmacological crisis with which we are currently afflicted.” 37
Moreover, performative practices require inventiveness, which would be the organological equivalent of creativity. Organology transcends scientific objectivity and allows for the practice of knowledge, understood as savoir faire, savoir vivre, and savoir conceptualiser. Only such a constellation expresses collective ways of knowing and understanding the world and creates the conditions for the manifestation of negentropy. In this sense, the Neganthropocene can become a performative response to the systemic challenges of the age of total destruction, and organology a new theory of performativity: “General organology is a method that makes possible transdisciplinary approaches, which have become absolutely essential in the current stage of organological development—that is, of technical development, which does in general modify both psychosomatic and social organizations but today does so in an accelerated way that raises completely new questions: these questions induce an epistemological, even ’anthropological’ break […].” 38
Stiegler’s concept of organology, as a practice of doing, living, and conceptualizing, can be applied to contemporary performative practices such as the installation by Tejal Shah analyzed in this essay. These practices call for a comprehensive organological approach to corporeality that takes into account the profound and irreversible changes in matter and the body brought about by technological interventions. Shah’s artistic work contrasts the Enlightenment fantasy of Man and the Romantic idea of Nature with Stiegler’s inventiveness, where innovative corporeality takes the place of a human being. It is in the realm of invention that space opens up for tangled interspecies histories, enabling a rethinking of the relationships of power and agency, individualism and collectivity, society and community, ontology and epistemology. In the installation Between the Waves, it is not a human trying to revive a devastated landscape; rather, it is the remnants of man trying to find their place in newly created and independent forms of existence. The dance in Landfill Dance is not solely created by the movement of the performers’ bodies. It also emerges from the possibilities of cinematic image creation: camera movement, close-ups, slowdowns, speed-ups, and finally, a montage of visual and auditory elements which allow the viewer to see the titular “landfill dance.” From the polyphony of living and inanimate entities, from the decentralization of the experiencing body, from the play between vividness and mediatization, an organic dance emerges. This new dance, understood as a performance of hybrid corporeality, is thus born out of a confrontation with the visually trained eye of the viewer/observer, requiring them to activate competencies cultivated through interactions with contemporary technologies.
Movement, whose formation and perception are both conditioned by the entanglement of the biological with the technical, co-creates the organic dance captured in the post-human world. It is only at the intersection of body, matter, and technology that dance is born, not purely organic but in constant connection with human organisms, the organs of the body, and the organic nature of matter. Organological dance—as both a concept and a practice—thus problematizes corporeality, which changes under the influence of technological modifications that shape the exosomatic conception of technical life forms. The technologically transformed movement of body and matter becomes a response to the progressive entropy of reality; it also opposes the alienating effects of total automation, introducing possibilities for life and coexistence in a toxic reality. Organological dance on the Anthropo-scene brings with it a new model of performing hybrid organs, which human bodies have become in the context of techno-environmental changes, and seeks to find alternative forms of relationality at the end of the Anthropocene.
My critical proposal for framing the Anthropocene from the perspective of the Anthropo-scene—as I tried to demonstrate in this essay—aims to actualize performative investigation that concentrates on the polyphony of scenic agents: animate, inanimate, and non-living entities, each of which manifests as a fragment, a remnant. Thus, the proposed perspective challenges the understanding of theater as “the realm of human affairs,” “a web of human relations,” i.e., an art into which “the political sphere of human life is transposed,” and “whose sole subject is man in his relationship to others.” 39 In my essay, I tried to show that the concept of the Anthropo-scene enables an expanded understanding of performance as a framework for the interpretation of more-than-human lifeworlds and cultures, involving also the action of various bodies—human and more-than-human, artifacts, resources, organic and technological residues—allowing for a shift in theoretical perspectives on performance. The focus lies on performative practices that situate themselves at the interface of art, eco-queer-activism, and Indigenous movements, critically approaching the concept of the anthropos, but also circumscribing it in the context of ecological crises and decolonial processes. The performative practices thus make visible and transform not only the image of the human, but also relationality, the notion of the common, the understanding of corporealities, and other materialities. This is because matter is actively shaping the Anthropo-scene and giving rise to various aspects of human existence: social context and political history, local environmental practices and speculative ecologies, gender determinants and ethnic discrimination, religious implications, and finally, aesthetic experiences. The concept of the Anthropo-scene, as outlined in this essay, invites an exploration of various scenes, where the “entanglement of existence” 40 manifests as the omnipresent Wasteland of which the anthropos has become an integral part.