The Refrain and the Territory of the Posthuman

The Refrain and the Territory of the Posthuman Aline Wiame The notion of “posthumanism” I intend to use throughout this paper encompasses both the assemblages of human and nonhuman components and the critical tool that posthumanism can be. Indeed, posthumanism addresses two problematic situations facing humanism as well as the humanities today. On the one hand, historically, humanism has often identified itself with imperialism—the universal Human as a norm shaped according to the image of the Western, white, Christian, heterosexual, upper-middle-class male. On the other hand, the development of biotechnologies and artificial intelligence, as well as the development of systemic and environmental modes of thought—all types of knowledge that lead to thinking in terms of life milieus rather than of isolated individuals—have made obsolete the possibility of studying humankind as a species separated from other life forms, whether they are organic or artificial (see for instance Haraway 2004; Braidotti 2013; Nayar 2014). If “posthuman” figures, because of their important place in our contemporary societies, affect numerous propositions elaborated upon within the performance arts, I am particularly interested in the way they affect the postdramatic stage. What can the stage, that space which A. Wiame (B) Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. Stalpaert et al. (eds.), Performance and Posthumanism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74745-9_8 137 138 A. WIAME was once supposed to remain hidden in order to allow the showing of inter-human relations, become when it is overwhelmed by a whole assemblage of nonhuman components? In Postdramatic Theatre, HansThies Lehmann tackles this question with Gertrude Stein’s concept of “landscape-play”: instead of the continuous tension required by a drama always situated in a specific time between the past and the future, we should be able to watch a play just like we contemplate a landscape. What comes first then is the effects of defocalization and equal status for all parts, which are inherent to the contemplation of a landscape: the spectator’s attention is no longer focused on the progression of a human drama represented on stage (Lehmann 2006, 62–63), but the gaze can now wander freely around the different elements presented on the stage. Theatre and its stage thus become, according to Lehmann, post-anthropocentric: They are aesthetic figurations that point utopically towards an alternative to the anthropocentric ideal of the subjection of nature. When human bodies join with objects, animals and energy lines into a single reality (as also seems to be the case in circus – thus the depth of the pleasure it causes), theatre makes it possible to imagine a reality other than that of man dominating nature. (81) In the following pages, I will develop on some propositions about this post-anthropocentric stage and its connections to the staging of the posthuman. It requires a first shift, a step to the side, away from the concept of landscape-play. Rather than thinking with landscapes—defined by and for a human gaze—I want to examine the outcomes of an animal point of view on space, on the shaping and appropriation of space, through the concept of territory such as it is approached by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the “Refrain” chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. But even before going into the characteristics of such a territory, an important issue raised by this point of view must be underlined. There are, of course, some similitudes between a territory and a stage, beginning with the way both are traced—let us think, for instance, of the famous chalk circle. However, if Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of territory allows for a direct account of the assemblage of human and nonhuman elements, its connection to the question of the posthuman remains more difficult to describe. For this reason, I will proceed step by step with an articulation of Deleuze THE REFRAIN AND THE TERRITORY OF THE POSTHUMAN 139 and Guattari’s territorial propositions and Heiner Goebbels’ performanceinstallation Stifters Dinge—a piece that interweaves stage and territory, nonhuman and posthuman. Echoes and passages between A Thousand Plateaus and Stifters Dinge will allow for an evaluation of the relevance of the concept of territory to thinking the stage of the posthuman, in a reciprocal communication rather than in a vain exercise that would apply philosophy to theatre. Let us begin with a few words about Stifters Dinge. Initially known for his collaborations with Heiner Müller as a stage designer and music composer (his first specialty), Heiner Goebbels, born in East Germany, has long been interested in the relations between theatre, opera and politics and has worked on texts from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gertrude Stein, Paul Valéry, Samuel Beckett and Maurice Blanchot—to name a few. First shown in 2007 at Théâtre Vidy, Laussanne, Stifters Dinge (literally “Stifter’s stuff”, derived from the name of Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century) is one of Goebbels’ major successes: the piece has been performed more than 350 times on four continents. Goebbels describes Stifters Dinge as a “a composition for five pianos with no pianists, a play with no actors, a performance without performers – one might say a no-man show” (2008a). What the audience is facing on stage is indeed a nonhuman device: five mechanically activated pianos; three pools that will allow for the development of textural plays with water, ice and vapour; visual projections and sound effects (Fig. 1). Such no-man shows entertain obvious connections to the question of the nonhuman: besides the fact that the star of the show is a mechanical device that plays with “natural” elements such as water, the music composed by Goebbels is conceived as discordant with harmonies familiar to our human ears1 —or at least to what the Western world has shaped as “humanity”. But the posthuman question is also present; the presentation of Stifters Dinge in the press kit concludes with the famous last lines of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things about the historical and transitory character of the dispositions that have allowed the constitution of the humanities: If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, ( … ) then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. (2005, 422) 140 A. WIAME Fig. 1 Heiner Goebbels, Stifters Dinge, 2007 (© Wonge Bergmann/ Ruhrtriennales) This erasing of “man”—one would rather say “humanity”—is omnipresent in Stifters Dinge. The performance makes us read and listen to extracts of Stifter’s My Great Grandfather’s Portfolio in which the writer crafts meticulous accounts of a forest immobilized and frozen. In Stifter’s text, any human point of view is already exceeded by some kind of “natural” estrangement. When this text itself is taken into Goebbels’ assemblage and combined with an old traditional Greek song in chromatic scale, antiphonal singing by Columbian Indians, interviews with and readings by Malcom X, Claude Lévi-Strauss or William Burroughs, then our usual representations of what a human is, become, indeed, similar to a face drawn in sand about to be erased by a rising tide. With Goebbels’ proposition for a post-anthropocentric stage, let us turn now to the concept of territory developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the chapter “The Refrain” and proceed by means of three propositions. THE REFRAIN AND THE TERRITORY OF THE POSTHUMAN 141 Proposition 1: The constitution of a territory is a performative practice that does not represent anything but that makes other ways of feeling and thinking exist Hans-Thies Lehmann himself underlines that the notion of “landscape” is only suitable for thinking about the post-anthropocentric stage if, from the usual values attached to the idea of the landscape, we draw instead on a defocalization that gives equal status to all parts of the landscape. Indeed, other aspects of the notion of landscape can only refer to a nature shaped by and for humans and their gaze; it is not a mere coincidence if, among the different types of art, the pictorial scheme is the most commonly associated with landscapes—and especially with the classical, very well-known genre of landscape painting. Opposed to this pictorial predominance, the whole of A Thousand Plateaus is underpinned by a discrete but consistent valorisation of music as an expressive component able to create material and conceptual beings without any need for a humanist kind of representation. This function of music throughout the book is at the heart of the “Refrain” chapter, which opens with the evocation of a child lost in the dark who tries to conjure away the chaos that surrounds him by singing a song that will give a rhythm to his walking: A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song of Orpheus. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 311) Vocal components, rhythms, accelerations, interruptions are all risky attempts to organize a fragile but stable centre withdrawn from chaos— and this fragile centre is the first sketch of a territory (311–312). Every territory is an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that territorializes them (313). A territory is not created by the shaping of an image-landscape but by rhythmic assemblages of heterogeneous components: a recurring theme of the “Refrain” chapter is, in fact, birds’ songs which create a territory through purely vocal and rhythmic means. 142 A. WIAME Goebbels’ stage is certainly not that different when it affirms its post-anthropocentric character with intentionally out-of-tune pianos that contradict the common rule of equal temperament tuning and thus “display a certain rebellion against the sound of human control” (Bell 2010, 155). For its part, with its description of the sound constitution of a territory, with its insistence on the fact that a territory does not represent anything but rather makes exist stable centres withdrawn from chaos, A Thousand Plateaus clearly echoes the idea that contemporary theatre is characterized by a break from the pictorial scheme, which dominated representation in the Italian theatrical apparatus (Hénin 2003), to a musical scheme—an idea that can be found, between others, in Saison (1998, 72–73) or Lehmann (2006, 91–93). If relations between A Thousand Plateaus and a form of contemporary theatre such as the one shaped by Goebbels can be established so easily, it is also because Deleuze and Guattari explicitly connect the drawing of a territory with the question of the emergence of art. In fact, for the two philosophers, an artist’s work is defined by the withdrawing of untreated, expressive materials in order to add her signature; she thus transforms those untreated materials into elements of her own territory (“readymades” are territorial acts—see Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 316). Deleuze and Guattari continue: And what is called art brut is not at all pathological or primitive; it is merely this constitution, this freeing, of matters of expression in the movement of territoriality: the base or ground of art. Take anything and make it a matter of expression. The stagemaker practices art brut. Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up their own posters. Of course, from this standpoint art is not the privilege of human beings. (316) Beyond the assertion that art does not begin with human beings, another remarkable point deserves to be noticed; the equivalence between the movement of territoriality, stagemakers, and artists. Would making a stage be a territorial practice close to art brut ? There is no doubt that a clear equivalence between territory-making and stage-making would delight the author of this article, but things are more complicated than that. “Stagemaker” is the English translation for a word that the French, original version of Mille plateaux gives in Latin: scenopoïetes . Obviously, scenopoïetes can literally be translated as “stagemaker”, but Deleuze and Guattari use the Latin and not the French (they could THE REFRAIN AND THE TERRITORY OF THE POSTHUMAN 143 have written something like “faiseur de scène”, after all), for a reason. Scenopoïetes dentirostris is indeed the name of a bird living in Australian mountain forests and commonly called the tooth-billed bowerbird (or, in fact, “stagemaker bowerbird”) in English.2 This bird is particularly interesting for Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 315 and 331) as its varied song, including imitations of other birds’ songs, is produced during amorous parade season, from a branch called singing stick that sits on top of a “stage” (display ground) made of leaves laid out with their pale underside face up. By affirming that a scenopoïetes makes art brut, by affirming that an artist is a scenopoïetes, Deleuze and Guattari are not simply establishing an analogy between the (human) making of a stage and the (animal) making of a territory: they actually argue that both the stage and the territory are parts of the same process—a process that is in no way exclusively human. “Of course, from this standpoint art is not the privilege of human beings (1987, 316).” Drawing a territory does imply the making of a stage, but that stage is not drawn by a human artist-creator; it is an element of a nonhuman, expressive assemblage. Proposition 2: A territory is made of nonhuman gestures and affects whose machinic becoming shapes the post-anthropocentric stage Let us go back to our “stagemaker” artist. Her motto could be: from anything, make an expressive material. “Indexes” from any milieu then become pretexts for a territorializing refrain, whatever the kind of indexes—“materials, organic products, skin or membrane states, energy sources, action-perception condensates” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 315). It means that, although the musical paradigm remains central in the constitution of a territory (notably in regard to the importance of rhythm in the process), every type of “refrain” can be constitutive of a territory—whether it be an optical, motor or gestural refrain (323). In the act of making a territory, something very singular then happens: there is a disjunction between the territory-in-the-making and the code inherent to the species of the animal shaping its territory (322). This can be explained with the case of a territorializing bird: while territorializing, the bird is decoding its innate reflexes and abilities, which are no more mere products of an internal necessity but are adjusted to the refrain required by the territory to make. Moreover, the bird territorializes its acquired abilities by adjusting them to the expressive materials of the territory rather than to external stimuli. Those disjunctive operations allow for the creation of novelty, beyond the code of the species: one does not establish a territory 144 A. WIAME to remain locked in, prisoner of a lugubrious repetition of what is already known, but to have enough stability for slowly opening the circle to other milieus. In Stifters Dinge, Stifter’s texts, the projection of classical paintings, non-Western musical songs, and speeches by Malcom X, Burroughs or Lévi-Strauss are not mere expressive materials, prisoners of a technical device that runs idle; on the contrary, they are assembled with out-oftune pianos, elevated to other powers which make us see another milieu, a milieu that is really “posthuman”. While humans and their creations used to master and organize this milieu, they are now mere cogs in a more-than-human machine they cannot comprehend. This is actually one of Goebbels’ goals: staging “a confrontation with the unknown: with the forces that man cannot master” (Goebbels 2008b; quoted in Bell 2010, 154). Stifters Dinge could then very well be what Deleuze and Guattari call a machinic opera: If a quality has motifs and counterpoints, if there are rhythmic characters and melodic landscapes in a given order, then there is the constitution of a veritable machinic opera tying together orders, species, and heterogeneous qualities. What we term machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneities as such. Inasmuch as these heterogeneities are matters of expression, we say that their synthesis itself, their consistency or capture, forms a properly machinic “statement” or “enunciation”. The varying relations into which a color, sound, gesture, movement, or position enters in the same species, and in different species, form so many machinic enunciations. (1987, 330–331) In Stifters Dinge, actual machines—whether they are mechanical or digital—allow for this synthesis of heterogeneities. What we are facing is an accurate performance of the way Deleuze and Guattari describe what happens when one leaves the territory, when it is deterritorialized: “Whenever a territorial assemblage is taken up by a movement that deterritorializes it (whether under so-called natural or artificial conditions), we say that a machine is released” (333). On Goebbels’ stage, those machines are actual machines, but they have to be thought of as a particularly striking exemplification of a broader device that can be of a totally other type, as Deleuze and Guattari define a machine as “a set of cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage undergoing deterritorialization, and draw variations and mutations of it” (333). In Stifters Dinge’s case, the machine is less exemplified in physically present on-stage pianos than THE REFRAIN AND THE TERRITORY OF THE POSTHUMAN 145 in the overpowering rhythm of the music they produce, with all its unanticipated rhythmic accents (one can think of a musical thriller; see Bell 2010, 151). A machinic deterritorialization thus has political effects, not only because questions of inhabiting and leaving a territory are highly political, but also because the deterritorialization of refrains extracts from them new propositional powers. For instance, when a speech by Malcom X is assembled with Stifters Dinge’s machinic rhythms, elements related to the race question highlight the arbitrary, false binary of the boundaries that separate races, humans, things, and their normative relations (Bell 2010, 155): by deterritorializing the elements and their relations, the device has already raised them to another power, showing the vacuity of normative boundaries. Proposition 3: The stage-become-territory is an experimental plane with regard to political questions of the Natal, the Earth and the people A Thousand Plateaus is a political book, haunted by the question of fascist tendencies of desire and its lines of flight.3 The “refrain” chapter is no exception and gives an important part to German Romanticism, to Lieder, to Hölderlin and to the specific operations that this movement effectuates on the territory around the theme of the “Natal”: The Natal is the innate, but decoded; and it is the acquired, but territorialized. The Natal is the new figure assumed by the innate and the acquired in the territorial assemblage. The affect proper to the Natal, as heard in the lied: to be forever lost, or refound, or aspiring to the unknown homeland. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 332) According to Deleuze and Guattari, the Natal opens the question of territoriality onto the cosmos. With Romanticism, artists abandon de jure universality, which was claimed by Classicism, and they reterritorialize; they reclaim the Earth: The earth is the intense point at the deepest level of the territory or is projected outside it like a focal point, where all the forces draw together in close embrace. The earth is no longer one force among others, nor is it a substance endowed with form or a coded milieu, with bounds and an apportioned share. The earth has become that close embrace of all forces ( … ). (338–339) 146 A. WIAME The territory is the requisite to know the Earth but there always is a disjunction between them—“The territory is German, the Earth Greek” (339). In the German Romanticist notion of territory, Deleuze and Guattari write, the attraction–repulsion movement between the Earth and the territory happens between the One-Alone of the soul and the One-All of the Earth: “The hero is a hero of the earth; he is mythic, rather than being a hero of the people and historical” (340). What is missing, then, is the people, according to Paul Klee’s famous formula that would become one of the leitmotivs of Deleuze’s Cinema II. The Time-Image (1989, 215–224). Paul Klee claims a deterritorialization, a flight from the Earth, but the One-Alone of the soul is not enough to accomplish such a thing; the “One-Crowd” is needed (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 341). “We still lack the ultimate force… We seek a people. We began over there in the Bauhaus… More we cannot do”, says Klee (1966, 55; quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 337–338). The problem of a missing people is all the more political, given that it is also musical, Deleuze and Guattari add (1987, 341): the romantic opera is a confrontation of the subjectified voice of the hero, which is full of “feelings”, with an instrumental and orchestral whole that mobilizes non-subjective affects. The political character of a romantic opera depends on its composition—a composition similar to the textual, sonic and visual polyphonies in Stifters Dinge: what voices can emerge when assemblages deterritorialize the forces that were framed by a territory? In German romantic operas, Deleuze and Guattari argue, orchestration