In some cultures familiar with only modest imaging technologies, people believe that one should not allow oneself to be photographed, as this process steals a part of the soul. This uncanny intuition perhaps shows an understanding that as representation of the self expands, the performative matrix becomes cluttered with simulated persona that can usurp the role of organic self-presentation. The body as representation relinquishes its sovereignty, leaving the image of the body available for appropriation and for reestablishment in sign networks separate from those of the given world. From a contemporary point of view, this is not necessarily negative, since it suggests the possibility that one can continually reinvent one's character identification and role to better suit one's desires. In light of this possibility, we ought to surrender essentialist notions of self, personality, and body, and take up roles within the dramaturgical grid of everyday life. Yet there is always an uneasiness that accompanies this utopian possibility. This anxiety arises less from the curious nonposition of having no fixed qualities, than it does from the fear that the power of reinvention lies elsewhere. One senses that hostile external forces, rather than self-motivated ones, are constructing us as individuals. This problem becomes increasingly complex in techno-culture, where people find themselves in virtual theaters alien to everyday life but which have a tremendous impact on it. Abstracted representations of self and the body, separate from the individual, are simultaneously present in numerous locations, interacting and recombining with others, beyond the control of the individual and often to h/is detriment. For the critical performer, exploring and interrogating the wanderings and manipulations of the numerous electronic dopplegängers within the many theaters of the virtual should be of primary significance.
Consider the following scenario: A person (P) walks into a bank with the idea of securing a loan. According to the dramaturgical structure of this situation, the person is required to present h/erself as a responsible and trustworthy loan applicant. Being a good performer, and comfortable with this situation, P has costumed h/erself well by wearing clothing and jewelry that indicate economic comfort. P follows the application procedures well, and uses good blocking techniques with appropriate handshakes, standing and sitting as socially expected, and so on. In addition, P has prepared and memorized a well-written script that fully explains h/er need for the loan, as well as h/er ability to repay it. As careful as P is to conform to the codes of the situation, it quickly becomes apparent that h/er performance in itself is not sufficient to secure the loan. All that P has accomplished by the performance is to successfully convince the loan officer to interview h/er electronic double. The loan officer calls up h/er credit history on the computer. It is this body, a body of data, that now controls the stage. It is, in fact, the only body which interests the loan officer. P's electronic double reveals that s/he has been late on credit payments in the past, and that she has been in a credit dispute with another bank. The loan is denied; end of performance.
This scenario could just as easily have had a happy ending, but its real importance is to show that the organic performance was primarily redundant. The reality of the applicant was suspect; h/er abstracted image as credit data determined the result of the performance. The engine of the stage, represented by the architecture of the bank, was consumed by the virtual theater. The stage of screenal space, supported by the backstage of data bases and internets, maintains ontological privilege over the theater of everyday life.
With an understanding of the virtual theater, one can easily see just how anachronistic most contemporary performance art is. The endless waves of autoperformance, manifesting themselves as monologues and character bits, serve primarily as nostalgic remembrances of the past, when the performative matrix was centered in everyday life, and focused on organic players. As a work of cultural resistance, the autoperformance's subversive intent appears in its futile attempt to reestablish the subject on the architectural stage. Like most restorationist theater, its cause is dead on arrival. The performance grid in this situation is already overcoded by the extreme duration of its history, and also suffers from the clutter of codes and simulated persona imposed by spectacle. The attempt to sidestep these problems, by bringing the personal into the discourse, does not have an intersubjective depth of meaning that can maintain itself without networking with coding systems independent of the individual performer. Consequently, the spectacular body and the virtual body consume the personal by imposing their own predetermined interpretive matrices. As shocking as it may sound, the personal is not political in recombinant culture.
