Intermission

Form (or genre)

Form is a relationship. When writers, painters or theatre-makers choose, adapt or even fabricate from nothing a form for their work ­– a world, frame or register in which their work has its being and communicates whatever it communicates – they do so with a relationship in mind. It is when that relationship is instantiated, in the act of reading or viewing, that the form of the work is realized. Until that moment, form does not really exist. This may not be obvious in the case of a painting or a sculpture, of which it might make some kind of sense to say that the object or product, in either two or three dimensions, possesses a form in-itself: it is just this shape or this arrangement of marks on such and such a surface of these particular dimensions that constitutes the form of the work.

But in the case of theatre it seems clear that form is a relationship. Of course there are examples of theatre practice in which the performance that is the work appears, or perhaps pretends, to behave as though its spectators did not exist. But this appearance or pretence is always just that, since it is always embedded in a framing recognition that, even if it is being ignored or excluded, the audience is there and the work would not be there without them. Nor is the audience an abstract audience. Each member brings with them their own ‘content’, ranging from their ‘brain’ to their social and economic circumstances, none of which they leave in the cloakroom (see Brecht). Form, we might suppose, then, is the relationship instantiated in the performance among the actions, objects and images, the spectators, their ‘brains’ and the institutional circumstances under which all these elements are brought together. This is not simply a relationship of simultaneity, circumscribed by the ‘live’ co-presence of all these elements, but one in which histories, memories and returns also play their part. The form may be partially achieved before the performance in question, then, in that both production choices and a larger set of historical experiences will have determined the range of possible forms that might appear in any given performance. But the form cannot be achieved until it is activated in its relationship with a particular historical audience.

Form, like genre, then, with which, as a technical term in literary and artistic theory, it often seems interchangeable, arises out of a specific institutional and performance situation.[1] As Fredric Jameson – a leading exponent of the form-genre equivalence – writes of genre in the literary field:

Genres are essentially contracts between a writer and his [sic] readers; or rather, to use the term which Claudio Guillén has so usefully revived, they are literary institutions, which like the other institutions of social life are based on tacit agreements or contracts.[2]

This way of thinking about genre oddly depends upon a performance relationship in the first instance – ‘contracts between a writer and his readers’ – but then proceeds to exclude performance from the considerations of genre that follow. In Jameson’s account, genre comes into being as an attempt to compensate for the absence of the signals provided by tone and gesture in an everyday live speech, or ‘performing’ situation, such as in the mythic scenario of oral storytelling as the origin of literary production. In a specific performing situation of this kind, tone and gesture are socially recognisable. Consider how sarcasm or irony rely upon a high degree of mutual recognition between speaker and listener, and how such speech so often fails when speaker and listener have too little, socially, in common with one another. Literary genre, Jameson argues, following Guillén, is the effect of the work writing does to construct a sociality-in-common between writer and reader sufficient to sustain the communicative act, or to make the absence of any communication recognizable as such, rather than as simple mutual incomprehension. What this account does not quite capture is the extent to which tone and gesture and all the other attributes of a specific ‘performing situation’ are themselves, in theatre obviously, but in all kinds of other performance as well, already constituting form or genre in their negotiation of a relationship with an audience.[3] Tone and gesture are in fact markers of genre rather than precedents. In other words, a theory of genre which finds its origins in performance has a tendency to relegate performance itself to the pre-generic. In the specific case of theatre, which, as has often been argued, is the most social, convention-bound and institutionalized of all the artistic practices regularly considered by critics such as Jameson, this is clearly nonsense (and not what Jameson intends). There is more form to the most conventional bourgeois drama (almost by definition) than in almost any other instance of contemporary cultural production. Indeed, this may start to explain why Jameson, whose essay on genre aims to restore a consideration of genre to literary history in the face of an ‘ideological modernism’ that insists instead upon the ‘singularity’ of each individual work (as though each work were its own unique form), neglects theatre in this instance: it is so obviously ‘conventional’ that there is no need to rescue it from the genre-deniers. So although he does not say so, the logic of Jameson’s argument is that form in theatre may be more thoroughly a social question than in any other field of cultural production and reception. As a ‘performing situation’ it is the proto-generic, and as an ‘institution’, it is the hyper-generic.

Form (or genre) is a relationship, and in the theatre that relationship is social, historical and unfolding. To continue to think of this relationship as genre (at the risk of appearing to embrace an outmoded academicism) avoids the ahistoricism in which each artistic form is somehow sui generis, and, at the same time, insists upon the social dimensions of the relationship, which extend far beyond the field of ‘art’ and into all the byways of culture inhabited by the obviously generic genres, above which the term art (and its attendant ‘form’) seeks to raise its referents. For the present purposes – which will eventually reveal themselves as having to do with an early twenty-first-century video installation by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin – to think about genre is one way of facilitating a discussion in which the ‘art’ of postdramatic theatre and questions of its ‘form’ can accommodate material so low and so trashy that it has always been considered in terms of genre.

