Fried avec Debord: Theatricality by Default

Preface: Signposting – Interpellation and Subjecthood

As the reader travels through the texts of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, or Badiou, he or she creates a precedent for philosophy as tourism, i.e. nomadic reading. Armed to the brim with maps and guidebooks, the philosopher–tourist has all the necessary information on the peripheral regions of thought; all the knowledge of the landmarks in every remote, God-forsaken textual corner – knowledge that the aborigines of marginalia, the native dwellers of these places – could only envy. On the one hand, when dealing with metaphysical constructs of extended temporal durability, the philosopher automatically escapes the clutches of Chronos. On the other hand, philosophy as tourism deprives the traveller’s own writing of bodily and spatial bonds. Tracking our virtual journeys from text to text, we become witnesses to a whimsical game – a game of blind man’s buff played with time.

The situation is complicated by the fact that in the sphere of philosophizing, there are areas in which one gets bogged down – bodily-consolidated areas, ecstatically intense segments, and irregular ‘thickets’ amidst the regular landscape of writing. The presence of such terrains leads to unforeseen hindrances and to everything that, from the point of view of the nomadic ‘I’, ensues from the possibility of losing tempo. These texts possess an excess of idiomatic capacity and are therefore resistant to reduction or conversion into other texts. As a rule, such zones are impossible to pass through without paying the price of ‘de-nomadization’. I am referring to the centauric texts of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Bataille, Klossowski, etc. It is possible that our interest in them has to do with an attempt to reduce the ‘bogginesque’ nature of these authors’ writing, that is, with the desire to make it transparent and available for a toll-free nomadic reading. And yet, this is precisely the point on which I agree with Geoffrey Hartman, as he identifies Jacques Derrida with poets, whose instinct of self-preservation makes their verses less transparent than we would like. Alain Badiou makes use of the metaphor to cast blame on some of his colleagues for ‘entrusting philosophy to poem’. To be fair, his opinion is not entirely baseless. Some theorists (including myself) rely on the existence of ‘blind alleys’ – autochthonic zones that make the penetrability of the text partial and thus preserve its life.

In passing, a nomadic writer is not limited to the removal of obstacles (read signposts) onto which one’s thought stumbles as it travels through the sphere of knowledge. In fact, he or she perceives this sphere as a kind of limitless text whose bodily resistance must be, if not worn down, then at least made to comply with certain (touristic) standards and requirements. This poses a question as to whether or not one should make an effort to transform the textual jungle into an orderly park, a lexical structure suitable for crossing. What seems to be at stake here is the zero-resistant text – a condition where one’s (mental) sight is neither blocked by an already existing quarry or corrupted by the anticipation of one, thereby making the reading uninterrupted and impervious to self-reflexive examination of its own reasoning.

The reader, as we know, transforms that which he or she reads. Among the contributing factors are the differences between the ecstasy of reading and the ecstasy of writing. The replication of the pleasure of writing within the framework of the pleasure of reading is more than likely to lead to alienation. To compensate for and to overcome this alienation, the creation of other ecstatic conditions, other bodily combinations, and hence the creation of another text (‘the reader’s text’) is required. The only reasonable signpost would be a notice that the reader is about to submerge in a discourse, where he or she may contemplate a variety of directions, hinted at but not necessarily chosen by the author. Otherwise, signposts will (additionally) serve the purpose of gatekeeping. The reader’s text and the writer’s text are mutually mediated. The transition from one register to the other happens by means of a shift. The order of the alternation, however, is optional. Being in both registers at the same time is a distinguishing characteristic of today’s textuality. But instead of signposts I would welcome the idea of indexical signs (e.g. turnout arrows and indicators), enabling the reader to switch from one path to another. Caesuras, pauses, paragraphs as well as changing tempo are such indicators.

