Posthumanist Performativity in Heiner Müller’s Play Despoiled Shore Medea-Material Landscape with Argonauts

Περίληψη

In the present paper, Heiner Müller’s 1982 play Despoiled Shore Medea-material Landscape with Argonauts1 is explored through a post-human interpretation of the myth, where Medea performs her mythical story of destruction and loss by means of the landscape itself. In this framework, Medea becomes the ‘despoiled shore’, the polluted anthropogenic landscape that acts against its perpetrators, the ‘Argonauts’ of capitalist society. In the theatrical triptych images of environmental degradation bring to the fore the non-human and the geological, as components of the myth in Müller's post-modern version. Medea, appearing as Nature herself, becomes the protagonist of a drama that stretches from mythical space to the landscapes of late capitalism. How can Müller’s play, and by consequence the myth of Medea, be interpreted through a non-anthropocentric notion of performativity; one that focuses on non-living things and landscapes rather than on human subjects? What messages do these entities convey as they act upon our lives?
By examining excerpts of Müller’s text, the essay focuses on a renewed understanding of performativity through the lens of new materialist theory and more specifically through Karen Barad’s term ‘post-humanist performativity’. Working within the theoretical framework of agential realism, Barad offers “an elaboration of performativity—a materialist, naturalist, and posthumanist elaboration—that allows matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming”. (Barad, 2003, 803) In the essay, Müller’s Medea is associated with such notion of the performative. The analysis thus focuses on lyrics that reveal transformations in space, composite materialities, human-non-human alliances and the mediating role that inorganic entities play in the production of knowledge. This shift towards the ‘post-humanist performativity’ of matter ultimately aims to convey a renewed understanding of the contemporary environment as an active agent, rather than a passive space for appropriation.