The prospectus for a Canadian conference on the topic ‘Why Theatre: Choices for the New Century’ posed a question that goes straight to the heart of the matter that concerns me here: ‘Theatre and the media: rivals or partners?’ At the level of cultural economy,1I am using the phrase ‘cultural economy’ to describe a realm of inquiry that includes both the real economic relations among cultural forms and the relative degrees of cultural prestige and power enjoyed by different forms. my own answer to this question is clear and unequivocal: theatre (and live performance generally) and the mass media are rivals, not partners. Neither are they equal rivals: it is absolutely clear that our current cultural formation is saturated with and dominated by the representations of the mass media. We have entered the era of what some theorists are calling the televisual. As Tony Fry puts it: What the televisual names ... is the end of the medium, in a context, and the arrival of television as the context. What is clear is that television has to be recognised as an organic part of the social fabric; which means that its transmissions are no longer managed by the flick of a switch. (1993: 13)
In other words, if television once could be seen as ranking among a number of vehicles for conveying expression or information from which we could choose, we no longer have a choice; the televisual is an intrinsic and determining element of our cultural formation. As Fry indicates, it is indeed no longer a question of thinking about television in various cultural contexts but of seeing it as the cultural context.
My concern is with the situation of live performance within this televisual environment. In an earlier article, I described what I see as a pattern of increased incursion of mediatization into live events, and suggested that live events are largely losing their distinctive character as a result (see Auslander 1996). Despite this erosion of the differences between the live and the mediatized within our televisual culture, there remains a strong tendency in performance theory to place live performance and mediatized or technologized forms in opposition to one another. The terms of this opposition focus around two primary issues: reproduction and distribution.2I have borrowed these categories from Pavis (l992). They are two of fifteen vectors identified by Pavis along which live performance and media may be compared. Herbert Molderings defines the question of reproduction by saying that ‘in contrast to traditional art[,] performances do not contain a reproduction element .... Whatever survives of a performance in the form of a photograph or video tape is no more than a fragmentary, petrified vestige of a lively process that took place at a different time in a different place’ (1984: 172-3). Or, in Peggy Phelan’s succinct formulations, performance ‘can be defined as representation without reproduction’( 1993a: 3); ‘Performance’s being becomes itself through disappearance’ (1993a: 146). In terms of distribution, Patrice Pavis contrasts the one-to-many model of broadcasting with the ‘limited range’ of theatre: ‘media easily multiply the number of their spectators, becoming accessible to a potentially infinite audience. If theatre relationships are to take place, however, the performance cannot tolerate more than a limited number of spectators’ (1992: 101). In these formulations, live performance is identified with intimacy and disappearance, media with a mass audience, reproduction and repetition. Phelan offers an apt summary of this view: ‘Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/ space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward’ ( 1993a: 149).
At one level, the anxiety of critics who champion live performance is understandable, given the way our cultural economy privileges the mediatized and marginalizes the live. In his analysis of the political economy of music, Jacques Attali describes the current historical configuration as dominated by a ‘network of repetition’ in which only mass-producible cultural commodities have value (1985: 87-132). In this account, live performance is little more than a vestigial remnant of the previous historical order, which can claim little in the way of cultural presence or power. Phelan claims that live performance’s inability to participate in the economy of repetition ‘gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge’ (1993a: 148). I would like to suggest in passing that in the context of a mediatized, repetitive economy, using the technology of reproduction in ways that defy that economy may be a more significantly oppositional gesture than asserting the value of the live. I am thinking, for instance, of Christine Kozlov’s installationInformation: No Theory (1970), which consisted of a tape recorder equipped with a tape loop, whose control was fixed in the ‘record’ mode. Therefore, as the artist herself noted, new information continuously replaced existing information on the tape, and ‘proof of the existence of the information [did] not in fact exist’ (in Meyer 1972: 172). The functions of reproduction, storage and distribution that animate the network of repetition were thus undermined by this way of using the very technology that brought that network into being.3Attali (1985: 32) ascribes the development of the network of repetition to the invention of sound-recording technologies. In this context, reproduction without representation may be more radical than representation without reproduction.