Such problems indicate powerfully that the model of production is thoroughly antiquated for performance (as for so much contemporary art). Although in ancient times, the stage was the preeminent platform for the interaction of mythic codes, and although this status remained unquestioned until the 19th century, it has now reached a point of exhaustion. The traditional stage in and of itself is a hollow bunker divorced from power. As a location for disturbance, it offers little hope. Rigor mortis has set in, and what used to be a site for liquid characters, who appeared simply by grabbing a mask, has now become a place where only the situations of the past or the simulations of the present may be replayed.
Attempts to expand the stage have met with interesting results. The aim of The Living Theater to break the boundaries of its traditional architecture was successful. It collapsed the art and life distinction, which has been of tremendous help by establishing one of the first recombinant stages. After all, only by examining everyday life through the frame of a dramaturgical model can one witness the poverty of this performative matrix. The problem is that effective resistance will not come from the theater of everyday life alone. Like the stage, the subelectronic - in this case the street, in its traditional architectural and sociological form - will have no effect on the privileged virtual stage.
Consider the following scenario: A hacker is placed on stage with a computer and a modem. Working under no fixed time limit, the hacker breaks into data bases, calls up h/er files, and proceeds to erase or manipulate them in accordance with h/er own desires. The performance ends when the computer is shut down.
This performance, albeit oversimplified, signifies the heart of the electronic disturbance. Such an action spirals through the performative network, nomadically interlocking the theater of everyday life, traditional theater, and virtual theater. Multiple representations of the performer all explicitly participate in this scenario to create a new hierarchy of representation. Within the virtual theater, the data structures that contain the electronic representation of the performer are disturbed through their manipulation or deletion. In order for electronic data to act as the reality of a person, the data "facts" cannot be open to democratic manipulation. Data loses privilege once it is found to be invalid or unreliable. This situation offers the resistant performer two strategies: One is to contaminate and call attention to corrupted data, while the other is to pass counterfeit data. Either way, the establishment of the utopian goal of personal reinvention through performative recombination begins to take a form beyond everyday life. Greater freedom in the theater of everyday life can be obtained, once the virtual theater is infiltrated. The liberation gained through the recombinant body can only exist as long as authoritarian codes do not disrupt the performance. For this to happen, the individual must have control of h/er image in all theaters, for only in this way can everyday life performance be aligned with personal desire.
To make the above example more concrete, assume that the hacker is also a female to male cross-dresser. In the performance she accesses h/er identification files, and changes the gender data to "male." S/he leaves the stage, and begins a performance of gender selection on the street. This begins a performance with desire unchained in the theater of everyday life. The gender with which s/he identifies becomes the gender s/he actually is, for no contradictory data resource exists. This performance is not limited to a matter of costuming, but can also affect the flesh. Even biology will begin to collapse. To give an extreme example: Dressed as a man from the waist down, and using "masculine" gesture codes, the performer walks down the street shirtless. S/he is stopped by the police. The appearance of h/er breasts contradicts the desired gender role performance. The police access the electronic information that validates the performer's claim to be a man. The performer is released, since it is not illegal for a man to go shirtless. This performance could easily have gone the other way with the arrest of the performer, but that is extremely unlikely, because such action would require perception to override the data facts.
To say the least, a performance like this is extremely risky. To challenge the codes and unleash desire is generally illegal, particularly as described here. Hacking draws the eye of discipline quickly; it is the best way to destabilize the reality and practical structure of all theaters. Yet these extreme examples outline the necessary steps needed for a postmodern theater of resistance. Effective performance as a site of resistance must utilize interlocking recombinant stages that oscillate between virtual life and everyday life. This means that the performer must cope with h/er electronic images, and with their techno-matrix. It is time to develop strategies that strike at virtual authority. As yet, there are none. Performers have been too mired in the traditional theater and the theater of everyday life to even realize how the virtual world acts as the theater of final judgment.
New theater should tell the viewer how to resist authority, regardless of its source along the political continuum. If we seek liberation through the control of our own images, performance should illustrate resistant processes and explicitly show how to achieve autonomy, however temporary it might be. Self-presentation revealed in the performance must not be perceived by the audience as a self image that should necessarily be copied, as this will end merely as a shift in coding regimes. Rather, one should seek an aesthetics of confusion that reveals potential choices, thus collapsing the bourgeois aesthetic of efficiency.
