square white world

It is the desire to occupy a place from which one can take everything in, first and foremost visually, but also orally and audibly, that renders the theatre and theatricality so suspect.

- Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium, Fordham University Press, New York, 2004, p. 7

Samuel Weber calls Plato’s ‘cave’ in The Republic a theatre. He calls for a mediumistic interpretation of theatricality. I would rather consider the cave in Plato’s story theatrical on the basis of its exaggeration, its blatant artificiality. Theatricality, then, is problematic for being artificial by nature, rather than suspect for interesting us in its panoptic potential. This view of theatre includes the impression it gives of potentially showing everything and when Weber calls on Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory to attest to the extra, the remainder, of what is in excess of the signifying system or regime installed by theatricality, he is sensitive to what I would more readily like to call exaggeration.

If Plato’s theatricality is not in the image he has chosen but first and foremost in his choice of adding a theatrical dimension, what we have in the ‘cave’ is indeed theatre by way of metaphor. The thought behind it has chosen a theatrical metaphor and done so not to express a theatrical truth or truth about theatre and its placing and setting of us up to see, hear and taste (? Weber writes ‘orally’) everything but to stage a truth about everything or set up a theatrical stage in order for that truth to be represented: the theatrical is constituted here by its metaphoricity. I would prefer to contrast this metaphoricity of the thought as it is theatricalised and/or performed with a theatricality particular in every instance of performance, a theatricality, that is, of theatre as it is thought. The theatre of thought depends on a generality, that supplied by metaphoricity. The thought of theatre is used to find a way to express and analyse the problematic natural artificiality we call theatricality.

As a note further on this line: I was reminded of the difference and the difference in relation to difference of theatricality and metaphoricity watching a DVD of Kraftwerk’s Minimum-Maximum. This is Kraftwerk in performance - which means doing not much apart from standing in a row in front of identical keyboards… while behind them a three-part screen explodes with all sorts, carefully contrived and often synched up with the songs, of graphic illustration.

I was struck by how innately theatrical the machine is. And it is so without speaking of our desire to see, hear, touch, taste, experience everything through our senses. It’s not its prosthetic McCluhan dimension that makes the machine dynamically theatrical, it is its strong artificiality. And this is where the risk lies, the danger: machines are sexy and dangerous. If they are prosthetic, the danger appears to lie in their exaggeration of single qualities, speed for example, strength, tele-vision. That they are machines makes them theatrical. Machines stage their own risky qualities. They make what they do obvious. They exaggerate. And this constitutes their appeal.

Machine designs are often said to be ‘revolutionary.’ I don’t think this is an entirely baseless description but applies less to the superfices of the machine than to its artifice: what it does AND what it stages. The delicious threat of being replaced or degraded by or upgraded to a machine exists and is compelling because robots are to the nth degree not us. The Big Other is a robot. We are literally upstaged by robots. Which is why robots are the future. (& Crime Oil - which is a trademark: contact for your order now.)

From the more limited point of view of metaphoricity, machines virtualise, become virtual, in the sense of virtual reality. They are put to work at creating a moral image, much like the ‘cave’’s use of a theatrical metaphor. Virtual reality is only sexy and dangerous to the extent that the artifice is highlighted, that it exaggerates us, itself or not us. The appeal of Second Life appears to lie directly in this performative dimension of prostheses or body modification. And the appeal of talking about Second Life or the immersive experience appears to have more to do with real-world implications on the nexus between artifice and nature, which is exactly that realm opened up, I would suggest, by the problematic of theatricality. In other words, our self-performance in virtual reality really really happens. It is exaggerated and signposts its artificiality. It takes place not within theatricality as a medium but theatricality as a problematic field.

Recollection is defined both in relation to the perception with which it is contemporaneous and the following moment in which it prolongs itself. Reuniting the two senses produces a bizarre impression: that of acting and being ‘acted’ upon at the same time.
- Gilles Deleuze, quoted in Difference and Givenness, Levy Bryant, p. 126

Is there a form of social conflict which is not terrorism and not capable of being delayed and repeated - represented - and which does not exemplify, provide a situation, a theatre for operations - with the suffering of people serving as backdrop to an ‘empty space,’ from which bursts of monologue?

And this is not to ask again whether terrorist acts serve as backdrop to capitalism, seen as some kind of homogeneous system of the world, in the theatrum mundi … but to get at what Simon Biggs called ‘complicity.’

