Performing Arts as a Limit to the Digital: Theatrical Space, Embodied Co‑Presence, and the Politics of Ephemeral Action

This article develops the hypothesis that the performing arts—unlike visual, musical, or pictorial arts—constitute an essential limit to digitalization. Their irreducible requirement of embodied co‑presence (Phelan 1993; Fischer‑Lichte 2008), their ephemeral temporality (Phelan 1993; Schneider 2011), and their intersubjective structure of meaning‑making position them as a privileged site of resistance to algorithmic rationality. Drawing on classical Greek theater, philosophical anthropology, and contemporary analyses of digital temporality (Stiegler 1998; Crary 2013; Chun 2016), the article argues that theatrical action reactivates the political, existential, and communal dimensions of human coexistence. In an era of pervasive digital communication and surveillance (Zuboff 2019; Crawford 2021), the performing arts re‑emerge as forms of subversive rupture that recreate free public time and reassert the primacy of lived experience.