We have never been human: Staging subjectivity from Diderot and Artaud to the aesthetics of the European refugee crisis

Introduction

The fall of 2015 saw two different yet equally memorable and infamous responses to the European refugee crisis: the first came from camerawoman Petra László of Hungary’s N1TV, and the second from fashion photographer Norbert Baksa. László was caught on camera tripping up a Syrian family and kicking other refugees who had just broken through a police barrier at the Hungarian–Serbian border (Figures 1 and 2). The video went viral on social media, prompting harsh criticism and condemnation worldwide. László was fired, and she later publicly apologized by saying,

I am very sorry for the incident, and as a mother I am especially sorry for the fact that fate pushed a child in my way. I did not see that at that moment. I started to panic and as I re-watch the film, it seems as [the person in] it was not even me. (László quoted in Karimi, 2015)

Although in 2017 László was initially placed on probation for disorderly conduct, in 2018, she was acquitted by the Supreme Court of Hungary, which declared her actions to be misdemeanors on which the statute of limitations had expired. Later, László sued the newspapers for defamation, but in February 2022, the Constitutional Court dismissed her charges against the reporters. ¹

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Figure 1.

A still from the video that shows László tripping up refugees.

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Figure 2.

A still from the video that shows László kicking a girl.

Inspired by the refugee crisis, Baksa created a series of photos featuring fashion model Monika Jablonczky posing as a refugee in designer clothes, taking a selfie in front of a chain-link fence, and pretending to be captured by border patrol (Figure 3). The pictures provoked angry criticism in social media across the globe, and Baksa later decided to remove them from his website. Baksa’s photo spread, which he called Der Migrant, follows a distinctive strand in the history of fashion photography, which has sought to accentuate the meaning of style through the juxtaposition of luxury and poverty. His work is part of a relatively recent trend, which, broadly construed, might be described as ‘migrant chic’, a controversial term used for the first time by Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, to describe the Yeezy Season 3 fashion line of Kanye West. ² In addition, the African-inspired collections by Valentino and Junya Watanabe, including the latter’s 2015 show in the Museum of Immigration History in Paris, for instance, also seem to resonate with the overall idea behind Der Migrant. New as it may seem, though, the controversy surrounding ‘migrant chic’ harkens to earlier debates about Primitivism and Orientalism in modern Western art, and everything they meant in terms of cultural and aesthetic appropriation and reappropriation, racial and gender stereotypes, and hybrid identities.

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Figure 3.

Screenshot from Norbert Baksa’s website showing Monika Jablonczky wearing designer clothes and pretending to be captured by border patrol.

Yet, these examples also reveal the performative dimensions of subject formation through which we are invited to bear witness to our conception of ourselves and the Other through theater and art. ³ Popular response on social media tends to make both incidents out as revolting and reprehensible, but typically for different reasons: the former on moral, the latter on aesthetic grounds. ⁴ László is a bad human being, the argument goes, because she seems to have impulsively acted upon negative feelings and emotions in absence of composure and sangfroid. Baksa, however, is a bad artist because his photos display an excess of form at the expense of feelings and compassion with a view to the exploitation and commodification of suffering. A problem with this line of thinking is that it understates and downplays the importance of art in the former, and that of humanity in the latter, thereby drawing a cordon sanitaire between the two realms, and suggesting that there is a solid foundation for a definition of subjectivity that precedes, and is therefore independent of, the realm of art.

However, if one’s first reaction is to think that László was driven by motivations so deeply human that they were the result of a gut reaction, then one should also bear in mind that these reactions are secretly prompted by an actor in us that is fully socialized in a culture of ideas, beliefs, judgments and preconceptions. Similarly, if one tends to think that in Baksa’s photos humanity is sacrificed to formal elements and decorative structures, then one should also remember the immemorial tradition in which theater and art are meant to stir up emotions in us that are typically viewed as inherently human. There appears to be no way out of this paradox, which reveals us to be artworks when we think we are human, yet at the same time invariably shows our humanity to be conditioned by art. Simply realizing this, though, is by no means to break the paradox of the human, which is inextricably bound up with the history of how it has been turned into art, and the honesty of which is the product of a deeply ingrained theater.

