steve dixon : absent fiends


Theory and Contexts: Ontologies of Online Theatre


Facts and Fallacies of Cyberspatial Theatre


Online technologies call received ideas about the nature of theatre into question. Once the computer becomes an agent of performative action and creation, there is a distinct blurring of what was formerly termed, for example, communication, scriptwriting, acting, visual art, science, design, theatre, video, and performance art. Finite distinctions apply less and less or, as John Reaves contests, they collapse altogether:

    In the digital world you cannot distinguish different disciplines by the physical nature of the media or by which work is created … Theater has always been an integrative, collaborative art which potentially (and sometimes actually) includes all art: music, dance, painting, sculpture, etc. Why not be aggressive in the tumultuous context of the Digital Revolution? Why not claim all interactive art in the name of theater?
    (1995: 5)


Online theatre is rationalised by many as being already ubiquitous, embracing multiple communicational and presentational aspects of electronic everyday life. Theatre is not only created by those who consciously use computer networks for theatrical events, but also millions of 'ordinary' individuals who use MOOs (see below) and chatrooms, or create home pages on the World Wide Web. Many home pages constitute digital palimpsests of Erving Goffman's notions of performative presentations of the self: the subject progressively erased, redefined and reinscribed as performance within a pixelated computer proscenium. Personas are honed as characters for the new theatrical confession-box. Like postmodern performance artists, individuals explore their autobiographies and enact intimate dialogues with their inner selves. Seduced by the apparent intimacy and privacy of this most public of spaces, they confess all online and reveal secrets to strangers that they have never told their closest friends (Murray 1997: 99). The World Wide Web is a site of therapeutic catharsis-overload, and constitutes the largest theatre in the world, offering everyone fifteen megabytes of fame.


The breadth of activities encompassing online 'theatre' has also prompted new ways of thinking about the effects of virtual technologies on concepts of identity and subjectivity. In the social and game-playing environments of MUDs (Multi-user dungeons/dimensions) and MOOs (object-orientated MUDs), users create Stanislavskian character biographies, logging-on with a textual description of their physical and psychological attributes. They carefully and consciously establish themselves as fictional beings: putting on 'masks', often crossing gender, and engaging in improvisational performances. Using the Internet in both a social and performative manner, the construction and representation of identity becomes multiple and hybrid, 'continuous but plural' (J. and M. Ito 1996: 80). There is intense identification with the assumed personas beyond even Strasburgian 'method'; to the point where many players consider their online identities to be more 'authentic' than those they present in RL (real life). RL becomes theorised as just one of many parallel windows which makes up the newly networked human ontology, with the adoption of hybrid personas a route to spiritual understanding and personal transformation (Turkle 1997). This notion is linked to prevalent but fallacious discourses on cyberspatial disembodiment and attendant visions of liberation from the flesh. As Michelle Kendrick points out, even within abstracted territories, notions of subjectivity are always inescapably embodied: "The bodiless entity that hypothetically exists in cyberspace depends, in myriad ways, on the referent of the corporeal body in front of the computer"(1996: 152).


Discourses on performed fictional identity have become the emperor's new clothes; misreading improvisational role-plays as seismic cultural and socio-aesthetic shifts:

    The Network creates new relationships between being fictive and being real(ized). Being fictive becomes seen as an integral part of being real ... Fiction will deepen so that one may fall in and never emerge ... We may see a retribalization of social structures through new fictive forms and spaces … Our online identities may become more important to us than our "real life" (RL) identities. Fictive VR may become more useful than personal RL. (Renan 1996: 62 - 69)

Such views are common currency within psychological theories on cyberspace, and have been uncritically adopted and assimilated within performance studies. But, as I have argued elsewhere (Dixon, 1999), the rhetoric is fanciful and hyperbolic, reconfiguring the age-old acting practice of adopting a character into some mystical life-changing experience heralding a brave new world. Whilst one might relate the effects of role-playing MUDs and MOOs to positive therapeutic aspects of participation in theatre or dramatherapy, the visions of cybernetically-transformed beings living in digitally-harmonised societies are mythologies. Such utopian cyber-prophesies confuse and conflate the metaphorical with the actual, and fail to recognise that cyberspace merely offers an alternative space in which to re-rehearse the always-already divided, fragmented and plural self. Rather than the Gibsonian notion of 'consensual hallucination', cyberspace has instead become "a consensual clich้, a dumping ground for repackaged philosophies about space, subjectivity, and culture" (Markley 1996: 56).

Whither (Wither) the body(less)?


