Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture

From Simulation to Embeddedness

Matthew Causey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134205691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture examines the recent history of advanced technologies, including new media, virtual environments, weapons systems and medical innovation, and considers how theatre, performance and culture at large have evolved within those systems.

The book examines the two Iraq wars, 9/11 and the War on Terror through the lens of performance studies, and, drawing on the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger, alongside the dramas of Beckett, Genet and Shakespeare, and the theatre of the Kantor, Foreman, Socíetas Raffaello Sanzio and the Wooster Group, the book positions theatre and performance in technoculture and articulates the processes of aesthetics, metaphysics and politics.

This wide-ranging study reflects on how the theatre and performance have been challenged and extended within these new cultural phenomena.

Part I
Simulation (before)
A theoretical accounting of the history of the (dis)appearance of theatre in virtual spaces

1 The screen test of the double
The uncanny performer in the space of technology

Your reality is already half video hallucination. Soon it will become total hallucination. You’re going to have to learn to live in a very strange, new world.

(Cronenberg, Videodrome 1983)

And if I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot.

(Lacan 1981: 97)

Question regarding the virtual and the real

There is nothing in cyberspace or in the screen technologies of the virtual that has not already been performed on the stage. The theatre has always been virtual, a space of illusory immediacy. Yet much of the contemporary discourse surrounding live performance and technological reproduction establishes an essentialized difference between the phenomena, from Walter Benjamin (1968) to Peggy Phelan (1993). The difference is further concretized in the critical writings of theatre and performance studies that ignore such performative mediated forms as film, television, radio and multimedia. Slavoj

, in the introduction to Mapping Ideology, writes that it is a commonplace assumption that ‘virtual or cyber-sex presents a radical break with the past since in it actual sexual contact with a real other is losing ground against masturbatory enjoyment, whose sole support is the virtual other’ (

1994: 5). He dismisses that assumption by suggesting that,

Lacan’s thesis that there is no sexual relationship means precisely that the structure of the real sexual act (of the act with a flesh and blood partner) is already inherently phantasmic – the real body of the other serves only as a support for our phantasmic projections.

(1994: 5)

Lacan’s argument thus challenges the assumptions inherent in the constructed binary of the real and the virtual, and thereby disputes the claims of immediacy and presence in live performance. If you accept Lacan’s argument, then the anxieties surrounding the shifting perspectives on the nature of presence, aura and liveness, in regard to the ontology of the theatre, brought about by the advent of new media performance, are wholly without merit. Everything has always-already been virtual.

The debate regarding the ontology of performance and the nature of liveness and identity in mediatized and technologized culture has been well rehearsed. For the purpose of my argument, I want to point to Philip Auslander’s Liveness (1999), a book to which this current study is deeply indebted, and to Peggy Phelan’s important Unmarked (1993). Phelan argues that performance is defined through its non-reproducibility. The nature of performance deteriorates as it is enfolded in technological reproducibility. Philip Auslander counters that the live is an artifact of mediatization. Liveness exists not as a prior condition, but as a result of mediatization. Both arguments are problematic. Phelan disregards any effect of technology on performance and draws a non-negotiable, essentialist border between the two media. Auslander draws out a sophisticated legal argument whose dynamic materialism overlooks the most material manner of marking the live, namely death. Disputing the argument of Phelan and amending Auslander’s, I suggest that the ontology of the performance (liveness), which exists before and after mediatization, has been altered within the space of technology. But how?

Question regarding performance in technoculture

Three basic assertions comprise the contemporary theory of subject construction in mediatized culture and help shape the aesthetic gestures of contemporary performance:

1. The material body and its subjectivity are extended, challenged and reconfigured through technology.
2. The televisual is the primary modality of contemporary technological representation dominating manners of thought and communication, culture and subject construction.
3. There exists an unavoidable convergence of the human and machine wherein the slave machine dominates the master human subject.

