The Human Nature of the Bot: a response to Philip Auslander

The issue of liveness—which Philip Auslander [see his "Live from Cyberspace" in this issue] has moved to center stage, where we thought it had always been—has various levels and phases, reimaginable now in terms of cyberspace. There was a time, however, when it seemed perfectly understandable to speak of "live" or "living" theatre as distinct from acting on film or even, with the closing down of the screen, the immediacy of television. Yet, long before the Internet, it might seem a failing distinction. For there were times within that time when I'd be tempted to say—in disenchantment with what I was seeing in the mainstream of American theatre—that the presence of live actors made no real difference: stage or screen, the effect and/or affect was very much the same.

What I meant was that everything was so unenlivening in its predictability, so insusceptible to the unexpected, so invariable once staged, that it seemed (to use an image from another era) like a carbon copy of itself. As for the text, when the play was the thing, it might have done better in a reading without any actors at all. And of course there was the tradition, from Kleist through Gordon Craig to Roland Barthes on to the Bunraku, in which puppets were preferred to actors whose impoverished subjectivity only got in the way, except that the acting I am talking about seemed, in its empty sameness, to be without any subjectivity. Whatever the ontological distinction between the one-dimensional figures on the screen and the presumably rounded figures in perspective on a proscenium stage, the felt actuality was such, in various productions I saw, that the quotient of liveness seemed more in the transparency of film. Indeed, it was apparent that the factitious reality of the figures on a screen could have considerably more vitality, as if they were truly alive, than the flesh-and-blood actors up there on the stage, whose behavior was so thoroughly coded and familiar it might as well have been canned.

That has by no means changed entirely in the contemporary theatre. But shifting contexts altogether, Auslander writes about the programmed responses in text-based digital environments, in which words and word patterns are picked up so that "it is now possible to be engaged in conversation with a chatterbot without knowing it." When you're on an e-mail list, he adds, or in a chatroom on the Internet, "it can be impossible to know whether you are conversing with a human being or a piece of software." But sometimes, too—it may be chastening to remember—you may be conversing with a human being and feel the same way, as if the person were programmed. Which may suggest that liveness is variable in definition, with inflections of value through a spectrum of meaning from being alive to being lively. In shifting the notion of liveness from the ontological to the temporal, "a relationship of simultaneity," an event in real time that can be watched as it occurs, Auslander refers to a passage in Blooded Thought, in which I wrote that the ontology of theatre may be predicated on the existential fact that the person performing is dying in front of your eyes.

This is not to deny, however, that the substance of that insidious truth may be more or less diminished by the dubious presence of the actor in a facsimile of performance that, if occurring in real time, nevertheless feels like a rerun or rather embalmed in advance; without the stink of mortality that, as in the irrefutable testimony on the heath of King Lear, is the appalling truth of theatre.

If bots are virtual entities that, because they are without biological presence or corporeality, are virtually immortal too, subverting "the centrality of the live, organic presence of human beings to...