Becoming-Animate: On the Performed Limits of "Human"

Abstract

Jennifer Parker-Starbuck's essay develops the theoretical concept of "becoming-animate," a triangulation among concepts of human, animal, and technology, which has the potential to draw attention to possible affiliations among the three terms. Developing Haraway's cyborg, Parker-Starbuck's own cyborg theatre, and Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming-animal" through moments of pause and hiatus inspired by Giorgio Agamben's idea of the "anthropological machine," the "becoming-animate" emerges as a provocative site for new alliances, especially ones that re-situate contemporary issues of animality. Cathy Weis's multimedia piece "Painting and Stripping" provides a theatrical example of work that blurs the questions of the boundaries among the three elements to foreground the ethical space of performance as the necessary staging ground of this questioning.