‘Entrusting philosophy to poem’ is rife with conceding that theoretical writing is often guided by an autopilot – and if so, signposts are mere obstacles. Most of them are abbreviatory forms of performative language that structure our Unconscious (be it political, clerical, aesthetic, optical, digital, etc.). In the best-case scenario, signpost anticipates a rail switch, but those who read the text are not necessarily travelling by train.

Part 1

The term ‘objecthood’ invokes Melanie Klein’s contribution to ‘object relation theory’ or, more specifically, her ‘seeing the baby via its physical relationship with a set of part-objects’ (be it a mother’s breast or infant’s own limbs, which it manages to observe only in fragments – that is, incompletely). This explains why in our adult life we desperately try to compensate for our mirror-stage anxieties by manipulating fragments in order to endow them with a false (or exaggerated) sense of universality. There is nothing new about expanding to universality, or ‘constructing’ it out of fractions, just as there is nothing wrong with universalism-related issues and observations, unless they are presented in a theatre format, be it a bestselling book, baroque picture frame, or the explosive belt of a suicide bomber. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord argues that, ‘as the indispensable packaging for things … responsible for the manufacture of ever-growing mass of image-objects, the spectacle is the chief product of present-day society’ (p. 9; see also Nicholson Smith, 1995: 16).

And what is more theatrical than the effort to present an overall picture of contemporary art in the showcase known as a gallery or museum? Even if such a picture were a displayable concept, it would still require a different means of presentation, different from those presently adopted by the museums and exhibition curators. The installation paradigm would have to become reflective of the non-Euclidean nature of contemporaneity, a phenomenon that has been hopelessly flattened and sequentialized by both individuals and institutions alike.

Actually, it is time to come up with terms for everything. The architect Terunobu Fujimori has a project for a tower on long legs with wheels. There is a princess in the tower, and all attempts to abduct her have remained utopian. The secret is that the tower should be abducted, not the princess. The fact that the tower has wheels is a metaphor. But this metaphor suggests a broader approach to the solution of problems unsolvable by traditional means. One example of this is Andrew Wiles and his brilliant proof of Fermat’s Great Theorem, which turned out to be a particular instance of a far more universal theoretical ‘project’. The strategy that Wiles chose once again confirms the fact that universalist ploys can liberate us from the bonds of specificity, which operates within embedded and often inert linguistic schemes. For Ernesto Laclau (2007[1966]: 9), everything boils down to ‘the incommensurability existing between the universality of the tasks to be performed and the limitations of the finite agents in charge of them’ – that is, by representatives (‘agents’) of a particular linguistic environment. History, Laclau believes, knows many instances of ‘divine interventions through which finite bodies have to take up universal tasks which were not predetermined in the least by their concrete finitude’ (p. 9). Universalism, as understood by Laclau, is directly related to utopia, though simply overcoming the limitations of language is not enough. In order to acquire the status of a universal paradigm of ‘renewal’, it must redefine itself and its predicates.

Minimal art is animated by tautology, also evident in minimalist music. Tautology is a therapeutic tool that in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (1989) (also see Derrida, 1983[1975]) is attributed to mimesis, for it engenders recovery and reconciliation when terrible experiences (real or fictional) are repeatedly duplicated and commemorated. The reason why this ‘mimetologism’ can undo painful memories is because the related trauma becomes mimetically re-presented and thus loses its autonomy. ‘Spectacular antagonism’ (as Debord, 1967: 41 puts it) turns into a mundane agonistic exchange. The latter is less theatrical than the former. Likewise, minimalism, is the least theatrical of all arts, unless we agree with Michael Fried’s position, expressed in Art and Objecthood.^{1, 2} To emphasize that ‘the condition of theatre’ engenders alienation, I will hand the mike over to Fried and Debord, whose seminal texts were published at the same time, in 1967, the only difference being that the fragments of The Society of the Spectacle were originally printed nine years earlier, in the first edition of Situationist International.

