Clyde: And so finally, Miss Karma, the theatre is superior to cinema because whereas in cinema everything is misplaced, in theatre the four corners of the stage are the four corners of the earth.
Karma: But that still doesn’t explain why people still walk out in the middle of a play.1
The Liveness Problem
The notion of liveness has been a perennial theoretical problem since it divided critics and theatergoers almost a century ago following the incorporation of film footage into live theater, and it remains a conundrum that is continually wrestled with both in perfor-mance studies and in wider cultural and cyber theory. It is an agonizing problem, which by turns clouds and obfuscates, then clarifies and illuminates understandings of digital performance. Theories of liveness take a difficult, even treacherous path. They twist and turn through wider technological theory, from Heidegger’s phenomenology of “chained slaves” and Benjamin’s notion of disintegrating auras, to McLuhan’s “media as message”
and Baudrillard’s simulations and simulacra. Discourses on liveness meander, diverge and frequently hit brick walls in the contrasting positions taken by performance theorists such as Susan Sontag, Michael Kirby, Patrice Pavis, Matthew Causey, Johannes Birringer, Peggy Phelan, and Philip Auslander. We will not attempt to analyze and summarize the total picture, but we will concentrate on drawing out some key concepts from what has become a torridly dialectical debate.
We will begin by going directly to a principal and originary core of the “problem”:
the medium of photography. Most screen-based visual images used in digital performance are not computer generated, but derive initially from a lens-based camera system, which is then digitized for manipulation within the computer. Photography therefore provides an essential starting point for discussion of digital media imagery and its relationship to liveness. Performers use a range of media in their work from photographic stills to film,
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video, and digital media, and the significant aesthetic and technological differences between them are marked. But their common link is a lens-based optical recording tech-nology, that is to say, a photographic system.
In Venice in 1845, the British art critic John Ruskin bought an early photographic daguerreotype2of a historic building and wrote excitedly to his father: “It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself; every chip of stone and stain is there.”3It is the “very nearly” of the photographic or mediatized image, its precise degree of close-ness and its exact relationship to its referent and the “real,” that lies at the heart of the problem of the still fiercely contested debate. We highlight the word “problem” and could equally use the term “paradox,” because meditation on the different theoretical viewpoints surrounding visual recordings and reproductions can bring sudden “eureka” affirmations that are followed immediately by doubts: a nagging sense that the argument is very nearly proven, but not quite. Ruskin himself would struggle with the notion of the liveness of the photograph and revise his view. His early thoughts, so close to Barthes’s, as we will see, would in 1875 become more allied to Benjamin’s thesis: “A photograph,” wrote Ruskin, “necessarily loses the most subtle beauty of all things . . . all glowing and warm shadows become too dark.”4
Benjamin Versus Barthes
Even the most perfect reproduction . . . is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space.
—walter benjamin5
Every Photograph is a certificate of presence.
—roland barthes6
Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) has become one of the most cited texts in theoretical discussions of digital arts and culture, perhaps only eclipsed in the citation league table by William Gibson’s definition of cyber-space as a “consensual hallucination.”7Amidst numerous discussions of the paper, its title has itself been reconfigured in digital discourses by a number of writers, including Bill Nichols’s “The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems” (1988) and Brett Terry’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Historiography” (1999). Sandy Stone, less direct in her homage and less literal in her scansion (though no one has ever got that right), nonetheless pays tribute in her enjoyable book The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (1996).
Benjamin’s central argument is that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. . . . The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”8Thus, he discerns in mechanical reproductions (such as films, photographs, and prints) a depreciation of the presence of the artwork and a withering of
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its essential aura.9This also extends to views of nature, where crucial auratic elements are eliminated when reproduced through film and photography, which issue to them “an invi-tation to a far-reaching liquidation.”10Benjamin’s critique of the mechanical dilution of presence and liveness in a reproduction work of art and its comparative lack of authen-ticity has been seized upon by both live performance purists and techno-theory dystopi-ans to back up their arguments warning of the insidious and destructive power of technology.
But performance scholars who repeatedly cite Benjamin as guardian of the rability of “liveness” tend to omit that he is also aware of the unique aura and incompa-rability of photographic art. He describes how a different aura is manifest, a permanent imprint from the ghostly representation. He sees early portrait photography, for example, as a “cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead. . . . For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.”11Photographic representation is thus afforded an aura by Benjamin and, crucially for understandings of its role in art and performance, an incomparably beautiful one. The photographic reproduction is incomparable not because it is less than the live moment that it captures, but because it is, in another artistic sense (the photographic sense), the original that is designed for repro-duction. Benjamin maintains that mechanical reproduction “emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual . . . the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”12He goes on to observe that the function of art within an age of mechanical reproduction is no longer based on ritual, but politics.13
“The Work of Art” opens with a quotation from Paul Valéry’s Aesthetics, which ends,
“For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial.”14Benjamin elaborates on the thesis, arguing that historical circum-stance and change brings about reciprocal transformations in “the mode of human sense perception . . . [and] humanity’s entire mode of existence.”15Benjamin suggests that at the same time mechanical reproduction destroys aura when it pries an art object “from its shell,” changes in sense perception tending to discern a “universal equality of all things”
mean that this impact is diminished.16 More recently, writers such as Baudrillard have extended the theme to argue that sense perception has transformed to such an extent that there is now little or no distinction made between originals, simulations and simulacra.17 Philip Auslander selects this part of Benjamin’s thesis to further his own argument that the politics and aesthetics of reproduction have now robbed live performance completely of its auratic and unique quality, and has led to its inherent mediatization: “Following Benjamin, I might argue that live performance has indeed been pried from its shell and that all performance modes, live or mediatized, are now equal: none is perceived as auratic or authentic; the live performance is just one more reproduction of a given text or one more reproducible text.”18“The Work of Art” has thus been used by critics on both sides of the liveness debate. On one hand, it stands as evidence for the unique aura and
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presence of live performance, which can only be damaged and robbed by technology, and on the other as proof that technological incursion does not significantly alter reception of performance, since our minds (and performance itself) are already mediatized.
