e Liveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance In an essay on theatre and cinema, Herbert Blau (1982: 113-4) describes a production in which he incorporated filmed actions into a live stage presentation in such a way as to make it seem that the actors were passing in and out of theatrical and cinematic images. The wall [of the set] was designed like a Chinese puzzle box, triggered like a pinball machine, with a number of swinging doors and windows which figured dazzlingly in the ensuing confusion, and confusion of realms: stage and screen images pursued and combined with each other, splitting and substituting, overlaid, in displacements more bewildering than the Czech Camera Obscura, or the mise en scéne of the unconscious. In the supersaturation of appearance and disappearance, the scopic drive was driven to dis- traction. Blau’s claim that a performance combining live bodies and filmed images can produce a "confusion of realms" presupposes that live and recorded images are perceived as belonging to different realms. Presumably, the scopic drive was driven to distraction by its inability to distinguish images belonging to the realm of live theatre from those belonging to the realm of film. The question I would like to raise here is whether this presupposition is valid: Do we experience live and mediatized images as distinct species whose hybridization can produce the confusion Blau describes ? Blau's essay on theatre and film, and the production it describes, belong to an ongoing modernist discourse on the relations between the two media and the possibilities of intermedial hybridization. As early as’ 1923, Sergei Eisenstein wrote of incorporating a filmed sequence into a stage production, and Erwin Piscator first incorporated film into Philip Auslander2 Philip Auslander a theatre performance in 1925 (Bisenstein 1991: 231; Piscator 1978: 94). Eisenstein was primarily interested in imbuing live performance with cinematic qualities. Rather than seeking to hybridize the two media, both Eisenstein and Piscator used filmed representations to comment on the live action, thus implicitly privileging film discourse over theatrical discourse. In 1941, the American theatre theorist Robert Edmond Jones (1941: 17) declared: "In the simultaneous use of the living actor and the talking picture in the theatre there lies a wholly new theatrical art, whose possibilities are as infinite as those of speech itself" (original emphasis). Whereas film, for Jones, is "the perfect medium for expressing the Unconscious," live actors express conscious reality. Therefore, the combination of the two media "will reveal simultaneously the two worlds of the Conscious and the Unconsciou: the objective world of actuality and the subjective world of motive" (Jones 1941: 18). Jones's psychic tropes anticipate Blau's description of the melding of theatre and film as replicating the mise-en-scéne of the unconscious. Jones's account of the relationship between theatre and film, consciousness and the unconscious, is orderly: each form represents a different aspect of the psyche and they exist in a well-defined, complementary relationship. Although Blau describes a production that he feels undermined this orderliness by commingling and confusing theatre and film in a way that prevented a clear perception of their difference, that confusion presumes that the original relationship between theatre and film was an orderly one such as Jones posits. Implicit in Jones's call for this form of mixed-media performance is the assumption that live and filmed representations can be combined as complementary and equally compelling languages, that theatre and film can work together as equal partners in a mixed-media production that privileges neither the theatrical nor the filmic. But was this the case, even in 1941? Over ten years earlier, in 1929-30, the Soviet the- atre director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1969[1930]: 254-6) had noted that "the cinema is attracting far greater audiences than any other type of theatre." His response was to call for the "cinefication" of the theatre: "Give us the chance to work in a theatre incorporating moder tech- niques and capable of meeting the demands which our conception ofLiveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance e the theatrical spectacle will create, and we shall stage productions which will attract just as many spectators as the cinema." Rather than proposing that a new form combining theatre and film be developed, Meyerhold took note of economic and cultural realities and suggested that the theatre itself must become like film in order to recapture the audience. The conditions Meyerhold describes held sway in the United States as well. Movies began stealing American audiences from theatre both in New York and on the road in the early 1920s. By 1930, about twenty Broadway theatres "were alternating motion pictures with plays” ; many of these theatres soon became movie houses (Poggi 1968: 83). Jack Poggi (1968: 43) comments: "the motion pictures could not have crushed the legitimate theater if there had been a real