User:Max Dovey/Reading Writing Research Methodologies/maxsection2
Section 2: Theoretical Context
Key questions: Why am I looking at these two authors?
I have chosen these two writers because of there discussion on the values of live performance and because I am interested in exposing a gap in their disagreement on the subject. Because Auslander discuses such a wide range of popular culture performance genres and Peggy Phelan just mentions some performance art works that support her understanding of live, I will argue there is a area of production that encorporates the technological mediation (described by Auslander) to produce the ontology of live described by Phelan.
In doing so the current debate in regards to how technology commodifies performance and weather it can be seen as ontologically distinctive to mass media can be situated with a body of work that uses technology to produce the live aura of performance and challenge the current debate.
These two writers are interesting because to a certain degree they agree on the importance and value of live performance but conflict in regar
ds to the how technology affects performance. I will summarize the two authors main viewpoints for this benefit of my argument and then look at particular contested subjects to apply to my body of work.
Why is it important now?
The question that lead me to write this thesis has been to understand how the use of mobile phones and digital computing is affecting live performance. Within the performance events I work in I noticed a trend of audiences handing in their mobile phones and being forced to make a physical detachment between themselves and the technological device. What was interesting to me about this was the reaction, I spoke with over 50 visitors to Back to The Future (a show I was performing in with Secret Cinema) who all were happy to have some time away from their mobile devices, one person even said ‘I wish life could be like that all the time’(source).
The gesture of handing in a mobile device to encourage yourself to participate in the present moment and in the same time and space as everybody else underlines the distinctive properties of performance that is threatened by technology.
It also seemed like the influx of digital communication and networked technology increases the cultural value of live and the importance of performance.
This has been noted in most performance fields from Music tours doubling from 1993 to 2005 to (another example). But it would be an over simplification to equate more computers/ digital communication to a higher demand for live performance. Firstly because it feels like repeating a fairly consistent argument that has been made since the 50s by people like _ arguing the negative effects of computers on physical.
And then it falls into the binary of digital media being artificial and live performance being the authentic real. In the current landscape performance has become intergrated with the digital and as the body converges with microchips and data this objective distinction is no longer valid.
Performance is altered within the space of technology and as technology changes performance adapts with it.
It is important to review the claims made by these two writers because the development and ubiquity of computers and mobile devices changes the scope of the current argument. I am particularly interested in how performance art has responded to digital media and networked communication, retaining the authentic live principles through mediating devices.
The debate currently is stuck on disputing ‘playback’ media, technological representation that occurs post-event and is a medium to show after the performance takes place.
Although Auslander takes into account video streaming at live concerts I think there is a lot more interesting examples of applied ‘real-time’ technology in performance art. The works that I present challenge how technology is used to communicate a performance within the live event and demonstrate how performance art has tested the limits of its own ontology with its use of technology.
Terminology / background
It is important for both myself and the reader to go through some terms that are frequently used in by the writers I am looking at and how we should think about those terms in this context.
‘Authenticity’
The first term is the way in which the word ‘authenticity’, that Walter Benjamin introduced in ‘Art in the age of technical reproducibility’ (1936) is applied within this discussion. Benjamin says that authenticity is based on the ‘premise of the original’ (xx) and that it is ‘outside of technical reproducibility’(xx). This logic retains a theory that the authentic, or also referred to as ‘The aura’, is physically insulated within a time and place that cannot be recreated. Benjamin specifically talks about the performance of an actor and how the ‘aura is tied to his presence’ (xx). When a camera records this performance ‘the aura that envelopes the actor vanishes’(xx). According to Benjamin, this is the result of a technological representation and there can be no comparison between authentic original performance where the aura exerts itself between actor and spectator and a performance for camera in which this aura vanishes.
‘Liveness’
The first word of the title and a words that seems like Auslander has potentially invented to support his argument.
What I understand is that liveness refers to the quality of a performance.
A helpful definition from the Dead Media archive that also is analyzing Auslanders argument:
Liveness: The quality or condition (of an event, performance, etc.) of being heard, watched, or broadcast at the time of occurrence.