Benjamin engages with notions of historical changes of sense perception and identifies unique and potent properties in technological reproductions, yet his emotional attach-ment to originals remains, and he describes them in romantic and nostalgic tones. But the essay was of its time, and it should be remembered that when the computer is used as a reproductive technology within postmodern culture, artists tend to like the media-tized copy as much as, if not more than the original. Since postmodern theory sounded the death knell on ideas of authenticity, authors, metanarratives, and the real, the “orig-inal” work of art has become a largely displaced and friendless entity. As Forced Enter-tainment director Tim Etchells notes in relation to their show about an Elvis Impersonator Some Confusions in the Law about Love (1989): “We didn’t want anything authentic, we wanted a third-rate copy—we loved that more dearly than anything authentic.”19
For us, Roland Barthes’s stubborn and unashamedly subjective Camera Lucida (1980) provides a more compelling and arguably ontologically advanced critique of the repro-ducible photographic image than Benjamin’s “Work of Art”; a more poetic exploration of its nature, its psychological effect, its presence, and its relationship to authenticity and
“liveness.” It has many similarities with Susan Sontag’s earlier On Photography (1977), which emphasizes photography’s symbolic possession of bodies, space, and time, and the photograph’s ontology as a fetish object: “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. . . . But . . . to possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to reexperience the unreality and remoteness of the real.”20Barthes shares many of Sontag’s thoughts, but goes even further to attempt to define a science of the subject through a strictly subjective and individual phenomeno-logical process; Camera Lucida represents a highly personal quest to define photography’s essence and its relationship both to philosophy and to the physical world. The photogra-phy he considers is exclusively documentary: images that capture moments from “real life”
without recourse to staged mockups, trick effects, or laboratory manipulations. Posed por-traits receive particular attention: children, slaves, politicians, criminals, artists (includ-ing Robert Wilson and Philip Glass), and, most important for Barthes, a specific photograph of his mother.
Barthes proceeds through a bombardment of conjectures and aphorisms relating to what he considers the authenticity and certainty, the palpable presence of the Photograph (Barthes capitalizes the first letter of “Photograph” throughout). The Photograph is
“authentication itself . . . every Photograph is a certificate of presence,”21 since the Photograph is wholly contingent upon its real-world referent, which always stubbornly adheres like “that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both.”22The physical substance of the Photograph itself is “always invis-ible” because it is rather the referent we see:
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Photography’s Referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call
“photographic referent” not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the nec-essarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no Photo-graph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. . . . in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and the past. And since this con-straint exists only for Photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noeme of Photography.23(figure 6.1).
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Figure 6.1 “Every Photograph is a certificate of presence . . .” (Barthes). An evocative old photograph used as part of Eduardo Kac’s performance installation Time Capsule (1997).
But in seeking to liberate photography from its status as mere reproduction and rep-resentation, Barthes’s theory at times falters and fails. He maintains that the defining essence of photography is not art or communication, nor simple representation, but “Ref-erence” to the real (“that-has-been”). Its imaged objects are never metaphoric, but tauto-logical: “a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe.”24Barthes refers here, of course, to Rene Magritte’s surrealist painting of a pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”
(this is not a pipe) below it (La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images, 1929). Magritte’s painted words play both with surrealist notions of the nature of reality, and with the simple idea that the painting itself is not a pipe, but merely a pictorial representation of one. Although Barthes tries to invert Magritte’s famous statement to his advantage, it is not a logical or convincing manoeuvre. Despite what Barthes says, Magritte’s maxim remains as true for realist photography as for painting: a photograph of a pipe is equally not a pipe per se, but its representation.
His meditations on the photograph as a symbol of death run throughout the book, with photographers cast as unknowing “agents of Death” in the very act of trying to pre-serve life.25Every photograph, he maintains, contains the terrible sense of “the return of the dead,”26because it reproduces a moment in time that can never be repeated, and in terms of mortification. When posing for a photograph, the camera’s click represents a subtle moment of the transformation of the subject into object, “a micro-version of death (or parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.”27Death becomes the eidos of the photo-graph, and even a photograph of a corpse “is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing”28(figure 6.2).