Already here and yet always one step ahead: It seems that virtual reality is always about to arrive with the next technological breakthrough. On the other hand, that curious feeling - that we are currently in a real environment - leads to the conclusion that virtual reality is located in the near future, in science fiction, or in an as-yet undeveloped technology. Perhaps the fact that we are already enveloped by the virtual is what makes it so unrecognizable. Perhaps it is because a promise has been issued by technologues, that the boundary between everyday life and virtual life will soon congeal, forming completely separate theaters. These promises are what keep the virtual forever invisible. The virtual theater promised by the technologues, like everyday life, will have an enveloping effect. It will be the first engine of the virtual where people will be able to physically interact and have a degree of control over their identities, narrative trajectories, and the objects of interaction. Unlike painting, theater, film, or television, the new virtual theater will make screenal mediation transparent and offer the appearance of unframed experience. This is the idea of virtual reality proper, in its technical sense. However, this technology does not really exist, except in the crudest of forms, and functions primarily as a game. For this reason, the virtual stage seems to be nothing worth noting, but as suggested herein, it is already interlocked with everyday life, and already controls the performances of this theater. Should virtual reality proper make its appearance in culture, it must not be confused with virtual power. At present, virtual reality and its promise act as deflectors to turn vision away from the electronic source of domination and authority. The promise of a cybernetic performative matrix serves to alienate us further from our electronic counterparts, falsely leading us to continue believing that electronic bodies do not really exist, let alone that they are signs of authoritarian power. A theater of resistance can be established only if we understand that the virtual world is in the here and now.
The Situationists were correct in their claim that power resides in the spectacle; however, this claim was truer in the past - when the opening shots were fired in the revolution of the economy of desire over the economy of production. Information technology quickly divorced power from the spectacle, and power now wanders invisibly in a cybernetic realm outside of everyday life. Spectacle has become the site of mediation, not so much between social relationships proper, but between the concrete and the virtual worlds, the sedentary and the nomadic, the organic and the electronic, and the present and the absent. To this extent, performance cannot concentrate solely on the virtual. The electronic elements of spectacle are also of great importance and require further investigation, especially since this is the side of the spectacle that mutates at a velocity that parallels consumption. (Architecture and other subelectronic visual markers of the spectacle are not as significant. These forms change too slowly and access to them is limited by geography.) In the electronic image one can detect the clearest traces of the cyberelite, but more importantly, this image is also the source which redistributes identities and lifestyles suitable for excessive consumption. This new social relationship between the electronic body (the body without organs) and the organic body is one of the best resources for performance material. Performance resources must go beyond the organic body, which at present acts as the master link in performative models of representation. In the age of electronic media, it is inappropriate to argue that performance exhausts itself under the sign of the organic. After all, the electronic body is always performing, even if in absentia on every stage.
There is every reason to desire the electronic body, and every reason to despise it. This pathological struggle occurs when one views the electronic body, and feelings of sympathy (Husserl) and envy (Benjamin) implode in a schizophrenic moment. As Baudrillard states: "In spite of himself the schizophrenic is open to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion. The schizophrenic is not, as generally claimed, characterized by his loss of touch with reality, but by the absolute proximity to and total instantaneousness with things, this overexposure to the transparency of the world." In the debris of intersubjectivity, the organic and the electronic face each other. The electronic body looks so real. It moves around, it gazes back, it communicates. Its appearance is our appearance. Identity manifests and is reinforced, as subjectivity is extracted/imposed by the electronic other. How can such a perception not conjure a sympathetic response? Yet in that same instant of unity comes the burning feeling of separation born of envy. The identity of the electronic body is not our own. We must eternally consume something to make our appearance more like its appearance. The desire for greater access to the signs of beauty, health, and intelligence, through the unceasing accumulation of cultural artifacts, brutally reminds us that the perfect excess of the electronic body is not our own. The limitations of the organic abound, and what is achieved becomes vulgar and unnecessary at the point of achievement. All that remains is the unbearable moment of enriched privation. Sympathy and envy are forever spliced together in the form of a hideous Siamese twin. This is the performance of everyday life, so near, so instantaneous, eternally recurring.
