Theatricality as Medium

3
Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality

Synopsis

WHAT IS the place or role of “theatricality” in an age increasingly dominated by electronic media? What is the place of “theater”? Or, since there is more than one kind, of “theaters”? What is the relation between such “theaters,” which seem to name something concrete, and “theatricality,” which need not take place in theaters, at least as commonly understood?

Perhaps most of all, what is the place of “place,” the role of “role,” which is to say, of the terms to which we have resorted in order to ask these initial questions? What is the relation between the two terms theater and theatricality, which frame our questioning and which we have begun by using as though they were synonymous, which they clearly are not? Whatever else it is, a “theater” is a place, but not only or necessarily one in which plays are performed before audiences. The definition provided by a contemporary dictionary begins with ancient Greek drama and ends with nuclear weapons:

the.ater or the.atre n [ME theatre, fr. MF, fr. L theatrum, fr. Gk theatron, fr. theasthai to view, fr. thea act of seeing; akin to Gk thauma miracle] (14c) 1 a: an outdoor structure for dramatic performances or spectacles in ancient Greece and Rome b: a building for dramatic performances c: a building or area for showing motion pictures 2: a place or sphere of enactment of usu. significant events or action (the ~ of public life) 3 a: a place rising by steps or gradations (a woody ~ of stateliest view—John Milton) b: a room often with rising tiers of seats for assemblies (as for lectures or surgical demonstrations) 4 a: dramatic literature: PLAYS b: dramatic representation as an art or profession: DRAMA 5 a: dramatic or theatrical quality or effectiveness b: SPECTACLE 1a c: entertainment in the form of a dramatic or diverting situation or series of events (their public feud made for good ~ ) 6: THEATER OF OPERATIONS theater adj (1977): of, relating to, or appropriate for use in a theater of operations (~ nuclear weapons)

What are the traits that seem to mark the use of the word, according at least to this definition? First, it entails a place in which events take place. Second, although these events are generally defined as either “dramatic performances or spectacles,” they can also be of a quite different nature: “significant events or actions … of public life,” for instance, medical demonstrations, lectures, or, more alarmingly, military events, such as those involving “nuclear weapons.” Certainly the spectacle of atomic explosions, recorded on and disseminated by photography, film, and then television, has burned itself into the popular imagination ever since the first atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Does this suffice to render such a spectacle a good example of a “theatrical” event, much less of a theater?

One widespread and very ancient premise that we find at work in this dictionary definition—a premise we have already begun to question—is the identification of “spectacle” with the “theatrical.” “Theaters of military operations” need not be so blatantly spectacular or so obviously destructive. But the dictionary confusion or confounding of theater with spectacle is surely as significant as it is symptomatic: the allusion to “nuclear weapons” brings to the fore one of the striking and distinguishing factors affecting the notion of “theater” and “theatricality” today, namely, the preponderance of energy over matter, of force over bodies, of power over place. The allusion to “nuclear weapons” as an exemplary manifestation of a “theater of operations” indicates that the “operations” involved do not simply “take place”: what distinguishes them is their power to quite literally volatilize or pulverize places, reducing the bodies that occupy them to dust or vapor. That such an operation could be cited as an illustration of the use of “theater” is possible only from a perspective that emerged historically with the introduction of the airborne film camera in the First World War, followed by various forms of remote audiovisual monitoring. Such a perspective is presupposed by the “mushroom cloud” that has since come to be the emblem of nuclear explosion as spectacle.

In any event, this banal and yet dubiously symptomatic dictionary example suggests how complex and contradictory the relation between “theater” and “media” has become. “Media” is a collective noun often used in the singular, but I will employ it as a plural noun in order to recall its heterogeneous composition. There are a variety of quite different “media”: broadcast media (radio, television), recording modes (digital and analog), recording supports (photography, film, video, audio), Internet (i.e., computer as medium), and so forth. Almost all of these very different types of “media,” despite their obvious and less obvious distinctions, depend upon electricity as their energy source, whether in order to record, to store, or to transmit. One of the traits that distinguishes electricity as a source of energy, at least insofar as it pertains to the electronic media, is its tendency, by virtue of its velocity, to transform traditional experiences of space and time, of distance and proximity, and hence of bodies, which in great part are defined through their spatio-temporal mode of being situated. What would seem to be specific to theater, by contrast, and presumably also to theatricality at least, as both are traditionally construed, is their dependence upon the “Euclidean” experience of space-time that the electronic media tend to relativize if not to abolish: above all, recourse to the opposition between presence and absence as well as to that of proximity and distance in the situating of bodies, especially living bodies.1

But the situation is, as usual, considerably more complicated. It requires us to return to the founding text of systematical thinking of theater in the “West”: Aristotle’s Poetics. In this text—reconstituted long after the fact, apparently from notes, and hence anything but simply complete or finished—Aristotle defends theater against the Platonic critique both by devalorizing its material environment, the specifically scenic medium of theater—everything having to do with spectacle, with opsis —and subordinating it to muthos, “plot.” Plot has as its object the “imitation not of men, but of a life [bios], of an action [praxos].” Through the structure of what Aristotle calls “complex” or “intricate” plots, merely contingent opsis is transformed into the condition of synopsis, the act of taking in the spectacle “with a single view.” In order, however, to be susceptible to such synoptic viewing, tragedy must possess an inner structural unity that mere appearances do not have. Just how Aristotle conceives the condition of that unity is elucidated by his interpreter and editor Gerald Else, who describes muthos as “a single course of action laid on by a particular will to achieve a particular goal. The reversal of a focused, unitary intention, in which the whole life of a man may be concentrated, is at the very heart of tragedy as Aristotle conceives it.”2