Alienation is a cyclical phenomenon. Its transition from one cycle to another emulates the movement of the pendulum. Hypnosis is based on the same principle: the observation of elementary repetitive motion plunges the audience into a trance, depriving it of the will to reflection. The same is true of eidetic templates, including Malevich’s Black Square, exhibited at the 0, 10 exhibition in Petrograd (1915). As is well known, the principal pathos of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1998[1970]) has to do with its author’s desire to prevent autonomous art from turning into the culture industry. Such a transformation is undergone by every artistic phenomenon that leaves the zone of de-reified activity. Given the inevitability of reification (verdinglichung), the goal of the critically thinking artist is to delay it. However appealing, Adorno’s arguments have for the most part lost their efficacy due to the culture industry’s expansion into the sphere of the optical unconscious and the instantaneous mimetic reciprocation between them, prompted by new technologies. That which Adorno regarded as non-identical to the culture industry turns out to be contaminated by it even before the moment of reification.

According to Fried (1998[1967]: 2, 3):

Whereas literalist art stakes everything on shape as a given property of objects, if not, indeed, as a kind of object in its own right, it aspires, not to defeat or suspend its own objecthood, but on the contrary to discover and project objecthood as such … The condition of non-art is what I have been calling objecthood.

In Art and Objecthood, Fried makes clear that ‘art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre’ (p. 8). ³ Apparently, the time has come for art practitioners to reconcile themselves to this ‘unhappy ending’ and follow the footsteps of Tristan Tzara, who paid his debts to the eschatological dimension of Dada by staging its funeral in 1922. This time it can be infinitely long and can generate new cycles or repetitions until mournful ‘attitudes [will eventually] become form’. ⁴ The memorial service industry requires the creation of both appropriate objects and an appropriate entourage. This is the soil on which the new aesthetic will blossom luxuriously. ⁵

In The Society of the Spectacle, uniqueness and singularity are corrupted by the so-called ‘theatricality of being’ (or, perhaps more appropriately, the theatricality of becoming). This ‘spectacle condition’ fits the definition of fate, provided that we discuss such phenomena in general terms. There are exceptions, of course, even though the virus of theatricality, let alone its ‘divine intervention’, can be extended to highly independent and very creative people, who should be mindful of what Stephane Mallarmé defined as ‘theatre of the mind’. Feeling insecure is what everyone experiences under pressure imposed by the ‘condition of fate’, regardless of who controls the stage – be it yourself, or some external ‘fate managers’, including real people, institutions, or psychic entities like ‘Ideal I’ or ‘les noms-du-père’.

There are places (alternative galleries, art squats, and other obscure settings) that function like Deleuzian ‘pleats’ or ‘folds’. These sites can be compared to dugouts that hermits and partisans make in the ground. ‘Displayed’ there are objects of a special kind that – by analogy with their location – could be called ‘obscuritarian’. I use this term in order to emphasize their existence apart from their own objectness. ⁶ They dissuade us, as it were, from acquiring them, from transferring them into a world of visual consumption where everything is optically processed, itemized, objectified. And this is not because they lack some necessary qualities, but because of their own indifference to the possibility of such a transfer. Each object might as well bear the inscription ‘Not for sale, admiration, or identification’. For, it is precisely this obscuritarian field that has the ability to create and maintain a sensation of disembodied objectness, or objectness held in suspense.

The objectness discussed here is a fairly unique phenomenon. In the case of Western artists, however obscured and alienated from the culture industry, these were Cinderella objects, orphaned objects, foundling objects – secretly or openly yearning to be accepted in ‘polite’ society. In contrast, the obscurity of the objects exhibited unofficially in the USSR was not camouflage; it is the chief distinction between autonomous aesthetic activities, advocated by Moscow conceptualism and other faktura-clastic practices, reluctant to turn their ‘noematic contents’ into templates, as did ‘literalist artists’ criticized by Fried. ⁷

Fried’s rejection of literalist objecthood echoes Franz Brentano’s notion of the ‘intentional inexistence of an object’. In his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1973[1874]), Brentano insists that ‘every mental phenomenon includes something as object [intentionally] within itself, which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing’ (pp. 88–89). Literalism is thus a collision between noetic and noematic, or, in Husserl’s terms, between an ‘I-pole’ and an ‘object-pole’ (via reification of the latter). ⁸

Discussing this paradigm of objectness, one must remember the 1920s and 1930s in Russia, when the bonds between the communal subject and the communal object were defetishized. I am referring to contact with objects of communal day-to-day life (Soviet-style) – kitchen utensils, clothes, furniture, and similar lowly, faceless things. It is possible that, in some sense, ‘communal conceptualism’ still holds onto these traditions.