preference for live drama. Theater managers would never have turned their buildings over to the movies if they could have made more money by booking plays..." How would an audience that had been deserting theatres in favor of movie houses for over twenty years perceive a mixed-media production that combined live performance with film? Would such an audience perceive the live aspects of the kind of mixed-media production envisioned by Jones as equally compelling as its filmed components, or would they see the live as an uninteresting, degraded version of the filmic? I assume that Jones was aware of the economic developments I just mentioned. It is possible, therefore, that his proposal for mixed-media performance was not really a call for a form that would combine theatre and film as equal partners, but rather a covert way of recuperating the theatre's rival. I am suggesting that the analysis of intermedial performances cannot rest on assumptions about the inherent qualities of different media and consequent assumptions about how they may combine with each other, however attractive such assumptions may be. It is not enough, for instance, to suppose that because theatre and film can be seen as representing different parts of the psyche, they can work together as equal partners when that partnership takes place in a cultural context in which film is clearly privileged over theatre, a privileging that is bound to affect audience perception of the hybrid. It is simply not the case that all media have the same cultural pres- ence and carry the same cultural authority, and any consideration of4 Philip Auslander intermediality must take these issues into account. Intermediality must be considered in terms of "cultural economy,” a phrase I use to describe a realm of inquiry that includes both the real economic relations among cultural forms, and the relative degrees of cultural prestige and power enjoyed by different forms. Meyerhold's analysis is a case in point. Whereas Jones aligned film with the unconscious and theatre with consciousness, Meyerhold had defined theatre as the realm of the word and film as the realm of the visual image. He therefore saw sound film as an attempt by the cinema "to compete with the theatre, with live actors [...by] furnishing the screen with dialogue... " This attempt was doomed to failure, in his view, because film's strength — and its inter- national appeal — was as a visual, not a verbal, medium. When film acquired language, Meyerhold believed, it lost its universality. He felt that once the theatre could offer visual spectacle comparable to the cinema, an audience craving both that spectacle and words would flock back to the theatre. Meyethold’s perception of theatre as an essentially verbal medium and of film as an essentially visual one led him to a faulty perception of theatre's and film's respective positions in cultural economy. Throughout the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, film achieved and enjoyed preeminence as the dominant cultural medium in the US, the USSR, and Europe. In order to understand the present cultural economy, we must identify the current culturally dominant medium. In his essay on theatre and cinema, Blau (1982: 121) quotes Marx's Grundrisse: "In all forms of society, there is one specific kind of production which pre- dominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influ- ence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it." Although Marx is describing industrial production under bourgeois capitalism, for Blau, "he might as well be describing the cinema." I would argue, pace Marx and Blau, that Marx might as well be describing television: Mary's allusions to a general illumination and an ether (a word frequently used in early discussions of broadcasting to describe the medium through which electronic waves pass) are even more appropriate to that medium than to the cinema.Liveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance e As for the cultural dominance of television and its productions, Cecilia Tichi (1991: 3-8) has suggested that television can no longer be seen just as an element in our cultural environment, one discourse among many, but must be seen as an environment in itself. As Tony Fry (1993: 13) suggests, television has transcended its identity as a particular medium and is suffused through the culture as "the tele- visual." What the televisual names... is the end of the medium, in a context, and the arrival of television as the context. What is clear is that television has to be recognised as an organic part of the social fabric; which means that its transmissions are no longer managed by the flick of a switch, In other words, if television once could be seen as ranking among a number of vehicles for conveying expression or information from the televisual has become an intrinsic and determining element of our cultural formation, As Fry indicates, it is indeed no longer a question of thinking about television in various cultural contexts but of seeing it as the cultural context, Sue-Ellen Case (1995: 1-2) has expanded on this idea by noting the dominance of