The Politics of New Media Theatre

Life®™

Gabriella Giannachi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134272617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The first book in the field to explore the links between theories of globalization and surveillance, bipower and biopolitics, performance and theatre, computer arts and politics, "The Politics of New Media Theatre" is an investigation into the political role played by the new media theatre. Gabriella Giannachi explores how new media arts constitute themselves as a radical political movement, and presents an analysis of both the role of virtuality in radical performance and politics in virtual and mixed reality practices. This outstanding new work offers an analysis of leading political, philosophical and artistic texts and artworks, and represents a milestone for anyone interested in new technologies, theatre and politics.

1
Introduction

Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed.

(Wark, 2004:001)

The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life^®™ offers the reader a series of lenses focused on different but interrelated spheres of nature and society. The direction is that of a descent, from global to city, from body to animals, plants, and, finally, cells. The fact that there is a descent is, however, not metaphorical of a fall. Quite the contrary, this book suggests that the solution to the global concerns of our times can be found in and through cellular models.

The book begins with a study of globalisation, the largest and most comprehensive filter through which to analyse the contemporary. Globalisation is treated here not only as a phase in the development of capitalism but as a framework for social, political and cultural life. Globalisation operates primarily at the level of information. This is the first thesis of the book, that the information society performs globalisation.

The spectacle of globalisation is generated in and by our ‘global’ cities, acting as broadcasters of information, always monitoring, informing, disseminating, connecting different world g(l)ocalities. By observing the ways in which global cities layer facts and fictions, façades and screens, space and place, we may not only witness how globalisation continuously reconstitutes itself as a hybrid of materiality and virtuality, product and brand, live and mediated, but also see how we ourselves continuously operate in these tensions. Thus the second thesis of the book is that because fictions, as well as facts, determine our economic, political and cultural performance, the politics of information is also an aesthetics.

Where the principal producer of globalisation is the global city region, the most significant sphere within which globalisation operates is that of the body. Following the decoding of the human genome, the body, whether human or animal, is increasingly equated to and treated as information. Because of this, the body is not only post-human but also trans-human. Part animal, part plant, part object, this body becomes at once an instrument and a producer of globalisation. Thus the third thesis of this book is that the interconnected, networked, post-human body is both the industry that produces globalisation as well as its principal consumer.

The fundamental level at which globalisation operates on the body is cellular. It is at this level, at the level of molecules and particles, that it determines what and who we are. But the cell is not only the principal means by which globalisation intervenes onto the body, it is also the fundamental site from which to operate an info-politics. It is crucial that info-politics absorbs a biopolitics so that the ongoing transformation of life into life^®™ is a democratic, open and an internationally lawful process. Cellular practice is where information and politics coincide. The fourth thesis of this volume is that cellular practice is at the heart of info-politics.

The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life^®™ rests on three fundamental axioms. The first one is that technology is material, literary and social. This axiom is derived from the seminal study Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1989; [1985]), where Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, with reference to Robert Boyle’s air-pump, demonstrate that there are three technologies: a material technology, ‘embedded in the construction and operation of the air-pump’; a literary technology, ‘by means of which the phenomena produced by the pump were made known to those who were not direct witnesses’; and a social technology, ‘that incorporated the conventions experimental philosophers should use in dealing with each other and considering knowledge-claims’. Literary and social practices, Shapin and Schaffer demonstrate, as well as machines, ‘are knowledge-producing tools’ (ibid.: 25, added emphasis). Each of these incorporates the others. This means that technology, culture and society do not operate separately but are intrinsically embedded in one another. Technology is not only grounded in materiality but also in discourse, fiction and society. By dislodging technology at the material and literary levels, the artists described in this monograph are therefore able to effect technology as a means of social and political interaction.

