On The Performance and Politics of Planetary Aesthetics 

Abstract:

The concept of the planetary is increasingly prevalent in ecocritical discourse, artistic practices and aesthetics; however, it is not without its ambiguities. This paper explores the politics of ‘planetary aesthetics’ beginning with an account of three conceptions of the planet viewed as an ‘aesthetic’ object. The first is the image of the Earth taken in 1968 by Apollo 8 astronauts called ‘Earthrise’, the second is Robert Smithson’s land artwork ‘Spiral Jetty’, and the third, a work by the contemporary Cherokee artist, Cannupa Hanska Luger, called ‘Future Ancestral Technologies’. Where the first two images produce a planetary aesthetic from the perspectives, respectively of ‘epistemic delocality’ (Burkart) and aesthetic delocality – both occupying what the philosopher Howard Caygill describes as a ‘synoptic’ viewpoint on the planet – the third produces the planet as aesthetic and epistemic locality comprising lived relations between the human and nonhuman world. These distinctions provoke several questions: Who is the subject of planetarity? What are the politics of planetary locality? What are the politics of delocality? And how might art practices respond to them? In addressing these questions, the paper identifies the political stakes of planetary aesthetics – how to confront the ever-increasing threats of anthropogenic climate breakdown, producing what I describe as ‘monstrous actants’, rooted in the effects of globalisation. I discuss the possibility of articulating a political project that might oppose such monstrous actants, which I describes as planetarisation, and which can inform understandings of eco-political art and performance practices. In the final section, the paper draws on Native American philosopher, Brian Burkhart’s concept of the ‘narrative of colonial difference’ and the concept of colonial epistemic difference to argue that planetarisation, whose ultimate aim must be the displacement of globalisation, requires reckoning with the epistemological dispositif of coloniality itself. It relates these concepts to Luger’s work, which presents us with an allegory of ‘survivance’ – thus, of how we might forge a new planetary subject, who lives the planet in the mode of epistemic locality.

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About the Speaker:

Tony Fisher is Professor of Theatre, Politics and Aesthetics at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, where he is Head of Research Strategy and Culture. He has a long-standing interest in the relationship between the arts, and theatre in particular, and politics and political power, both historically and in contemporary socio-political contexts. His research examines this relationship as a complex and intricate interdependence, often characterized by conflict and ambiguity. He is the author of two monographs The Aesthetic Exception: Essays on Art, Theatre and Politics (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Theatre and Governance in Britain: 1500-1900, Democracy, Disorder and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2017), as well as several edited volumes: Theatre Institutions in Crisis: European Perspectives – coedited with Christopher Balme (Routledge, 2021), Foucault’s Theatres – coedited with Kélina Gotman (Manchester University Press, 2020), Beyond Failure: New Essays on the Cultural History of Failure in Theatre and Performance – coedited with Eve Katsouraki (Routledge, 2019) and Performing Antagonism: Theatre, Performance and Radical Democracy – coedited with Eve Katsouraki (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He has published numerous essays in journals such as Performance Philosophy Journal, Performance Research, Cultural Critique, Third Text, Continental Philosophy Review, and European Journal of Philosophy. He is currently collaborating with Professor Bishnupriya Dutt at Jawaharlal University in Delhi on a forthcoming volume for Bloomsbury press entitled Performing Sites of Decolonial Entanglement.