This essay examines the shifting matrix underlying the pervasive theater that enacts the making and unmaking of human subjectivity by focusing on key historical transformations and prominent contemporary manifestations. Drawing on Denis Diderot’s (1995 [1773]) theory of the actor and Antonin Artaud’s (1958 [1938]) theater of cruelty, I argue that the paradox of the human had led to human–artwork hybrids well before the digital age of the posthuman recast the body as virtuality in examples such as the László video and Baksa’s Der Migrant. Although this observation may seem trivial, it is in fact crucial in terms of sharpening and complementing critical responses both to the exclusions generated in the name of humanism, and to reconfigurations of the human by technoscientific advances that eroded traditional distinctions between human and nonhuman. ⁵ Offering an aesthetic approach to important issues of cultural studies that are typically viewed through a socio-political lens, my argument also speaks to recent debates over intersections between digital humanities and art history, especially the ways in which theater and performance art are re- and trans-mediated by digital media. ⁶

As relics of embodiment and live presence, theater and performance art may not easily lend themselves to computer-generated spaces of material disembodiment. Yet, a comparative reading of Diderot and Artaud suggests that we have never been human – our imagined purity as a species is revealed to have always been a hybrid construct. In light of a broader understanding and scope of human–artwork hybridization, the examples of László and Baksa become case studies showing how the aesthetic and cultural practices revolving around the staging of the European refugee crisis constitute a key sphere in which this hybridization is tested, played out, and in the context of East-Central Europe, calibrated to a ballad tradition whose generic conventions were reinvented in conjunction with a growing national identity in the 19th century. ⁷ A powerful sacrificial narrative of builder’s rite, the ballad of ‘The Walled-Up Wife’, examined in some detail later, has enjoyed sustained popularity in East-Central Europe, ever since its anachronistic ‘rediscovery’ in multiple national literatures around the mid 1800s. It deserves critical attention, for its extensive cultural history as well as its rich vernacular heritage can shed new light on the ways in which the idea of material embodiment comes to bear extended meanings for a reconceptualization of the human in digital spaces of aesthetic rather than merely socio-political signification.

Acting human

If we are to understand certain key complexities of human subjectivity, we must look in the realm where humans are least expected to be their own natural self – in that of the theater. As if sensing the great depth and importance of this contradiction, Diderot (1995 [1773]) conceived the exceptional actor, in his Paradox of the Actor, in such a way as to epitomize in fact the general condition of ordinary humanity. According to Diderot, the greatest actors are those who show the least amount of emotion and sensibility and are able to remain completely unaffected by the feelings they are about to dramatize. ‘Extreme sensibility’, he argues, ‘makes actors mediocre, mediocre sensibility makes the great number of bad actors, and a complete lack of sensibility prepares actors for the sublime’ (Diderot, 1995 [1773]: 57). In this view, it seems that the best and most authentic dramatic performance will come from someone who is least human and most like a ‘mannequin’ or a work of art (Diderot, 1995 [1773]: 51). To illustrate this, though, Diderot draws his examples not merely from a few handpicked actors of his time, but from situations commonly encountered in everyday life as well. The good actor, he maintains, is also to be found in someone who

weeps like an unbelieving priest who preaches on the Passion; like a seducer on his knees before a woman he does not love but whom he wishes to deceive; like a beggar in the street or at the doorway of a church who starts insulting you when he realizes he cannot move you; or like a courtesan who feels nothing and yet swoons in your arms. (Diderot, 1995 [1773]: 57)

There is a hidden irony here in Diderot’s text: great talent, which should be the prerogative of the sublime actor and thus only of a select few, seems also to pervade everyday life, for it can be discovered virtually everywhere. ⁸