Else thereby touches on one of the most striking and curious points in Aristotle’s text: the way it links praxis to bios, “action” to “life.” Whether the life and action referred to are understood as those of an “individual,” as Else argues, or in a more general way, the association of the two seems designed to bring out their unifying function. Such unity also defines the key function of “reversal,” peripeteia, which, as described by Aristotle, does not simply disrupt the action, but ultimately prepares the way for the recognition of its underlying unity. Such recognition (anagnrisis) may come to us a shock, but its shock value only reinforces the unity of action and of life that it reveals. A mainstay of Aristotle’s Poetics is the thesis that the convergence of peripeteia and anagnrisis invests tragedy with meaningful unity and thereby elevates it from the otherwise contingent medium of theatrical spectacle— opsis. This thesis thereby defines tragedy as an essentially dramatic genre, and at the same time as the supreme poetic form.

Aristotle thus construes the medium—and this will become the traditional conception of “media” as such—as a means to an end. Medium equals means, instrument, element, a necessary but not sufficient ingredient of poetry. At the outset of the Poetics, in its second chapter, Aristotle attempts quickly to dispatch questions of media by dividing them into categories drawn from the senses, essentially visual and auditory, sight and hearing. Shapes and colors are attributed to the former; rhythm, speech, and melody, to the latter. He then goes on to inveigh against those who confuse the media with the specific use to which they are put (thus anticipating the critique of “formalism” that has been so popular ever since). He illustrates this confusion by pointing to critics who confound the poetry of Homer with the scientific writing of Empedocles simply because both are formulated in verse.

Applied to theater, or, as Aristotle conceives it, to drama, the scenic medium allows mimesis quite literally to take place, but only to the extent that it fades into pure transparency. In tragedy it is the plot, the muthos, that transforms theatrical opsis into meaningful synopsis. The scenic medium thus becomes the transparent space that allows the plot to emerge.

Thus any discussion of the relation of “theater” to “the media” must begin by distinguishing different traditions of interpreting theater itself as medium. In the “West,” the tradition that begins with Aristotle’s Poetics is surely the most powerful, in the sense of being the most influential, not just in terms of theory, but also with respect to practice.3 But, as we shall see, neither is it the only possible interpretation nor is the text itself entirely consistent.

With Aristotle, then, begins a tradition that systematically and prescriptively equates medium with means, and in so doing defines through synopsis the scenic medium of theater as a means of perception, of vision, and of understanding. It does so by conceiving theater on the model of tragedy or, more precisely, on the basis of its interpretation of tragedy, namely, as the enactment of dramatic conflicts ultimately resolved through a unified and self-contained plot. The “living presence” of actors and audience is taken into account, of course, but only as a necessary means toward the end of representing the unity of an “action” and, through it, of a “life.”

Having thus summarized the prevailing argument of Aristotle’s treatise concerning the relation of tragedy to theater, we must immediately add that the text is more complex than this résumé would suggest. Although the conception of theater as medium just described predominates in the explicit arguments of the Poetics, in at least one place the questions of place and medium appear to resist instrumentalization in a curious and significant way. Early in the lectures (§5), Aristotle discusses the origins of tragedy and comedy and relates how different cities have tried to lay claim to their paternity:

They [the Dorians] use the names “comedy” and “drama” as evidence; for they say that they call their outlying villages kimai while the Athenians call theirs dmoi, the assumption being that the participants in comedy were called kmidoi not from their being revelers but because they wandered from one village to another, being degraded and excluded from the city—and that they call “doing” and “acting” dran while the Athenians designate it by prattein. (48a35–45)4

“The allegations of the ‘Dorians,”’ Else notes, “are neither true nor to the point. “Comedy is from kmos, revel, an Attic word, not from km, village” (p. 85). Philologically, Else is presumably correct. But apart from his palpable annoyance at having to bother with this passage at all, since it is “neither true nor to the point,” Else does not stop to consider just what the point might be, or whether a point might not be of interest even if it is not “true” in the sense of being etymologically accurate. Alternatively, I would like to suggest that Aristotle’s text here touches on a number of issues that stand in very significant relation to theatricality. Within the context of an etymological speculation designed to establish the right of a particular city-state to be regarded as the “father” of theater, the association of “comedy” with a certain extraterritoriality, with exile and with wandering, both echoes and anticipates one of the hallmarks of the history of theater, again in the West: its problematic relation to property, to politics and to established, consecrated places and institutions, both private and public, political and domestic. Before Aristotle, Plato had already condemned theatrical mimesis on similar grounds,⁵ and his judgment was to be echoed throughout the centuries that followed, often justifying bans on theater as such.

Of course, none of this is made explicit in the fragmentary text of Aristotle that has been handed down under the title Poetics. But the problem is coextensive with the birth of tragedy and, above all, with the particular tragedy that Aristotle and many others take to be the epitome of the genre: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. What does it mean to be the native of a city-state, as opposed to being a stranger? What of Oedipus, who considers himself a foreigner in the city he rules before discovering himself to be a native? The situation of Oedipus suggests that, far from confirming the totalizing and unifying conception of theater advanced in the Poetics, Sophocles’ play may be read as its theatrical dismantling. This opens up a different understanding of or approach to theater, in which the distinctively scenic medium is no longer merely a means to an end, but, rather, is the spatio-temporal condition of what Benjamin, writing almost three millennia later, was to call “the exposing of the present [die Exponierung des Anwesenden].” Benjamin employs this expression in several essays, one of which is of particular interest in our context, since it has to do with defining the specificity of theater with respect to the “new media,” which at the time, for Benjamin, were above all film and radio. In what follows, then, I will first indicate briefly how Oedipus can be read as a problematization of theatrical space qua medium, and then go on to discuss Benjamin’s attempt to interpret that space with respect to the new media.

