Mediatized Dramaturgy

The Evolution of Plays in the Media Age

Seda Ilter, Enoch Brater, Mark Taylor-Batty

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350031166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theatergeschichte & -kritik

This study explores the ways in which playtexts have evolved in relation to the sociocultural and cognitive conditions of a mediatized age, and how they, in form and content, respond to this environment and open up new critical possibilities in text and performance. The study combines theatre and media theory through the innovative concept of 'mediatized dramaturgy' and offers conceptual reflections on the ways in which a playtext negotiates the new reality of contemporary culture. The book scrutinizes the form of playtexts and works through the exchange between text and performance by exploring contemporary works such as Simon Stephens's Pornography, Caryl Churchill's Love and Information, and David Greig's The Yes/No Plays, and their selected productions. Offering a pioneering intervention that expands discussions about the mediatization of theatre, and new playwriting, Mediatized Dramaturgy proposes areas for discussion that appeal to researchers, audiences and practitioners with an interest in the sub-field of media and performance, and British and North American drama and theatre. Media technologies and their socio-cultural repercussions have increasingly influenced theatre, particularly since the ubiquitous prevalence of digital technologies from the 1990s onwards. Consequently, new modes such as digital and intermedial theatre have come to populate and transform the theatre practice and scholarship. In this changing theatrical landscape, what has happened to plays in the historically text-oriented British theatre? How has playtext changed in an age of theatre marked by mediatization and its possibilities?

1

Theorizing mediatized dramaturgy

We live in a media-saturated culture: we shop online; track our nutrition, movements and sleep with wearable tech; communicate ideas and opinions on global social media networks; consent to our privacy being violated by multinational corporations and political actors, while, at the same time, participating in social activism against dataveillance on media platforms funded or owned by these same corporations. Theorizing this culture, Neil Postman puts forward an important argument:

[T]echnological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. [. . .] One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. (1992: 18)

Media’s ecology is deeply connected to sociocultural and political ecology: as new technologies emerge and enter our lives, a consequential change occurs in the social, cultural, economic and political spheres of society. As Postman illustrates, fifty years after the invention of the printing press, ‘we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe’ (1992: 18). Likewise, in today’s fast, hyper-connected and digitized world, everything has changed: from our everyday lives and relationships to our sense of reality and self-expression. We now live, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, ‘in the insubstantial, instantaneous time of the software world’ (2012: 118). New realities such as the global capitalist culture industry characterized by data mining and information manipulation prevail.

Playtexts, stamped with the structures and circumstances of the culture that they are produced in, have undergone intriguing changes. As with the stage, which is populated by current technologies and aesthetically and conceptually influenced by the changing media ecology, playtexts speak of a world and consciousness shaped by media technologies and the societal, cultural transformation they have engendered. However, when we consider the relationship between the theatre and media, we often focus on the audio, visual, tactile and virtual aspects. We think about the use of multiple projections or screens on stage as shrewdly deployed in Tonnelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies (2007) and the Builders Association’s Super Vision (2005–6), or the inventive use of sound technology in such works as the Fuel Theatre’s Ring (2015) and Complicité’s The Encounter (2015). Considering the increasing influence and presence of technologies and media culture in theatre, one wonders where playtexts sit. How has dramatic writing evolved, and how does it make meaning in relation to a media-saturated world and theatre landscape? How do playtexts accommodate, speak to and raise critical awareness about the impact of media on our lives?

This chapter provides the theoretical background for the analysis of these questions throughout Mediatized Dramaturgy. To this end, first I define and outline the notion of mediatization – the sociocultural backdrop that generates media-derived structures, language and meaning in contemporary theatre and dramatic writing. Second, I present an overview of how the increasing presence of media technologies in everyday life has affected the theatre scene, and relatedly, how critical interest in this subject, which has often separated media and text, has left the question of dramatic writing under-examined.