Artaud's only misjudgment was his belief that the body without organs had yet to be created. The electronic body is the body without organs. It already dominates performance, and has recentered the theater around empty identity and empty desire. The body without organs is the perfect body - forever reproducible. No reduction to biology now. Two hundred Elvis clones appear on the screen. Separate them: Turn the channel; play the tape. Each performance is on an eternal loop. These clones were not made in a test tube; they reproduce of their own accord, each as precise and as perfect as the last. No fluids, no plagues, no interruptions. The orifices of the body without organs are sewn tightly shut. No consumption, no excretion, no interruptions. Such freedom: Safely screened off from the virtual catastrophes of war, capital, gender, or any other manifestation teetering at the brink of a crash, the body without organs is free to drift in the electronic rhizome. The theater of the street and its associated cultural debris collapses. Civilization has been washed clean - progress is complete - dirt, trash, rot, and rubble have been screened off and erased from the perfect world of the electronic body. The electronic body, free of the flesh, free of the economy of desire, has escaped the pain of becoming.
What is the fate of the organic body, caught between sympathy and envy, forever following in the shadow of the body without organs? Very simply, the flesh is sacrificed - carved into layers that better serve various economies. This is not the Cartesian dualism valued by cyberpunk ("Hence, at least through the instrumentality of the Virtual power, mind can exist apart from body, and body apart from mind"), in which the body is no more than a slab of meat. It is not simply a matter of downloading the mind and trashing the body. Rather, the body is divided between surface and depth, between dry and wet. Since spectacle is a dry surface image, the body must reflect that image. The body becomes its mirror, or perhaps more accurately, its xerox. It is paper onto which designer gender, ethnicity, and lifestyle are inscribed. As with any surface of inscription, it must be dry if it is to run through the sight machine. It must also be flat and void of depth (desire). The only acceptable desire is the desire to consume the spectacle's texts. As image cascades down through the various classes of consumption, the resolution of the original decays, until nothing is left but the body as receptacle of water. This is the body sacrificed to the anti-economy. It is the abject body, left to wander the street in misery ("What is sacred undoubtedly corresponds to the object of horror I have spoken of, a fetid, sticky object without boundaries, which teems with life and yet is the sign of death").
The body which signifies the absence of rationalized economic desire is that which we are taught to fear. It is the sign of the organic itself; it is the primordial soup, the placenta-filled womb to which there can be no return. To mention the sacred, or worse, to display signs of the organic, the code of death, is to reject economic inscription. To do so is to become one of the abject, and to suffer great punishment. Many performers have tried to reinstate the organic within the network of value, but they are unable to overcome the power of the body without organs (BwO). The BwO is always there with them, on the stage and in the audience. The best result produced from such work is a cheer for deviance, but the sign of deviance is never broken. Simply putting on a counterspectacle within the theater of the abject is not enough. It only serves to confirm what is already known: Do not mention the organic and its untamed desire, or its yearning for death. Such spectacle is quickly reduced to an aberration, or a peculiar idiosyncrasy. The organic and the electronic must explicitly clash in an attempt to open the rigid hierarchical closure that is presented every day by the engines of the spectacle. To take the most obvious example, this closure is crucial to the success of any horror movie. In every case, horror films express the BwO overcoming the sign of the organic. Spilled guts, sticky goo, splitting skin, erupting pus, uncontrolled excrement, all incite horror in the viewer. It reminds h/er of the organic, that uncontrolled watery excess simply waiting to burst through the seamless xerox surface. The horror movie makes the organic - as well as the means by which it must be punished for its appearance - visible. There are two fundamental rules for simulating horror in spectacular society: The innocent (BwO) must suffer (eat the sacrifice), and the guilty (subelectronic desire) must be punished. The replaying of these two fundamental myths in spectacular endeavors keeps people buying. It makes known that all must aspire to be the innocent and virginal BwO, and that all must block the organic with accumulated piles of manufactured excess. This is the performance that must be disturbed, but it must be disturbed electronically.