This book will grapple with all three of these claims and the manners in which they provoke performance production in culture and in art. Notable performance works created in the wake of technoculture include the theatre of the now-classical postmodernist Wooster Group (US); Desperate Optimists, an expatriate Irish company (Ireland/UK) working in performance and digital media; the altered medical body of Orlan (France); the obsolete body of Stelarc (Australia/UK); and the post-colonial cyber-performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes (Chicano-American); dumb type (Japan) and Robert Lepage (Canada). They are all, more or less, in the process of embodying mediated subjectivity and articulating/representing that experience in performance. The developing art forms of web-based performance, interactive installations and virtual environments, including the work of Jeffery Shaw, Bill Viola and Perry Hoberman, are extending the boundaries of the theatre and notions of what constitutes a performance while exploring the experience of living within a technological culture. The fundamental objective of the first part of this book is to understand the processes of theatre and performance, which converge with mediated and digital technologies of representation. In the second part, I articulate some of the larger cultural performance practices of technoculture and how various artists have responded.

I pursue the question regarding the real and the virtual and the position of performance in technoculture by isolating a critical moment in new media performance works specifically and technoculture in general, when the presence of the double takes place through mediated duplication: the simple moment when a live actor confronts her mediated other through the technologies of reproduction. I propose that the experience of the self as other in the space of technology can be read as an uncanny experience, a making material of split subjectivity. My position is that the inclusion of the televisual screen in performance and the practice of performance in the screened world of virtual environments constitutes the staging of the privileged object of the split subject, that which assists in the subject’s division, capturing the gaze, enacting the subject’s annihilation, its nothingness, while presenting the unpresentable approach of the real through the televisual screens. Part psychoanalytic reading (Freud and Lacan), part textual analysis (Beckett and Genet), part film analysis (Lynch and Weir), this chapter focuses on the material object wherein and upon which these performance phenomena take place, both in the nowhere of the psyche and in the lived space of the body:

the screens.¹ The goal of the tripartite strategy is to demonstrate how questions of virtuality and the real are being played out in both live and mediated performative work and across a variety of historical contexts.

‘At the tone, please leave a message’

Avital Ronell, in The Telephone Book, writes of Freud’s notion of unheimlich, or the uncanny, and how the phenomenon reoccurs through the subject’s experience of displacement within technology. She remarks that ‘the more dreadfully disquieting thing is not the other or an alien; it is, rather, yourself in oldest familiarity with the other, for example, it could be the Double in which you recognize yourself outside of yourself’ (1989: 69). The confrontation with the double, the recognition of yourself outside of yourself through the echoing voice on the telephone, the anamorphic projection on the television in freeze-frame, slow-motion, fast forward and reverse, through a kind of being in technology with morphing identities that exist within the fragility of digital space, present the technologically triggered uncanniness of technoculture subjectivity. The experience of the uncanny within the space of technology seems easily constructed. When a computer screen displays a message, a question, ‘how are you?’ or more likely, ‘what are you wearing?’ or ‘asl?’ (code for ‘age, sex, and location?’) from an anonymous chatroom participant the experience is palpable. Who is it behind the text, on the other side of the screen? It is whomever or whatever I desire. The pulsating cursor, like a heart beat, anticipates the streaming text that follows, unencumbered by the appearance of the body, offering a flat screen ideally suited to project our own desires, our desiring phantasms. Increased bandwidth allows the use of video-conferencing and as a result the computer is less textual and more televisual and perhaps less illusory, now more depthlessly real. The mathematics and abstractions of text creates an unknown depth and obscurity that the video can only interrupt in its obscene clarity. The audio sampling of our voices (‘at the tone, please leave a message’) and the black and white surveillance video capture of our images (‘is that how I look queuing up at the bank?’) are now commonplace, but somehow unsettling. Why? In attempting to outline an aesthetic of the uncanny, Freud noted several literary examples that would elicit an experience of the uncanny, such as dolls, mirrors, automatons, dead bodies (televisions turned to dead channels?). When one enters a darkened room and senses a reflection in a distant mirror, or sees a figure (perhaps a child-size doll) seated immobilized in a chair with frozen eyes, the almost sublime experience of the uncanny is felt. What is sensed? Freud writes, ‘this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression’ (1955: 241). The ego does not believe in the possibility of its death. The unconscious thinks it is immortal. The uncanny experience of the double is death made material, unavoidable, present and screened.