And can also be explained by its formal properties : Liveness is the absence of writing. It is encoding and decoding happening simultaneously.
‘Mediatization’
Another commonly used term by Auslander is ‘mediatization’ that is used to describe a cultural object produced from or within mass media or mass technology. It can be traced to the post-modern theorist Jean Baurdrillard who identifies it as
‘What is mediatized is not what comes off the daily press, out of the tube, or on the radio: it is what is reinterpreted by the sign form, articulated into models, and adminsted by the code’ (1981:175-6)
This rather open ended description makes any technological medium illegible as a object of mediatization. The appropriation of this term implies a postmodernist perspective about the ubiquity of technology that is far from neutral and should be remembered when considering Auslander’s views.
What are there views?
Phillip Auslander
Phillip Auslander’s ‘Liveness: performance in a mediatized culture’ has been a key text to performance theorists and culture studies as it examines how technology has co-opted live performance. The book looks at performance in a broad sense from rock concerts to legal trials to demonstrate how media (or electronic reproduction) has invaded performance to the point that they are both ‘mutually interdependent’. (xx)
This situation represents the historical triumph of mechanical (and electronic) reproduction (what i am calling mediatiaztion) and Benjamin implies: aura, authenticity, and cult value have been definitively routed, even in live performance, the site that once seemed the last refuge of the auratic' (2005: 70)
Auslander uses this concept of authenticity to propose that all modes are performance are now mediated to an extent and that this traditional distinction of authenticity between performance and technology has now converged to a point where they have become indistinguishable.
‘Neither is auratic or authentic the live performance is just one more reproduction of a given text or one more reproducible text’ (55:2005)
In his very practical analysis Auslander wants to dispel vague notions of there being something unique or unexplainable about the live moment and firmly situate live performance within a media epistemology.
Live performance now often incorporates mediatization to the degree that the live event itself is a produce of media technologies. (2005: 40)
Problems with Auslander
Too General
In Auslander’s ‘one size fits all’ he looks predominantly at performance in mass media (Live TV, Rock Concerts etc) so that the technology used is already part of an apparatus, a broadcast medium designed to transmit performance. But when he is talking about the authenticity of rock bands from The Beatles recordings to Duran Duran lip syncying, we are unable to see why that performance would be exempt from the tactics of mass media.
Auslander makes some broad claims that do help us understand the how technology has altered and even produced this sense of ‘live’ being of something of value, both physically and culturally. But his use of the term ‘mediatized’ for all things electronic is irrational at times he says that the microphone and speaker are a technological reproduction of an ‘original (live) acoustic event.’ (2005:25)
All serve within the economy of reproduction – doesn’t everything?
No interesting performance art works
What I will focus on in chapter 3 is adapting Auslander’s argument to work where the performer works with the constraints of technology and by rendering the process of mediation visible the technology produces an authenticity that is distinct from that of the performer.
Peggy Phelan
Peggy Phelan is one of the founders of performance studies International and wrote ‘Unmarked: The politics of performance’ in 1993. She employs psychoanalysis and feminist theory to describe how representation affects the real. Phelan says she is looking for a ‘theory of value’ that is created through the performative act that is rendered (in)visible by its very disappearance of being. ‘Unmarked’ describes performance as an act of absence and disappearance and its unique ontology that ‘performance’s only life is in the present’(1993:146) .
“Performance’s being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance “ (1993:159)
It is a intriguing position, that there is something other that only manifests through the ephemerality of performance that is disappearing into the past. This notion I will draw on later to look at the cultural value of time and its importance in performance.
I want to specifically look at chapter 7: ‘The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction’ as this is where Phelan summarizes her view on the relationship between performance and technical reproduction. Phelan describes performance as under ‘pressure to succumb to the laws of the reproductive economy’ (1993:159). That performance’s distinctive quality of ‘now’ is infiltrated by technological reproduction that attempts to capture and reproduce this. I want pay particular attention to the way Phelan describes the temporal vulnerability of performance that it ‘plunges into visibility-in a manically charged present-and disappears into memory’(1993:161) and later on in chapter 3 will discuss how the importance of now is a relic for both performance and communication technology.