The second axiom at the heart of this book is that artistic performance impacts on economic performance. This position is derived from Jon McKenzie’s fascinating Perform or Else (2001) in which the author draws attention to the utilisation of the concept and practice of performance in management, art and technological innovation. In his study, McKenzie argues that performance is ‘an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge’ (ibid.: 194) and that ‘individuals work and live only to enact performances dictated by others, performances normalized according to the dictates of expediency and efficiency’ (ibid.: 160). Performance, McKenzie suggests, ‘functions as a formation of power: as a mode of domination’, the performance principle therefore ‘extends a certain technological rationality and economic alienation into all social organizations and, through mass culture, into leisure activities and private life’ (ibid.: 161). Within this framework the ‘power of performance operates through social stratifications such as gender, sexual, ethnic, racial, class, and religious identity, where blocks of performatives and performances constitute different subject positions within different language games’ (ibid.: 181). By operating through performance, the practices presented in this book function at a ‘nonreproductive’, ontologically unstable level (see Phelan, 1993:148). This suggests that within performance there is a non-necessary, non-reproducible, flickering surplus which, however unstable, can effect real social and political change precisely because of this ontological hybridity.

This position, after Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), is also inspired by Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1995; [1967]) in which the author claims that ‘[t]he whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation’ (ibid.: 12, added emphasis). The spectacle, Debord suggests, ‘is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image’ (ibid.: 24, original emphasis); ‘it is the world of commodity ruling over all lived experience’ (ibid.: 26) so that ‘commodities are now all that there is to see’ (ibid.: 29, original emphasis). At the level of the spectacle, the world of art and that of economics resolve into one another causing an excess, capital or surplus of information. This excess is where art is politically and aesthetically charged.

The third axiom of this book is written after Nick Kaye’s influential Site-Specific Art (2000). Here Kaye argues that site-specificity

arises in a disturbance of the opposition between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ spaces, in a dialectical relationship between the work and its site, or in a questioning of the art object’s material integrity, so the very possibility of establishing a work’s proper location is called into question.

(ibid.: 183)

The site-specificity of the practices presented in his book, Kaye notes, ‘arises precisely in uncertainties over the borders and limits of work and site’ (ibid.: 215). The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life^®™ consists of a series of explorations of multiple and dislocated practices and knowledges. These are over-laid by one another, creating imperfect but on occasion cumulative intertextualities. The superimposition intends to identify excesses, capitals, as well as zones of difference. Thus the dislocative, multiple, fragmented, ambivalent and especially uncertain qualities of the aesthetics presented in this study constitute the unstable grounds within which processes of Verfremdung rather than of Entfremdung are allowed to occur. These are the sites for a post-modern politics. Thus the third axiom of the book is that uncertainty is at the root of the politics of knowledge.

The Politics of New Media Theatre: Life^®™ was written in the attempt to engage with a number of seemingly irreconcilable tensions. These tensions map over the two fundamental fields that I discuss in this study, namely nature and society. These two fields are of course profoundly embedded in one another and in many ways this book represents an attempt to argue that only at the levels of nature and society can politics have a longlasting and global impact.

The first tension explored in this book is that between ecology and postmodern cultural history. According to ecology, nature is an objective and tangible reality that urgently needs to be safeguarded from destabilising human intervention. According to post-modern cultural history, nature is a cultural construction whose definition and parameters vary through history and geographical boundaries. According to ecology, nature needs preservation. According to cultural history, nature, by definition, implies change. According to ecology there are effective strategies that must be employed in order to maintain nature ‘as it is’. According to cultural history, the concept and practice of nature develop with and through progress to include what in its original definition it was not – the technological, the genetically modified, the other. But where does this leave an ecological practice that also has a post-modern cultural history? What of ecological ethics and post-modern cultural discourse?