My purpose here is to destabilize these theoretical oppositions of the live and the mediatized somewhat, first by reference to what might be called the ‘electronic ontology’ of media (these initial observations will not pertain to film, of course, whose ontology is photographic rather than electronic): the broadcast flow is ... a vanishing, a constant disappearing of what has just been shown. The electron scan builds up two images of each frame shown, the lines interlacing to form a ‘complete’ picture. Yet not only is the sensation of movement on screen an optical illusion brought about by the rapid succession of frames: each frame is itself radically incomplete, the line before always fading away, the first scan of the frame all but gone, even from the retina, before the second interlacing scan is complete .... TV's presence to the viewer is subject to constant flux: it is only intermittently ‘present,’ as a kind of writing on the glass ... caught in a dialectic of constant becoming and constant fading. (Cubitt 1991: 30-1)
As this quotation from Sean Cubitt suggests, disappearance may be even more fundamental to television than it is to live performance - the televisual image is always simultaneously coming into being and vanishing; there is no point at which it is fully present. 5Koziol’s tape-recorder installation replicates this process of the continuous replacement of electronic information. The difference is that whereas in the normal usage of video this process is the necessary condition for the creation of a perceivable image, it becomes, when applied by Koziol to sound recording, a way of making an imperceptible sound image that exists only theoretically. What presence it does possess is only a subjective effect created by the viewer’s perceptual schema. At the electronic level, the televisual image is hardly a petrified remnant of some other event, as Molderings would have it, but exists rather as a lively, and forever unresolved, process. For some theorists, the televisual image’s existence only in the present also obviates the notion that television (and video) is a form of reproduction. Contrasting television with film in this regard, Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow point out that where film sides towards instantaeous memory (‘everything is absent, everything is recorded—as a memory trace which is so at once, without having been something else before’) television operates much more as an absence of memory, the recorded material it usesincluding material recorded on film—instituted as actual in the production of the television image.6The quotation embedded in this quotation is from Christian Metz. (1977: 54-6)
Regardless of whether the image conveyed by television is live or recorded (and, as Stanley Cavell reminds us, on television there is ‘no sensuous distinction between the live and the repeat or replay’ [1982: 86]), its production as a televisual image occurs only in the present moment. ‘Hence the possibility of performing the television image—electronic, it can be modified, altered, transformed in the moment of its transmission, is a production in the present’ (Heath and Skirrow 1977: 53). Although Heath and Skirrow are referring here to broadcast television, what they say is as true for video as it is for broadcast: the televisual image is not only a reproduction or repetition of a performance, but a performance in itself
If we shift our gaze from the electronic writing on the glass to consider, for a moment, the nature of the magnetic writing on a videotape, another issue comes to the fore. Cubitt posits as a crucial feature of the medium ‘the phenomena of lost generations’ resulting from the various stages of life a video image is likely to pass through, ‘from master to submaster, to broadcast, to timeshift, where it begins to degenerate with every play’ (1991: 169). Video shares this characteristic with other means of technical reproduction, including photographic and sound-recording media. Since tapes, films and other recording media deteriorate over time and with each use, they are, in fact, physically different objects at each playing, even though this process may only become visible when it reaches critical mass (e.g. when the film or video develops visible flaws). Each time I watch a videotape is the only time I can watch that tape in that state of being because the very process of playing it alters it. The tape that I initially placed in my VCR or audio-player started disappearing the moment I began watching it or listening to it. Disappearance, existence only in the present moment, is not, then, an ontological quality of live performance that distinguishes it from modes of technical reproduction. Both live performance and the performance of mediatization are predicated on disappearance: the televisual image is produced by an ongoing process in which scan lines replace one another and is always as absent as it is present; the use of recordings causes them to degenerate. In a very literal, material sense, televisual and other technical reproductions, like live performances, become themselves through disappearance.7It is worth wondering about the implications of digital reproductions for this position, since at least some digital media ostensibly do not degrade. My present feeling is that it is too soon to tell whether or not that’s true.
I want to worry this question of reproduction in one last context, by considering the related issue of repetition. Writing on the experience of film, Cavell observes that movies ... at least some movies, maybe most, used to exist in something that resembles [a] condition of evanescence, viewable only in certain places at certain times, discussable solely as occasions for sociable exchange, and never seen more than once, and then more or less forgotten. (1982: 78)
It is remarkable how closely Cavell’s description of the film experience parallels descriptions of the experience of live performance. The fact that Cavell is talking about the past, probably about the heyday of the American film industry in the 1930s and 1940s, and about a way of experiencing film that we no longer believe to be typical, is critical. Film is no longer an unrepeated experience confined to particular places and times; people frequently see their favourite films multiple times, and have opportunities to do so afforded them by the movies’ appearances on cable and broadcast television, and video-cassettes. If we want to, we can own copies of movies and watch them whenever, and as often as, we wish. Whereas film was once experienced as evanescence, it is now experienced as repetition. The crucial point is that this transition was not caused by any substantive change in the film medium itself. As a medium, film can be used to provide an evanescent experience that leaves little behind, in the manner of a live performance, or it can provide an experience based in repetition and the stockpiling of film commodities. Cubitt makes much the same point with respect to video, arguing that repetition is not ‘an essence in the medium’. Rather, ‘the possibility of repetition is only a possibility’; the actual use of the medium is determined by ‘the imaginary relation of viewer and tape’ (1991: 92-3). Repetition is not an ontological characteristic of either film or video that determines the experiences these media can provide, but an historically contingent effect of their culturally determined uses. 8My insistence that how technologies are used should be understood as effect rather than cause derives from Raymond Williams’s (1992) critique of technological determinism in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 113-28)