Media work in what Deleuze called a theatre of repetition, reliant on recognition, the habit of the first passive synthesis. Acts / encounters which aim to break the deadlock, rock the status quo, engender thought, lose / have lost particularity in what used to be the anodyne of media commentary and is now the acid bath. They are habitual and become general. Virilio’s image, his analogon, is that they are total, turning the mirror on the work of art, on aesthesis, to give us the full immersion media-experience of their Ganzfeld virtuality. This gaze is pitiless.

Where I mean to draw attention to a ‘complicity’ is not only with the Image of thought-as-representation, rather than Deleuze’s thought-of-thought, of the media and its (re)mediation of spectacular terrorism, but also with art - as a disctinction-without-difference. I mean that the Crisis of Representation has left us with this legacy on the one hand and that on the other we have the past-futurity, the futurism, of a global Crisis of Values, which rests on the complicity of art, capital and terror, to the power of a ‘triplicity,’ and is that show in which this triunity is spectacularly confirmed.

In the circle of repetition of the selfsame there is no drama because it consists in what Neal Stephenson called a ‘consensus cluster.’ Conflict resolves before it arises: and its resolution is High Definition. The Society of the Spectacle … is also this … is also that … terror / capital … art / terror … art / capital … in endless combination, at rates of oscillation and substitution (exemplification) invisible to the naked eye …

- João Magueijo, cosmologist

… another sense is needed, beyond the habitual five, or six - the sixth being death, in which the creative act shall have no dominion - in answer to the problem of light which is faster than light.

there are no names. This is the language that does not belong. + it is the language of my not-belonging.

The current problem would be and I am putting here to start thinking it through: without a clinical practice (the idea of small theatre group called T-Cell might remain but there is no support for it), what would the theoretical, critical practice be? (There might not be any support for this either: I may still have to follow the example of other exiles who want to salvage a modicum of respectability through teaching in their adoptive lands.)

I like this: “there is a raw materialism in Virilio’s reflection, nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex histories of electronic transactions as our most private autobiographies.” [Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, City of Transformation: Paul Virilio in Obama's America]

I like it because of the vitality of the sci-fi drama introduced as taking place in a ‘theatre of thought.’ It makes me think the thought that’s involved me these past few months - itself springing from the encounter with theatre - can sustain itself, like an oasis.

Does it shimmer like a mirage? Yes.

At present it does. And N-set feels like a place I cannot recover except in the rehearsal room, except by becoming a group. (By ‘N-set’ I mean here the country whose existence I cannot prove but of whose reality I am convinced, as I am that I live n-exile from it: ‘non-specified enemy territory’ - a zone of risk and immediate context.)

The Krokers use the theatre of thought like a ticket to gain direct access to what is showing: migrations into flesh, granulations of bodies, tattoos, embeddings - into the very meatspace, as if this were a sign of legitimation not only for their presence as lived but also for their histories and private autobiographies. I undertake that this is in the nature of a characterisation of Virilio, in whose thought - and theatre - a naturalism still obtains, in which the natural body is yet valorised. However, that there might be a theatre of thought, really, is exciting.

And I wonder if it will hold still long enough - migrating, granulating, getting tattoos, becoming embedded - for me to approach, flip it onto its back and take a good long look at it as a thought of theatre. In other words, do the Krokers here provide the clinical instance of theatre, the practice to criticise?

- Isabel Samaras, painting detail

“Nexx will be New Zealand’s online marketplace for social lending. We’ll let people borrow and lend money directly with each other, without greedy banks and unpredictable finance companies in the middle.“

Is there a similar programme to assist non-profit organisations and non-commercial enterprises - such as those found here - to find backers, sponsors, patrons?

San Fran has one:

it takes extremely fragile and extremely solid people to risk and even gain from the encounter with madness without succumbing or being taken by it to destruction and death

(here’s the link for reference to Ghetto Life 101, the radio diary of LeAlan Jones, then thirteen, and Lloyd Newman, fourteen, recorded in 1993 on Chicago’s South Side.

(It is in a BBC-backed programme that LeAlan Jones revisits the diary fifteen years later and comments on his mother’s mental illness, at the onset of which she conversed with Ronald Reagan on the porch: her paranoia was politically inspired … he goes on to wonder about how many such mental illnesses are politically inspired.)

The critique would run like this: the New Zealand theatre is an aspect, a symptom, and an emblem, of colonial culture. In a way, it’s worse than poetry, because it’s expensive. It costs more money for its ephemeral productions than it does to publish the slim volume of poetry that will last even if it does not live forever.