More than One: Oedipus Tyrannos

Everything relating to theater as medium, to the scene and the spectacle, to opsis, exists, insofar as Aristotle is concerned, only to serve the synopsis. The machinery of representation is thus useful only to the extent that it is able to efface itself, to become transparent, revealing a more direct view of the thing itself—which is to say, of the unity of an action and a life—than is possible in other forms of mimesis, especially epic. In tragedy, he emphasizes, no mediating narrative intervention is required, since the mimesis is enacted directly by living persons, “here and now,” on stage. The scenic medium of theater thus allows a certain “here and now” to take place and ostensibly to become transparent, revealing the more fundamental immediacy of a life, if not of life itself.

The question that emerges from this Aristotelian approach to theater is: what sort of “here and now” is presented on stage? Is it one that can efface itself in a diaphany that allows (a) life itself to appear, in its inherent and meaningful unity? Aristotle’s response, as we have seen, is that the “shock of recognition”—shock and surprise followed or accompanied by recognition—involves (which is to say, either produces or entails) a “purgation” by which extraneous elements are removed or “purged”—the famous katharsis. However one interprets this term, whether traditionally, as relating to the sentiments of the audience, or, as Else suggests, as concerning the tragic act itself, it seems undeniable that its function is to confirm the transformation of opsis into synopsis, of medium into means, and of the events represented on stage into the complete and meaningful sequence of a unified action and life.

Now, it is striking that all of these elements are explicitly inscribed in Oedipus Tyrannos, but as elements of Oedipus’ predicament, of the tragic hamartia rather than of its solution. Perhaps the most striking way to demonstrate this is by juxtaposing the following, extremely theatrical passage from Oedipus’ opening speech to the terrible words that the seer Tiresias will address to him. Here is Oedipus, speaking to the citizens of Thebes, who have gathered anxiously before the Royal Palace:

I have not thought it fit to rely on my messengers
But am here to learn for myself—I, Oedipus,
Whose name is known afar.6

And now, Tiresias’s parting words:

I will go … when I have said my all. Thus to your face
Fearful of nothing you can do to me:
The man for whom you have ordered hue and cry,
The killer of Laius—that man is here;
Passing for an alien, a sojourner among us;
But, as presently shall appear, a Theban born. (p. 38)

Both of these discourses have the same “referent,” of course, but in each case with a totally different significance. Even more importantly, perhaps, each defines a very distinct approach to the “here and now,” and with it, to the question of presence in general and theatrical presence in particular. Oedipus, in “presenting himself” not just to the citizens of Thebes, to the Chorus, but also to the audience of the play, does so in a thoroughly “Aristotelian” manner: which to say, in one which seeks to do away with the mediations of the medium, with all “messengers,” in order “to learn for myself.” That self, Oedipus believes he can assert, is transparent in his person: he has come “here,” presenting himself before the Thebans, in order to hear their distress directly and see what he can do to alleviate it.

Oedipus can ostensibly be all the more confident in so presenting himself since his very presence, as King of Thebes, seems to testify to his ability to resolve enigmas. If his “name” is “known afar,” conquering distance, it is because he was able to respond to the riddle of the Sphinx, thus liberating Thebes and becoming its new ruler. The present is thus understood by Oedipus to be an identical repetition of the past: what once was will come again, and the renown of his name is proof of this. The “here and now” is transparent because it seems to be an identical repetition of the “there and then,” the present a repetition of the past, the future a potential repetition of the present. Repetition, here, is understood in the sense of the recurrence of the identical, not as its alteration or transformation.

This conception of time, of present, past, and future, fills Oedipus with confidence in his ability to restore the transparency that has been lost: “I will start afresh, and bring everything into the light” (p. 29). Once it has thus been brought to light, the problem will be resolved by “purification,” which is to say, by eliminating the noxious element, the miasma, from the body politic and thus restoring health to the city.7

It is thus Oedipus who quite literally presents himself as the embodiment of the conception of theater, later to be schematized by Aristotle as a presentation, an enactment capable of bringing about pure transparency. This in turn presupposes a certain conception of place, of what it means to be “here and now,” for instance, as distinct from “there and then.” The terrible parting words of Tiresias repeat this conception, but in repeating also dismantle it. The person you are seeking out “there,” Tiresias tells Oedipus, is in fact right “here,” “here and now.” But that person is not here as you believe things are here, which is to say, accessible to a synoptic vision. “Have you eyes, … And cannot see what company you keep?” (p. 37). The very notion of what it means to see and, hence, to see in a theater, to see and hear a play, for instance, is also implicitly called into question by Tiresias, and by the play. For Oedipus, as for Aristotle, the medium of theater, the theatron, is both desirable and unproblematic because it is a medium that ultimately effaces itself, becoming diaphanous. This is why he can reject Creon’s offer to go inside the palace to discuss the words of the oracle with the grandiloquent admonition: “Speak before all. Their plight concerns me now more than my life” (p. 28).