The modern world (including the global market of political structures and financial pyramids) is woven from a multitude of disconnected environments: atomic, molecular, global, etc. Regardless of their genealogy, all these entities experience the magic of the word usurped by the Polis in order to conceptualize our lives, which have always been controlled by linguistic means, extendable to non-verbal (albeit matchable) phenomena. The complex variety of connections (resemblant of Leibniz’s monadology) gives us no reason to believe that nearly all links in this chain are subordinated to some single, yet unfamiliar, goal – especially since the Polis itself has no clear goal orientation. Most likely, it is the stochastic chaos of failed utopian (or bureaucratic) ventures – fragmentary and perpetually unfinished. In reality, all that happens is the assembly of words and images, slogans and sketches, whose hustle-bustle creates the effect of performative saturation.

Minimalism’s self-imposed austerity fits the definition of ‘speculative idealism’ that attests to Hegel’s obsession with totality. Yet, Adorno deems the Hegelian framework applicable in so far as ‘the force of the whole is absorbed into the knowledge of the particular’. An exemplary minimalist painting is, thus, a ‘totality in miniature’, i.e. unrealizable utopia of landing in a placeless place. Minimalist sculptures were made by Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, or Donald Judd with an aim to furnish a ‘neverland’.

The aim of Art and Objecthood is to convince the reader that ‘the literalist attitude toward sculpture is associated by Judd with what he calls anthropomorphism, ⁹ while ‘the literalist case against painting rests mainly on … the relational character [of the medium]. One may wonder if this reasoning can be extended to today’s ‘relational art’, and if so, the question should be addressed to Nicolas Bourriaud, whose model of ‘relational aesthetics’ was revealed in his 1998 book with that title.

Returning to Fried’s Art and Objecthood, I will add that his assessment that ‘Literalist sensibility is theatrical because the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder’ (p. 3) – matches Debord’s idea expressed in the Situationist International magazine (‘Contre la Cinema’) that art and creation should liberate from the spectacle. Yet, in The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argues that ‘it is the price put on art that destroys [its] integrity,’ not ‘the literalist espousal of objecthood’ that Fried blames for the sins of theatricality. Thus, it might be useful to cite Fried and Debord once again, compare their opinions on the subject, and engage them (albeit by default) in a theatrical dialogue, based on their texts:

What The Society of the Spectacle and Art and Objecthood have in common (apart from both being insightful and challenging) is their predilection for phenomenological bias manifested in a reductionist reading of a variety of issues. Focusing on those aspects, Jacques Derrida (in his book Moscou aller – retour, 1995) discourages us from ‘describing reality in such a way that it would appear as the referent’s self-description’, for in all such descriptions, ‘the interpretive content is endowed with pre-interpretive status’. This reference to philosophy is a roundabout way to hear what Fried and Debord think about it:

The vulnerability of Fried’s position is in its failure to appreciate (or to simply face) the fact that art contaminated by theatre cannot be detached from it, partially because both, the former and the latter, are to equal degrees clichéd, processed by the media or culture industry, and are largely co-extensive. This is what we need to be liberated from, which, of course, is a utopia. But in 1967 it was still acceptable to rely on the existence of art forms and modalities that were not blended with, or bound to, anything else.

