Real Events

Philip Auslander. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.

The effort to "cite" the performance that interests us even as it disappears is much like the effort to find the word to say what we mean. It can't be done, but the futile looking attaches us again to Hope. It's impossible to succeed, but writing's supplement traces the architecture of the ruin's Hope. . . .

--Peggy Phelan, Reading

For Peggy Phelan, writing about performance, an ephemeral art form that disappears even as it is appearing, is an impossible task as the performance cannot be re-instated, but only vaguely remembered. As she argued in her 1993 book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, performance derives its strength from its unique ontology of non-reproducibility. Performance's ability to elude what Phelan has termed "the politics of visibility" places it outside of the (phallic) Law and therefore outside of the domain of patriarchal and oppressive representation. Performance can never be re-presented; it is thus in the domain of performance that Phelan finds "Hope," the trace or indication of a place from which a revolution might take place. Writing towards disappearance, as Phelan proposes to do, is an inherently optimistic act, one that does not so much "fix" the performance as re-position it to mean something new and exciting.

Phelan's belief in the inherently transgressive nature of performance, a belief that has been echoed in much less theoretical terms by performance artists themselves, has become enormously influential in the six years that have passed since the publication of Unmarked (and of the anthology Acting Out: Feminist Performances, which she prepared with Lynda Hart). This is not particularly surprising, as Phelan's claims for the radical ontology of live performance address a collective nostalgia (one that is modernist in origin) for a site of resistance or transgression. What better place to situate that site than art/live performance, which has traditionally situated itself outside of the realm of hegemonic representation? Does performance really stand apart ontologically and ideologically from other forms of representation in today's culture of simulacra and media representation? Is it in fact above (or beyond) the Law and its discursive structures? Or is it in fact the result of those very forms that it supposedly opposes?

These provocative questions are posed by Philip Auslander in his recent book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, in which he takes on the meaning of "liveness" at the end of the twentieth century, and ultimately comes to some very different conclusions about the ontology of performance, and even the significance of "liveness" in a society whose point of reference has become the television. Auslander's point of departure is the common assumption, prevalent in both popular culture and performance theory, "that the 'live' event is 'real' and that mediatized events are secondary and somehow artificial reproductions of the real." In an effort to get beyond this conventional wisdom, Auslander examines the place and ideology of "live" performance in three institutions: television, the rock concert, and copyright law.

In his first chapter, Auslander argues that live performance, even that done by avant-garde performance artists today, is shaped by and modeled upon the mediatized representations of television. Looking back at the history of television, Auslander points out that television initially modeled itself on the ideology of "liveness,"able to capture the intimacy and immediacy of live theatre in a way that film could not (originally all television broadcasts were live). This ideology of "liveness" in connection with television and the televisual has continued today in spite of the fact that most television is no longer live, resulting in the displacement of live performance, which is now used after the fact to validate the "realness" of the mediatized event. Thus television sitcoms such as Happy Days or children's films such as The Lion King are made into stage events after the initial mediatized version has been released, while a character...