We have never been human: Staging subjectivity from Diderot and Artaud to the aesthetics of the European refugee crisis

Abstract

This essay explores the shifting matrix underlying the pervasive theater that enacts the making and unmaking of human subjectivity by focusing on key historical transformations and prominent contemporary manifestations. Offering a comparative analysis of Denis Diderot’s theory of the actor, and Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, I argue that the paradox of the human had led to human–artwork hybrids well before the digital age of the posthuman recast the body as virtuality. Drawing on a broader understanding and scope of human–artwork hybridization, I examine two different yet equally memorable and infamous responses in 2015 to the European refugee crisis: the Petra László video and Norbert Baksa’s Der Migrant. The aesthetic and cultural practices revolving around the staging of the European refugee crisis constitute a key sphere in which this hybridization is tested, played out and in the context of East-Central Europe, calibrated to a ballad tradition whose generic conventions were reinvented in conjunction with a growing national identity in the 19th century. The ballad of ‘The Walled-Up Wife’ has enjoyed sustained popularity in East-Central Europe, ever since its anachronistic ‘rediscovery’ in multiple national literatures around the mid 1800s. It deserves critical attention, for its extensive cultural history as well as its rich vernacular heritage can shed new light on the ways in which the idea of material embodiment comes to bear extended meanings for a reconceptualization of the human in digital spaces of aesthetic rather than merely socio-political signification.