what she calls the "screenic" in cultural media. (But is it now a television screen or a computer screen, which we could choose, we no longer have that choic and does it matter? I will return to this question briefly at the end of this essay.) Television and mediatization now play major roles in the shaping of the economic context of performance. To an ever greater extent, the- atre and other live forms are economically tied to television and other mediatized forms. In the case of professional sports, for instance, the live game can take place because of the income the teams receive from the companies that broadcast the game, who derive income, in turn, from advertising during the game. In many instances, the same capital interests are behind both live and mediatized cultural objects. Disney's Beauty and the Beast is another example: Disney has produced the same material as an animated film for theatres and video cassettes, productions, sound recordings, toys, and so on. In these instances, the economic success or failure of any one cultural object is much less6 Philip Auslander important than the profit derived from the whole package. This has always been the case for popular music concerts. In many instances, the concerts themselves do not tum a profit (which is one reason why they are now usually underwritten by sponsors from outside the music industry). They do, however, serve to advertise recordings that, if successful, will be enormously profitable and more than make up for losses incurred by the concert tour. The current trend, which will continue for the foreseeable future, is for highly capitalized cultural producers to envision "projects" that can be realized in many different forms (as films, television programs, video cassettes, live perfor- mances, sound recordings, toys, collectibles, etc.) rather than indivi- dual cultural objects. In addition to dominating the economics of performance, the tele- visual shapes the conditions under which performance is now per- ceived. In his crucially important essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), Walter Benjamin asserts that “human sense perception... is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well" (1986 [1936]: 31). Benjamin (1986 [1936]: 31-2) describes the mode of perception he saw in an emergent mass culture in terms of overcoming distance (and therefore banishing aura, which can be undertood as a function of distance). He refers to “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction." Although Benjamin's notion of a mass desire for proximity, and its alliance with a desire for repro- duced objects, derives from his understanding of the film medium, it continues to provide a useful matrix for understanding the interrela- tion of live and mediatized forms in the televisual or mediatized cultural environment I have described. The use of giant video screens at sporting events, music and dance concerts, and other performances is a direct illustration of Benjamin's concey the kind of proximity and intimacy we can experience with television, which has become our model for close-up perception, but that is absent from these perfor- mances, can be reintroduced only by means of their videation. When aLiveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance e live performance recreates a mass-reproduced one, as in the case of the replication of music video imagery in concerts or cartoon images in theatre, an inverted version of the same effect takes place. Because we are already intimately familiar with the images from our televisual and filmic experience of them, we see them as proximate no matter how far away they may be in physical distance. If you know what Madonna's videos look like from MTY, you can read the images in her concerts as if you were in intimate relation to them, even from the last row. Whether the effect of intimacy results from the videation of the live event or from acquaintance with the live images from their prior repro- ductions, it makes live performances seem more like television, and thus enables live events to fulfill the desire for reproduction that Benjamin notes. Even in the most intimate of performance ast projects, in which we may be only a few feet away from the performers, we are still frequently offered the opportunity for the even greater intimacy of watching the performers in close-up on video monitors, as if we can experience true proximity only in televisual terms. This points to another of Benjamin's postulates: that "the quality of {the original's] presence is always depreciated” by reproduction. Steve Wurtzler's analysis of this effect in the context of sports may be generalized to many other cultural contexts : Over time, as the conventions of the televisually posited live come to constitute the way we think of the live, attending the game... becomes a degraded version of the event's televisual representation. This degradation of the live is itself compensated for by the use of Diamondvision and instant replays on elaborate stadium score boards... In other words, the degradation of the live is compensated for by the inscription into