and instrumentation both separate and unite sound forces and assign the hero’s voice a part according to earthly forces, forces from the One-All. The musicological question is thus political: as the Natal can be thought of according to the Earth or according to the people, as orchestration can manage—or not—to individuate a people, connections of voices to peoples able to populate a territory can vary drastically. A people fed by the forces of the Earth does not individuate in the same way as a people drawn by the forces of the crowd. Such differences in musical composition could very well explain why fascism used Verdi much less than Nazism did Wagner (341). The problem of Romanticism, although essential because it shows how territoriality can become an active agent in the process of artistic creation, is nevertheless no longer ours. Why would we think of art from the viewpoint of territory today? And what could a post-anthropocentric stage bring to the debate when it is approached as a special kind of territory? THE REFRAIN AND THE TERRITORY OF THE POSTHUMAN 147 Actually, the question of the Earth and of the people, even if reconfigured nowadays, remains crucial. For Deleuze and Guattari, we are facing a “deterritorialized”, “open” Earth as well as a “molecularized” people, a people that cannot be contained in any organized form or institution as it is made of pure forces and intensities: The earth is now at its most deterritorialized: not only a point in a galaxy, but one galaxy among others. The people is now at its most molecularized: a molecular population, a people of oscillators as so many forces of interaction. The artist discards romantic figures, relinquishes both the forces of the earth and those of the people. The combat, if combat there is, has moved. (345) Art then can, and must, propose new forms of perception (with perception referring to all the senses, including seeing and hearing); art has to work on new territorial assemblages to work on our thresholds of perception, our thresholds of discernibility. “All history is really the history of perception” (347), Deleuze and Guattari write, refusing to see a structural evolution in the succession of classic, romantic and modern ages. Modes of perception, the way some beings and some people of the Earth are (or are not) perceptible, are the real agents that determine territories and links to the forces of chaos and cosmos. By bringing face to face the inhumanity of the Earth and the inhumanity of machines, by tackling Western and non-Western harmonies, by mixing the theme of humanity’s disappearance with racial and postcolonial questions, Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge is composing a stage territory that makes us perceive an open Earth, populated by “posthuman” beings in the critical sense of the term. Those beings are the ones about whom Donna Haraway writes that they “can call us to account for our imagined humanity, whose parts are always articulated through translations” (Haraway 2004, 60). Humans and nonhumans, those beings staged and articulated by Goebbels, play a part in what Rosi Braidotti qualifies as a redefinition of subjectivity when faced with the stakes of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism: “The relational capacity of the posthuman subject is not confined within our species, but it includes all non-anthropomorphic elements”, which makes us feel “the virtual possibilities of an expanded, relational self that functions in a nature–culture continuum” (2013, 60–61). A molecular people for a deterritorialized Earth: such is the aim of a stage-turned-territory for diverse human and 148 A. WIAME Fig. 2 Heiner Goebbels, Stifters Dinge, 2007 (© Wonge Bergmann/ Ruhrtriennale) nonhuman components assembled to compose a new refrain towards the cosmic (Fig. 2). Conclusion: The Climate Crisis and the Precarious Creation of the Unknown The representations of Stifters Dinge in New York coincided with the failure of the United Nations’ summit about climate change in Copenhagen in December 2008. Goebbels commented on that coincidence by stating that the ecological politics that can be deduced from his play did not arise from a predetermined position but resulted from what the materials themselves were requiring (Schaefer 2009; quoted in Bell 2010, 156). In other words, working on the invention of a posthuman stage-become-territory can only bring posthuman, ecological propositions regarding new ways for species and artefacts to inhabit and interact on the Earth. With that in mind, we should not underestimate Goebbels’s statement about the absence of a predetermined (political) position regarding THE REFRAIN AND THE TERRITORY OF THE POSTHUMAN 149 the ecological crisis: the precarious, uncertain factor that could connect posthuman assemblages to climate change-related concerns is key. It is the precarity of our attempts, the uncertainty of the decoding process, that allows for the irruption of yet unseen perceptions of the interwoven futures of many kind of lives on Earth. Currently, the Anthropocene—and what this strange insertion of human activities in the inhuman geological strata of the Earth tells us about the disjunction of today’s human societies and the temporality of a more-than-human Earth—urges us to reconsider the importance of stage propositions that work on the territory-to-Earth connections as well as on the kind of assemblages that can populate that Earth. In that respect, to end this article, I want to insist on the path shown by Goebbels’ Stifters Dinge as a way to develop artistic creation towards interwoven ways to elaborate new perceptions of the Earth. Actually, the question of creation is central to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s view on the task of arts and philosophy regarding the future forms of the Earth and its peoples.4 In What Is Philosophy, they explicitly present creation as a tool of resistance to the present in order to produce a new people for a new Earth: We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist. ( … ) Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people that are lacking as the correlate of creation. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 108) Here, creation, whether artistic or conceptual, must be understood as the precarious invention of the unknown, as opposed to the pseudoinevitability of the “it is what it is” kind of resignation—arts and philosophy create forces against stabilized forms. But what would “the constitution of a new Earth” mean? What does it mean when the two authors write that, in the process of creation, we are lacking an earth, whether it is a creation of concepts or of art? After all, don’t we rather have too much of it, too much of a fantasized “mother” earth, too much of an earth to appropriate and exploit, too much of an earth that we have spoiled to the point that it could actually kill us? That is a point recently made by Claire Colebrook (2014, 72): we should not forget that the figure of the globe—the Earth as a globe—is only a way through which “‘we’ give a world to ourselves through our own recuperating 150 A. WIAME imagination”. We probably have too much of this kind of Earth, seized and measured for Man, and that is precisely the reason why the Earth is lacking—the “open earth” Deleuze and Guattari are calling for, the unmeasurable Earth that cannot even be understood in terms of organic life. This resistance opposed by the Earth to any attempt to stamp it with the tools of human thought is precisely the reason why Deleuze and Guattari associate the theme of the Earth with the question of creation: we are not only lacking an earth and a people, we are also lacking tools to think and create them. The propositions Stifters Dinge elaborates on may not be those lacking tools per se but they are assemblages pointing towards those tools. They are not trying to represent the Earth on a stage; they escape from the landscape-play logics to experiment with expressive rather than representative means. The territory that those propositions create can thus only exist outside of a strictly human gaze and requires multilayered, interwoven interactions between all kinds of living species and mechanical, sometimes uncanny, forms of existence. The people-to-come suggested by such a stage-become-territory can only be described as revolutionary as it exceeds any classical, humanist definition of the people—those kinds of State-centred definitions that can only lead to deceptive results as the one of the United Nations Copenhagen summit in 2008 did.5 Yet, thinkingwith and acting-with those uncanny peoples could very well be the best option to inherit an Earth both devastated by climate changes induced by anthropic activities and defiant towards any will of human mastery. In line with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s call for creation as means to resist the paralysed forms of the present, Stifters Dinge creates a process, a becoming that indicates a way beyond pessimism, cynicism, and desperation: those “posthuman” performative experiments may be our chance to create new modes of thought and perception, new philosophical, artistic and political ways to engage with becoming. Notes 1. For this fact about Stifters Dinge as well as many others mentioned in this paper, I rely on Bell (2010). 2. In Massumi’s English translation of A Thousand Plateaus, the scenopoïetes dentirostris is introduced as the “brown stagemaker” (315), just one page before the quotation discussed here. 3. See for instance the chapter “Micropolitics and Segmentarity”, 208–231. THE REFRAIN AND THE TERRITORY OF THE POSTHUMAN 151 4. I develop those questions, articulated with the concepts of geophilosophy and fabulation, in Wiame (2018). 5. 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London and New York: Routledge Classics. Goebbels, Heiner. 2008a. “Press Kit on Stifters Dinge.” n.d. http://www.heiner goebbels.com/en/archive/works/complete/view/4/texts. Goebbels, Heiner. 2008b. “Why I Made Stifter’s Dinge.” Artangel, n.d. www.artangel.org.uk//projects/2008/stifter_s_dinge/heiner_goebbels_ on_stifter_s_dinge/heiner_goebbels_on_stifter_s_dinge. Haraway, Donna. 2004. “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Ar’n’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-humanist Landscape.” In The Haraway Reader, 47–61. New York and London: Routledge. Hénin, Emmanuelle. 2003. Ut Pictura Theatrum. Théâtre et Peinture de la Renaissance italienne au Classicisme français. Genève: Librairie Druoz. Klee, Paul. 1966. On Modern Art. Translated by Paul Findlay, introduction by Herbert Reed. London: Faber. Latour, Bruno. 2015. Face à Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. Paris: La Découverte. Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen JürsMunby. 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