Screening the Camera's Eye: Black and White Confrontations of Technological Representation

Screening the Camera's Eye: Black and White Confrontations of Technological Representation TIMOTHY MURRAY The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word "picture" [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature ofman's producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is. Because this position secures, organizes, and articulates itself as a world view, the modem relationship to that which is, is one that becomes, in its decisive unfolding, a confrontation of world views.... For the sake ofthis struggle ofworld views and in keeping with its meaning, man brings into play his unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture" This brief citation of "The Age of the World Picture" underscores the political seriousness and philosophical complexity of any consideration of modem drama and the media. Martin Heidegger's pioneering analyses of questions concerning technology leave us with the responsibility of acknowledging the ideological weight of our relation to technological machines of communication . Although academic discussion ofthe media may be thought trendy or still theoretically unrefined, exemplified by the media's own sustenance of raw humor and play, this discourse can never be innocent or naIve. For it is grounded in what Heidegger depicts as the duofold fiber constituting the contemporary (technological) image as always both a structure of representation and a device or apparatus (tool and episteme) lending itselfnaturally to our struggles for power and authority. To speak of contemporary American drama in view of the technological image is to raise the specter of man bringing "into play his unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things." Conversely, to speak of the technological image in view of contemporary American drama is to unfold theatre's aesthetic and ideological garments of Black and White Confrontations of Technological Representations I I I confrontational strategy and enactment. In regarding contemporary American drama, moreover, I find myself dwelling on how the complexity of technological confrontation is developed with particular care and concern by Black American theatre, by a play world suggesting that the marvelous technicolors of the media have yet to escape from their white against black fundamentals. A CAST OF CAMERAS "Give me a camera," boasts Sean in Ntozake Shange's a photograph: lovers in motion, "& i cd get you anything/ you wanted/ breeze/ a wad of money/ madness/ women on back porches kneading bread/ stars falling/ ice cream! & drunks & forever/ i cd give you forever in a night sky/ michael! i cd give you love/ pure & full/ in a photograph."l Sean's unspoken assertion here is that the objects of desire, from money to ice cream, from breeze to eternity, are not realizable on a stage lying outside of the realm of the camera, outside of the world of the picture. His hopeful, and yet clearly desperate position suggests that desire can be fulfilled only as a picture, as a copy, as a supplement. Of course, Sean's is not a new or contemporary belief in the essence of pictorial representation, but rather one common to the conceptual history of drama. It would not be that difficult to extend Sean's hope in photographic mimesis to the historically familiar aesthetic depiction of theatre as pharmakon, as a curative experience of the world.2 Yet Shange directs us to suspect the authenticity of any pictorial catharsis in the world of her play, "which has no cures for our 'condition' save those we afford ourselves.,,3 In the shadow of the now implausible health of traditional, mimetic notions of theatre, Shange displays, most effectively, the "condition" of sick hope in a world picture nurtured by the fated marriage of modem drama and the media. As Heidegger explained to us as early as 1938, this is a blighted condition, untreatable by (partially because it may stem from) Aristotle's notion of mimetic, curative drama: With the word "picture" we think first of all of a copy of something. Accordingly, the world picture would be...