the "real" of its representation. (1992: 92) The ubiquity of reproductions of performances of all kinds in our culture has led to the depreciation of live presence, which can only be compensated for by making the perceptual experience of the live as much as possible like that of the mediatized, even in cases where the live event provides its own brand of proximity. To the extent that I am proposing that live and mediatized perfor- ‘mance are parallel forms that participate in the same cultural economy,8 Philip Auslander my usage of "mediatization” follows Fredric Jameson's definition of the term as "the process whereby the traditional fine arts... come to consciousness of themselves as various media within a mediatic system..." (1991: 162). Whereas the traditional view reflected in Blau’s and Jones's respective views of the relationship between theatre and film sees theatre and the live performance arts generally as belonging toa cultural system separate from that of film and the mass media, live art forms like theatre have become mediatized in Jameson's sense: they have been forced by economic and cultural realities to acknowledge their status as media within a mediatic system that includes the mass media and information technologies. An important consequence of thinking about live and mediatized performances as belonging to the same mediatic system is the inscription of live performance within the historical logic of media identified by Marshall McLuhan (1964: 158): "A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them’. This view asserts that older media operate within a context created by newer media that generally have the upper hand in determining the cultural landscape. This way of thinking, which emerged from the study of the mass media, clearly problematizes the notion that older and newer media can operate as equal partners cherished by most of those who look at the issue from the perspective of theatre and perfor- mance. In 1966, twenty-five years after Jones called for a performance form combining theatre and film, the actor Roberts Blossom, who was combining live actors with film in a series of experiments he called Filmstage, explicated his activity in terms very similar to Jones's. Whereas Jones saw film as representing the Unconscious and live actors Consciousness, Blossom (1966: 70) saw film as representing consciousness and the live actors as representing corporeality, physical existence. Unlike Jones, who saw theatre and film as portraying complementary aspects of the psyche, Blossom saw the live and filmed elements of his productions as competing with one another. Blossom acknowledged that the competition between the actors’ live bodies and the filmed images in these mixed-media performances wasLiveness, Mediatization, and Intermedia Performance e intrinsically unfair because the filmed images were inevitably more compelling. By comparison with the films, the actors appeared as "fifty-watt bulbs waiting to be screwed into their source and to shine with the light that is perpetual (behind them, around them) but which they can only reflect at fifty watts.” (Blossom's formulation here is reminiscent of Marx's notion of a "general illumination” and Blau’s gloss on it.) In terms of psychic economy, we might interpret Blossom as saying that physical existence is only ever a pale reflection of the consciousness underlying it. But Blossom's statement can also be read in terms of cultural economy. In those terms, the live actors are only pale reflections of the mediatized representations that dominate the cultural landscape. Although Blossom (1966: 72) may be implying the possibility of existing as pure consciousness when he concludes that "our presence as bodies begins to be suspect," that statement also summarizes the devaluation of live presence in mediatized culture that is a fact of our present cultural economy. If the value of live presence has depreciated in our mediatized culture, it would seem that audiences would be more likely to perceive the live elements of mixed-media performances as the fifty-watt bulbs described by Blossom than as the equal partners of mediatized representations envisioned by Jones. This question is difficult to address in any other than anecdotal terms: when we go to a concert or sports event employing a large video screen, for instance, what do we look at? Do we concentrate our attention on the live bodies or are our eyes drawn to the screen, as Benjamin's postulate of our desire for proximity would predict? At a party I attended recently, I found the latter to be the case. There was a live band, dancing, and a video simul- cast of the dancers on two screens adjacent to the dance floor. My eye was drawn to the screen, compared to which the live dancers indeed had all the brilliance of fifty-watt bulbs, Ibis in the context of television — or, more properly, the televisual —as the cultural dominant that I shall reformulate my initial question concerning intermedial performances: Do we see the live and the recorded or mediatized elements contained in them as belonging to separate realms, or do we see all elements of