 

Lehmann (or Jameson)

One general consequence of the historical emergence of the theatre and performance practices presented and theorized by Hans-Thies Lehmann in Postdramatic Theatre is a renewed critical attention to form (what we might call theatre’s theatreness) rather than content (the action on stage in the drama). Of course, only the most wilfully anti-theatrical dramatic criticism ever failed entirely to speak of the relationship between the dramatic action on stage and the audiences and theatres that received and contained such action – the theatreness of theatre was never entirely eliminated from view – but both the work Lehmann catalogues, and the logic of his designation of that work as ‘postdramatic’, invite consideration of form (including ‘dramatic’ form) in terms of a theatrical relationship. In other words, they invite the theorisation of form, in drama and theatre, in terms of the social. This involves making a move that Lehmann himself is reluctant to make, but which Fredric Jameson, were he ever to write about theatre, would be compelled to make: to inquire into the politics inherent in contemporary theatrical forms, not only within the theatres (and other institutions) in which they appear, but in the specific late capitalist relations of production that constitute part of their conditions of possibility. Form is a relationship to relations of production. It is not only that, but it always is, even if the relation might be oblique, obscure or even invisible.

To what extent does Lehmann see form as social, and taking shape in relationship to relations or modes of production? Lehmann certainly sees the theatre practices he theorizes as arising from (or at least correlated with, if not caused by) a rupture after which it becomes possible to speak of a new kind of society. This is what he calls the ‘caesura of the media society’, whose consequences for theatre he summarizes thus: ‘the spread and omnipresence of the media in everyday life since the 1970s has brought with it a new multiform kind of theatrical discourse that is here going to be described as postdramatic theatre’.[4] In this formulation, theatre is seen to be either part of or responding to a more general consolidation of a ‘media society’ in which social relations are increasingly maintained through the mediations of television, to begin with, and subsequently the internet and its attendant social media. To call such a society a ‘media society’, as Lehmann does, and to begin the book itself with an allusion to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ is to make a strong claim for both correlation and periodization. But it falls some way short of causality, let alone any kind of economic determination, and it does so as a matter of choice. For as Lehmann explains towards the end of the book, as his attention turns, in the ‘Epilogue’, to questions of politics, he is sceptical of theorization that moves too eagerly towards grand claims about a present that is still unfolding:

This study of postdramatic theatre does not aim to trace the new theatrical modes of creation to sociologically determined causes and circumstances. For one thing, such deductions normally fall short, even in the case of subject matter to which scholars have more of a historical distance. They can be trusted even less when it comes to the confusing and ‘unsurveyable’ present (Habermas) in which highly contradictory – but therefore no less ambitious – large scale analyses of the state of the world are chasing each other.[5]

Lehmann wishes to avoid insisting upon any meaningful connection, let alone a causal or determinate relation between aesthetic form and economic ‘circumstances’ such as changes in modes or relations of production. However, while generally avoiding reference to production as such, his entire project arrives, as we have seen, framed by assumptions about the production of representations. The question that Lehmann chooses not to address is to what extent the production of representations, and any historical changes in such production (especially of the epoch-making kind he attributes to the ‘caesura’) might be understood as part of broader changes in economic production. This is precisely the sort of question Jameson wants to ask.

In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson is working with a very similar periodization to Lehmann’s. Like Lehmann, Jameson observes a decisive transformation in cultural production making itself available to consciousness during the 1970s. Many of the distinctive features of Jameson’s postmodern cultural production are of the same kind that Lehmann identifies with postdramatic theatre: such as narrative and subjective fragmentation, surfaces being privileged over depth, the predominance of images over language, calculated incoherence. Beyond these coincidences of timing and effect, there is a further affinity between Lehmann and Jameson which is of particular significance here. For Jameson, too, ‘media’ is the keyword:

We postcontemporary people have a word for that discovery [that culture is material] – a word that has tended to displace the older language of genres and forms – and this is, of course, the word medium, and in particular its plural, media, a word which now conjoins three relatively distinct signals: that of an artistic mode or specific form of artistic production, that of a specific technology, generally organized around a central apparatus or machine; and that, finally, of a social institution.[6]

This observation comes at the beginning of Jameson’s chapter on video in Postmodernism. Jameson preserves here his earlier insistence upon the historicity of ‘forms and genres’, in which genres rise to and fall from cultural prominence in proportion to their capacity to function (to communicate, express or sell something) in a specific historical period, which is itself defined by its mode and relations of production. From this it follows, he proposes, that ‘the most likely candidate for cultural hegemony today’ is, of course, video.[7] Video is understood here as both the globally pervasive technology of television and also the experimental artistic practice, Jameson suggests that experimental video makes visible the full scope of a medium which, in its mass communication form, does not make the fullest use of its expressive or communicative potentialities. Jameson sees the emergence, and subsequent dominance through pervasiveness – in other words, the hegemony – of media, as a defining characteristic of the postmodern, just as Lehmann does for the postdramatic. What Jameson does, though, which Lehmann does not, is to identify this ‘caesura’ or periodization with ‘sociologically determined causes and circumstances’ or, something that he might want to claim as a further, first-order, periodization: ‘late’ capitalism. In other words, Jameson insists on both the possibility and the value of relating changes in aesthetic form, understood as medium and therefore also as a social relation, to changes in economic production and its relations:

If we are willing to entertain the hypothesis that capitalism can be periodized by the quantum leaps or technological mutations by which it responds to its deepest systemic crises, then it may become a little clearer why and how video – so closely related to the dominant computer and information technology of the late, or third, stage of capitalism – has a powerful claim for being the art form par excellence of late capitalism.[8]

For Jameson, then, there is a specific relation between media and capitalism, or between the production of representations and production as such. This relation becomes apparent once the ‘materiality’ of culture is taken into account. The media for the production, distribution and consumption of representations, be they books or televisions, are themselves produced under specific historical conditions in which specific relations of production obtain. Might we imagine, then, that postdramatic theatre is theatre in the age of video’s cultural hegemony, that it is a theatrical ‘form or genre’ that understands itself as a medium, and that it bears at least some meaningful relation to responses to a systemic crisis in capitalism for which Jameson, following Ernest Mandel, uses the term ‘late capitalism’?

Mandel became significant for Jameson because he thought his work represented the first major Marxist attempt to theorize, as a revolution in capitalist production, the technological transformations wrought by the mass production of electronics in the second half of the twentieth century – a development that had hitherto received much more attention from theorists of the pro-capitalist right, such as Daniel Bell, than it had from theorists in the Marxist tradition, who were rightly sceptical of the tendency among most such theorizations to claim that capitalism had suddenly transcended the very class conflict upon which it is in fact founded. Mandel’s periodization of this third stage of capitalism complements other work that was to follow it, such as David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, which also sees the transformations in capitalist production commonly identified as fully under way in the 1970s as involving a response on the part of capital to a systemic crisis. In this view, developments such as factory automation, the mass production of electronics including the personal computer, as well as the reorganization of production logistics to facilitate just-in-time fulfilment of orders and coordinated political campaigns against labour unions, were all part of an attempt to reassert the power of capital over labour and to secure for capitalism a new phase of dynamism at the expense of the social and political gains achieved by workers over the preceding decades of the post-war boom.

The extent to which video and related digital and screen-based technologies were part of this reorganization of capitalist production is far clearer today than it was when Jameson was writing, as these technologies have been introduced into almost every corner of most people’s working and non-working lives in the advanced capitalist society Jameson discusses. This is an aspect of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have named the ‘new spirit of capitalism’[9] and will also turn out to have been responsible, as we shall see below, for the interpenetration of work and leisure under the rhetoric of participation for which Fitch and Trecartin, in the installation to which I shall shortly turn, have adopted the term ‘the audience revolution’. Even in the two decades since Lehmann’s book was first published, it has become much easier to imagine that, whatever his own reservations about such a ‘large scale analys[i]s’, Lehmann’s ‘media society’ is actually another way of describing ‘late capitalism’. This is precisely what Jameson implies in his remarks on the significance of Mandel’s work for his own project: ‘media society’ is offered, along with Bell’s ‘postindustrial society’, ‘information society’, ‘electronic society’ among the terms for which Mandel’s ‘late capitalism’ is viewed as a welcome replacement.[10] If we were to follow Jameson in being ‘willing to entertain [this] hypothesis’, too, in this expanded form, might we not further suppose that the most meaningful relations a postdramatic theatre practice might entertain with late capitalism and its systemic crisis will turn out to be those relations ­– be they critical, affirmative or merely submissive – carried on in some sense under the sign of video, and on terms shaped, if not fully determined by, the ‘omnipresence of media’?

 

Theatre (or video)

Is there any evidence to support this theoretical proposition? What sort of evidence might we look for? Does postdramatic theatre exhibit the characteristics of video, for example? There’s no shortage of evidence of this kind, including numerous instances in which video is used as a significant compositional element, as well as a production tool. Video is not just integrated into public performance, but its presence within the production process has permitted the development of ways of working that had not previously been possible. More generally, it could be argued that all kinds of multimedia or intermedial production depends to some extent upon the availability of technologies such as video for their conceptualization as such, rather than merely as a medium to be used within the theatre. In other words, it is the fact that video is palpably a medium that enables theatremakers to conceive of theatre as a medium, or to imagine the possibilities of intermediality. At a third remove, there is much theatre that may make no use of video as a technology, but which makes use of aesthetic strategies and effects that can plausibly be attributed to the pervasiveness of video and to the resulting capacity of spectators to think and feel in response to material that shares some of video’s aesthetic features.[11] Among the features of postdramatic theatre that Lehmann identifies as characteristic, those that strongly suggest a special affinity with video might include: the undoing of the voice-body suture; scenic composition determining textual composition; tone and gesture not being subjugated to meaning or communication; montage of visual and aural elements; a preference for real over fictive time; repetition; duration; image-time; and, perhaps most important of all, as we shall see, flow.