“[I] am here to learn for myself,” Oedipus begins by announcing. But his conception of learning presupposes the very logic of identity and of opposition that his situation undercuts: that to be “here and now” is not to be “there and then”; that to “learn for myself” is incompatible with learning “from others”; that being a foreigner and being native born must be as mutually exclusive as being oneself and being a stranger. The mainstay of that logic, however, is the argument that one cannot be both one and many. He clings to this as he is deluged by the very “messengers” he had thought to exclude, confiding to Jocasta a last hope:

Oedipus. That is my only hope; to await the shepherd.
Jocasta. And why? What help do you expect from him?
Oedipus. This: if we find his story fits with yours,
     I am absolved.
Jocasta. In what particular point?
What did I say?
Oedipus. You said he spoke of robbers —
     That robbers killed him. If he still says robbers,
     It was not I; one is not more than one. (p. 49)

“One is not more than one”: and yet is this not precisely what the tragedy of Oedipus both confirms and denies? Oedipus is the stranger, come from afar, and the native-born Theban. He is both the avenger of Laius and his murderer, or, in the words of Tiresias

… brother … and father at once, to the children he cherishes; son
And husband, to the woman who bore him; father-killer,
And father/supplanter.
Go in, and think on this.
When you can prove me wrong, then call me blind. (p. 38)

Oedipus, who comes to see for himself, not through the eyes of others, who comes to banish the dark and bring light, who hopes to save Thebes from the plague as he saved it from the Sphinx— Oedipus, as Hölderlin puts it, again in his remarkable “Remarks,” “entirely forgets himself, because he is entirely in the moment,” equating the present with the past and the past with the future. He thus comes to stand for a notion of presence that is as simple as it is untenable: the specious simplicity of the present indicative, the is. All of Oedipus’ fame, and his intelligence, rests on his having been able to answer the riddle of the Sphinx by providing a response in the form of a predication and a name: “man.” This is also how he responds to the predicament in which he finds himself: to rid Thebes of the plague, he seeks to find a culprit who can be banished. To explain the words of Tiresias, he again seeks to identify a conspirator, Creon. The other exists only as a possibility of identification, of judging, predicating, naming, and thus knowing. In Oedipus, according to Hölderlin, knowledge “has broken through its limits [seine Schranke durchrissen hat]” and stands for a moment, “intoxicated.” Indeed, one can argue that the redefinition and reimposition of precisely those limits constitutes the major dramatic moment in the play, the “caesura,” which, in Hölderlin’s reformulation of the Aristotelian reversal, interrupts and suspends the forward thrust of the “action,” but not necessarily in the sense of anagnrisis Aristotle had foreseen. This moment can be situated quite precisely. In response to Tiresias, who has just told him that “the killer you are seeking is yourself” (p. 36), Oedipus taunts the seer, asking him where he was when the Sphinx tormented Thebes, and then threatening him with “sharp punishment.” This threat elicits from Tiresias a response that begins as follows:

King though you are, one right—
To answer—makes us equal; and I claim it.
It is not you, but Loxias, whom I serve;
Nor am I bound to Creon’s patronage. (p. 37)

With these words, Tiresias begins his final, devastating prophecy, predicting suffering and scorn, blindness and exile for the tortured king. But his words also indicate a very different sort of thinking and of speaking from that which Oedipus has hitherto practiced. It is a thinking that has not “forgotten itself in the moment,” which is to say, in the present, not the thinking of a speaker who believes himself to be in control because transparent to himself, just as language seems transparent to him. Rather, what Tiresias insists on is that, despite their differences in status and power, before language both the seer and the king are equal, for both enjoy—and are subject to—the “right of response.” Tiresias, who cannot see with his eyes, is free from the hubris of a certain conception of sight, which thinks or believes that one can “see for oneself,” without the aid of others, without the intervention of “messengers” or of “media.” It is the hubris, in short, of a certain belief in the diaphany and docility of language. “I see your words, sir, tending/To no good end” (p. 34), Tiresias tells Oedipus at the beginning of their confrontation. The seer also insists that he “never should have come.” And yet he has no choice but to come, not simply because the king has summoned him, but because he must respond to the call of the other, no matter what the cost: “when wisdom brings no profit, / To be wise is to suffer” (p. 34).

The difference between Tiresias and Oedipus, then, could be summed up as follows: each is playing a part that has long been prescribed, recorded, already like a role in a play even before “the play” in which they appear was actually written. But whereas Oedipus thinks he is the self-made ruler, sovereign, the tyrannos over Thebes and over language, Tiresias knows that he takes his cues from another, that he serves “not you, but Loxias” (p. 37).

This “wisdom” concerning the right and indeed the responsibility to respond, to take one’s cue from the call of another who will never simply be present, opens the way to a different conception and, indeed, practice of theater, in which the medium reemerges as of decisive significance. That reemergence is marked by the importance of the response: Tiresias’s response to Oedipus, his insistence on the obligation of responding, but also the response of the Chorus to the confrontation between the two. It is a response that begins in the discursive mode of the tyrannos but moves gradually toward that of the seer:

From the Delphian rock the heavenly voice denounces
The shedder of blood, the doer of deeds unnamed.
Who is the man?
…
Out from the snowy dawn on high Parnassus
The order flashed, to hunt a man from his hiding.
And where is he?
…
Terrible things indeed has the prophet spoken.
We cannot believe, we cannot deny; all’s dark.
We fear, but we cannot see, what is before us. (p. 39)

The Chorus begins by asking questions of identity and, related, of place: “Who is the man?” And “Where is he?” To be identified, the culprit must be located. But if the perpetrator is both here and now, right in front of us, and yet in the place of the ruler, then the space and time involved are no longer the transparent conditions of identification but rather elements of a more ambiguous, more ambivalent dynamics: “We cannot believe, we cannot deny… . We fear, but we cannot see, what is before us.” What is “before” the Chorus is the split and shifting scene, or scenario, of a play that enacts, not simply the unity or totality of an “action” or a “life,” but also their irreducible disunity, in which “one” is always “more than one”—more and less, at once.