Mediatization: Background

The technological has always been at the core of the human evolutionary process. Technology and media are not ‘something external and contingent, but rather an essential – indeed, the essential – dimension of the human’ (Hansen 2010: 65; emphasis in original). Media has never been a neutral force: specific technologies have long-shaped social organization, cognitive patterning, and cultural interaction and values. Today, we live in an age and culture where media is increasingly prevalent, affecting aspects of our lives, consciousness, selfhood, social relations and sociopolitical institutions. We have instant access to information via search engines; we record and digitize our memories on Instagram; we follow news and, at least to a certain extent, affect sociopolitical dynamics by releasing news via social networking services such as Twitter. In this sociocultural setting, ‘characterized by diverse, intersecting, and still-evolving forms of multimodal, interactive, networked forms of communication’ (Livingstone 2009b: ix), media is not an accumulation of different technological mediums, separate from cultural and other social institutions; nor is it supplemental to the content it carries and communicates. Instead, media is a cultural technology, a social institution and an ideological mechanism that operates in its own right and affects the workings of society, individuals’ lives and consciousness. It is not merely and narrowly a technical body or system, but the perceptual and ontological condition and the sociocultural and epistemological environment we live in. Media technologies do not merely determine our situation, as Friedrich Kittler initially suggested, but rather, as Mark Hansen and William J. T. Mitchell put it, they ‘are our situation’ (Mitchell and Hansen 2010: xxii). The changing social and cognitive landscape since the late twentieth century and predominantly since the early twenty-first century – a process that marks the emergence and widespread use of digital media technologies and platforms such as personal computers, the internet and social media – has led to the search for frameworks through which to understand the contemporary world and the changes media has exerted on society. The concept of mediatization can be usefully applied to the theatre and dramaturgy in order to tackle the question of how contemporary plays have evolved in our media-saturated culture and theatre.

Let’s briefly consider the Germanic roots of the term Mediatisierung to clarify its complex meaning in English. The German use of ‘mediatization’ dates back to the nineteenth century when ‘the states of the Holy Roman Empire were “mediatized” by Napoleon [as] Napoleon interposed between the miscellany of independent cities, the princes and the archbishops who previously answered only to the Emperor, an intermediate level of territorial authorities’ (Livingstone 2009a: 6). The term, used in a governmental context, may appear irrelevant to its current use. However, Sonia Livingstone argues that, similar to the way ‘the rule of the annexed state keeps his title’ (Livingstone 2009a: 6), the media ‘not only get between any and all participants in society but also, crucially, annex a sizeable part of their power by mediatizing – subordinating – the previously powerful authorities of government, education, the church, the family’ (Livingstone 2009a: 6). The increasing power of media over other societal and cultural institutions is an important aspect of mediatization.

The contemporary use of the term Mediatisierung simply refers to social change in relation to media’s prevalent influence and presence, as well as to the interconnections between media and other social systems and institutions. Some media scholars and sociologists use terms such as ‘medialization’¹ and ‘mediazation’² to denote the influence of media on social and cultural conditions. However, alongside mediatization, ‘mediation’ is the most commonly used notion to characterize media influence in the contemporary world. These two notions can be confused or considered to be the same. Nevertheless, media theorists such as Stig Hjarvard, Sonia Livingstone, Gianpietro Mazzoleni and Winfried Schulz suggest mediatization differs from, though overlaps with, the broader concept of mediation. Briefly, mediation refers to ‘any acts of intervening, conveying, or reconciling between different actors, collectives, or institutions’ (Mazzoleni and Schulz 2010: 249). By contrast, mediatization refers to a process whereby media move beyond simply mediating in the sense of ‘getting in between’ (Livingstone 2009b: ix–x); instead, they ‘alter the historical possibilities for human communication by reshaping relations not just among media organizations and their publics but among all social institutions – government, commerce, family, church, and so forth’ (Livingstone 2009b). Mediatization, therefore, implies a social phenomenon exerted on contemporary society and individuals by media.

It is also important to touch on the idea of ‘media logic’ at this point since it is fundamental to our understanding of mediatization as a current social, cultural and cognitive experience. David Altheide and Robert Snow’s understanding of media as a social force proposes that media has a unique logic of its own which shapes social life and other social institutions (1979: 9, 12). Media logic, they argue, is ‘a way of “seeing” and of interpreting social affairs’ (1979: 9); it suggests a framework or process through which media presents and shares information and, accordingly, influences the sociocultural organization and perceptual and cognitive patterning. ‘Form’ in Altheide and Snow’s sense, borrowing from Georg Simmel’s definition of form – ‘a process through which reality is rendered intelligible’ (1979: 15) – is not a structure per se, but ‘a processual framework through which social action occurs’ (1979: 15). Media logic, in this regard, comprises a single, coherent framework underpinning all media forms and the social and cultural institutions that are revolutionized through media. In response to Altheide and Snow’s idea, modern sociologists and media theorists such as Knut Lundby, Stig Hjarvard and Friedrich Krotz argue that ‘it is not viable to speak of an overall media logic [and] it is necessary to specify how various media capabilities are applied in various patterns of social interaction’ (Lundby 2009a: 117). Critiquing the idea of a unified, singular mechanism structuring all media, Nick Couldry, among others, argues that the roles the media take on to transform social and cultural spheres are ‘too heterogeneous to be reduced to a single “media logic”’ (2008: 378) and should not be treated ‘as if they all operated in one direction, at the same speed, through a parallel mechanism and according to the same calculus of probability’ (2008: 378). There is no single media logic independent of various cultural and societal contexts and history.