In contemporary cultural and cybercultural theories, the body has been increasingly conceptualised as an object divorced from the mind, and emerging discourses on the virtual body and 'disembodiment' reinforce and extend the Cartesian split. The bifurcatory division between body and mind has lead to an objectified redefinition of the human subject - the 'person' - into an abstracted, depersonalised and increasingly dehumanised physical object. But, as Johannes Birringer (1998) has noted, the human body is not a concept. Bodies are particular, not general. Bodies are not animated cadavers, despite Stelarc's protestations. Bodies embody consciousness; to talk of disembodied consciousness is a contradiction in terms.

A key problem in understanding and conceptualising the virtual performing body is the dualistic distinction between information and matter. The mapping of the body into a computational environment is generally assumed to render it disembodied informational data, rather than embodied material flesh. But this position is now rightly being challenged by writers such as Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin who assert, for example, that if one considers that the self is expressed in email communication, it does not mean that the self is disembodied,

    but that it is embodied in a particularly mediated form … the same is true of all mediated expressions of the networked self: the self that participates in a video conference is embodied as a video and audio image … the self that surfs the net is embodied in its IP address, its web browser, and its plug-ins (2000: 234).


In relation to digital manifestations of experimental theatre, dance and performance, I would suggest that, when animated in performative action, the virtual human body (as opposed to a computer simulated body) is still perceived by viewers empathetically as always-already embodied material flesh. This perception is shared by the performer, whose actions in creating recordings or images for manifestations of their virtual body are fully embodied actions of body and mind. The computer monitor, rather than representing a Lacanian mirror of misrecognition, operates as an identificatory mirror of empathetic human recognition. Contrary to prevalent critical assumptions, I do not believe the performing virtual body is either less authentic than the live, nor is it disembodied from the performer. What possible use is disembodiment to a performer? Or the very idea of a mind and body split?

The fundamental goal of the performer is the eradication of distinction between mind and body - the fluid and unmediated bridge between the inner and the outer - mental or emotional impulse spontaneously combusting as unique and pure physical expression (Grotowski 1968). Regardless of the medium, performance artists explicitly explore and enact their holistic autonomies and interiorities (gendered, spiritual, emotional and political), not simply their bodily corporeality. If this process takes place within a recorded digital or electronic environment, it is the medium that is virtual, unreal or disembodied, not the human performer within it. In the performance arts, whether in a theatre, on a street corner, or a computer monitor, the medium is not the message (and never has been), the performer is.

For this reason, I interpret Peggy Phelan's oft-cited argument (1992) that performance is characterised by live presence in a constant state of disappearance as more a statement of her preferred medium of performance rather than a cogent ontological theory. Performance's ontology must surely centre on the performer, not on liveness - particularly in an age when performers are increasingly 'embodied' within electronic and virtual technologies. The ontology (and aesthetics) of disappearance has been discussed extensively by Paul Virilio (1991) in relation to recorded media and has also been adopted by Peter Lunenfeld. He has argued the distinctiveness and uniqueness of networked digital media, seeing its interactive ontology as fundamentally different from television or film (1999: xix). He suggests that the continually evolving technologies and the built-in obsolescence of hardware and software systems means that we should "embrace their mercurial qualities and conceptualize them as being somehow evanescent, like theatrical performances or dance recitals" (xx).

The Posthuman Body and Mind


Cyberneticist Gregory Bateson has posed the question of whether a blind man's stick is part of the man (in Hayles 1999: 84). In epidermal biological terms it is not, but as far as cybernetic systems are concerned it is, as is a hearing aid, or Steven Hawking's voice synthesiser, since it constitutes part of a single information flow and feedback system. If we accept this premise, then the digital manifestations of performers working telematically are also part of the performer's bodies.

But to fully embrace such radical theory may also involve accepting the proposition that one has become 'posthuman'. Posthuman theory places 'emphasis on cognition rather than embodiment' (Hayles 1999: 5) towards the amalgam of human consciousness and intelligent machine, with the body becoming a manipulable evolutionary prosthesis, as can be seen, for example, in the work of Stelarc (1999).

Katherine Hayles stresses that becoming posthuman is not contingent upon technological components or implants in the body as in the literal cyborg, but on the construction of subjectivity and informational processes. 'People become posthuman when they think they are posthuman' she says (6). If we accept this premise, we may need to acknowledge that 'Digital Performance' is predominantly created by people who are (or believe themselves to be) posthuman for people who are posthuman.