To be fair, I will balance my criticism of Fried by offering a moderate critique of The Society of the Spectacle. However brilliant, Debord’s book can be regarded as synecdoche at a pinnacle of its generalizing capacity. This trope is equipped with the technique of magnifying the fractional in order to familiarize us (as spectators) with the ‘totality of the scene’ in which everything is taken into account, put on record, given a place. Our willingness to accept it is made possible because, being tired of watching the world through a ‘crack’, we cry out for compensation.

Part 2

Regarding literalist artworks, Fried wonders ‘what decides their identity as paintings or as objects?’ (Art and Objecthood, p. 2) This yearning for identifications, persistently vocalized by market forces, is fully armed with categories and definitions essential for constituting identity. The latter, however, is ‘the primary form of ideology’, and ‘the universal coercive mechanism’, while ‘any definition is identification’ (see Adorno, 1973: 147–149). Yet, the will to identity often travels ‘ahead of itself’. In Art and Its Objects ( Richard Wollheim, 1968: sections 4–10) confirmed the existence of ‘some physical objects that could conceivably be identified as works of art, [and] some works of art as physical objects … There are those which insist that it would be quite erroneous to make this identification.’ ¹¹

Thus, if we identify autonomous art as that which escapes reification, then the question arises about whether its ‘hard-to-get’ appearance is reflective of a residual (and largely belated) reliance on some other agency – one that does not necessarily obey the rules of logic or care for safeguarding the values of high or low … Even though reification is an ‘unwelcome guest’ for critically thinking artists and theorists, it still seems inevitable.

It may be tempting to suggest that ‘the condition of theatre’ continues to serve as a connecting link between cult and culture. Not only has it infiltrated all spheres of financial, political and social life but it has become a spectacle of global proportions. The way such spectacles gain their museological status remains the most intriguing cryptaphore of our times. To break its code (i.e. the code of that cryptaphore) could be as challenging as Julian Assange hacking into the Pentagon files, or an Israeli cyber security firm unlocking a terrorist’s iPhone.

Also worth mentioning is the 2006 Dada exhibition organized by the National Gallery in Washington and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The major impression the works on exhibit made was the half-hearted nature of negation, which for the Dadaists became a ‘part-object’: having fallen out of love with art, they continued to love creativity. However vertiginous, there is probably nothing more spectacular than that ‘falling out’. Hence, breaking the bonds of theatricality merits separate discussion; particularly taking into account that, regardless of the nature of our pursuits, we are always on stage, and it would be naïve to think that aesthetic practices are an exception.

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In Das Kapital (1997[1889]), Marx makes an inventory of items stretching from material wealth to ‘the intellectual potentialities’, which proletarians had been estranged from inasmuch as they were subjected to the ‘accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital’. In light of this negative definition, the proletariat became identifiable as a class, especially in the minds of intellectuals – yet another negatively defined group of people whose negativity (even if self-inflicted) was, and still is, essential to their way of thinking. Speaking of the proletariat, it has long vanished in the West: its remnants are outnumbered by the cognitariat, i.e. clerkship, engaged in providing services. The same is true of contemporary culture, where ‘cognitive work’ is often (albeit falsely) presented as a metanoia that unbinds art from the alterity of the object.

The experience of recent years convinces us that in disseminating ‘immaterial values’, the lion’s share belongs to the internet and mobile phone services. Both function as operating systems for the digital unconscious, and due to these brain-hacking practices, streams of desire are washed ashore. Converted to a digital format, words and pictures play equal parts in regulating the dynamics of mass communication, regardless of the differences between parties. Heterogeneous contexts are reduced to a common denominator in a fraction of a second. Bouncing between paranoia and metanoia becomes routine. Leftist anarchists and fundamentalists instantly work out a joint platform in virtual space, not realizing that among them there is no (and cannot be) ideological unity. Confrontation will begin later.