This is, perhaps, why the end of the play is not, here at least, the end of a life. Rather, it is the beginning of the end of a family, a lineage, perhaps of a city-state. It involves the self-mutilation of a body, and a move into exile. Oedipus, like the comic players in the etymological debate quoted by Aristotle, is banned from the city and begins to wander. It is against this background of an end that is more like an interruption than a conclusion that the concluding Chorus should be set:

Sons and daughters of Thebes, behold: this was Oedipus,
Greatest of men; he held the key to the deepest mysteries;
Was envied by all his fellowmen for his great prosperity;
Behold, what a full tide of misfortune swept over his head
Then learn that mortal man must always look to [episkopounta] the final day,
And call no one happy before he has crossed life’s border [terma tou biou] free from pain. (ll. 1524–30)

This anticipated ending of life, terma tou bios, is most definitely not the end of the tragedy, the end of the play. And yet precisely because the end of the play cannot meaningfully coincide with the end of the story, nor this with the end of a life, precisely in this noncoincidence of “ending” and “meaning,” a certain theater is involved. It is a theater marked by interruptions or, to once again recall the formula of Benjamin, by the “exposing of the present.” The present is ex-posed in being placed before “us,” before our eyes, but in a way that can never simply be seen, because it is never fully there. Rather, such presence is overdetermined by being situated in a space that is limited and yet never fully closed or defined. It must be seen, heard, commented upon, and responded to, yet without being entirely comprehended in any of those responses. The limits thus placed on comprehension determine the relation of theater to the “new media.”

Groupings

This relation can be approached via a short text of Benjamin entitled simply “Theater and Radio.” It has, however, an important subtitle: “On the Reciprocal Control of Their Pedagogical Work.” Benjamin’s opening remarks on the relationship between these two media sound quite familiar today, and yet also quite remote. He begins by noting that, despite the harmony suggested by his title (presumably by the “and”), the relation between the two media seems actually to be more competitive than collaborative, with radio clearly expanding its activities and theater just as clearly caught in an ever-growing crisis. Nevertheless, Benjamin insists on the possibility of their collaborating on “cooperative projects [Gemeinschaftsarbeit],” albeit strictly of a “pedagogical” nature. At this point his remarks touch on one of the most important distinctions and problems affecting any discussion of media today: its relation to the public and private—in particular, economic—spheres. Radio, at the time Benjamin was writing and in Europe until the last few decades, was exclusively owned and operated by the state. However much it served the interests of the ruling group, it still was considered a public service. In the last decades, this has radically changed, not just in Europe but globally, as the American model of privately owned media for profit has imposed itself everywhere.

No single historical development is of greater importance than this shift of the broadcast “media” from the realm of “public service” to that of private enterprise. Any discussion of the global impact of the media that does not begin and end with an interpretation of this fact, however variegated its effects may be in different areas and at different times, will not be able to do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon. As Adorno reminds his readers at the beginning of his essay “Prologue to Television”: “The social, technical, artistic aspects of television cannot be treated in isolation from one another.”8 Benjamin does not, to be sure, dwell on this point specifically in his short essay. But it is clear from his discussion of contemporary developments in Weimar Germany that he presupposes this aspect of radio. Benjamin thus mentions the various plays of Brecht that have been broadcast by the Southwest German Radio, as well as other educational programming, in the framework of Schulfunk : radio school. In this sense, the comparison between theater and radio is based on very specific and ostensibly very distant conditions. Curiously, however, if one substitutes “television,” specifically “cable television,” for radio, one discovers today, in Europe at least, a somewhat similar phenomenon beginning to emerge. In order to fill the possibilities of programming opened by cable and satellite transmission, the—now largely corporately funded—providers of television programs are forced to appeal to programming that under previous broadcast conditions, through the “Hertzian” airwaves, with their limited transmission space, would have been both impossible and unnecessary. One of the results of this programming deficit has been the creation of a number of channels entirely devoted to theater and/or music, including music theater, opera, and dance. Thus, some seventy years after Benjamin wrote his essay, once again theater and the media find themselves in uneasy collaboration, although this time the medium concerned is private cable television rather than public radio.

Benjamin’s point of departure, then, may not be as entirely out of date as it might have seemed just a few years ago. The arguments he elicits from it, in any case, are certainly no. They can be framed around a single word, a German word that I have already cited several times in connection with theater, but that is anything but easy to render in English. That word is Exponierung, which it would be convenient to translate simply as “exposure,” although that, as we shall shortly see, doesn’t quite fit the bill. Here are the two arguments. First, concerning radio:

With respect to theater, radio involves [stellt … dar] a technology that is not only newer but also more advanced, more audacious [exponiertere]. Unlike theater, it does not have a classical age to fall back on. The masses it grips are incomparably larger; finally, and above all, the material elements upon which its apparatus is based and the intellectual ones on which its productions are built are both most intimately connected with the interests of listeners.9

The term exponiert has to do with being “exposed,” but in a variety of senses: here, the term suggests risk, taking chances, uncertainties—all of which relate to the points Benjamin mentions: the absence of a “classical” tradition to fall back on, the size and therefore heterogeneity of the audience and hence of its “interests.” If the contemporary media have obviously never lost track of the size of their audience—since, in the perspective of private enterprise, precisely this size measures the value of the commodity the media have to “sell” to their advertisers, and hence, the value of the “media” themselves— what those media have only recently been compelled to acknowledge, in seeking to fill the programming slots made available by satellite and digital transmission, is the potential heterogeneity of that audience.

It remains to be seen to what extent the notion of Exponiertheit that Benjamin applied to radio in the twenties can be said to pertain to the media today, whether radio, television, or, more interestingly perhaps, the transformation of these two institutions currently taking place under the impact of the Internet. I will return to these questions in a moment. First let me continue retracing Benjamin’s arguments, which, as we have already begun to see, will allow us to pose, if not to ex-pose, a number of significant questions concerning the relation of the media to theater today.

