Meaning in the Weaving: Mapping and Texture as Figures of Spatiality and Eventness

Advocating a dramaturgical ontology of events rather than objects – or ecologies rather than cartographies – the article defends the metaphors of texture and weaving as intuitive, non-anthropocentric alternatives to current idioms of becoming and emergence. Already popularized as the very definition of “dramaturgy” by Eugenio Barba, these are specifically traced through Tim Ingold’s recent anthropology of weaving and S. C. Pepper’s philosophical pragmatism: where Ingold’s ecology of lines admits to “no insides or outsides [...] trailing loose ends in every direction”, Pepper’s “contextualistic world” of events admits “no top nor bottom” to its strands and textures. Intended only as a theoretical introduction to the implications of a certain family of metaphors (complete with a graphic representation thereof ), this article distinguishes the eventness of texture from certain notions of spatial “mapping” and discusses the “ecological” range of the metaphor through the concepts of textural fusion and spread

Economies and Ecologies: Figures of Spectating and the Enclosure of Emancipation

Starting from the tropes of ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’ as framing discourses for theatre and performance studies, and touching on larger debates about humanism and posthumanism, modernity and postmodernism, this playful essay teases out how any of these idioms may inadvertently reproduce the logic of global capitalism. Reading the latter as an ever-widening project of ‘enclosure’ – the closing in of the commons, the theatres, the individual, and the very imagination of emancipation – the problem with it is located in its reduction of human agents to mere spectators of the world’s unfolding. If modern or humanist economies risk the reduction of nature to mere scenery for human exploits, some postmodern and posthuman ecologies may run the converse risk of divesting human politics of both agency and accountability. Drawing on Kate Soper’s and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s defences of humanism and modernity, Andreas Malm’s and Alf Hornborg’s critiques of posthumanism, and David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s paean to political imagination, the essay enters the theatre only occasionally, but addresses all its themes through a performative lens.Artikkeli käsittelee leikillisellä otteella laajoja aihepiirejä: yhtäältä ekonomiaa ja ekologiaa teatterin- ja esitystutkimuksen kattokäsitteinä, toisaalta vielä laveampia keskusteluita humanismista ja posthumanismista, modernista ja postmodernista. Väitteenä on, että kaikilla näillä diskursseilla on mahdollista tulla toisintaneeksi – vaikka vahingossakin – globaalin kapitalismin logiikkaa, joka sulkeistaa sisäänsä niin yhteismaat, teatterit, yksilöt kuin mielikuvituksenkin, redusoiden ihmistoimijat pelkiksi tämän luonnonvoimana näyttäytyvän spektaakkelin katsojiksi. Missä modernit tai humanistiset ’ekonomiat’ alistavat ei-inhimillisen luonnon vain hyötytalouden lavasteiksi, postmodernit ja posthumanistiset ’ekologiat’ voivat vastaavasti häivyttää ihmisten tekemästä politiikasta sekä vastuun että toimijuuden ulottuvuudet. Teksti etenee humanismin ja modernin puolustuspuheenvuoroista (Kate Soper, Ellen Meiksins Wood) posthumanismin kritiikkiin (Andreas Malm, Alf Hornborg) ja poliittisen mielikuvituksen mahdollisuuksiin (David Graeber, David Wengrow); teatterissa poiketaan vain toisinaan, mutta tutkitut ilmiöt ymmärretään pohjimmiltaan performatiivisiksi

Doing Things With Natures: A Performative History in Four Anthropo(s)cenes

The article expands on Lewis and Maslin’s “double two-step” historicization of the Anthropocene, with two major transitions in energy (agriculture and fossil fuels) and two in social organization (modernity and the Great Acceleration). Insofar as planetary impacts arise from “what we spend our time doing” – foraging, farming, feudal then waged labour, finally unsustainable consumption – such “doing” is understood as precisely ‘performative’ in the sense that its effects only arise from a massive social repetition that is confused with essential nature and thus concealed. Through a graphic model of such ‘plural performativity,’ four consecutive Anthropo(s)cenes are sketched: the Giving World of agriculture and state formation; the New World of colonial pillage and world trade; the Netherworld of wage labour and fossil capital; then ‘All the World’ but not with all of “us” as players. Apart from environmental changes, the paper targets performances of power and inequality: normative histories of ‘common sense’ on the one hand, concealing ‘people’s histories’ of conflict and opposition, on the other – the Anthropocene arising not simply from what the majority of people have been doing, but from what they have always beenforced to do

Poor Theatre, Rich Theatre : Layers of Exchange in Two Adaptations of Ingmar Bergman and Paavo Haavikko

The article analyzes two Finnish theatre adaptations of Fanny och Alexander, by Ingmar Bergman, and Rauta-aika, by Paavo Haavikko, premiered in 2010 and 2011 respectively. The key question is, how the two works brought the filmic originals’ wealth of material to theatrically manageable proportions, and how the themes of poverty and prosperity were developed by their scenic machineries – a question of theatricality, but also, if you will, of a sort of theatrical exchange: “golden age” to exile or decline in the story-worlds, lavish film to theatrical constraint in production. The first two sections take a specifically economic perspective on the original TV projects and their central storylines; the two final sections address how these storylines were locally woven by the revolving stage and the revolving auditorium used in the theatre productions. On various levels, a playfully “monetary” distinction of metonymy and metaphor is suggested in which metonymic contiguity stands for contextual prosperity (as experience, community, immediacy), metaphoric substitution for relative deprivation (as distance, abstraction, exchange)

Meaning in the Weaving: Mapping and Texture as Figures of Spatiality and Eventness

Advocating a dramaturgical ontology of events rather than objects – or ecologies rather than cartographies – the article defends the metaphors of texture and weaving as intuitive, non-anthropocentric alternatives to current idioms of becoming and emergence. Already popularized as the very definition of “dramaturgy” by Eugenio Barba, these are specifically traced through Tim Ingold’s recent anthropology of weaving and S. C. Pepper’s philosophical pragmatism: where Ingold’s ecology of lines admits to “no insides or outsides [...] trailing loose ends in every direction”, Pepper’s “contextualistic world” of events admits “no top nor bottom” to its strands and textures. Intended only as a theoretical introduction to the implications of a certain family of metaphors (complete with a graphic representation thereof ), this article distinguishes the eventness of texture from certain notions of spatial “mapping” and discusses the “ecological” range of the metaphor through the concepts of textural fusion and spread