It is true that to a large extent Diderot’s notion of the ideal actor was shaped by the social and political conditions of his time as well as by the culture and aesthetics of 18th-century French theater. His argument reveals a passion for genius shown by the ideal actor in an era when, as he admits, ‘the stage is a resource, never a choice’ (Diderot, 1995 [1773]: 96). But even as he is trying to redeem the image of the actor from its association with varying degrees of social prejudice, Diderot maintains a sarcastic and yet puckishly witty attitude by showing how traces of the stigmatized profession of acting can be found in practically all aspects of life. That he was onto something is apparent not only in the examples he gave of priests, seducers, beggars, and courtesans, but also in how theater mingled with the sphere of politics in Revolutionary France, and in how, as custom would often have it, actual actors became politicians, and deputies of the National Assembly took acting lessons. ⁹

There is an important way, however, in which Diderot’s argument goes beyond these 18th-century contexts and bears significance to the way regular people, the likes of László, can turn into ‘actors’ on the Internet. As an implied satire of humanity, Diderot’s paradox still speaks to us in powerful new ways today. ‘Never did an actor’, Diderot’s (1995 [1773]) speaker points out,

become so from love of virtue, from the desire to be useful in the world, or to serve his country or family; never from any of the honorable motives that might incline a noble mind, a feeling heart, a sensitive soul, to so fine a profession. (pp. 63–64)

The broader audience here includes not just the professional actor on the stage but also the numerous actors of everyday life: priests, seducers, beggars, courtesans and virtually everyone else who perceives Diderot’s irony and realizes that being human is being asked to play the part of oneself. Diderot’s noble minds, feeling hearts and sensitive souls are just as devoid of an emotional core as is the unfeeling actor, who appears to be a mannequin or a work of art. They are imaginary abstractions that take human shape and get endowed with reason, emotion, virtue and psychology through the theater of insensitivity performed by the sublime actor but also by the likes of László and Baksa’s model.

The paradox of Diderot’s actor is the paradox of a humanity that invents its own nature by being both protagonist and spectator of its own show. Caught on camera with camera in hand, both filming and being filmed, shown in a disturbing display of insensitivity, László is the prototype of Diderot’s actor for a digital age. The fact that she may not have realized that she was filmed, or that she may not have been fully in control of what she was doing, accentuates even more the paradox of her acting. In addition, her own view of what happened – especially her statement, ‘as I re-watch the film, it seems as (the person in) it was not even me’ (László quoted in Karimi, 2015) – seems suggestive of the so-called dual personality or double consciousness Diderot attributed, for instance, to a great actor of his time such as Mademoiselle Clairon. ‘Just as sometimes occurs in dreams’, Diderot’s (1995 [1773]) speaker says, ‘she is the soul of a great mannequin into which she has slipped: her practice has bonded her to it. . . . In this moment, she is double: the little Clairon and the great Agrippina’ (p. 51). What in the 18th century was identified by Diderot’s genius as the artful performance of manufactured humanity in the person of the sublime actor reappears by way of the effects of a video gone viral in the 21st.

The Internet has served as a testing ground of sorts for Diderot’s theory of the actor. From various challenges and memes to conspiracy theories and deepfakes to video-sharing social networking sites, the story of the human is the story of how it invents, as it artfully forgets, the scripted nature of its being. In many ways, of course, this invention process is hardly new, for it has been around at least since Plato’s noble lie through to Shakespeare’s theater and to Baudelaire’s dandy. ¹⁰ The idea that we are all actors on the stage of life may in fact sound a lot like a platitude and a commonplace of aesthetic theory that has been overused so much that it seems to fit almost any context. However, it is this very plasticity that is given new meaning by digital technology, which forces us to be shaped by art like never before, and which sometimes enters our life surveillance-style, throwing us into the crucible of Diderot’s paradox of the actor.