Within the cybernetic model, the problem of the body and embodiment is short-circuited if not erased since it is considered that:

    information has lost its body … to be conceptualised as an entity separate from the material forms in which it is thought to be embedded … In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals (2 - 3).


In cybernetic information and communication theory, embodiment is therefore immaterial, and according to Hayles is defined by pattern rather than presence. If this is the case, and if questions of absence and presence are not relevant to information and communication within cybernetic discourse, should they be any more relevant to digital manifestations of performance? In a postmodern age when Foucault and others have already conceptualised the body as a primarily linguistic discourse system, does the intervention of mediating technologies alter the chain of bodily information and communication production in performance?

Theatre has always been the will to virtuality. Theatre has always been a 'virtual reality' where actors imaginatively conspire with audiences to conjure a belief (otherwise known as a 'suspension of disbelief') that a bare stage is in fact a Danish castle, or an eleventh century Scottish battlefield. The transformation of the human body has always been quintessential to performance: by external (costume, makeup, lighting) and internal means (physical and psychological characterisation). The notion of the 'real' has never sat happily within theatre, notwithstanding realist theatre's concern for verisimilitude. Performance is always-already a simulation. It stands for something outside of itself. Theatre is the inauthentic masquerading as the authentic; the unreal posited as the real.


This basic paradigm is the same as in virtual systems, as Brenda Laurel (1991) has discussed extensively, drawing parallels between the virtual worlds of theatres and computers. Mark Poster has observed that: "Virtual reality systems continue the Western trend of duplicating the real by means of technology. They provide the participant with a second-order reality" (1999: 42). I would suggest that this second-order reality corresponds to exactly what goes on in theatre production, which similarly makes use of technology to simulate the real. What binds theatre in both live and virtual forms is the presence, whether live or electronic, of the empathetic human body and the exploration of the symbolic and the unreal. As Matthew Causey has observed: "the sublimity of performance and art within the theater lies in their capacity, as Lyotard theorized it, 'to put forward the unpresentable in presentation itself'" (1999: 198).

For me, postmodernism is the explanation of how society has become consumed by mass media. We are becoming the media. The posthuman notion extends this until we are media. That we can now conceive that live and mediatised bodies are the same is because we have (or will have) succeeded in 'taking away' the technology, since we no longer give it a thought. It is part of us. Posthuman theories, extending McLuhan's concept of mediatised consciousness and Baudrillard's ideas of simulation and simulacra, suggest that there is no reason why we should recognise breathing, living bodies to have greater solidity and authenticity than electronic humans similarly engaged in performative actions. As performers increasingly virtualise and posthumanise themselves in digital manifestations, they too believe in, and are reliant upon this erasure of difference between live, recorded, physically present or telematically transmitted embodiments.



References

Birringer, J., 1998. Media and Performance: Along The Border. Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press.

Bolter, J. and Grusin, R., 1999. Remediation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Causey. M., 1999. 'Postorganic Performance: The Appearance of Theater in Virtual Spaces' in Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Bloomington & Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Dixon, S., 1999. 'Digits, Discourse and Documentation: Performance Research and Hypermedia' in TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 43, Number 1 (T161), Spring, pp 152 - 175.

Grotowski, J., 1968. Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Routledge.

Hayles, N.K., 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ito, J. & M., 1996. "Joichi and Mizuko Ito - Interviewed by Lynn Hershman Leeson" in Clicking In: Hot Links To A Digital Culture, edited by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Seattle, WA: Bay Press.

Kendrick, M., 1996. "Cyberspace and the Technological Real" In Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, edited by Robert Markley, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Laurel, B., 1991. Computers as Theater. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.

Lunenfeld, P. (ed.), 2000. The Digital Dialectic. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Markley, R. (ed.), 1996. Virtual Realities and Their Discontents. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.

Murray, J., 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press.

Phelan, P., 1992. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge.

Poster, M., 1999. 'Theorizing Virtual Reality: Baudrillard and Derrida' in Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, Bloomington & Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Reaves, J., 1995. 'Theory and Practice: The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre' in CyberStage, Vol 1 No.3 (Summer), Toronto, Canada: CyberStage Publishing.

Renan, S., 1996. 'The Net and the Future of Being Fictive' in Clicking In: Hot Links To A Digital Culture, ed. Lynn Hershman Leeson, Seattle, WA: Bay Press.

Stelarc
1999 ParaSite: Event for Invaded and Involuntary Body. World Wide Web page <http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/parasite/index.htm>

Turkle, S., 1997. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Phoenix.

Virilio, P., 1991. The Aesthetics of Disappearance. New York: Semiotext(e).

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