The Slow Emergency of the Future

Abstract

This article explores The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (2019) by Back to Back Theatre, an ensemble based in Geelong, Australia, whose members are perceived to have intellectual disabilities – a unique position from which Back to Back comment on the categories of identity and modes of perception of ableist society. Shadow is, in part, a response to the launch of the Australian Royal Commission into the Violence, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability in 2019, which has since confirmed that these conditions are widespread, systemic and of urgent attention. Shadow positions the typically able-bodied spectator as the subject of a negated future in which their fate cannot be disentangled from that of those with whom they believe to have little in common. A group of activists warn spectators of an apocalypse brought about by the invasion of artificial intelligence, wherein the spectators’ survival will be threatened by precisely the same circumstances that those who live with disability currently endure. Such a circumstance is the apotheosis and stakes of what Theodor Adorno calls ‘identity-thinking’ – the reduction of a heterogenous world to knowable and finite concepts and categories at the expense of, and respect for, difference, or the nonidentical. I consider how identity-thinking is a form of ‘slow violence’ (Rob Nixon (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) that manifests in the forms of intolerance and oppression Shadow engages with. I employ negative dialectics, conceived by Adorno as way of resisting such violence, to examine how Back to Back reveal the urgent stakes of identity-thinking and grapple with the possibility of a future in which survival is a collective pursuit.