Read Dean Wilcox's original review which was published in Theatre Research International, 25, 1 (2000), pp. 98–9.

Since publishing Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture in 1999, Philip Auslander has revisited the central question – ‘What is the status of live performance in a culture dominated by mass media?’ – in a second edition and in further publications. While the first edition focused on mediation mainly in terms of recording technologies and television, the second edition (2008) revised his foundational arguments about liveness in relation to digital technologies, as well as the sociocultural conditions of the digital age. Following the second edition, Auslander further explored the question of liveness in ‘Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective’ and emphasized the idea of liveness as a historically variable effect of developing technologies and processes of mediatization.Footnote ¹ Auslander's continuous efforts to update and renew his approach to liveness since 1999 have influenced subsequent scholarship and galvanized critical interest, and are still shaping the thinking around mediatized theatre.

Auslander's interdisciplinary take on liveness encompasses the study of live performance forms ranging from theatre and rock music to sport and courtroom testimony. This double-take review mainly focuses on Auslander's arguments in relation to theatre in a mediatized age which has become ever more germane in an increasingly media-saturated culture and theatre practice. Auslander's approach to mediatization and media technologies largely concentrates on recording technologies and mass media (particularly television). Borrowing from Jean Baudrillard's idea of the mass media as ‘the cultural dominant of contemporary, western/ized societies’ (p. 5), Auslander defines mediatization as ‘a particular cultural object [that] is the product of the mass media or of media technology’ (p. 5) and that participates in the same cultural economy as mass media. As a result, Auslander's idea of mediatized performance refers mainly to ‘performance that is circulated on television, as audio or video recordings, and in other forms based in technologies of reproduction’ (p. 5). Even though Auslander brilliantly highlights that ‘mediatization is not just a question of the employment of media technology; it is also a matter of what might be called media epistemology’ (p. 32), in most of his analysis he uses mediatization to talk about mediation – an act of transmitting between different actors. Further analysis of mediatization as a sociocultural, epistemological, cognitive and political phenomenon, and how this phenomenon has shaped live performance beyond the question of reproducibility, would enrich our understanding of mediatized performance and fit into what he is exploring in Liveness.

As noted by Dean Wilcox in the original review for the TRI (2000), Auslander relies ‘heavily on the work of Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard and his own previously published material’ to demonstrate the shared ontological characteristics between live performance and mediatized forms.Footnote ² Auslander argues that in an age where mediatized cultural forms have dominated the contemporary cultural economy and audience expectations, and lead the older media to adjust to the new forms and environment, live forms would inevitably adapt to this reality: ‘the general response of live performance to the oppression and economic superiority of mediatized forms has been to become as much like them as possible’ (p. 7). For Auslander, the replacement of the live by the mediatized within cultural economy, and the adaptation of the live to the mediatized, ‘both technologically and epistemologically’ (p. 39), have resulted in anxiety ‘that underlies many performance theorists’ desire to reassert the integrity of the live and the corrupt, co-opted nature of the mediatized’ (p. 39). Throughout Liveness, particularly through his critique of Peggy Phelan's Unmarked in chapter 2, Auslander problematizes the idea of theatre performance as an authentic, irreproducible form that stands ‘outside the ideologies of capital and reproduction that define a mediatized culture’ (p. 40). Phelan's argument about the nature of performance sets the disappearance of performance as its core quality. This suggests that live performance ‘becomes something other than performance’ when it ‘participate[s] in the circulation of representations of representations’,Footnote ³ and that its distinctive value and ontology change. Auslander believes that such an ontological positioning is based on and promotes binary opposition between the live and the mediatized that values the live over the mediatized and wrongly positions the live outside the dominant cultural economy. For Auslander, although there is ‘competitive opposition’ (p. 11) between the two at the level of cultural economy, the live and the mediatized are interdependent and synchronous, without being ontologically undistinguishable.

Auslander and Phelan have different, yet connected, foci in their arguments despite often being perceived as opposites. Phelan, for example, does not use the notion of liveness in her discussion of the ontology of performance, and Auslander explores liveness predominantly in relation to cultural economy. Phelan is interested in the unmarked – ‘perpetual inaccessibility of a real/now’ as Stephen Bottoms explains: ‘Every purported presence is ghosted both by the past, in the unmarked form of absences and substitutions, and by the imminence of its own future disappearance.’Footnote ⁴ For Phelan, therefore, the idea of reproduced performance becoming ‘something other than performance’ does not necessarily suggest an ontological opposition, but an ontological difference. Auslander thinks about the relationship between the live and the mediatized – outside the context of cultural economy – in a similar way, which he emphasizes particularly in the second edition: the live and the mediatized neither are ontological opposites, nor do they ‘partake of a shared ontology’ (p. 51). Liveness, for Auslander, is not an ontological constant, but a contingent, variable effect of mediatization – a process that alters continually in line with the developing technologies and the technology-induced social, economic, cultural, political and cognitive conditions. Auslander updates his idea of the historicity of liveness in ‘Digital Liveness’, and to an extent moves beyond his focus on cultural economy to explore liveness from a phenomenological perspective. He argues that ‘liveness does not inhere in a technological artifact or its operations – it results from our engagement with it and our willingness to bring it into full presence for ourselves’.Footnote ⁵ Therefore liveness is an interaction, an experience that ‘results from our conscious act of grasping virtual entities as live in response to the claims they make on us’.Footnote ⁶