If the BwO is conceived of as appearance of self contained in screenal space, it is nearly supernatural to think that the BwO can possess the flesh and walk the earth. It is during the time of possession that the BwO is the most vulnerable to the appearance of organic deficiencies, and yet, this is also the time when the BwO can present itself as an entity separate from spectacle, thus reinforcing its ideal image as existing in the realm of real achievement. The phenomenon of flesh possession by the BwO is commonly referred to as a celebrity. The celebrity acts as empirical proof positive that electronic appearance is but a record of the natural world, and that the electronic is still dependent on the organic. In this form the BwO is not just a mediated screenal vision, but can also be touched, so that it deflects thought away from the categories of the recombinant, and toward the nostalgia of essentialism. Is it any wonder that celebrities are hounded for autographs or any other artifact that can act as a trace of comfort to those desiring the assurances of the pre-electronic order?
The construction of the electronic theater has been completed by nomadic power. The Situationists alarmed us to its construction when they presented their critique of the spectacle. Indeed, the melding of architecture, graphic design, radio, television and film have come to constitute the spectacular stage, but its logistical support in backstage virtual technology had yet to fully appear. The strategic error came when anachronistic forms of resistance (occupations, strikes, protests, etc.) were used as a means to stop construction. One of the many failures of the revolutionary actions of the late 60s and early 70s is that they neither attacked the electronic theater nor employed nomadic oppositional tactics. The theater of operations was perceived as purely sedentary, without a nomadic component, and was thereby situated in the binary of offense/defense. Within the electronic theater, strategy consists of pure offense. Surveillance systems are the only remaining defensive trace. The trick is never to be caught off guard, always to track the opposition's movements, thus preventing the disappearance of the opponents. The other option is to establish temporary blockage points that allow time to regroup and begin a counter-offensive. The defensive posture of fortification is unrealistic. Unfortunately this has traditionally been the tactic (occupation) chosen by the resistance. This was a proper means of resistance against spectacular architecture, but the electronic theater remained untouched and continued expanding its domain. Once again, the culture of resistance is working primarily from a model of critique, and as always, is moving very slowly off the mark in this endeavor, preferring to continue engaging cultural and political bunkers. However, all is not lost. Because of the lack of fortifications in the electronic theater, there are always windows and gaps ripe for disturbance. Unfortunately, such resistance can only come from the technocratic class, and it must occur before surveillance systems become too well-distributed. The performance of the politicized hacker should be the ultimate in performative resistance.
Compared to cyberspace resistance techniques, possible strategies for the cultural producer are much more modest. These producers can re-present the electronic theater for what it is, by creating simulations of performative control that call attention to the technology and methods of control. The other strategy is to attempt to reestablish the organic body in arenas other than the abject and the deviant; however, this performance has no meaning other than to replay the past, unless it is contrasted with the mythic standing of the BwO. To take this approach is not to uncover the invisible, but to impose the vacuum of scepticism on the visible. With either option, the performer must appropriate and occupy the electronic theater. It is unwise to wait until virtual reality has the trappings of a classical theater - one into which the performer and viewer may physically enter and which is enveloped by artificial (electronic) surroundings. As stated earlier, resistant performers must establish those interlocking recombinant stages which oscillate between the theater of everyday life and the virtual theater. Such action will help develop practical performance models - ones which lend themselves to an autonomous performative matrix, rather than ones in which the performers are automatons, replaying the creations of designer culture. Resistant theater is electronic theater.
Référence: http://www.critical-art.net/ted/toc.html