But this is not really the point. Like readings of Lehmann that use what was intended as a theoretical proposition about a historical development of a form, genre or medium to conduct a kind of survey of contemporary theatrical production to determine whether this or that example qualifies as postdramatic according to some checklist of features or effects, it would be entirely reductive to seek to identify, by means, for instance, of a similar survey, to what extent this or that production exhibits features that resemble those we attribute to video, and then to propose that any correlations thrown up by such a survey amount to evidence of how theatre production is affected by the cultural hegemony of video. There is no logical or theoretical reason to suppose that theatre made under conditions shaped by the cultural hegemony of video should necessarily resemble video in any way. Nor is it necessarily the case that those numerous theatre productions that make use of video technologies in a range of inventive ways are, simply by virtue of the use of the technology, either postdramatic by definition, or engaged in any meaningful way with the problematic posed to theatre production by the cultural hegemony of video, let alone the politics of late capitalism. Indeed, one of the most obvious consequences for a theatre-maker of identifying video’s cultural hegemony might be, instead, to insist upon those aspects of theatrical production that seem to resist, negate or at least avoid replicating the appearance and effects of video. Such resistance or negation could register as evidence of theatre responding to the hegemonic power of video, perhaps much more strongly or plausibly than work that makes use of video in its composition in a carefree manner, as just one expressive tool among others.

Whether theatre uses or looks like video or not, then, is not my primary concern here. Instead, what interests me is what the cultural hegemony of video in late capitalism does for the human subjects living in this historical moment, and, in terms of theatre specifically, what sort of spectatorship it produces. Jameson describes the primary spectatorial experience of video, in both its mass media and its experimental art registers, as ‘immersion in the total flow of the thing itself’.[12] This is effected, in part, by the way the act of viewing video locks the viewer and the video (subject and object) together in a material, machinic time:

The living room, to be sure (or even the relaxed informality of the video museum), seems an unlikely place for this assimilation of human subjects to the technological: yet a voluntary attention is demanded by the total flow of the videotext in time which is scarcely relaxed at all, and rather different from the comfortable scanning of the movie screen, let alone of the cigar-smoking detachment of the Brechtian theatregoer.[13]

Here the theatre, making one of its rare appearances in Jameson’s work (appearances which are nearly always Brecht) stands as some kind of antithesis to the experience of ‘total flow’. Elsewhere in his discussion of ‘total flow’, Jameson notes that it is an experience without ‘intermission’: ‘Turning the television set off has little in common with the intermission of a play or an opera … when the lights slowly come back on and memory begins its mysterious work.’[14] He seems to be suggesting that there is something about at least some kinds of theatre and its spectatorial conventions that might resist this kind of immersion. It is worth noting briefly that since at least the second half of the nineteenth century successive phases of theatrical experimentation have sought to do away with some if not all such conventions, in what was once seen (by Adorno on Wagner, for example) as an attempt to bring theatre closer to the condition of cinema, and which might now, perhaps, be regarded as an attempt to make it more like television (without commercials, of course, and therefore not really like television at all). In any case, what these conventions of theatrical spectatorship seem in principle to offer Jameson, even if he does not pursue them through any extended consideration of theatre as such, is some possibility that ‘what used to be called “critical distance” [which] seems to be obsolete’, might somehow be restored, at least for the duration of some kind of ‘intermission’.[15]

Jameson’s sense of the significance – aesthetic and political – of the ‘total flow’ of the video experience has been emphatically confirmed by technological and socio-economic developments in the decades since the publication of his Postmodernism. Today subjection to this flow is not confined to the living room or the ‘video museum’ (I am not quite sure what Jameson is thinking of here), but is extended throughout the fabric of everyday life in late capitalism. This is almost too commonplace to comment upon. Simply to note the range and ubiquity of video flow components in everyday urban life might involve reference, at minimum, to the screen-time of labour (from the call-centre to the graphic design studio), the almost seamless minute-by-minute alternation between work, social life and entertainment afforded by internet-enabled tablets and phones, and pervasive video-surveillance in public, quasi-public and privatized spaces. Sticklers for a certain brand of technological specificity might object here that many of these interactions do not involve video, per se: Instagram and WhatsApp, they might insist, are not really video at all. But their logic, and, in particular, the logic of their fluid entanglement, is the logic of video. The flow in which these technologies – finely attuned as they are, through data mining and algorithms, to the operations of the late capitalist economy ­– now immerse their subjects is almost oceanic. Just as, for Jameson, the logic of the ‘videotext’ renders the idea of the autonomous art-work effectively obsolete, so the coalescence of all the various components of the immersive video environment tends to dissolve the need to make meaningful distinctions between the various apps, sites and devices across which the flow of the late capitalist spectacle is experienced. These are the conditions under which postdramatic theatre is produced, and, perhaps more importantly, they determine how it will be experienced by spectators whose lives are lived in at least partial subjection to late capitalism’s video-flow. What kind of intermission might it make?

 

Video (or theatre)

An intermission comes from within. It is not an alternative to that which it interrupts or pauses. It is not a case of simply doing something else instead and imagining that one is magically freed from the power of whatever it is you are turning away from. Nor is it an exodus, a withdrawal from the noise of late capitalism or a retreat into some earlier way of being and doing. Inasmuch as it is a kind of negation – and that’s the way I want it – it goes with the flow in order to interrupt it. To take a gesture from video itself, it is the pause button. It’s used to pause and also to resume.