As digital technology has made acting a commonplace of everyday life, we continue to have a keen sense of the ways in which Diderot’s paradox is also the paradox of the modern, especially as it permeates our conceptions of contemporary society, politics, and culture. The coexistence of these contradictory strands – of an art that is at once set off from, yet is crucially mixed up with, the realm of the human – prompted the title of this essay, which is a reference to Bruno Latour’s (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. According to Latour, the work of purification (which separates human from nonhuman) and the work of hybridization (which creates nature–culture hybrids) are both part of the history of the modern, but once we consider them as being simultaneous phenomena, we cease to be modern. It is the ‘paradox of the modern’, he argues, that we can only realize it as a distinctly modern conception that we have never been modern – in other words, that ‘the more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the more possible their interbreeding becomes’ (Latour, 1993: 12). Similarly, the more we must resist the idea of being human–artwork hybrids by maintaining a separate category for art, the more we must come to terms with our own hybrid nature in various digital forms such as the examples of the László video and Baksa’s photo spread. Whether our reaction is astonishment, indignation, or disgust at these examples, we are confronted with the challenge of recognizing ourselves in Diderot’s (1995 [1773]) account of the actor as ‘wasteful, self-interested, more struck by mockery than touched by our misfortunes; of an undisturbed spirit at the sight of a troubling event or at the telling of a sad story’ (p. 95). The reason we tend not to see ourselves as such is due in part to our resistance to what Latour called the ‘work of hybridization’ and our tendency to discover but then to quickly forget the actor in ourselves, or in other words, to learn and unlearn the artifice of manufacturing nature out of culture.

Diderot’s critique is, in a broader sense, then, as much about theater and the sublime actor as it is about laying bare the deceptive dimensions of a fundamentally darker view of society, culture and everyday life. From this perspective, Diderot was an early precursor in a line of drama theorists leading up to the avant-garde theater of the early-20th century, especially to a profoundly influential figure such as the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. Viewed as the quintessential madman and artist genius of the modernist avant-garde, Artaud witnessed, in both life and art, Diderot’s paradox of the actor taken to a dramatic extreme. A whole series of external encumbrances – such as frequent nervous breakdowns, in addition to a lifelong drug addiction due to opiates prescribed to treat his hereditary syphilis – combined with the sensibility of a visionary genius put him in a position to live the role of the sublime, unfeeling actor Diderot could only write about. The irony of Diderot’s theory of acting, which expanded the boundaries of the theater, was a reality of lived experience for Artaud, whose madness has come to typify the very nature and fabric of modern existence. ¹¹

Acting posthuman

In ‘The Theater and Its Double’, Artaud (1958 [1938]: 22) locates the activity of the theater in a gratuitous impulse that enables victims of the plague to give free rein to hidden feelings and desires, and to initiate an entire spectacle of ‘peculiarities, mysteries, contradictions, and symptoms’ they cannot fully control. ‘The state of the victim who dies without material destruction, with all the stigmata of an absolute and almost abstract disease upon him’, he argues, ‘is identical with the state of an actor entirely penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition’ (Artaud, 1958 [1938]: 24). We might presume that Artaud’s own inherited illness must have felt a bit like an ‘absolute and almost abstract disease’, and like an actor playing a role, he, too, was living within the orbit of Diderot’s paradox by regarding his own feelings of pain and suffering as being intimately familiar yet at the same time also foreign and exterior to himself. Theater for Artaud (1958 [1938]) is meant to give shape to such an immanent yet obscure and elusive realm, ‘as the Double, not of this direct, everyday reality which it is gradually being reduced to a mere inert replica – as empty as it is sugarcoated – but of another archetypal and dangerous reality’ (p. 48). This is no longer the theater of ‘as if’ in the traditional sense, but one in which the dramatic act is performed in part by way of real symptoms of the body. Seeking to resurrect a theater rooted in myth, ritual, and magic, Artaud considered the spoken word and the performative act as powerful mediators in creating a profound unity between the reality of the body and that of a raw, unsocialized spiritual existence.

