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

Abstract

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.