This is why I choose as an example with which to illustrate at least one version of the intermission of late capitalist immersion, not a work of theatre, in the sense of a production presented in a theatre, or within the institutional framework of that industry, but rather a work of video art, produced, according to its author, as a ‘movie’ but presented in the institutional setting where ‘art’ versions of video production are most commonly found: the contemporary art gallery. Rather than find some theatre that might intervene to arrest the flow of the videotext, I choose instead to identify a passage of the videotext itself in which an intermission or interruption is directed against itself by theatrical means. The movie in question, Comma Boat, was first shown in an untitled installation as part of the 2013 Venice Biennale’s main Arsenale show, The Encyclopedic Palace (curator Massimiliano Gioni), and was subsequently remounted as Priority Innfield (and comprising, alongside Comma Boat, the movies Center Jenny, Item Falls and Junior War) at the Zabludowicz Collection in London in 2014.[16] Ryan Trecartin was credited as director of the movies, but the show as a whole, in which the movies were presented in custom-designed ‘sculptural theatres’ (about which, more shortly) was the work of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin. While the work is not marked institutionally as theatre, it will, I think become clear in the description and analysis that follows that these theatrical viewing arrangements align it in more than merely superficial ways with the historical development of theatre to which Lehmann gave the term postdramatic.

In Comma Boat, Trecartin takes centre stage as the director of a movie in mid-shoot. The movie-in-the making seems to involve, inter alia, a trio of singers apparently checking their own sound quality in a repeated melodic riff (‘Do I sound goo-oo-ood?’), the launch of a boat, and the inauguration of a group of young women into their roles as various kinds of ‘Jenny’. But, of course, the actual movie being made is the movie we see on screen, directed by Trecartin, rather than any movie that Trecartin’s on-screen director might be making. In this movie, his own movie, Trecartin, a slight and somewhat gender-neutral figure wearing a grey sweatshirt with the logo ‘Witness’ on the front, a black bob wig and two-tone face make-up (white above, purple beneath) alternates to-camera comments and self-disclosures with instructions and harangues directed at his fellow performers and crew. Throughout the half hour of the movie he / they / this persona is urgently, even desperately concerned to be sure that ‘the camera’ – a camera that is capturing all this ‘making-of’ footage – should be filming them:

‘Fucking shut up right now. Why aren’t you filming me?’ (4.57)

‘I thought that was the camera’ (5.50)

‘Why isn’t anyone filming me?’ (6.13)

‘What the fuck are you not filming me for. Is your hand getting tired, motherfucker?’ (7.57)

‘Second camera, get the fucking cut-away’ (11.59)

‘Why the hell are you not filming anything?’ (12.37)

‘Where the hell did that camera person go?’ (13.07)

‘Why the fuck weren’t you filming me?’ (17.39)

‘Why aren’t you filming me, fuckface?’ (18.17)

‘Where the fuck is all the camera?’ (22.08)

Why the fuck are you filming Jenny and not me?’ (26.56)

‘Why aren’t you filming me, you fuck-nut?’ (30.36)

This is not simply the egomania of a movie star or the dictatorial tendency of a cinema auteur, although it may be both of these things; it is also a heightened expression of a subjectivity formed under the cultural hegemony of video, whose pathologies include an acute fear of abandonment by the apparatus of the flow. Trecartin offers a clue to the historicity of this kind of subjectivity, commenting on how the figures who appear in Junior War are from the figures in Comma Boat, Item Falls and Center Jenny. The teenagers in Junior War, which uses footage Trecartin shot in 2000 during his senior year at high school, lived at a time when people had not yet acquired, as a core dimension of their everyday consciousness, the sense that they might be on camera at any time, their entire lives documented as part of an ever-expanding ocean of user-generated videoflow. Fifteen years later, in a world where almost every American high school student owns a cell-phone, a whole new generation is conscious of being always ‘on’, and it is this generation who populates the later videos.

Even when they are juiced up to their ears on the flesh-eating kool-aid of their all-night post-war martial-law live-streaming total-confession narco-animation apparatus, they seem to register, from time to time, through some residual neuro-pathways with no real purpose any more, that there was once a time before ‘the audience revolution’, and that back then, before the catastrophic fall into the immersive world of the total studio, before they learned how to act as though everyone were watching all the time, even though no one was, before the state of total social performance kicked in, there had been an ancient technology developed over thousands of years that allowed people, usually upon payment of a small fee, to get out of that feeling of being watched all the time and to become, for a short and blessed period of blissful relief, merely spectators. The name of this technology was stadium seating. Here is Trecartin’s persona introducing their desire to have it back:

Because the last time we liked something as authentic as stadium seating, which, by the way, we haven’t had since the audience revolution, I remember loving how much I used to like talking in front of people, but now no one watches, I do all of this in vain. I love stadium seating. Bring back the masses. I want to see fans. I don’t want to pick them. I want them to just pick me, you know, like the Top 40 bullshit I used to be. (20.40)

Here are some fellow-performers echoing that sentiment in a kind of chorus:

‘Oh, shit ‘n balls, I love stadium seating.’ (22.48)

‘Oh, shit ‘n balls, I love stadium seating … I loves me some stadium seating … I love authentic stadium seating … I love it.’ (24.04)