The utopian dimensions of this unity are reflected in his belief that theater extends beyond the stage and can be found in everyday life as well. But unlike Diderot, who saw examples of acting practically everywhere, Artaud set out on a journey to Mexico in search of palpable proof for his ideas. At the end of his ‘voyage to the land of speaking blood’, he imagined he would find, in the tribal society of the Tarahumara, a prime example of the ideal theater (Artaud, 1976: 353). Here, he thought, acting would be inseparable from life, and would manifest itself through the creative powers of language and consciousness to connect body, mind and external reality into a single organic entity. Mapping the inferno of his own bodily experience onto the topographic reality of the land of the Tarahumara, Artaud appropriated their symbols, culture and mythology, and lifted them into his own theory of art. In doing so, he drew out the implications of Diderot’s paradox and proposed a new form of theater that would come to be echoed a century later in examples such as the László incident and Baksa’s photo spread as well as in contemporary theories of the posthuman.

Artaud saw in the Sierra Tarahumara the genius loci of theater. ‘When a whole area of the earth’, he explains,

develops a philosophy parallel to that of its inhabitants; when one knows that the first men utilized a language of signs, and when one finds this language formidably expanded on the rocks – then surely one cannot continue to think that this is whim, and that this whim signifies nothing. (Artaud, 1976: 379)

In Artaud’s imaginary geomorphology, landform is objectified, endowed with symbolic meaning and turned into a set design for the theater to reveal, in petrified gestures, the deadly archetypal reality he always looked for in art. In ‘The Mountain of Signs’, he explains how he saw ‘in a certain phenomenon of light which was superimposed on the relief pattern of the rocks’, terrifying visions ranging from ‘truncated statues of human forms’ to numerous figures of gods and human shapes prompting images of torture, destruction and death (Artaud, 1976: 380). It was in this deadly vortex of images that Artaud hoped to find a sense of liberation from the constant state of ‘oblique bewilderment’ of his own body, which he had also described as a ‘piece of damaged geology’ and ‘a vast landscape of ice on the point of breaking up’ (Artaud, 1976: 65, 382–383).

However, Artaud’s road to liberation led him into even deeper feelings of despair and entrapment. What he saw as the formidable expansion of signs on the rocks was in fact the formidable expansion of his own imagination giving him the illusion that for the first time in his life, he might just be able to find his true inner nature in art, and his true self in the theater of petrified hieroglyphs of the Sierra Tarahumara. What he saw in the curious phenomenon of light was a mirage veiling what his body had been telling him all his life: that the feelings he thought to be foreign to himself were prompted by the actor in him that is called human nature, and that his feelings of alienation from others were symptoms of the theater that is called society. ¹² It was this ineluctable and painful void in himself that Artaud raised to a cosmic scale, called by the name ‘cruelty’, and proposed to fill with images and scenic elements that would go beyond the theater of ‘as if’ in order to ‘shake the organism to its foundations and leave an ineffaceable scar’ both in the actor and in the audience (Artaud, 1958 [1938]: 77). Yet to achieve this immediacy of experience was to replicate on the stage the void he felt in his own body, thereby depriving the performance of its object, and the actors of their reality and even their humanity.