The study of agonistic exchange, undertaken by Marcel Mauss (1990[1924]), and related to archaic gifts and offerings, can be extended to ‘the concept of “immaterial labor” that involves activities, rarely recognized as “work” – be it defining or fixing cultural and artistic standards, or shaping tastes, fashions, consumer norms, and … public opinion.’ It comes as no surprise that the tendencies outlined in the above statement by Maurizio Lazzarato, surfaced long before the publication of his book, Il lavoro immaterial: Forme di vita e produzione di soggettivita (1997). In the late 1950s, with the emergence of conceptual art, a new cycle of questioning the relationship between two signifying practices – verbal and visual – began.

To follow up on this theme, I will touch upon the interdisciplinary practices that arise on the border between art and literature, where gear-shifting from the regimes of phrases to those of pictures proves ineffective without instant reskilling. Although outworn images and words are often replaced, modified, or refurbished within their own homogeneous milieus, heterotopias can also be viewed as a health care policy, even more effective (at times) than fooling around with phenomena of the same ilk. In fact, literary clichés are best cured by idiosyncratic imagery, and clichéd imagery by idiosyncratic texts. This is probably why artists are addicted to poetry and poets go to art galleries. In a way, interdisciplinary fields are rehab facilities for voice/gaze injuries.

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The question that awaits an answer is whether or not an art medium fits the notion of that ‘vantage point’ from where something else can be observed – particularly another art medium. And: should this aesthetic configuration of thinking be extended to political actions and to the logic of their arrangement? Is it good for an artwork to switch places with critical and poetic narratives? If so, can ‘spectacle culture’, along with ‘the condition of theatre’, make it look all-inclusive? Today art and politics are completely hung up on glamour. If it were possible to mount a glamour-free exhibition, it would still be glamorous by virtue of inversion – its unglamorousness.

When Fried reproached surrealists for their theatricality, it can also be traced to Duchamp’s ‘Rrose Sélavy’, ‘Étant donnés’, and Dada in general, which (while lying on its death bed) thought that Surrealism was worthy enough to succeed it. ¹² Regardless of one’s access to the ‘champions of mind games’, it is unthinkable to engage them in a professional exchange if its context fails to qualify as sufficiently theatrical. Seen as an integral part of symposia or conferences, the theatrical dimension can be traced back to the anatomical theatres of the University of Salamanca (1552) and University of Padua (1594), where theatricality attained academic standing. ¹³ Mention of the Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir (1795) should also be made, along with Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double (1938).

Fried’s crusade against theatricality turns out to be a double bind because in Art and Objecthood he is not only denouncing spectacle, but he is helping to reinforce it. ‘Spectacular critique of the spectacle’ (Debord, 1995 [1967]: 138) emerges as its ally, rather than an enemy. Thanks to ‘literalist artists’, the outstretched inventory of conditions needed to stimulate aesthetic reflection was reduced to the bare minimum. Even though Minimalism befits the notion of reductionist enterprise, Fried nonetheless subjected it to yet another round of bracketing in order to eradicate the theatricality that filled the vacuum. In fact, Fried confronted Minimalism while observing it from a vantage point of systemic thinking, precisely at a time when Minimal art was still regarded as non-systemic, or a semi-systemic phenomenon. Thus, Art and Objecthood can be read as a critique of non-systemic reason, thereby alluding to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (2004[1960]), and Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason (1987).

In a sense, the economy of writing is informed by the condition of theatre. The problem is that in the works of some authors, theatricality is deliberately repressed to enhance the outwardly modest and innocently naked truth, thereby attesting to the fact that the sublime terror, which academic thinkers inflict on their own writings, appears to be theatrically mediated. In Husserl’s work, for instance, the act of undressing the truth looks like a gynecological check-up (known as epoché). Barthes, on the other hand, is more interested in dressing than undressing. For him, truth is a drag queen to be ecstatically draped by the veil of writing.