Barthes plays freely with complex notions of the Photograph as both a live phenome-non and one that marks the sense of death. His views constitute an important incursion into the liveness debate, but have received little commentary within it, and there is cer-tainly no mention in Auslander’s Liveness book.29Barthes sees the photograph’s immobil-ity as confusing the two concepts of “the Real and the Live” since “the object has been real, [and] the photograph surreptitiously induces the belief that it is alive”. Barthes is insistent that, although the photograph shows a reality of the past, of something already dead in time, the referent itself appears once again live to us, “in flesh and blood, or again in person.”30The Photograph never “calls up” the past like a Proustian memory, but attests to the “live” reality of a moment and presents it equally alive in a resurrection: “the loved body is immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal, silver . . . [which,] like all the metals of Alchemy, is alive.”31He refutes fashionable theoretical readings of the photo-graph as an inauthentic, fabricated construction; or as a “copy” of reality; or as “an anal-ogon of the world.”32Rather, in the Photograph, he says, “the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.”33
Barthes’s position here is the antithesis of Benjamin’s; indeed Barthes does not even consider photography to be a form of “reproduction.” The photograph does not refer to or replicate any original, nor is it inherently connected to ideas of “the work of art.” The
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Photograph is an “image without code”34—not a copy of reality but “an emanation of a past reality: a magic, not an art.”35Like Gibson’s definition of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” (coined after Barthes’s words), the Photograph becomes for Barthes “a bizarre medium, a form of hallucination . . . a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other “but it has indeed been”): a mad image, chafed by reality.” Finally, Barthes ties together his thematics of the Photograph’s play of time, death, reality, and madness to the idea of the pangs of love, the way one can feel in love in with certain images. This particular love is broader than a lover’s sentiment, going beyond the unreality of representation, to enter the spectacle of the ostensibly dead photograph “crazily,” to take it in one’s arms, weeping “for Pity’s sake.”36
In his final work before his death, the photograph became an existential journey for Barthes, a window into the nature of reality that finally reveals photography as “superior
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Figure 6.2 Barthes’ notion of the photograph as a memento mori is encapsulated here using VR technol-ogy in Toni Dove and Michael Mackenzie’s VR installation Archeoltechnol-ogy of a Mother Tongue (1993).
to everything the human mind can or can have conceived to assure us of reality—but also this reality is never anything but a contingency (“so much, no more”).”37 If we relate his work to digital performance, the contention implies that the photographic image ulti-mately becomes a more telling and profound presence than the live performer, at least in a philosophical sense. It opens an explanation (or at least a perspective) as to why in digital theater it is often the media projection rather than the live performer that wields the real power, the sense of (aesthetic, semiotic) reality.
Barthes discourse supports an argument that manipulated photographic images central to the digital performance project may not constitute the popularly held manifestation of a destabilized, fragmented, and disappearing reality, but rather the opposite. They do not represent a questioning of reality, but its affirmation—its proof. For Barthes, they repre-sent the antithesis of any dehumanization, or denial of humanity; they are deeply con-cerned with mortality itself, with the nature, the neome of humanity. It is an interesting and nowadays highly unusual perspective. Barthes attempts to define the photographic image, to simplify and clarify rather than complicate it. Whether or not we accept the totality of his vision, Barthes’s confidence and decisiveness, his Nietzschean “sovereignty of the ego” is a refreshing contrast to the extensive body of recent work which tries to undermine and disprove notions of technological and corporeal difference, or to offer psy-chologically speculative platitudes of indeterminacy.
Phelan Versus Auslander Look closely at this card, it’s a reproduction.
I confide to You this solemn and sententious aphorism: did not everything between us begin with a reproduction? Yes, and at the same time nothing is more simply false, the tragedy is there.
—jacques derrida38
Having considered Benjamin’s and Barthes’s contrasting positions on the notion of live-ness and presence within photographic media, let us consider two of the key protagonists of the current liveness debate within performance studies, Peggy Phelan and Philip Aus-lander. Although their theories also clash violently, it would be wrong to ally them too closely to the earlier writers, except stylistically: Auslander takes Benjamin’s more skep-tical, scientific stance, whereas Phelan’s writing echoes Barthes’s poetic, phenomenologi-cal passion. Indeed, both writers would take issue with both Benjamin’s and Barthes’s analyses, offering divergent perspectives. Although we have seen already how Auslander does refer to Benjamin to support his argument, Auslander is at odds with him
Having considered Benjamin’s and Barthes’s contrasting positions on the notion of live-ness and presence within photographic media, let us consider two of the key protagonists of the current liveness debate within performance studies, Peggy Phelan and Philip Aus-lander. Although their theories also clash violently, it would be wrong to ally them too closely to the earlier writers, except stylistically: Auslander takes Benjamin’s more skep-tical, scientific stance, whereas Phelan’s writing echoes Barthes’s poetic, phenomenologi-cal passion. Indeed, both writers would take issue with both Benjamin’s and Barthes’s analyses, offering divergent perspectives. Although we have seen already how Auslander does refer to Benjamin to support his argument, Auslander is at odds with him