Such is the case with the Tarahumara Indians and with the troupe of Balinese dancers that Artaud saw at the Paris International Colonial Exposition in 1931. Echoing an earlier view of himself as a ‘walking robot who can feel the rupture of his unconscious’, Artaud recreated the world of the Balinese dancers into his own image, and he did so with the unhuman motivation characterizing the abstract logic and mathematical precision of a machine-like demiurge (Artaud quoted in Greene, 1970: 81). From his perspective, the dancers are ‘animated manikins’ with ‘mechanically rolling eyes, pouting lips, and muscular spasms, all producing methodically calculated effects which forbid any recourse to spontaneous improvisation’ (Artaud, 1958 [1938]: 54–55). ‘A kind of terror seizes us’, he continues, ‘at the thought of these mechanized beings, whose joys and griefs seem not their own but at the service of age-old rites, as if they were dictated by superior intelligences’ (Artaud, 1958 [1938]: 58). But these superior intelligences were in fact of Artaud’s own making, for they were dictated by his own perception, which was in turn guided by a systematic abstraction and dehumanization of the Orient. ¹³ Recast as a virtuality and a double of Artaud’s (1958 [1938]) own sense of disembodiment, the Balinese dancers represented, in his view, an ideal form of theater through ‘the very automatism of the liberated unconscious’ (p. 54) that had long been forgotten in the West.

Often associated with important influences such as Surrealism and Symbolism as well as the works of Alfred Jarry, Artaud’s legacy can also be traced in contemporary theories of the posthuman. His theory of art seems to resonate with a kind of ‘intangible materialism’ through which the natural and social sciences of the 20th century tried to account for the reality of felt experience by distinguishing various kinds of physical facts and worldly materiality. ¹⁴ To be sure, the ‘ineffaceable scar’ that Artaud wished to leave in his audience would take a distinctive place among these. In this context, it is also revealing that ‘On the Balinese Theater’ was published in 1931, just a few years before Claude Shannon’s important work on applications of the binary operations of Boolean algebra to electrical circuits, which helped pave the way for digital electronics, information theory, and computer science.

In Artaud’s description of ‘gesture diagrams’ and the ‘detached geometry’ of mechanically moving body parts, as in the ‘truncated statues of human forms’ he envisioned in ‘a certain phenomenon of light’ in the Sierra Tarahumara, we have the making of an imaginary world that is similar to cyberspace. Here, too, as in cyberspace, presence is largely an optical illusion, and the physical body – typified by ‘animated hieroglyphs’ (Artaud, 1958 [1938]: 54) – is recast in a system of coding and decoding generated by categories of pattern and randomness: pattern in ‘methodically calculated effects’ and randomness in the ‘automatism of the liberated unconscious’. ¹⁵ Artaud’s visionary genius had to wait almost a century, though, to be confirmed by computer technology and by posthuman ontologies of simultaneous corporeal embodiment and cybernetic disembodiment captured by concepts such as ‘virtual bodies’ and ‘flickering signifiers’. ¹⁶

Long before the Internet managed to expand the boundaries of the theater, Artaud had realized that the boundaries of the physical body extend into the theater of illusions that defines it. ¹⁷ Caught in this closed loop or circular relationship, yet in an act of ‘perpetual emanation’, Artaud’s (1958 [1938]: 114) theater of cybernetics is born. Like cybernetics, or the science of ‘control and communications’ in which a controller constantly adjusts the system’s behavior, his theater has feedback – when outputs of a system are reintroduced as inputs through a circular loop – built into it on multiple levels. ¹⁸ Whether mapped onto the rocks of the Sierra Tarahumara or typified by the Balinese troupe, the rupture Artaud feels in himself generates the theater, which is in turn rerouted into his own experiential subjectivity in the form of an imagined unity: healing through the ritual of the peyote dance and catharsis through feelings of terror and pity at the mechanized Balinese dancers. Gratuitous and folding back onto itself, Artaud’s theater absorbs everything in its path. As a form of ‘expression in space’, it relies on the accumulation and compression of brute materiality into an imaginary world in which the audience learns to speak a ‘language half-way between gesture and thought’ (Artaud, 1958 [1938]: 90), much like users immersed in, and interacting with, 3D worlds learn to find their way in virtual reality.