Having established the clear-cut superiority of radio over theater in terms of the degree of “exposure” of the respective technologies concerned, Benjamin proceeds by asking two questions: “And what does theater, by contrast, have to throw into the balance? The employment of living beings 10—and nothing but. Perhaps the situation of theater in crisis can be unfolded most decisively from the following question: What does the employment of a living person in it tell us?” (pp. 584/774).

Benjamin once again brings us back to the Aristotelian bios: not, however, as the frame of the action imitated in the plot, but as the means through which that mimesis takes place. Benjamin thus poses, or exposes, the “living means” as a decisive constituent of the theatrical medium. Characteristically, his exposition is two-fold, reflecting what he calls a “regressive” and a “progressive” approach to theater: “The former in no way sees itself obliged to take notice of the crisis. For it, the harmony of the whole is and remains undiminished, and man its representative. It sees him at the height of his power, as Lord of Creation, as personality (even if he be the lowliest wage-laborer). His frame is today’s cultural sphere, and over it he holds sway in the name of the ‘human”’ (pp. 584/774).

No matter what specific content it assumes, such triumphant theater “always realizes itself as ‘symbol,’ ‘totality,’ and Gesamtkunstwerk.” It is a theater of education and cultivation (Bildung) as much as of entertainment and diversion (Zerstreuung), for, however opposed they may seem, they are “really only complementary manifestations.” However, Benjamin concludes, no matter how grandiose the means that such theater may have at its disposal, it is no match for what radio, film—and, we can add today, television—have to offer. In the light of contemporary Hollywood films, however, Benjamin’s evaluation must be modified: the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in the production and marketing of films today is in no way rendered obsolete by the technologies of the media, since the two have become increasingly complementary if not, indeed, from an economic standpoint symbiotic. The Gesamtkunstwerk is now realized not simply at the level of the “work” but—and in this, it is once again quite theatrical—at the level of its “execution,” which includes its distribution and reception as well as its performance and display, and thus also its transformation from one medium to another, from film to video to CD to t-shirt, moving from one geographical “zone” to another, all under the auspices of a coordinated marketing operation of global proportions.

At the center of this convergence of theater and media we find precisely the figure that Benjamin described, one that we also encounter at the beginning of Oedipus : that of “man” as self-made, as tyrannos, in command of others as he seems to be of himself. The “crisis” is there, but only as an obstacle to be surmounted, a riddle to be resolved through the magic name man. This privileged notion of “man,” of the “human,” links Oedipus to the onto-theological subject, the “personality” that dominates much of modern Western theater. It confirms the continuity of creation that Oedipus presupposes in passing precipitously from his all too general interpretation of the oracle’s words to an all too particular, all too personal search for a foreign culprit who can be banished.

It is precisely such a continuum, with its humanistic and onto-theological presuppositions, that the alternative conception of theater, the “progressive” conception that Benjamin now goes on to elaborate, calls into question. Such a theater, he emphasizes, relates differently to the techniques of the new media, radio and film. Instead of simply competing with them—or, given the necessary modifications we have introduced, of completing them—Brecht’s Epic Theater, which serves Benjamin as the model of a progressive theater, adopts and adapts the techniques of “montage” elaborated in film and radio—not from the perspective of simply outdoing competing media by creating ever-greater works, but in order to demonstrate, as directly as possible, the untenable character of such totalizing perspectives. The key word here, which Benjamin will develop in his essay “What Is Epic Theater?,” is interruption. The distinctive, defining trait of Epic Theater, he asserts, resides in the way “it brings the plot in its sequence to a standstill and thereby forces the listener to take a position with respect to that sequence, forces the actor to take a position with respect to his role” (pp. 584/775).

To fully understand the implications of Benjamin’s concept of “interruption” as applied to theater, it helps to recall where his terms come from. Benjamin describes the disposition of Epic Theater in adapting the techniques of the new media for its own ends as “sober” or “prosaic”—in German, nüchtern —a word that, more than any other, articulates “the tendency of [Hölderlin’s] late” works.11 This term and tendency is tied to a notion that is the forerunner of Benjamin’s use of interruption: the Hölderlinian notion of “caesura,” which Benjamin discusses in his early essay on Hölderlin’s poetry. Why “sobriety” in connection with “caesura”? Because the “caesura” marks a decisive interruption and limitation of exaltation and sublimity, in particular, of what Hölderlin, in his “Remarks,” calls the “tragic transport”:

The tragic transport is, namely, authentically empty, and the most unfettered. Through it, the rhythmic succession of representations, wherein the transport presents itself, that which in prosody is called the caesura, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic interruption, becomes necessary in order, namely, to counter the surging alternation of representations at its height, so that what then appears is no longer the alternation of representations but representation itself [die Vorstellung selbst].¹²

Here Hölderlin is thinking specifically of the confrontation between Oedipus and Tiresias, in which the forward thrust of Oedipus’ desire to find an external culprit is brought to a halt by the response of the seer. According to Hölderlin, the effect of this cut or caesura is, not just to suspend the rush to judgment, the “alternation of representations,” but to allow “representation itself [die Vorstellung selbst],” which Hölderlin also calls “the pure word,” to emerge. What is this “pure word,” this process of speaking, as distinguished from actualized speech, the process of representing (Vorstellung) rather than the alternation of concrete representations? In German, Vorstellung —literally, “placing-before”—signifies not just “idea” or mental “representation,” but also theatrical performance. And it is precisely this, the production of the theatrical process in its distinctive mediality— Vorstellung as representing before rather than simply as representation —that Benjamin associates with the “interruption” practiced by Brechtian theater. When it is suspended, identity comes up short, and it does so through “gesture.” Gesture interrupts action, which, as a movement of meaning, constituted for Aristotle the primary object of tragic representation. By interrupting this movement of fulfillment—and action almost always connotes fulfillment—gesture allows the representing to emerge as a process of setting-before.