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‘Heterotopia of the spectacle’ (e.g. play within a play, even if ‘retreated beneath its bar’) ¹⁴ refers to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the Prince of Denmark, after welcoming a troupe of vagabond actors, plots to stage a play featuring his father’s murder. The notion of the ‘heterotopia of the spectacle’ is constitutive of a situation in which everything can be seen as theatrical: public and private, work and leisure, trust and fear, violence and retribution, exchange and deceit. If all of the above succumbed to the condition of theatre, then theatricality would have no Other. Besides, ‘heterotopias of the spectacle’ – be they on stage or beyond – are mutually reciprocal. Hamlet, for example, mistakes Polonius for a rat. Polonius is stealth itself, and in that sense, his death is as much a rat as he is. The story of Ernst Lanzer comes to mind as we recall Freud’s study, ‘Case of the Rat Man’ (1909). ¹⁵ But if Polonius is the rat, then Hamlet is the ‘Rat Man’ – which is hardly discernible in the jostling of interpretations that focus on the relationships between the characters. Salvation lies in nuance: Hamlet is theatrical and Polonius is not. His place is behind the curtain, on the periphery of ‘spectacle culture’ (thus inviting a comparison with Fried). In Shakespeare, this turns out to be a labyrinth of curtains, installed not only on the stage but also in the texts uttered by characters and authored by the playwright. Take, for instance the word ‘or’, which appears in the question, ‘To be or not to be?’ When Hamlet runs his sword through the curtain, he removes the distinctions and, simultaneously, the symbolic border that separates him from the ‘rat’. ¹⁶

The difference between the regimes of spectacle, peculiar to past and present, lies in the fact that today (through digital media and beyond) we are already moving swiftly, if not instantaneously, from one theater to another – and, moreover, that the arena for spectacularization is, first and foremost, our own consciousness. It is, in fact, structuring itself in the likeness of the theatre. What remains unanswered is whether this kind of structuring can be extended to the Unconscious. And if so, one can think of the heterotopia of the spectacle in terms of its applicability to networks of desire, where everyone can act on or off stage in a reciprocal fashion.

In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2010[1920]), the death drive is defined as ‘an urge to restore an earlier [inanimate] state of things’. The death drive (read Thanatos) is balanced by the libido (read Eros), both partaking in the fort-da game and ‘cast’ to be the principal actors in the playhouse of our psychic life. The additional ‘casting’ has been undertaken by Maria Granic-White who argues that ‘one way in which the sentient Unconscious enters consciousness is through the “theatrical drive”, which plays a fundamental role in protecting the individual against the death drive … this drive is an unconscious response to societal change and pressures which extant or forming ideologies exert upon the human being’ (Granic-White, 2012). Not spotted by therapists, the ‘theatrical drive’ nonetheless assumes the position of ‘stage director’ – a Stanislavsky of sorts, to mediate the contest between libido (read protagonist) and the death drive (read antagonist). In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), the ‘theatrical drive’ is personified by Dionysus wearing the mask of Apollo and accompanied by a troupe of Satyrs and Maenads. His advocacy for unrestrained libido strikes as being dramatically enhanced by both the ‘theatrical drive’ and the ‘condition of theatre’.

Fried’s suspicion that a ‘hollow shape’ (read literalist object) can easily be filled with equally vacant content, including ideology, was not entirely groundless. The best possible scenario for such an object is to assume the form of a ‘glass coffin’, in which the sleeping princess awaits her prince – that is, in effect, the viewer. The ‘princess’ stands for the content packed into the coffin. There is some kind of hidden expression resting within it. And in order to make it apparent, the viewer must shatter the glass coffin with his or her gaze – freeing the content imprisoned inside, and begin interacting with it.

Misuse of the gaze is not a free ride. Tiresias lost his sight as payback for staring at Athena while she was swimming naked. The lesson he learned was that eternity could not be experienced in a single shot. Today our craving for constant visual consumption has become shamefully reminiscent of the Olympic gods’ fascination with ancient ‘Reality shows’ such as the Trojan War, the blinding of Cyclops, or the beheading of Medusa. The audience (i.e. Zeus and other immortals) is the prime source from which most Europeans draw their voyeurism. If St John (the Evangelist) were Greek or Roman – he would probably be more inclined to admit that in the beginning was sight, not word.