This is the case with the László incident and Baksa’s Der Migrant, both of which present, as far as Artaud is concerned, the necessary conditions that make them fit perfectly well into the world of posthuman theater. In Baksa’s pictures, the crude reality of migration is co-opted, eviscerated and turned into empty form, just like the ‘gesture diagrams’ and the ‘detached geometry’ that Artaud saw in the Sierra Tarahumara and in the Balinese dancers. Grown popular in social media, the incidental protagonists of the László video are often believed to be manipulated and pulled on invisible strings of ideology, just as the ‘animated manikins’ of Artaud’s theater of cruelty are seen to be dancing to the virtuality of pattern and randomness. Accidentally caught on camera, László’s act is, from this perspective, the externalization of the ‘liberated unconscious’, and the refugees she kicked are not just victims of her, but like László herself, they are also actors in a global spectacle that is fueled by conspiracy theories of world domination and fake news. The source of evil here is as familiar and ubiquitous and yet also as abstract and intangible as the painful void that Artaud felt in his own body and projected onto reality in the form of theater.

Acts of sacrifice and ‘The Walled-Up Wife’

The possibility of both actors and audience getting absorbed into art to such an extent as to almost lose their grip on reality was also recognized by André Breton (1969), who saw in Artaud’s theater the aesthetic allure of a magnificent vulgarity that turns language into a ‘glistening weapon’ (p. 113). Of course, the whole point for Artaud (1958 [1938]), though, was to show that there was in fact no reality outside the magnificent vulgarity of the theater of cruelty, described as ‘a pure and detached feeling, a veritable movement of the mind based on the gestures of life itself’ (p. 114). For Artaud, then, perhaps even more than for Diderot, theater is coterminous with life itself on a deeply metaphysical level. It is his belief in the formidable expansion of theater that enables Artaud (1958 [1938]) to go so far as to state, ‘if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames’ (p. 13). Scared to death on a stage that blurs the distinction between real and symbolic suffering, the actor in pain puts on display the symptoms of mortality by creating a countervailing illusion of eternity and immortality in the audience through the idea of humanity as art.

From this perspective, theater is meant to show a reality, denuded and purified, before it has been conceptualized as such, or, alternatively, to reveal the inescapable limitations of artistic representation that Friedrich Schlegel (1980 [1800]: 2, 206) summed up in the concept of irony, which he defined as ‘the form of paradox’ that pervades human existence. For Schlegel (1980 [1800]), irony is ‘the freest of all licenses, for through it one transcends oneself, and yet also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary’ (pp. 2, 207). Schlegel realizes, and so did Artaud, that it is in the fate of the human condition to be sacrificed to the rule of irony through art – to create representations that measure its mundane finitude up to a sovereignty in the face of which it cannot help but be found wanting. The effects of this all-pervasive demand for irony are at work when Artaud compares actors to sacrificial victims ‘burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames’. But Schlegel’s irony is also present in the grand theater of everyday life: in László’s act, which might seem to be involuntary yet completely deliberate at the same time; in Baksa’s photos, which are dead serious yet make a mockery out of real suffering; and in conspiracy theories that turn reality into fake news and the reality of refugees into spectacle.

Furthermore, the spectacle featuring László and Baksa’s model as actors of Artaud’s theater and puppets of Schlegel’s irony bears significance for a reconceptualization of the aesthetic dimensions of the refugee crisis within the context of East-Central European folklore, including one of its most famous exemplars, the ballad of ‘The Walled-Up Wife’. Telling the story of what is essentially a sacrificial narrative of the builder’s rite, the ballad starts with the construction of a symbolic structure (such as a bridge, monastery and castle) by a group of masons, who find that what they build during the day invariably crumbles at night. A revelation usually comes, in a dream or by supernatural means, to the chief mason, who is made to understand that the construction will not stand until they immure into it the first woman who comes to visit the site. After the chief mason’s wife is immured, the spirits are appeased, and the building is allowed to stand in all the magnificence of a work of art. This short summary does not even begin to adumbrate the complexity of this powerful ballad and the numerous additional details, in dozens of variations that exist in countries such as Greece (‘The Bridge of Arta’), Hungary (‘Clement Mason’), Romania (‘Master Manole’) and Serbia (‘The Building of Skadar’). It should nonetheless give an indication of its general scope and of the presence in it of a number of key themes and topics that folklorists and literary theorists have identified – to name just a few – as ranging from ‘foundation sacrifice’ (Grimm, 1966 [1880]: 3, 1143) to cosmogonic myth through ‘death serenely accepted’ (Eliade, 1972: 190) to a feminist reading focusing on the ‘deadly metaphor for marriage’ (Dundes, 1995: 50).

