The planet as method
My work focuses on thinking about, through, and alongside the planet. This obviously means thinking and working in adjacency to debates on the cultural implications of the Anthropocene, climate change, climate justice, and other ecologically oriented research agendas. But my interest is to ask: what else we can do when we think about the planet and performance studies? Some guiding questions in my work include: What methodological affordances for teaching and research do we gain in developing a sense of critical planetarity? What theoretical frameworks can be articulated if we see performance’s worlding power more as a planetary feature and not just a utopic promise? How might performance studies articulate and validate planetary subjectivities that complicate epistemic binaries, such as inner/outer? And, can we rethink the politics of performance and its study, as these being always already the planet’s politics?
To explore these questions, I think about the planet, first, as a metaphor to describe a constellation of collaborative scholarly practices and, second, as a chief material condition for performance to occur. I am interested in modes of academic work and topics of academic and creative research that produce ways of being, thinking, and experiencing our planetary existence in politically charged yet intellectually humble ways. In this context, a cornerstone of my thinking is Gayatri’s Spivak’s articulation of planetarity:
If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away. And thus to think of it is already to transgress, for, in spite of our forays into what we metaphorize, differently, as outer and inner space, what is above and beyond our own reach is not continuous with us as it is not, indeed, specifically discontinuous. We must persistently educate ourselves into this peculiar mindset. (2003, p.73)
I find this passage very inspiring because it invites me to think about finitude and relationality, and I am always puzzled, in a good way, with the many meanings one can derive from that last sentence – what does it mean to “educate ourselves in this peculiar, planetary, mindset”? Alongside Spivak, I also often return to this passage in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies from the South, where he suggests the notions of ecologies of knowledge, of epistemic copresence, and epistemic incompleteness. Santos writes:
Herein lies the impulse for copresence and for incompleteness. Since no single type of knowledge can account for all possible interventions in the world, all knowledges are incomplete in different ways. […] All forms of knowledge uphold practices and constitute subjects. […] In a climate of ecology of knowledges, the quest for intersubjectivity is as important as it is complex. Since different knowledge practices take place on different spatial scales and according to different durations and rhythms, intersubjectivity entails also the disposition to know and to act on different scales and under the articulation of different times and durations. (2014, 276).
This passage from De Sousa Santos is important for me because it serves as a reminder that knowing things about this world, about this planet, is always already accepting that we share our planetary existence with others – both humans and non-humans. Indeed, knowing is accepting one’s own finitude. So drawing from Spivak and Santos, among others, my approach to critical planetarity stems from considering “the planet” as a matrix of multiple co-presences, and I suggest that thinking in this way affords performance studies to do 5 key things: 1) Advocate for planetarity as a critical framework that benefits the formation of ecologies of knowledges (i.e. relational, circulatory, and co-creative histories and accountabilities); 2) Engage research from the standpoint of epistemic finitude and vulnerability; 3) Resist employing the critical vocabularies and semantics of globalization (including global north and south) on account of their limited scope when dealing with the increasingly complex cultural, social, political, and ecological aspects of life on this planet in the XXI century; 4) Interrogate “the planetary sensible” as this appears in performances; 5) Emphasise the materiality of the planet in the study of performance. Here, the materiality is not just of the planet as our planet, but also as one of many planets. (Cervera, 2017).
So for me to speak about the planet as a method is to sincerely locate the task of doing performance studies on this planet; to continuously educate myself in the mindset that planetary synchronicity, for example, even when perceived as such during our interactions in platforms such as Zoom or Whatsapp, is always already an experience of being positively incomplete because the biggest lesson that the planet has for us is that we cannot define it, nor our relation to it, just by ourselves.