The Mise en Scène of Posthuman Thinking

The Mise en Scène of Posthuman Thinking.
Maaike Bleeker
Chair: Kristina Hagström-Ståhl

Plenary session by Maaike Bleeker as a part of the PARSE 3rd biennial research conference, Human, The Artistic Faculty, University of Gothenburg, Wed 13–Fri 15 Nov. 2019.

My presentation will approach the subject of ‘the human’ today from the perspective of what media theorist Mark Hansen (2015) describes as human implicatedness. Hansen introduces this term in the context of his discussion of current technological developments that confront us with a situation in which technology can no longer be understood as a set of tools used by humans, and instead has become an ecology in which humans participate. The fact that humans operate as part of larger ecologies, and that their agency and sense of self is intimately intertwined with the affordances of these ecologies, is of course not new, nor is it unique to today, or to technology. As theorists of posthumanism have pointed out, this condition has merely been obscured by a history of human-centered thinking. The current state of technological developments foregrounds the condition of human implicatedness and intensifies it. This situation, Hansen argues, requires that humans develop better awareness of their modes of being, doing, perceiving and thinking, as well as their sense of self and of agency, as being implicated within larger apparatuses. I will explore various aspects of human implicatedness in dialogue with works by contemporary artists using staging (mise en scène) as a means to address this condition and to rehearse ways of engaging with it. The work of these artists (including Julian Hetzel, Stefan Kaegi/Rimini Protocoll, Manuela Infante, Kris Verdonck, Dries Verhoeven and Erik Joris) is often presented in the context of theatre and performance. I am using ‘staging’ rather than ‘theatre’ or ‘performance’ to describe their work because rather than showing or telling stories by means of theatrical performance, they use staging as a means to create arrangements in time and space that implicate spectators in larger apparatuses and engage them in modes of looking, associating, and making sense. Their work is thus not only about aspects of human implicatedness but also explores the potential of staging as a posthuman approach to thinking as a material practice in which human modes of making sense and thinking are implicated within larger apparatuses. Their work, I will argue, demonstrates the potential of the theatrical apparatus as what I propose to term a thought apparatus engaging audiences in a thinking that happens in the world rather than in the head of the autonomous human subject, and in interaction with larger material apparatuses in which humans participate. This understanding of staging as thought apparatus takes its inspiration from on the one hand the idea of the thought-image as promoted by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and other European writers in the 1930s and 1940s and, on the other hand, a non-representational understanding of thinking as creative practice of confronting chaos by making connections, grasping relations, and composing form as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in their What is Philosophy?