Benjamin borrows this distinctively theatrical process of setting-before, of Vor-stellen, from Hölderlin and Brecht, yet he transforms it, as the following passage indicates: “To the dramatic Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] Epic Theater opposes the dramatic laboratory. It returns in a new way to the great and venerable resource of theater— exposing the present [die Exponierung des Anwesenden]. At the core of its experiments [Versuche] stands man in our crisis” (pp. 584/775).

There is a shift here, but also a surprise. The shift takes place in redefining the theatrical performance as a “placing before” (Vor-stellung), that is also an Exponierung, “exposing.” The surprise is the reintroduction of the notion of “man.” Was not “man” at the heart of the “reactionary” conception of theater from which Benjamin is distinguishing “Epic Theater”?

But is it the same “man”? Benjamin goes on to assert that this “man in our crisis” is also the man that is excluded, “eliminated from radio and film.” What sort of human being is this? It is a human being that is defined, first of all, as having been “sidelined [kaltgestellt]” by the prevailing media apparatus, to which it appears as little more than a “fifth wheel.” Epic Theater, however, far from attempting a nostalgic recovery of this relegated human being, submits it to a series of tests and examinations. It is this process that constitutes the return of theater to its sources: the exposing of the present, and not simply of “the audience,” those that are “present” for the performance. What is exposed by Epic Theater, and by theater generally, is the claim of humanity to be present to itself, in the guise of the autonomous individual.

That is why, when Benjamin proceeds to indicate how this reintroduction of “man in our crisis” is to function in Epic Theater, and presumably also in the new media, a certain repetition of the most “mechanical sort turns out to be essential: “What results is this: events can be changed, not at their high-points, not through virtue and decision, but only in their strictly habitual course, through reason and practice (Übung) . Out of the most minute elements of behavior patterns (Verhaltensweisen), to construct what Aristotelian dramaturgy called “acting” (handeln) —this is the sense of Epic Theater” (pp. 584/ 775).

Epic Theater thus exposes the “living” by stripping it of its heroic claims to sovereignty, claims that confound the divine with the human and that find their secular and dissimulated embodiment in the cult of “personality.” This “cult,” as Benjamin well understood, is by no means limited to Stalinism but is inculcated ever more globally by the media and the uses to which they are put in determinate social contexts. In this context, Benjamin’s explicit allusion to “Aristotelian dramaturgy” is precise and revealing. Aristotle, we recall, sought to separate the unity of an action, and even of a “life,” from the unity of character, even going so far as to assert that the tragic plot could consist of “actions without character but not character without action.” Benjamin revives this antipsychological approach of Aristotelian dramaturgy in attacking what might be called the “heroic” conception of action. At the same time, however, he changes the very notion of “action” and its relation to “life.” The nature of that change is already indicated in his use of the gerundive, Handeln, “acting,” rather than the more static noun Handlung, “action” or “plot.” By appealing to the present participle, Benjamin indicates that the “acting” which constitutes the true medium of theater is incompatible with the self-contained unity suggested by the present indicative. On the stage, no action is ever fully self-present. As acting, such “action” is ex-posed in and through the iterations of a present participle that can never be totalized. Such acting is less like heroic action than the “strictly habitual course” of instinctively performed repetitions that constitute conventional “behavior patterns” or, rather, ways of behaving, Verhaltensweisen. But “acting,” by redoubling such patterns, does not merely limit itself to repeating them identically: rather, in repeat ing them, it exposes them, which is to say, almost immobilizes them, in the “trembling contours” of singular gestures, gestures that, as Benjamin writes in “What Is Epic Theater?,” can themselves be cited.

In short, what emerges is a reiterative singularity that is no longer simply taken for granted as the transparent medium of identification, of recognition, but that becomes identifiable and recognizable only through the “trembling” of an irreducible alterity. This alterity is irreducible for two reasons. First, because it has been extrapolated and isolated from the ostensible continuity of a quasi-instinctive, habitual pattern, and second, because in this isolation and extrapolation it reveals itself to be transferable, movable, transformable—synonyms for what Benjamin designates as “citable.” This is why the “contours” of such a “gesture” must be described as “trembling”: their location is always the result of a tension that is both in-and ex-tensive, affecting both internal composition and external situation. Both are what they are, but at the same time both are radically alterable, could be entirely different. Because these possibilities can never be reduced to or measured in terms of any single set of realizations, the medium of this theater is more akin to a “laboratory” than to a “work,” at least in the sense of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a notion that marks the consummation of an aesthetic tradition that has always sought to subordinate the medium to its instantiation, precisely qua work. The work in this sense is held to instantiate the genre, and thus in this tradition the general always takes precedence over the singular. The interruptive gesture calls this precedence into question, even as it questions the notion of performance and of performativity, at least as teleological processes of fulfillment.