‘I love stadium seating .. I love stadium seating … I love authentic, authentic stadium seating.’ (29.50)

Stadium seating refers, of course, to the seating arrangements in a stadium, but also, by extension, to those of all sorts of performing arts venues, including concert halls and theatres, in which spectators are organized into rows of seats each of which is set a little higher than the one in front of it in a configuration designed to maximize the number of spectators enjoying a good (monetizable) view of the spectacle being presented. It is a seating arrangement preferred in venues and for entertainment forms (or genres) where a performance or some other action is presented to spectators who are expected to limit their activity to spectating (watching and listening). It can accommodate various forms of limited participation ranging from applause, speaking back to or joining in with performers when invited to, or even coming on stage if forced to do so. But these are always recognized as exceptions, playful engagements with the format, not as violations or challenges to the social and spectatorial relations stadium seating is designed to encourage (or enforce). Stadium seating is an arrangement – a technology of spectatorship, even – that was not designed to facilitate immersion and flow. Its origins lie far back in time, before the cultural hegemony of video, before late capitalism, before the audience revolution. It has to do with theatre, also, rather than drama.

When was the audience revolution and what happened in it? There are at least three ways of answering this question, depending on who you ask. Ask a theatre historian and expect an account of the numerous theatre-makers who either called for it or claimed that they and their work were bringing it into being. Most versions of this list will look remarkably like the syllabus for a conventional twentieth-century university course on modern or avant-garde theatre – Meyerhold, Brecht, Artaud, Handke, Grotowski, Kaprow, Boal – suggesting that the audience revolution has been a defining characteristic of the theatre taken most seriously by those who, consciously or unconsciously, develop and maintain genre hierarchies and reproduce the social relations and hierarchies to which they are so intimately related, including those who have ensured that such canons continue to be dominated by white men. Most versions of this list will also resemble the compilation of prehistories to the postdramatic presented by Lehmann. As Jacques Rancière has observed, the paradigmatic examples of this audience revolution in the theatre, the proposals of those whom Rancière calls ‘reformers of theatre’, such as Brecht and Artaud – notwithstanding the differences between their practices – want to activate their audience into a participation that goes beyond a merely ‘passive’ spectatorship. In this sense, the audience revolution signifies a desire for the abolition of stadium seating, or, in Ranciére’s language, theatre itself is revealed as ‘a mediation striving for its own abolition’.[17] One of its most recent manifestations, among theatremakers, is the interest in immersion as a theatrical experience that empowers the audience by seducing or compelling them into a supposedly self-directed navigation of an environment of theatrical actions, narratives and mises en scénes, producing experiences that, for some analysts, more closely resemble video-based games than any other cultural form (or genre).

If you were to ask a media theorist, it is more likely that the answer will have something to do with user-generated content. This is an audience revolution that, rather than abolishing the medium in which it has its being, appears to be in the business of abolishing the audience itself, by eradicating the distinction between audience and performer. (Of course, in the case of theatre, the abolition of this distinction might amount to the same thing.) In many well-known examples of this development in mass-media culture, this is, of course, neither its true purpose nor its real consequence. In fact, this apparent audience revolution is all about maximizing audiences for the purposes of revenue-generation. Reality TV, for example, presents its audience with a selection of people who are conventionally understood to be real precisely because they resemble and even in some cases represent the rest of the audience. This ‘realness’ is then leveraged to build an audience with an affective investment in imagining itself translated from the status of audience to that of TV star. In some more ‘home-grown’ phenomena, like personal YouTube channels, the entire apparatus explicitly foregrounds, through its registration of ‘views’, the fact that it is in the business of ‘growing’ rather than abolishing the audience and the category of spectatorship. The model for success in such scenarios is that a certain amount of media control is handed over to or seized by a small selection of a mass audience, who then exploit their special status as ‘real people’ to direct large selections of the remaining mass audience (of which they are still a part of course) towards the performance or self-presentation they offer. In the less immediately commercial sphere of news media, there are claims that audience material and user-generated content have revolutionized the production of news. But other analyses suggest that most uses of user-generated content remain firmly within the normative framework of broadcasting established before this supposed audience revolution.[18] There are, of course, exceptions to this, models where success might be measured in other terms. There’s a long history, for instance, in which the tools of representation, with the video camera being one of the most significant, are taken up and used by people habitually regarded by the professional elites of late capitalism as ‘the public’ and used for counter-hegemonic purposes. There are even theatrical performances of a postdramatic nature that have thematized aspects of this practice. But if we are considering the audience revolution in relation to the cultural hegemony of video, such work might be understood as emergent or resistant in relation to the dominance of the forms that have elsewhere contributed to the installation of a reality TV character as President of the United States.