intermedial performances in terms set by the culturally dominant medium? One of the distinc-10 Philip Auslander tive characteristics of television is that it "does not simply ‘transport’ previous forms (theatre, film, radio) but rather translates and recom- bines them" — converts them into television, in other words (Dienst 1994: 142). It is, then, distinctly possible that in a culture dominated by the televisual, live and recorded images are not perceived as intrin- sically different — both are perceived as potentially televisual. Their combination and juxtaposition in multimedia performances would not produce the confusion of realms Blau describes, but would be per- ceived, rather, as the assimilation of varied materials to the culturally dominant medium, This effect is intensified by the use of digital media in performance. For example, Péles, by Pps Danse of Montreal, is a performance described by its makers as "Dance + Virtual." The piece combines two live dancers with holographic projections of themselves deployed against a shifting background of digital projections. The best moments of Péles are those in which it is difficult to distinguish the living dancers from their holographic counterparts. In one sequence, four figures chase each other through a grotto-like projection; the three- dimensional dancers seem as able to enter into the two-dimensional projected space as the wraith-like holograms. On other occasions, the holograms are projected onto the dancers to produce the effect of dematerializing bodies. The question that such a performance raises for me is: Do we see a piece like Péles as a juxtaposition of the live and the digital, a shifting among realms such as Blau describes? Is the scopic drive still driven to distraction by such hybridizations of media, and the inability to distinguish the mediatized and the live? My feeling is that the answer is no, that we now experience such work in terms of fusion, not con-fusion, a fusion that we see as taking place within an essentially televisual digital environment that incorporates both live and recorded elements indiscriminately as raw materials. In Péles, both the live elements and the digital elements are assimilated to the dominant medium, which is the digital. In that sense, the equation tums out to be: Dance + Virtual = Virtual. Nevertheless, I am not yet convinced that digitality represents a cultural dominant different from the televisual. The question for me is whether the digital will replace the televisual as the culturallyLiveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance e dominant media category, or whether the digital will combine with the televisual in such a way as to produce a new articulation of the tele- visual itself. I have already suggested here that the dominance of a new medium does not necessarily entail a complete break with the previously dominant medium. Both film and television fulfill the desire for proximity Benjamin noted, though they do not fulfill it in the same ways. (Arguably, film conveys a sense of spatial proximity, while televisual proximity is experienced in temporal terms.) Filmic proximity and televisual proximity are not exactly the same phenomena. Similarly, it may be that the digital refines an ideology of interactivity that was always implicit in the televisual. The question, then, of whether or not digitality is a new cultural dominant remains open for me. Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Trans. Harry Zohn, Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. Ed. John G. Hanhardt. Layton, UT : Peregrine Smith Books, 1986 [1936]. 27-52. Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre. New York: PAJ Press, 1982. Blossom, Roberts. "On Filmstage." TDR: Tulane Drama Review 11.1 (1966) : 68-72. Case, Sue-Ellen. "Performing Lesbian in the Space of Technology: Part I." Theatre Journal 47 (1995) : 1-18. Dienst, Richard. Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television. Durham, NC : Duke UP, 1994. Eisenstein, Sergei M. Selected Works. Vol. Il : Towards A Theory of Montage. Trans. Michael Glenny. London: British Film Institute, 1991. iu REFERENCES12 Philip Auslander Fry, Tony. "Introduction." R U A TV ?: Heidegger and the Televisual. Ed. Tony Fry. Sydney: Power Publications, 1993, 11-23. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Jones, Robert Edmond. The Dramatic Imagination. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: New American Library, 1964, 2nd ed.. Meyerhold, Vsevolod. "The Reconstruction of the Theatre.” Meyerhold on Theatre. Ed. and Transl. Edward Braun. New York: Hill and Wang, 1969. Piscator, Erwin. The Political Theatre: A History 1914-1929. Trans. Hugh Rorrison. New York: Avon, 1978. Poggi, Jack. Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1967. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1968. Tichi, Cecilia. Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Wurtzler, Steve. "She Sang Live, but the Microphone was Turned Off : The Live, the Recorded, and the Subject of Representation." Sound Theory Sound Practice. Ed. Rick Altman. New York, London: Routledge, 1992. 87-103.