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<p>This article examines how magnetic tape technology in Samuel Beckett’s late plays functions as more than a theatrical prop; it becomes a material operator that reshapes the conditions under which subjectivity can appear. Through readings of <i>Krapp’s Last Tape</i>, <i>Rockaby</i>, and <i>Breath</i>, I argue that tape’s specific affordances—recording, erasure, looping, failure—constitute a posthuman mode of consciousness distributed across human and technical components. Drawing on Beckett’s BBC collaborations and his Kantian-inflected critique of Proustian memory, I show how tape recorders stage, in concrete electromechanical terms, the limits and inaccessibility of pure experience rather than giving access to the “thing-in-itself.” This “magnetic dramaturgy” aligns Beckett with a media‑archaeological sensibility, treating postwar sound infrastructures as historical conditions for the articulation of experience. In doing so, it anticipates contemporary debates about distributed agency in human–machine assemblages, revealing subjectivity as an ongoing negotiation between biological and technological systems, with “the tape runs on” functioning as both medium and limit of late‑modern, posthuman experience.</p>

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“The tape runs on”: Magnetic media, Beckett, and the limits of Kantian subjectivity

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月8日

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  • Jie Zheng

摘要

This article examines how magnetic tape technology in Samuel Beckett’s late plays functions as more than a theatrical prop; it becomes a material operator that reshapes the conditions under which subjectivity can appear. Through readings of Krapp’s Last Tape, Rockaby, and Breath, I argue that tape’s specific affordances—recording, erasure, looping, failure—constitute a posthuman mode of consciousness distributed across human and technical components. Drawing on Beckett’s BBC collaborations and his Kantian-inflected critique of Proustian memory, I show how tape recorders stage, in concrete electromechanical terms, the limits and inaccessibility of pure experience rather than giving access to the “thing-in-itself.” This “magnetic dramaturgy” aligns Beckett with a media‑archaeological sensibility, treating postwar sound infrastructures as historical conditions for the articulation of experience. In doing so, it anticipates contemporary debates about distributed agency in human–machine assemblages, revealing subjectivity as an ongoing negotiation between biological and technological systems, with “the tape runs on” functioning as both medium and limit of late‑modern, posthuman experience.