Benjamin concludes with a final remark that once again demonstrates the uncanny prescience of his approach to media. It has to do with the element that ties the medium of theater to the new media and that is perhaps characteristic of all media, as distinct from the genres of aesthetics. This element is situated in the aftermath of performance. From the viewpoint of traditional aesthetics, a work is considered to be self-contained and the effects it produces the result of its internal structure. Theater has from the very beginning been suspect because of its tendency to subordinate the work qua instantiation (of a genre) to the effects through which it constitutes itself, as it were, post facto. Significantly, the remark with which Benjamin concludes his brief text “Radio and Theater” has to do with the audience. In it, he sums up the relation of Epic Theater to conventional theater: “In this way Epic Theater distinguishes itself from the theater of convention: it replaces education [Bildung] with schooling [Schulung], distraction [Zerstreuung] by grouping [Gruppierung][… .] The education (of knowledge) is replaced by the schooling or training (of judgment)” (pp. 585/775–76).

This remark is particularly prescient for two reasons. First, because it demonstrates that the medium, whether theater, radio, television, or all of these, now unified and transformed through the Internet, produces its audience rather than simply reproducing the latter’s expectations. Therefore the analysis of a medium can never be limited to strictly internal relations within a work, a play, understood as the exemplification or instantiation of an equally self-contained system or set of rules. Rather, what distinguishes medium from work is precisely the complex interaction between production and reception, caught up in a movement that might be described as “circulation,” but only if we understand that such circulation never returns to its point of departure, never comes full circle.

This is why all attempts to justify a medium in terms of a given audience forget, overlook, or obscure the fact that the medium also contributes to the definition of that audience. It never does so in a vacuum, however, but always in the context of other media and “conventions.” To be sure, those “conventions” are never arbitrary or natural, because they are never self-identical or self-contained. Rather, they are the product of a process of iteration that endows them with a relative fixity but also leaves them open to change.

The second point that demonstrates Benjamin’s prescience with respect to the new media is suggested by the term he employs to describe the distinctive kind of synthesis or collection they produce. That term is, quite simply, grouping. Starting in his earliest writing, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” Benjamin calls for a concept to replace that of “synthesis,” a concept that could do justice to the alterity upon which all such “bringing together” depends and which it never simply eliminates or integrates.13 His use of the word grouping signals one such attempt. It suggests that the media, radio or theater, can bring together “addressees” or “receivers” in structures that are neither monolithic nor eternal and, above all, are never simply the expression of natural or intrinsic characteristics—such as race, gender, or ethnicity—but that are always determined by historically changeable situations, by “media” and “conventions,” by “conventions” that are media and by media that are structured “conventionally.” Such “groupings”—and not simply “groups”—are, Benjamin suggests held together by what he calls “interest.” Social, economic, and political interest, to be sure. But in the context he develops, the notion of “interest” has also to be taken as literally as possible. Groupings held together by interest are those whose “being” is situated in a space between: inter-esse. That space is like a “stage” or a “scene,” but temporally it also resembles a “scenario.” It is constituted by its relations to what it is not, to determinate possibilities that are never actualized or present as such. This is why it is more appropriate to speak of groupings than of groups, in the fixed and familiar sense of “interest groups.” These groupings of interest never finish getting their act together, taking their cue—like an actor playing a role, a part that will never be whole—from events that come from elsewhere.

The emergence of such “groupings of interest” is powerfully promoted by the “new media,” but it is by no means exclusive to them. It is rooted in a process that is endemic to “media” as such or, rather, to “media” as distinct from “works.” What is “new” is only—but this is hardly insignificant—that the new, electronic media have made manifest what was always at work in the “work” itself: namely, its mediality, just as alterity has always been “at work” in the constitution of identity. As Jacques Derrida has observed:

Private space [le chez-soi] has always been structured by the other, both by the host and by the menace of expropriation. It has been constituted only in the shadow of this menace. Nevertheless, we are witness today to a new expropriation, a deterritorialization, a delocalization, a disassociation of the political and the local, of the national, of the national-state and the local, that is so radical that the response, or rather the reaction, is to wish to be “at home [chez moi],” finally at home, with my family [avec les miens], with those closest to me [auprès de mes proches]. 14

In short, what is new today is an exacerbation of a conflict that is very old:

At every instant television introduces into my home [dans le chez moi] the elsewhere, the global. I am more isolated, more privatized than ever before, with my home being visited by a permanent intrusion, desired by me, of the other, of the foreigner, the far-off, of another language. I desire it and at the same time I close myself off with this alien, wishing to isolate myself with him and without him, wishing to be at home. The recourse to one’s own space [au chez soi], the return toward the chez-soi is all the more powerful, naturally, the more potent and violent the technological expropriation, its delocalization is.

Moreover it is not accurate to speak even of a response here, as though it were a question of a secondary reactivity that arrived to compensate, to react belatedly as it were—no, it is the same movement. It is part of the constitution of the proper and derives from the law of ex-appropriation of which I have spoken previously: no appropriation without the possibility of expropriation, without the confirmation of this possibility.15

What Derrida describes here as characteristic of the new media entails not so much a response to a provocation as a quasi-simultaneous movement of ambivalence, splitting the same, chez soi, in order to delimit it. Derrida’s generic term for this is iterability, the irreducible possibility of indefinite repetition as alteration, as a reproduction that constitutes what it repeats différance, both difference and deferral, both altered and alterable.

The challenge, of course, is to understand both how such iterability could be the structural condition of identity-formation and at the same time provide the basis of all historical specification, especially with respect to today’s “tele-technologies” and the “media” they entail.

Here the writings of Benjamin can be of great use. Benjamin’s identification, in the wake of Hölderlin, of the structuring effects of interruption, whether as tragic “caesura,” theatrical peripeteia, or cinematic “montage,” suggest that the “cut” does not simply destroy: in segmenting, it becomes a formative factor. But the “forms” that it parts with thereby “tremble” like an image projected upon a screen. And only a vision very different from that of King Oedipus will ever be able to see it.¹⁶

3Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality

3
Scene and Screen: Electronic Media and Theatricality