- Adonis, hanging for the Globe Theatre London, designed by Dr Raymond Boyce, courtesy Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand

Because the project of New Zealand theatre is essentially colonial, it stands to reason that it was historically in theatre that colonialism was most hotly contested. Since it’s where something is going to be a problem that it’s going to be, it’s got to be, clearly articulated. So in the 1970s we have 7 community theatres and we have a practice which in calling itself New Zealand theatre is analysing its indebtedness to English theatre.

My father, Anthony Taylor, artistic director of Downstage in the late 1970s, named as enemy and obstacle to a specifically local theatre practice the British repertory system. And the star system. When, in 1982, at the behest of the West German government he presented a paper at the Brücke Ãœber Grenzen conference (called by way of a consultation on BRD cultural policy-making), it was entitled: ‘Cultural Colonization: The Dilemma of a Small Nation.’

The paper’s argument ran: New Zealand already has art, literature, theatre; therefore any cultural exchange must be a two-way street and respect our differences from the rest of the world. It asked that larger nations neither assume cultural dominance, nor assume dominating roles and avoid cultural colonization. The colonization here envisaged is not primary and static. It is what contemporary colonizers actively engage in when they send or sell us their art, literature, theatre, film and TV.

This second-wave colonization serves to counter the critique that theatre foundered in New Zealand when the white colonial class lost its hold on cultural production. However, the critique continues: theatre loses traction as the old money disappears. ‘Old money’ implies a class and its values and assumptions.

Old money supports civic life. Its perspective is that the institutions of civic life are worthy of support whether or not they have an ideological function; that is, whether they are critical of old money or not. There is a principle here, noblesse oblige, for sure, but it includes a notion of both economic and political disinterest and a concept of value as genetic and primordial. The fact of theatre existing is seen as good in itself. This goes for other civic institutions, of course.

Why have theatres lost the sort of attention paid them by old money? Has their internal critique been too effective and destroyed the class bases on which they are built? Such class bases would include ideas of colonialism, postcolonialism and neocolonialism. So what about globalization?

- Atlas, hanging for the Globe Theatre London, designed by Dr Raymond Boyce, courtesy Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand

The parochial form of civic life goes begging when the new money defines itself as globalized. The global form resembles exactly that “cultural colonization” my father drew the West German government’s attention to in 1982: the domination of the smaller by the larger power.

Note that this dominance is ideological, economic and political. It exists to serve vested interests.

Colonialism becomes like some kind of saurian survivor in a postliberal world, a world in which cultural colonization is actual and ubiquitous. It is the vested interest that would then divest the theatre not only of its critical function - ideologically, politically, economically and socially - but of its value and its self, its internal difference.

It would do this in New Zealand by naturalising the wholesale destruction of civic institutions - that is, saying that it’s natural for this to happen - by claiming that they are redundant on ideological grounds. Colonialism is then an ally of colonization. The charge that vestiges of colonialism might remain in our theatres is enough to put a new generation in charge of old money to flight.

How has this happened? And has this happened because we don’t need the fact that it has explained to us any more? as the critique of the theatre would have it.

- Venus, hanging for the Globe Theatre London, designed by Dr Raymond Boyce, courtesy Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand

The current crisis of representation is the mirroring effect of liberalism and postliberalism. The latter uses the former as a disguise simply when it is useful to it to do so. This is the same as the relation between colonialism and colonization I have tried to describe: that cultural colonization we otherwise understand by the term globalization uses the charge of colonialism when it is in its interests so to do.

A real side-effect of this crisis of representation is that it empties out the history from colonialism, its actions in history, the fact that theatres before the 1970s were not fauning. Practitioners here were routinely insulted by their British counterparts: “Oh,” they said, “Do you have theatre out there?” We did. It was further ahead than is now believed. And so the advances of liberalism, its real actions, whether positive or negative, are occluded. In its place we have the cynical manipulation of its reputation, that which represents it as having acted, not as currently acting.

Consensual society poses a threat to vested interests because it connotes the fluidity of uncontrolled populations and their identities. The two-way street is dangerous because it places demands on the the dominant power and questions the culture of dominance.

- Hercules, hanging for the Globe Theatre London, designed by Dr Raymond Boyce, courtesy Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand

When we cease to be information consumers - and when our very consumption ceases to be represented as a ‘kind’ of creation - and we begin to create in a consensual environment, at the level of social participation in civic institutions, including theatre, and at the level of global decision-making, then we will have realised this crisis, this dilemma of a small nation.