And if you were to ask Danny Iny, entrepreneur and author of The Audience Revolution, you’d learn that the audience revolution is a new approach to business, exemplified by new media corporations such as Netflix:

The big idea that I teach in the book is that – unlike the traditional strategy of a lot of old-school businesses – you don’t start by thinking of something to sell, and then looking for people who want to buy it. Instead, you start by finding the people who resonate with your message and connect with your ideas, attract them to you, and then – once the audience is there – offering them the things that will help them the most.[19]

In this example, too, the revolution is a change in relations between the audience (or in this case, quite clearly, the consumer) and the producer of the ‘message’ or product. In Iny’s case, the idea that this is a ‘revolution’ depends upon a dubious characterization of previous business practice: ‘thinking of something to sell, and then looking for people to buy it’ is a description of pre-revolutionary business that is hard to square with the existence of a whole industrial sector known as market research, let alone theories of economic relations that trouble the banal notion that demand is what drives business innovation. So while Iny’s slogan may not be much more plausible than its antithesis, ‘If you build it they will come’, it does seem to refer to the experience described by Trecartin’s persona in Comma Boat, who complains, you’ll recall, that ‘I don’t want to pick them. I want them to just pick me, you know, like the Top 40 bullshit I used to be.’ What is also reveals is an at first paradoxical fact about the audience revolution: it involves a change in power relations in which those in whose name the revolution is made lose rather than gain power, even in the narrow terms offered by the discourse of consumer choice. Rather than choosing the products, messages or experiences they want, they are instead first chosen by the producers who then deliver whatever it is they are assumed to want based upon an algorithmic calculation of their desires, preferences and vulnerabilities. In this account the audience revolution looks very much like an Ideological State Apparatus 2.0.

Inside the videotext, then, there’s someone who wants out. Is this just something that a ‘character’ in the very tightly scripted scenario of Comma Boat wants, and a desire with which a potential spectator might fleetingly identify? Is there anything else in there that might add up to an intermission from within, something that offers that critical distance that the ‘media society’, ‘late capitalism’ and the ‘audience revolution’ threaten to make obsolete, and that offers it in more than merely ideational form? In other words, what does it feel like to encounter this work? My recollections of the installation as a whole in London may as well begin with the experience of the space through which you navigate to encounter each of the individual works. The lighting is low. The walls are painted in a dark colour, purple perhaps. There’s a pervasive, almost intrusive background music. Each individual work is installed within its own ‘sculptural theatre’, each of which seems to gesture towards the condition of stadium seating, in that it provides seats, benches or ledges on which spectators can sit to watch the video. The audio for each individual video comes through headphones within the sculptural theatres. Each sculptural theatre contains within it what look like traces or remnants of material from within the mise en scène of its respective video, and each suggests a different kind of possible real-world, suburban American environment As you move between these theatres you can sometimes be fooled into thinking there’s a passageway where there is in fact a mirror in which you foolishly catch sight of yourself heading nowhere. There are passageways, though, at least one of them painted in the kind of green associated with green screen, and which will also appear in the opening sequence of Center Jenny. In addition to the four named video works, there’s an additional screen which seemed, on my visit, to be showing extended credit sequences. This does not all become apparent at once, of course, especially if you move quite quickly to take a seat, put some headphones on and get up close with one of the videos. As I did.

You can get really close to the screen. With the sound feeding directly into your ears you can make it so that the images feel like they are right in your eyes, with nothing much, like space or air, in between. You can sort of wedge yourself down one end of the screen, sitting quite comfortably, and get what feels like the visual equivalent of being right up by the speakers in a club or a concert. As though the images which explode through rapid cuts and across a spectrum of hypercolours were vibrating on a special frequency inside your body. It’s exciting and alien, even a little repellent. Someone’s talking about raising stunt chickens (this video turns out to be Item Falls). It takes a while to make any sense of it, which is not an altogether unusual experience with videos in galleries, where you are often coming in part way through, and you’ve no idea whether this is near the beginning or the end, or how long this thing might be. But it’s more difficult than usual on this occasion, not just because of my decision to sit so close to the screen that I just can’t get a perspective on it, but also because, as it turns out, these videos, even once you’ve seen them in their entirety, don’t feel like they have beginnings and ends. They really do flow.

Eventually the language of the work starts to get a little more familiar. Images and ideas recur, and a picture of an imaginary world begins to assemble itself that promises to link the scenarios of each video in such a way that they seem to be part of the same flow, the same shoot: people seem to be animations based on partly-remembered humans from the past, and they’re in some kind of school or audition situation in which they are trying to progress upwards from ‘Basic Jenny’ capacities to the far superior condition that is ‘Center Jenny’. It starts to be funny. The precision of the script starts to kick in. The musicality of the editing is exhilarating, in that special way that watching people trash stuff can be. I try to repeat the initial experience of Item Falls with each successive video, although not all the seating arrangements and headphone dispositions offer quite such an intense version of the experience as this first encounter. But in each case there’s something about being captured and immersed from a position in a kind of theatre that feels both distinctive and peculiar. In trying to name this feeling, I describe it as being beside myself in my own immersion. I am in it, at sea in it, even, but at the same time I can sense myself to be in an intermission. The intermission does nothing to diminish the affective impact of the flow, and the powerlessness I experience, pleasurable as it is (and perhaps because it is becoming more and more pleasurable as I learn how to enjoy it), does not go away. The intermission doesn’t put me outside anything. If I am looking in on this, it is from an outside I’ve not imagined yet, but whose conditions of possibility might be, I think later, generated by the sculptural theatres. I am in the flow and I am in the theatre. I am both before and after the audience revolution. This immersion in late capitalism is thrilling as all hell, but it knows that I know there’s something gone terribly wrong. The remedy, it seems clear to both of us, lies in some reorganization of social relations.