Just as recording media such as film and video can provide an experience of evanescence, so, too, live forms such as theatre have been used in ways that do not respect, or even recognize, the ostensible spatial and temporal characteristics of live performance. One such example would be the WPA Federal Theatre’s 1936 production of It Can’t Happen Here, which opened simultaneously in eighteen different American cities. The intention of this experiment is clearly suggested by a contemporary account which observes that the Federal Theatre produced the play ‘after a motion picture corporation decided not to do it’ (Whitman 1937: 6). To take a more current example, producers of the genre Elinor Fuchs has called ‘shopping plays’ envision live performances as repeatable commodities. Barrie Wexler, the California producer of Tamara, ‘franchises ... Tamara worldwide, replicating the product in exact and dependable detail. “lIt’s like staying in the Hilton,” he explains, “leverything is exactly the same no matter where you are”’ (Fuchs 1996: 142). In both these cases, live performance takes on the defining characteristics of a mass medium: it makes the same text available simultaneously to a large number of participants distributed widely in space. In fact, Hollywood saw the Federal Theatre as a competitor, and opposed it (Whitman 1937: 130-2). (I am not suggesting that there would be no differences between the various productions of a mass-media theatre production, such as Tamara. But if we take its producer at his word, whatever differences there might be would be trivial variations, not distinctions that would differentiate one production from another in any significant way.) It is crucial to observe that the intentions underlying these two examples of this use of the live medium are very different, and each is arguably reflective of its historical moment. Whereas the Federal Theatre Project’s practices grew out of a generally leftpopulist attitude, shopping theatre ‘mimics in its underlying structures of presentation and reception the fundamental culture of contemporary capitalism’ (Fuchs 1996: 129). The ideological positioning of these productions is determined not by their shared use of live performance as a mass medium, but by the different intentions and contexts of those uses. Ironically, shopping plays like Tamara commodify the very aspects of live performance that are said to resist commodification. Because they are designed to offer a different experience at each visit, they can be merchandised as events that must be purchased over and over again: the ostensible evanescence and non-repeatability of the live experience become selling-points. This may be what Fuchs has in mind when she says that ‘In this theater ... we are seeing the commodification of the theatrical unconscious’ (1996: 129).
I am suggesting that thinking about the relationship between live and mediatized forms in terms of ontological oppositions is not especially productive, because there are few grounds on which to make significant ontological distinctions. Like live performance, electronic and photographic media can be described meaningfully as partaking of the ontology of disappearance ascribed to live performance, and can be used to provide an experience of evanescence. Like film and television, theatre can be used as a mass medium. Half jokingly, I might cite Pavis’s observation that ‘theatre repeated too often deteriorates’ (1992: 101) as evidence that the theatrical object degenerates in a manner akin to a recorded object! The more serious point is that to understand the relationship between live and mediatized forms, it is necessary to investigate that relationship as historical and contingent, not as ontologically given or technologically determined.
As a starting-point for this exploration, I have proposed (in Auslander 1996) that, historically, the live is an effect of mediating technologies. Prior to the advent of those technologies (e.g. sound recording and motion pictures), there was no such thing as ‘live’ performance, for that category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility. The ancient Greek theatre, for example, was not live because there was no possibility of recording it. In a special case ofBaudrillard’s well-known dictum that ‘the very definition of the real is that of which it is possibility to give an equivalent reproduction’ ( 1983: 146), the ‘live’ can be defined only as ‘that which can be recorded’. (Although I realize that this is a contentious point, I will stipulate that I do not consider writing to be a form of recording in this context, for several reasons. Scripts are blueprints for performances, not recordings of them, even though they may contain some information based on performance practice. Written descriptions and drawings or paintings of performances are not direct transcriptions through which we can access the performance itself, as are aural and visual recording media. In everyday usage, we refer to ‘live’ or ‘recorded’ performances but not to written performances or painted performances, perhaps for this reason.) This means that the history oflive performance extends over approximately the past 100 to 150 years, and is bound up with the history of recording media. To declare retroactively that all performance before, say, the mid-nineteenth century was ‘live’ would be an anachronistic imposition of a modern concept on a pre-modern phenomenon.
On this basis, the historical relationship of liveness and mediatization must be seen as a relation of dependence and imbrication rather than opposition. Similarly, live performance cannot be said to have ontological or historical priority over mediatization, since the live was brought into being by the possibility of technical reproduction. This problematizes Phelan’s claim that ‘To the degree that live performance attempts to enter into the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology’ (1993a: 146), not just because it is not at all clear that live performance has a distinctive ontology, but also because it is not a question of performance’s entering into the economy of reproduction, since it has always been there. My argument is that the very concept of live performance presupposes that of reproduction, that the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction.