As suggested in the introduction to Futurenatural (1996), the concept of nature is fragile and unstable precisely because it is a ‘product of discourse’ while its referent represents a ‘subject of politics’ (Robertson et al., 1996:1). Nature resides both in discourse and in practice. It can be both conceptualised and performed (see Szerszynski et al., 2003; and Giannachi and Stewart, 2005). While, as in Kate Soper’s words, nature is being constituted ‘in the chain of the signifier’, it also represents the ‘independent domain of intrinsic value, truth or authenticity’ (in Robertson et al., 1996:22) that is at the heart of the political debate around ecological and environmental welfare. This means that nature must be read as both post-cultural and non-cultural, as both the product of discourse and what is as yet outside it. Because nature, including technologically reproduced nature, is in discourse, by performing at the level of the sign, of information, it is possible to modify the economic and biological performances of nature. This position allows for an ecological and post-modern politics of nature that affects not only nature but also discourse, again, technologically, literarily and socially. For this position I am of course indebted to Bruno Latour’s decisive findings in Politics of Nature (2004), which suggest the possibility of a multinaturalism in which the theatres of nature and society are no longer separate.

The second tension explored owes much to Umberto Eco’s Apocalittici e Integrati (1964), and deals with the construction of societas within nature. The focus here is on the collapse of history, politics and form out of which a new biotechnologically assisted ‘nature’ is emerging. Jean Baudrillard claims that ‘in the case of the Gulf War as in the case of the events in Eastern Europe, we are no longer dealing with “historical events” but with places of collapse’ (1995:70). This collapse, of nation states, ideologies, welfare systems, society, party politics, artistic form and content, is an unquestionable feature of our age. Yet out of this collapse, of the ruins of our history, new structures are emerging. So while Francis Fukuyama famously called for The End of History (1992), barely a decade later he himself was forced to revisit his provocative claim to argue that biotechnology, the very science through which it is possible to recombine, engineer and manipulate DNA and other molecules, currently produces such tangible effects for world politics (2002:19) that history can no longer be considered dead. Arguing now that as long as there is science there is history (ibid.: xi ff.), Fukuyama identifies ‘social control’ (ibid.: 53) as a determining factor in contemporary politics and predicts that genetic inequality will become ‘one of the chief controversies of twenty-first century politics’ (ibid.: 160). His question: ‘[w]hat will happen to political rights once we are able to, in effect, breed some people with saddles on their backs, and others with boots and spurs?’ (ibid.: 10) is of crucial consequence to the thinking behind this book. The societas of nature, inclusive of human, trans-human and non-human beings, must become the theatre of info-politics.

Far from witnessing the end of history, and therewith, the end of politics, I note what has been described as the growing politicisation of the homo economicus (Rosenkrands in van de Donk et al., 2004:59). This politicisation is a necessary consequence to the growing influence that this homo economicus, the finest product of capitalist evolution, now has over nature and society. Jeremy Rifkin is a point of influence here. Rifkin observes the necessity for a powerful and new social and political current: ‘[a]t the epicentre is a technology revolution unmatched in all of history in its power to make ourselves, our institutions, and our world.’ Here Rifkin identifies technology, in all its complex ramifications, as responsible for the fundamental changes to society and nature that define our age. ‘Before our eyes’, Rifkin proposes, ‘lies an uncharted new landscape whose contours are being shaped in thousands of biotechnology laboratories in universities, government agencies, and corporations around the world.’ The consequences of these changes, Rifkin concludes, ‘for society and future generations are likely to be enormous’ (1998:1). This analysis is crucial. Although technology operates at the level of the modification, augmentation and virtualisation of the real, its most significant and disturbing effect manifests itself at the level of nature. Within the information society, it is the nature of society as well as the societas of nature that is at stake.

Rifkin shows how a ‘handful of global corporations, research institutions, and governments could hold patents on virtually all 100,000 genes that make up the blueprints of the human race, as well as the cells, organs, and tissues that comprise the human body’. ‘They also’, he notes, ‘own similar patents on tens of thousands of micro-organisms, plants, and animals, allowing them unprecedented power to dictate the terms by which we and future generations will live our lives’ (ibid.: 2). This marks the beginning of an era in which we will witness the exploitation of genetic resources for specific economic ends, the awarding of patents as an incentive to the marketplace for the exploitation of these resources, ‘the wholesale reseeding of the earth’s biosphere with a laboratory-conceived second Genesis’, the ‘whole...