 

[1] Consideration of recent literary scholarship yields numerous examples of the practical equivalence of form and genre. This, from the second edition of a standard textbook on genre: ‘What these two radically different readings reflect, or course, is the significance of literary form or genre’, Heather Dubrow, Genre, London and New York: Routledge 1982 (2014), p. 2. Two, from recent scholarly essays: ‘The more standardized the literary form or genre, the easier it travels’, Andreas Hedberg, ‘The Knife in the Lemon: Nordic Noir and the Glocalization of Crime Fiction’ in Louise Nilsson, David Damrosch and Theo D’haen (eds), Crime Fiction as World Literature, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 13-22, here p. 21; ‘The resulting question of the proper role of literary form or genre in a postcolonial state is of interest principally because it situates literature coming from former European colonies in a larger global discussion of the evolution of form in literary studies and the proper place for aesthetics in nation-building’, John C. Hawley, ‘Postcolonial Modernism: Shame and National Form’ in Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy and Stuart Murray (eds), What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, London and New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 67-86, here p. 71. Another, from a recent book on an emergent literary genre offers a clue as to the possible origin, within the scholarly literature, for this equivalence: ‘[Fredric] Jameson was the first theorist to link postmodernism not to a particular form or genre, but to socio-political circumstances, or history,’ Megan L. Musgrave, Digital Citizenship in Twenty-First Century Young Adult Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, p. xx. Finally, in texts spanning the period 1991-2016, here are some examples of Jameson himself doing it: ‘The content of the Utopian form will emerge from that other form or genre which is the fairy tale,’ Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, London and New York: Verso, 2005, p. 85; ‘But perhaps two deeper theoretical trends need to be mentioned in any discussion of this much-maligned form or genre called “universal history,” to which Karatani makes so interesting a new contribution here,’ Fredric Jameson, ‘Ancient Society and the New Politics: From Kant to Modes of Production’, Criticism 58.2 (2016), p. 330; and, most appropriately, as will soon be evident, in the opening sentence of the chapter entitled ‘Video’ in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, ‘It has often been said that every age is dominated by a privileged form, or genre, which seems by its structure the fittest to express its secret truths’, London and New York: Verso, 1991, p. 67.

[2] Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, New Literary History 7.1 (1975), pp. 135-163, here p. 135.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 22.

[5] Ibid., 175.

[6] Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 67.

[7] Ibid.,p. 69.

[8] Ibid., p. 76.

[9] Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, 2007.

[10] Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 3.

[11] There is now a large body of critical work, within theatre and performance studies alone, that addresses these and related questions of what is often called theatre’s ‘intermediality’. For just some of the most recent relevant interventions in this expanding field, see Andy Lavender, Performance in the 21st Century: Theatres of Engagement (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), especially chapters 3 (on hybridity and intermedial theatre) and 6 (on YouTube performances); Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck and David Saltz, Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), which is especially useful for its clear survey of the state of the (changing) field; and, for work to which I owe some of the general critical disposition of the present chapter, two essays by Martin Harries: ‘Theatre and Media Before “New” Media’: Beckett’s Film and Play’, Theater 42.2 (2012), pp. 7-25; and ‘Theater after Film, or Dismediation’, ELH 58.2 (2016), pp. 345-361. A further and highly pertinent contribution is Matthew Causey’s essay, ‘Postdigital Performance’, Theatre Journal 68.3 (2016), pp. 427-441, which includes valuable analysis of work by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin whose ‘postdigital’ nature is exemplified for Causey by the sense that their work is ‘at home in the reality of the virtual’, (p. 432). For a consideration of Fitch and Trecartin’s work as ‘postcinematic’, see Lisa Åkervall, ‘Networked selves: Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s postcinematic aesthetics’, Screen 57.1 (2016), pp. 35-51. Clearly my consideration of their work in what follows as ‘postdramatic’ is far from original.

[12] Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 78.

[13] Ibid., 74.

[14] Ibid., 70.

[15] Ibid., 70.

[16] It was at around this time that supporters of a call from Palestinian cultural and academic organisations began to work on a campaign to boycott the Zabludowicz Collection on the grounds that the Zabludowicz Art Trust, which owns the collection, is involved with Israeli companies that supply services and maintenance to the Israeli Airforce. See https://boycottzabludowicz.wordpress.com.

[17] Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott, London and New York: Verso, 2009, p. 8.

[18] For a good summary of these positions and the evidence that supports them, at least in a UK context, see Andy Williams, Claire Wardle, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, ‘“HAVE THEY GOT NEWS FOR US?” Audience revolution or business as usual at the BBC?’, Journalism Practice 5.1 (2011), pp. 85-99.

[19] Marketing material for Danny Iny, The Audience Revolution: The Smarter Way to Build a Business, Make a Difference, and Change the World (Firepole Marketing: 2015). Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Audience-Revolution-Smarter-Business-Difference-ebook/dp/B00V14UTWI (accessed 20 September 2017).