Future Visions: A Pre-Performative History of Infant Theatricality

As new as babies appear to be, they also have a history. This essay investigates the history of theatrical showmanship that circulated the invention of the modern baby incubator at the end of the nineteenth century. It connects this history of machinic culture to material and philosophical conceptualizations of the modern child-figure. In baby incubator exhibitions held across Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States from the late 1890s to the mid-1900s, premature infants were invested with unprecedented social sentiment; they became central commodities within evolving spectatorial practices that encompassed modern temporalities of attention and leisure. The essay uses this history to argue that the highly theatrical approach to the public display of premature infants reveals not only a transformation in the material lives of children, but a recalibration of how the social, cultural, and performative conditions of the child-figure were embodied. In closing, it turns to BR.#04 Brussels by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio to show how the pre-performative spectacle activated by the not-performing incubator baby has been inherited by contemporary theatrical approaches. These legacies are most persistent in contemporary frameworks that reflect the discursive codification of infants as being outside of culture, or as "naturally" themselves.