Artur Å»mijewski’s show is covered by we make money not art. The blog talks about two works by the Polish artist. One is a recreation of a scientific study at Stanford to find out what happens to good people in an evil environment. Students volunteered to act, some playing the screws, some the inmates. But the prison was real. Å»mijewski’s Repetition is a film of the 2005 recreation, using unemployed people as its actors.

The Stanford experiment lasted six days. Å»mijewski’s performance lasted only a couple of days. The curtain was brought down by the actors in the the latter case. They opted not to continue. The decision to leave the set was allegedly a collective decision.

Was the walk out perhaps inspired by the Stanford experiment? In that case scientific observers called a halt to proceedings out of fear that their subjects were in danger. The volunteer guards were terrorising the volunteer inmates.

This on its own might not inspire a contemporary cast to bunk out. However, it is recorded in addition that the Stanford crew were enjoying themselves while they were torturing, humiliating and punishing their prisoners.

Might it not be said that the participants in Å»mijewski’s play cut short the run for the same reason as the scientists at Stanford? Both were afraid that there might be some enjoyment to be had and wanted to end this reign of pleasure, in 2005 before it even began. In fact, doesn’t Å»mijewski’s work preempt the Stanford experiment?

It leads us to ask: Why didn’t the students opt out earlier in 1971? And to formulate a possible answer: Because the prison scenario existed to hide the fact that the experiment itself was the prison, in which the scientists were the guards.

This notion of immoral pleasure reminds me of two friends conversing: ‘Why do people want bad art?’ said one.

‘It’s not that they want bad art, it’s that they prefer it,’ said the other.

Another of Å»mijewski’s film or video works (I think they’re referred to as video to foreground by association, by sympathetic magic, the vérité aspect; their function as artworks depends on the authority of the performance they are simply recording) shows the artist convincing a Survivor to have his tattoo refreshed.

This is what we make money not art has to say:

Å»mijewski believes that in order for art to regain its value in society, it has to expose societal conflict and disclose the conditions in which social antagonisms are cultivated and maintained by the powers that be. Convinced that the hard-won autonomy of art–in which art is considered independent from the “real” world–has actually disempowered it from acting as an accountable public voice, Å»mijewski insistently requires of art that it take responsibility and engage in a dialog with the current social and political reality around us.

And in Å»mijewski’s own words:

When I undertook this film experiment with memory, I expected that under the effect of the tattooing the ‘doors of memory’ would open, that there would be an eruption of remembrance of that time, a stream of images or words describing the painful past. Yet that didn’t happen. But another interesting thing happened. Asked whether, while in the camp, he had felt an impulse to revolt, to protest against the way he was treated, Tarnawa replied: ‘Protest? What do you mean, protest? Adapt - try and survive.

I think it looks nicer now. More visible. More eye-catching.

In other words, Å»mijewski’s rehearsals of scenes of social conflict are eye-candy: a pornography of the human condition.

Now, I know we don’t negotiate with terrorists, but dialogue is indeed possible between the “current social and political reality” and pornographers.

After all, it’s our history, let’s change it!

In other words, Å»mijewski’s rehearsals of scenes of historic conflict write history, as a rerun.

Sure it looks nicer this time around. It’s more visible. More eye-catching.

“A bunch of poofs strutting around in tights pretending they’re kings and queens,” is Robert David MacDonald’s summation of the view of a contemporary audience. Is this all that’s going on on stage to lead us to consider theatre not an artform? a camp theatricality? which, according to the logic of camp as the ‘the lie that tells the truth,’ swings both ways: to cheap and tawdry imitation and to expensive and shameless self-display?

Were it to rid itself of its lies, the theatre, like the church or the brothel, would no longer be much fun. Like the promises of the whore or the priest the actor’s are broken before they’re made.

Honesty is a trap for the literal-minded. Oscar Wilde: Consistency is the last refuge of the dull. David Byrne: Our loved ones demand honesty, but what they really want is better fiction. (In his book, The New Sins.)

This is not of the State, the social compact, our desire for the outright lie, the more outlandish the better, but of another figure. This is how, in the theatre, in its very theatricality, we are haunted by the ghost of being.

- The Evil Tongue, by Enkeling & found here

Behind the ‘popular laughter’ and ‘hypocritical chattering’ - Norman Manea’s phrases - there is the tragedy of a life. Where it’s all been a mistake. And it is in the nature of false leads to be more compelling than true. What one might call ordinary ontological sfx.