To describe the ontology that Phelan presents, is that of time passing and temporal disappearance that is created through physical presence and unrecorded bodily acts.
“Performance art implicates the real through the presence of living bodies” (1993:148) These understandings open up further questions such as What happens when this presence is mediated through telepresence or ones performance is seen through the continual changing and disappearing frames of television or a digital video stream?
Before looking at specific contested issues and similartities between Auslander and Phelan perhaps it may help to look at why the two authors have disputed when Auslander is generally looking at live within a media studies perspective whilst Phelan is taking a psychoanalytic, gender studies approach to performance.
Conflict 1 – performance art is outside of the economics of reproduction"'
Auslander claims that the ontology of Performance cannot exist outside of capitalist discourse and that it is naïve for Phelan to defend performance art as a distinct or ‘site of resistance’(xx). In regards to documentation of performance art, I agree with this statement, however when we talk about performance art’s use of technology in the work I don’t think is that transparent. They both talk about the use of video in Angelika Festa’s work (XX). Auslander says that the use of video in the performance piece erodes the authenticity of live performance that Phelan is trying to defend. This is where Auslander’s all encompassing definition that permits the use of any technology as a mediatization and therefore a product of mass media capitalism becomes inadequate. Something I want to look at later is how the now-ness of live performance has become the pursuit of networked technologies and weather the present resists or thrives of commodification or technological mediation?
Agreement –
Its helpful to look at where the are commonalities in their arguments to progress this discussion. Phelan does not explicitly use the word ‘liveness’ but she talks about disappearance being fundamental to the ontology of performance and how as soon as it is written or recorded it becomes something else. Liveness can be thought of as the absence of writing; it is something that is encoding and decoding simultaneously and continually being lost in the agency of time. They both agree on the formal properties of live and how it is transmitted and received but differ how technology affects the quality of live.
Liveness is what it is not and peggy phelan disappearance. Both depend on the knowledge of the alternative to bring into existence.
Phelan
‘For me, live performance remains an interesting art form because it contains the possibility of both the actor and the spectator becoming transformed during the event’s unfolding’
and my response is that live performance is an interesting art form because the technology can contain the possibility for the actor and the spectators experience to be transformed during the events unfolding.
Performance’s independence from mass reproduction, technologically, economically, and linguistically, is its greatest strength (1993:162)
- What has changed? Has anything significantly changed since they were written?
- What do they miss/ not address?
- What do I want to summarize from them?
Summary:
Some contemporary case studies that demonstrate the importance of live in mass culture but also the tension between the physical and technological in live performance. By looking at performances artists application of technology in the realization of live work I will show how the two views of Auslander and Phelan have enfolded and enhanced each other.
Theoretical context (summary)
The theoretical context I will use to analyze these performance works is currently situated between arguments put forward by Phillip Auslander in ‘Liveness’ (1999) and Peggy Phelan’s ‘Unmarked’ (1993). Although different in opinion they both apply ideas from Walter Benjamin’s ‘Art in the age of technical reproducibility’. Auslander applies Benjamin’s theory of reproducibility to all performance genres that use a technology in the production of the event. He does this to stake his claim that ‘all performance is now mediatized’ and that live performance serves mediatization.
His definition of mediatizaton is intentionally vague to support his general analysis of all performance and its complex relationship with technological and the media. The important aspect of his views for my discussion is his views on performance art, automated chatbots and his discussion with Peggy Phelan.
Peggy Phelan opposes Aulander’s view that all performance serves to be mediatized and argues that it is ontologically distinctive to any technological reproduction.
Phelan - ‘performances only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of reproductions of representation, once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’ (Phelan: 41)
I will address what Phelan means and demonstrate how some performance artists have subverted and experimented with the idea of presence in performance with technology. This will allow for a greater understanding of Auslander’s view within a performance art history, rather than the current debate that opposes each other, I see both views as supporting one another in some regard.