For example, if we consider the workings of mass media such as national newspapers or television in Turkey, where there has been an increasing filtering of news due to state censorship, as opposed to how mass media operates in the UK, we would see that the idea of a single stable media logic is unconvincing. Thus, there are diverse instances of media logic at work in different societies and times. This, however, does not mean that there is no shared media logic at all. In contemporary late capitalist societies, the current media logic often abides by and works through capitalist ideological discourse and perspective. This common logic is important while considering contemporary plays since it emerges as a significant element in their thematic and aesthetic compositions. For example, in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, we hear the neoliberal voice of advertisements. In Christopher Brett Bailey’s THWD and Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information the aesthetics of speed speak to the fast-paced consumer culture. Building on the origins and some important foundational aspects of mediatization that I introduced here, the following section defines the notion in detail.

Mediatization: Theorizing the contemporary

Technogenesis – the idea that human beings co-evolve with the tools and technologies they have created – is a processual story. Media theorists and sociologists such as Friedrich Krotz, John B. Thompson and Stig Hjarvard claim that mediatization points to a ‘long-lasting process, whereby social and cultural institutions and modes of interaction are changed as a consequence of the growth of the media’s influence’ (Hjarvard 2013: 19). Thompson argues that the origins of mediasation (similar to the processes of mediatization) date back to early modernity, to the printing press and the media organizations founded after Gutenberg’s invention in the second half of the fifteenth century (1995: 46). The invention of the printing press rendered it possible to circulate information to society, over long distances and among large numbers of people, as well as institutionalizing mass media as influential forces in society. This technological revolution led to an increase in literacy, undermining the domination of the elite in education, and led to the emergence of a middle class, to the Reformation and the destabilization of political and religious authorities, as well as of the feudal society. This view on mediatization identifies it as a long historical process.

Undoubtedly, the human–machine interaction and the societal changes occurring as a result of our technological creations and how we use them have a long history. Besides the example of printing press, we can think of the use of mass communication and information technologies as propaganda machines in Nazi Germany, and how these mass media forms such as film and radio started to be used also for commercial purposes in the post-war era. However, the influence of media on society and consciousness has attained a different degree since the late twentieth century as a result of a drastic increase in the media saturation of everyday lives in highly industrialized, late capitalist, mainly Western³ societies.

Mediatization as a part of the long history of our interaction with technology refers to this radical shift that has happened more predominantly since the late twentieth century, and to sociocultural transformations that media has generated in contemporary high-modern societies. Although the influence of media has been in play for a long time, the phenomenon of mediatization does not characterize every process through which media affects society and culture. Rather, it suggests a process in high or late modernity in which media has become an autonomous body that majorly influences other social entities such as politics and education. As a result of the independent position and increasingly prevalent presence of media in society, other social, cultural and political institutions have adapted to its logic and workings. For example, we cannot deny that the invention of the printing press transformed individuals’ lives and perception of the universe and profoundly influenced religion and knowledge. Nevertheless, this medium did not revolutionize the form or content of social organizations such as politics, education and the family. Also, the printing press did not operate as an independent medium but was an instrument in the hands of other institutions such as religion, science, politics and commerce, and was used in relation to their ideological logic. It is mainly through the expansion and wide accessibility of media in the twentieth century that it has started to have a major influence on other social institutions, individuals’ everyday lives, knowledge and perception. These are the markers of mediatization and a mediatized society. Yet again, it is important to stress that mediatization does not suggest a single historic event or an entirely new singularity that creates a rupture in our long co-evolutionary process. Rather, it presents an interesting leap in this course.

The operations of media as a social institution, with its technological and ideological modus operandi in high-modern societies, are directly and deeply connected to late capitalism and its other processes such as globalization, commercialization, dataveillance and individualization. Mediatization is therefore a metaprocess that contains ‘long-term and culture-crossing changes, processes of processes in a certain sense, which influence the social and cultural development of humankind in the long run’ (Krotz in Hepp 2012: 9). For example, mediatization is associated with globalization in various ways. On the one hand, it means going beyond physical borders between countries, cultures, languages and viewpoints as media technologies extend co...