It is equally intriguing that the rediscovery of this ballad in the mid-19th century was at the center of an awakening nationalism involving arguments that were seeking to legitimize one national version over another, based on precarious ideas of genealogy and lines of influence that would show evidence of authenticity, originality and superior aesthetic qualities. ¹⁹ As the ballad genre was turned into an artifact, so would a nation consolidate its place in history by inventing an ephemeral orality of the past in need of rescue to justify its genealogy through the materiality of the written work in the present. ²⁰ And as humanity is reborn by being sacrificed on the altar of art, in the ballad, so do the ballad collector and reader thrive in a crisis of authenticity, which, by severing the link between the ballad and its performative context, can help them shore up their own sense of subjectivity through the newly created artifact of the printed form. The more the origins of ‘The Walled-Up Wife’ seemed lost in the obscurity of the past, the more that obscurity was used to manufacture purity from the redefinition of the genre by way of its external history.

The process of legitimation and national purification, which revolved, in the 19th century, around the ballad of ‘The Walled-Up Wife’, continues through a redefinition of art that turns the refugee crisis into a ballad-like spectacle in the 21st century. It may be true that the examples we see in the László video and in Baksa’s Der Migrant are within a certain tradition of theater and art, especially if we look at them from perspectives offered by Diderot’s paradox and Artaud’s theater. Yet, the question remains whether what we are witnessing here might also have to do with the birth of a new genre – like that of the printed ballad in its time – or with a new form of performance art, created though a crisis of authenticity generated by the growing uncertainty surrounding the rapid spread of information and misinformation on the Internet. There is hardly an easier target for this kind of uncertainty than a large group of people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, who are desperately seeking refuge in a foreign land, who show up at a nation’s borders often without any form of ID, and who can easily be silenced, made to look like enemies and symbolically ‘sacrificed’ on the altar of art.

When we see László’s act and Baksa’s photos on the screen – in news headlines, Twitter posts or memes – we are in a position that is similar to that of readers of the newly-formed printed ballad in the 19th century. We are asked to reassemble the disaggregated pieces of our humanity into an expanded form of theater and art that thrives in a crisis of authenticity specific this time not to the printed text but to digital codes flickering on the computer screen. ²¹ As we move from human to posthuman, the thick brick-and-mortar wall that houses the immured body, in ‘The Walled-Up Wife’, is replaced, in Baksa’s photos, with the transparent chain-link fence topped with razor wire, which is at once a physical barrier and a symbolic way of capturing the body as representation and code. László’s kick seeks to arrest the body; yet the camera, meanwhile, seeks to hurl those around her into the maelstrom of a contemporary posthuman theater by turning them into digital copies of themselves.

Before anyone might think that it is possible to return to a conception of the human that is exterior or simply foreign to the vulgarity of art by virtue of an imaginary purity, they should keep in mind – in a gentle nod to Diderot and Artaud – that that purity is shaped by the misanthropy of art. ²² Also, if the frustration with the theatrical by-products of the recent digital information explosion should give birth to feelings of nostalgia for the human, then that nostalgia should also include an awareness of the social, political and cultural factors enabling the hidden actor in us to seamlessly integrate those very feelings into human nature. For us, who live in a world in which digital technology is constantly blurring the lines between reality and fiction, authenticity and simulation, the conclusion remains: we have never been human until the moment we experience the making and unmaking of us by art.