Transferred Agencies: Performance and the Fear of Automatism

The fear of losing agency takes forms that vary according to the discourses in which they are reflected. For the modern era, these range from rhetorics of technological determinism to fairy stories about evil enchanters. Agency is an anxious topic and many of the forms of anxiety surrounding it in our own time can be traced back to the later nineteenth century, when electrical technologies began to link bodies and machines in continuous circuits of activity. What David Seltzer has called “melodramas of uncertain agency” arose from this circuitry as “the machinelikeness of persons and the personation of machines” evoked a strange mixture of politics, science, and sorcery. ¹ The mixture was at its most potent where machine circuitry was at its most intricate: in automata and calculating machines, whose behavior imitated human coordination in ways that suggested the presence of intelligence and volition. As the automatic machine became increasingly suggestive of agency, any appearance of the automatic in human behavior conversely seemed to suggest loss of agency. It was as though agency could leak from bodies into machines through the circuitry by which they were interconnected.

James R. Beniger identifies “a crucial transition in human thought about programming and control” between the later nineteenth century and the 1930s, which he identifies as “the first stage of the revolution in control technology.” ² This transition in thought is accompanied by intense activity in the cultural imaginary, as anxieties about programming and control are thematised in painting, fiction, film, and dramatic literature. The performer embodies the human-machine confusion thematised by writers and scenographers and can therefore be said to engage with it more immediately. In performance, automatism is associated with enchanted beings (swan maidens, animated dolls), with puppetry and with “wooden” actors who can express nothing more than careful programming by their trainers. Yet by playing across the borderline between the agentic and the automatic, the performer can explore some of the disturbing ambiguities associated with the machine’s uncanny lack of agency. Perhaps the performer and the machine have some strange affinity that draws out cultural anxieties about becoming automatic. When it comes to dealing with live presence—simulating it, or conjuring it forth, and setting it in dynamic relation with other presences—there is also a “live” concern with agency. The electricity is on, moving through bodies, and the spectator can be witness to processes of energy transmission and conversion.

What I am calling “transferred agency” is a classic example of a cultural anxiety. Although we have well-established methods for addressing anxiety at the level of the individual, relatively little has been done to establish ways of addressing the cultural production of anxiety. Cultural anxieties are generated through narratives, tropes, and thematic paradigms. The anxious consciousness, especially when it is collective, is characteristically convinced that it is born of the present, its nerves attuned to a future stirring in the conditions of the moment. This in itself provides strong reason for studying its history. The cultural production of anxiety is obstinately formulaic and the strongest patterns of anxious speculation change very little from one era to the next, showing remarkable resistance to paradigm shifts occurring in fields of knowledge. Late-nineteenth-century anxieties about the transferral of agency from human to machine are repeated through the twentieth century, going beyond the 1930s into the era of the electronic revolution, adapting to changes in the nature and function of the machine without making changes to their own underlying logic. What follows is an attempt to observe the echoes in that underlying logic across four very differently placed versions of human/machine relations. Three of these have in common a live performative element that threatens to disrupt the substratum of logic and demonstrates how the evidence available from the bodies on view may serve at once to lure and to call the bluff on rhetorically formulated anxieties. The first account, though, may serve as a model against which to measure the other three, as it sets out the logic in its purest form, in an anecdote that cuts a swath across the timeband by bringing...