Notes

Chapter 1: introduction

Auslander opens by comparing theatre and media, referencing Herbert Blau and Karl Marx. Theatre and media are rivals, and, much like industrial production, media (specifically television) has filled and saturated the cultural economy. Television has essentially formed its own culture, its own environment in of itself. Television is “the” cultural context, not just one of many. Arguably, the same could be said today of the internet.

On live performance, Auslander is trying to challenge the ideas of the traditional value of liveness. Performers in theatre cling to “the magic of live theatre”. These ideas attempt to place a binary opposition between live performance and the media. Generally, this style of thought puts liveness as the defined opposite of the recorded. “In other words, the common assumption is that the live event is ‘real’, and that mediatized events are secondary and somehow artificial reproductions of the real.” (p. 3)

The term “mediatized” derives from Baudrillard, and is concerned with the idea of “mass media” and, in Baudrillard’s definition, a system of bringing all discourses under a single code (sort of a universal formulation of everything as equivalent under a particular semiotic system as a substrate, much like poured concrete). Mediatization can be applied to live performances, by which they become mediatized performances, for example, a play or event broadcast on TV.

Ultimately, Auslander emphasizes that there are no ontological differences between live performance and media. Live performances are just as susceptible to incorporating media elements as others.

Chapter 2: Live Performance in a Mediatized Culture

Initially, media events were modeled on live ones. Now that media is culturally dominant, live events are now modeled on mediatized ones. Auslander treats this change as one dependent on the historical situation, rather than as dependent on intrinsic properties. Note: This could be just an instance of remediation, where disciplines borrow, reference, and support each other. This approach treats the relationship as non-antagonistic, though.

Television strove to emulate theatre when it emerged (rather than film). Initially it had the capacity to “go live” which emphasized its quality of liveness and immediacy, even though that is not generally how it is used today.

Television’s essential properties are immediacy and intimacy. It can look on events exactly when and as they happen. Film, by contrast, is characterized by memory, repetition, and temporal displacement. Television is intimate in the sense of bringing the external to the home, without needing to travel to it. TV was seen as a cultural sanitizer, to bring only appropriate legitimate content and values into the home. Similar properties can be said of digital media, but in that case it uses the hypermediate in addition to the immediate, and the illusion of the sanitized vanished much more quickly.

Live performance is now heavily influenced (and tends to emulate) the rhetoric and practices of mediatization, with screens becoming prominent in many situations and venues.

Mediatization is reflected in production of performance by the apparatus of reproduction. Auslander references Jacques Attali on representation as a method compared to repetition. Representation developed initially with capitalism but was gradually replaced by repetition as a result of mass-production. This sounds to reference Greenberg on the Avant-Garde and Kitsch.

Referencing Benjamin: Masses have desire for proximity, and at the same time, have desire for reproduced objects. Benjamin’s claim that reproduction devalues the original can be seen as evidenced by the decay of the value of “real” liveness and intimacy, as eroded and replaced by the emulated synthetic on the screen.

Auslander concludes this section with the claim that the system of the virtual has incorporated liveness into its substance. This could be seen as that live elements may be understood as tools and media for a larger system of meaning making. I don’t think that is what Auslander is getting at, but it seems like a productive line of enquiry.

On simulation and live performance: Ronald McDonald performing in restaurants (p. 49-50). Performances occur in numerous locations, and are all live and separate, but are designed to evoke one single character, which is the template that generates each performance. “All performances of Ronald McDonald are generated from a single interpretation of the character, which functions as a template. I have chosen this example in part to make the point that a template is not the same as a script: improvisational performances, too, can be generated from a template.” (p. 50) Here, live performance aspires to the conditions of mass art.

A condition of this, related to Benjamin’s aura, is the illusion of authenticity. No occurrence of mass or scripted art can be considered authentic because of its reproducibility. Performances that derive from templates instead reference an ideal template, and attempt to borrow its aura or authority.

Using Baudrillard’s definition of the real as “that which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction”, then the live must be defined as “that which can be recorded”.

Loose notes:

Television has become its own culture.

live performances are “more real”
but mediatized are more artificial

live performance can function as mass media?
or, mass media better enables narrative adaptation??

book is controversial because of challenging liveness of theatre?

new media for Auslander is TV

Recent web technologies,
web 2.0, instant messaging, mobile computing
aid confusion of liveness and mediation

liveness and canon?
variation of performance is acceptable in theatre
but in TV and others, liveness leads to a conflict in the establishment of canon.
some particular instance must be elevated to some degree of authority
this derives from the idea of having the perfect performance

for example, music videos which replicate live performance
but use studio track
so the idea of liveness and the reality of it is very
confused and challenged

some performances have have celebration of the virtual
for example, Gorrilaz, which hides liveness of performers
television yields a combination of immediacy and intimacy
filming live television is a SIMULATION not a REPLICATION