Failures to Self-Locate: Counterfactual Ontologies in Contemporary Theatre and Physics

Failures to Self-Locate examines the overlooked influence of quantum mechanics on the development of contemporary theatre aesthetics. Physicists began openly grappling with the ramifications of quantum theory in 1926. The same year, Bertolt Brecht announced his theatre for a scientific age as an arena for atomic man. Unsatisfied with the metaphysical implications of the first formulation of quantum mechanics, known now as the Copenhagen interpretation, physicists and philosophers of science spent the twentieth century advocating, developing, and testing alternative interpretations of the atomic realm. Throughout that same period, the Western stage witnessed a resonant series of developments on Brechts aesthetic project. Placing the interpretations of quantum mechanics in dialogue with contemporary theatre from North America and Europe, this dissertation uncovers how, after an initial point of direct contact between Brecht and physicists, physics and theatre have developed similar ontological paradigms to interpret experiments and performances respectively.

In physics, these paradigms fall into two distinct camps: those that salvage strict determinism at the expense of a singular world (collapse-free interpretations of quantum mechanics) and those that safeguard our worlds uniqueness by accepting fundamental stochasticity in reality (collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics). Experimental evidence supports both options, and so these groups must also explain the apparent validity of the other. Theatremakers actively investigated a similar ontological issue, exacerbated by Brechtian stage techniques and centred on the storied divide between reality and representation. Where the physicists navigated between determinism and locality, playwrights return to the ancient tension between fate and free will. Those crosscurrents may bring ruin to the classical protagonist, but the quantum protagonist experiences one framework (e.g., free will) while secretly being ruled by the other (e.g., determinism). So positioned, these protagonists fail to self-locate among their myriad possibilities.

This dissertation maps the resonances between the scientific quest to reconcile determinism and stochasticity and the theatrical quest to reconcile free will and fate within the quantum theoretical paradigm, by analyzing the scientific and theatrical output through the lens of counterfactual analysis.