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the feature prequel to the US television series, Twin Peaks, works through these issues of technological uncanniness. It is February 16 at 10:10 a.m. when Special Agent Dale Cooper enters the office of FBI Regional Director Gordon Cole. The establishing shot of the FBI Building begins with an upside-down shadow of the Liberty Bell panning up to the actual Bell, which is then echoed in a print of the Bell in Director Gordon’s office. ‘I was worried about today because of the dream I told you about,’ Cooper confides, kneeling at Gordon’s desk. Gordon nods. Cut to: an empty office hallway with a single surveillance camera hung from the ceiling pointing away from the viewer. Special Agent Cooper enters the frame, stands in front of the surveillance camera and waits. Cut to: Close-up of the surveillance monitor with Cooper looking up at the camera. Cut to: Medium shot of the hallway as Cooper walks out. Cut to: Medium shot of surveillance control room where a security guard watches three video monitors. The middle monitor displays Cooper just exiting the hallway as he enters the frame of the film and into the control room. He studies the monitor. Nothing. He repeats the sequence. Still, nothing is seen on the monitor. The editing works to unsettle the eye between monitored video space and the narrative filmic space. An elevator door opens. Pause. Philip Jeffries (David Bowie), a long lost federal agent walks up the hallway toward Cooper, who is again looking into the surveillance camera. Cooper walks back in the control room and is astonished to see himself on the live monitor and that Jeffries is walking past his image. He calls out anxiously, ‘Gordon! Gordon!’ Seeing himself see himself creates a startling chain of events. Jeffries, now in Gordon’s office, speaks in a halting voice about an unknown Judy. The video noise of a dead TV channel, which later proves to be the sighting of the father as killer, fades in and out, superimposed upon the scenes. It is through the technological that we enter the dream space of Twin Peaks with its patented reverse speak. When Jeffries vanishes, it is as if he does so along the electrical wires and through videated space, as quick inserts of cabling and telephone poles are flashed. The front desk of FBI headquarters says that Jeffries was never there. Cole and Cooper confirm Jeffries’s presence and Cooper’s visual doubling by reviewing the video. It is not unlike the chant that went out during many protest marches concerning the Rodney King verdict, ‘the video doesn’t lie, the video doesn’t lie!’ The uncanny and videated doubling of Cooper is the warning, the crisis point, wherein the dream space of fragmentation via technology invades the real space. This crash of ontological positions and representational regimes is the situation I am pursuing.

The issues of televisual, simulated and digital culture are now commonplace Hollywood script fodder, depicting either the anxiety or desire that my life is, or should be, TV. The Truman Show (Weir 1998) and EdTV (Howard 1999) are examples from the 1990s, but newer films continue with similar technophobias such as simulation anxiety, The Matrix (Wachowski 1999), and biotech panic scenarios, I, Robot (Proyas 2004) and The Island (Bay 2005). Both of the earlier films and The Matrix offer a Baudrillard for Dummies, a Pirandello for those who missed modernism, through a dramatization of the theory of simulations. Pleasantville (Ross 1998) is a film whose twisted ideology narrates an attempted reconstruction of the televisual as flesh through a slow process of colorization. If we are trapped in the television, if our world has become televisual, then why not forget the real and make the television our reality? The designing of simulated wars for political gain is played out in Wag the Dog (Levinson 1997) eerily reflecting what many thought was the cynicism that lay behind Clinton’s militarism in 1998–9 to counter the scandals of his presidency. However, these games of simulation in which the real is hidden by fabrication are not the critical issues facing technoculture today, but rather the problems of embeddedness in which information is infected from within so the real itself is reordered. It is that question which I will pursue in Part II of this book.

Why this ubiquity of challenge and confrontation of the real and the televisual, the organic and technological in popular culture? The struggle between reality and illusion is a problem that has persisted throughout Western culture from Plato’s cave to Hamlet’s seeming versus being, from Pirandello’s Six Characters in search of their author to Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime (1996). The plethora of technological and simulation anxiety movies indicates both a long-standing fascination of philosophy as well as science fiction literature and cinema, and a more current response to the flood of mediatized experiences in current technoculture. In the following chapter I discuss this further by looking to the overpowering influence of the televisual.

The use of the technology of the screen in the films mentioned above is telling. There is often a person behind the curtain, a controlling force behind the screen or two-way mirror, that can be isolated as the cause of the mediated invasion. The Director in The Truman Show, the TV repairman in Pleasantville and the media specialist in Wag the Dog are the men behind the curtain. This reccurring ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction A willing suspension of disbelief for the moment
• Part I Simulation (before) A theoretical accounting of the history of the (dis)appearance of theatre in virtual spaces
• Part II Embeddedness (after) The performance of ‘bare life’ and the bio-politics of digital culture
• Notes
• Works cited
• Index