Auslander responds to a crucial point which was overlooked in Liveness: the perceptions and experiences of audiences. Furthermore, Auslander marginalizes theatre as a social art form and considers the collective experience and engagement in theatre merely in terms of cultural economy and states that ‘communality is not a function of liveness’ (p. 56). However, as we have experienced, increasingly and globally since the COVID-19 pandemic, collective experience of performance is a significant component of digital liveness. Although this does not exclude mediatized one-to-one performances or the digital liveness generated by the connection between audience and virtual performer, it emphasizes the role of collective phenomenology of audience in epistemologically, experientially and affectively grasping a new mode of performance that destabilizes the binary oppositions between the live and the mediatized. For example, in Arlekin Players’ Zoom-based digital theatre performance ChekovOS, audiences watch and participate in the fictional story of Chekhovian characters, whilst at the same time commenting on the fictional world and other audience members' messages through Zoom's chat function. In such performances, which have become increasingly prevalent since the pandemic, the concept and experience of liveness – its ontology – have shifted once more: what forms or affirms liveness is not only our acceptance of the claim that the virtual entity makes on us, as Auslander argues, but also our knowledge of our co-presence with other audience members through a shared experience, our direct or indirect engagement with their virtual existence regardless of their temporal, spatial or subjective realities.

The perceived hierarchical opposition between the live and the mediatized that Auslander challenges in Liveness was undeniably an accurate observation of a prevailing custom, and is still accurate, to a degree, now. Auslander's questioning of the undisputed value and power given to live performance over the mediatized is crucial, as well as his argument against Eric Bogosian's idea of theatre as ‘medicine for a toxic environment of electronic media mind-pollution … opposing the oppressive regime of “electronic noise” imposed upon us by the mass media’ (p. 4). It is this kind of ‘reductive binary opposition of the live and the mediatized’ (p. 3) that positions the mediatized as ‘secondary and somehow artificial reproductions of the real’ (p. 3) and suggests that the live has a political function outside and opposed to the mediatized that Auslander effectively defies. Although the conversation about opposing ontologies is still marked in various analyses of contemporary theatre and performance, neither the perceived binary opposition between the live and the mediatized, nor the political capability and cultural value of the one over the other, is sustainable or in fact valid. Highlighting the importance of Auslander's critical approach, yet also critiquing it, Matthew Causey argues that the ontological divisions are ‘irresolvable and false’ in the context of postdigital culture – ‘a social system fully familiarized and embedded in electronic communications and virtual representations, wherein the biological and the mechanical, the virtual and the real, and the organic and the inorganic approach indistinction’. Causey emphasizes that ‘the ontologies of the performance and media converge and are experienced as less uncanny and more familiar, less discrete and autonomous phenomena, and understood as a flow, a becoming, and always in process’.Footnote ⁷ Auslander's critique of the unquestioned value and political function of the live as the source of truth insinuates a significant point about performance today: the value or critical capacity of performance is not dependent on a no-longer valid or relevant ontological separation between the live or the mediatized. It depends, however, on how performance operates in relation and in response to the dominant power structures and technologies of the late capitalist mediatized culture. The resistant potential of performance resides not in the notion of performance that is ontologically unique and separate from mediatization, but in how performance, whether analogue, digital, or hybrid, challenges the dominant narratives and structures of mediatized culture from within this very culture and by incorporating its discourse and machineries into performance in order to resist and ‘return … the system back against itself’.Footnote ⁸ Thus, as Auslander suggests, live performance is not, or should not be, expected to remain outside the ideologies of a media-saturated capitalist system, ‘even to assume an oppositional stance’ (p. 40); instead, it exists and works in, whether to subvert or reproduce, this cultural and sociopolitical ecology.

Although I have thus far focused on Auslander's ideas in relation to live performance in theatre, it is important to briefly mention his intriguing argument about live performance in the courtroom, which proposes that the ‘legal arena may be one of the few sites left where liveness continues to be valued’ (p. 157). Auslander calls the idea of live performance as the source of truth into question, yet also accepts that the legal context (at least in the US) necessitates the presence of all the actors in the courtroom. In ‘Pandemic Proceedings: Legal Performance in the Time of Covid-19’, Auslander revisited the central role of live performance as ‘the only means to the revelation of truth’ in ‘the procedural fabric of American jurisprudence’.Footnote ⁹ This was written during a time when the pandemic affected the court's operations, thus necessitating alternative approaches such as the use of video teleconferencing in legal trials. Auslander astutely presents both sides of the debate on liveness in the courtroom: while some argue that physical confrontation in a courtroom is the way to assess the credibility of a witness, others draw on the experience during the pandemic and contend that ‘the current objections to the online trial will evaporate’ as the Internet will become a ‘naturalized environment’.Footnote ¹⁰ Considering both positions, Auslander highlights that the ritual, symbolic and widely putative value of liveness in the courtroom is something that the US legal system mainly still adheres to. Nevertheless, the pandemic conditions have undoubtedly put this under scrutiny, leaving this question about the relationship between performance and contemporary law open to discussion.

Almost twenty-five years since its original publication, during which digital culture and technologies have become increasingly integral to our lives and cultural practices, while the pandemic has rapidly necessitated a deeper conversation about mediatized performance, the questions Auslander asked in Liveness are still applicable to emerging forms, practices and experiences of liveness. These questions are as relevant today as ever, particularly in the current theatre landscape where mediatized performance is not only about prerecorded or live broadcast performance, but also about various modes of digital and hybrid performance that use technologies at the core of their formation, design, critical rationale, staging and audience engagement strategies. Rather than the debate on ontological oppositions, which has been repeatedly reviewed in relation to theatre and performance studies of mediatized culture, one of the key and still pertinent arguments in Liveness that we should draw on and develop today is Auslander's emphasis on the historicity of liveness, shaping ontological, phenomenological and aesthetico-political properties of performance – an argument that Auslander will surely be advancing and offering innovative perspectives on in a forthcoming edition.