1

Interfaciality: Levinas and the ethical challenge of new media theatre

Levinas’s relation to theatre arts is intimate although not explicit: the relation of his dramatic
philosophy of the Other to Shakespearean drama for instance turns out to be deep and
strongly anchored in Totality and Infinity but most of all in Otherwise than being or beyond
essence. Besides, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell evinced in all his works on
performance and theory, the relevance of such a parallel analysis; let also mention Levinas’s
close connection to the work of M. Blanchot on Beckett. Levinas’s ethics of the visage, of the
risk of the approach and the diachronic “face to face” as prior to Being or Not, finds new
challenges if we consider the recent technological developments in terms of “interface”.
Indeed, what are the implications of an open and responsive network in artistic creation?
What could a Public 2.0 mean for a play1, for all stage writing? In order to attempt at
describing the stakes and conditions of this contemporary artistic context, we decided to use
the concept of “interfaciality” which raises the issue of ethics when the physical approach can
be delayed or even virtual, and thus questions its phenomenological bases. In art performance,
there seems to be a verbal and physical resilience to the virtual, a dialogue on this very
pervasive transiency of human social contacts through the testimony and participation of the
public.
“Interfaciality” poses the question of a congruence between intermediality2 and ethics, which
I understand as Levinas does that is to say as the primacy of my responsibility for the other
and not as an elaborate system of moral prescriptions. Levinas encapsulates this encounter
with the other as the “face to face”. Hence the neologism “interfaciality” which aims to think
together the interrelations of our contemporary society of networks, thanks to R-technologies,
and the face, or “le visage” as it is described by Emmanuel Levinas. The face constitutes the
link between expression and responsibility: the face, Levinas says, tears open sensibility (« Le
visage déchire le sensible »). It is anarchical and upsurges in language. This definition seems
to precisely conjure up the attempts of new media theatre to go from the body of the actor and
spectator to a beyond-body of relations which are anachronic and virtual or spectral. I chose
to study this topic by invoking two other important philosophers of technology and economics
and whose works are not in contradiction with levinassian ethics but address social

1
I would like to refer here to the experimental works and reflexions of the CNES/Chartreuse de Villeneuve-lez-
Avignon on participation in performance: “Spectateur 2.0”.
http://sondes.chartreuse.org/document.php?r=49&id=136
2
cf. Mapping intermediality.
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intermediality more directly: namely, Michel Serres, and Bernard Stiegler. The overall paper
follows the conception of ethics as it is developed by Levinas.

1. Technological pharmakon: the transformation of the stage as fresh thought

The incidence of technology on performance and stage writing affects many aspects of
theatrical representation. Is the technicality of performance a hindrance, a loss of freedom for
the artist, the actor, the audience? Or on the contrary a way of thinking technological
externalisation (which is the same term in French as outsourcing) and endow the audience
with a new resilient culture capable of digesting these new changes? Maybe theatre here
replaces what philosophy delays in conceptualizing clearly. For Michel Serres, this has
important ethical, legal and political consequences. The externalisation of thought (writing
and printing books), conscience and memory (with computers), of motor ability (robot), of
voice (telephone) and now of communication (with new technologies of information)
provokes the deconstruction of subjectivity as Michel Serres explained throughout his works
and in Atlas in particular3. The object becomes almost-subject… (cf. I, Robot).

New media theatre embodies the growing difficulties we meet grappling with this reality.
Digital performance ponders what some may inaccurately call the “posthuman” by staging it:
in that respect, I’m not sure that it is necessary to perform the real act of transforming our
human body in front of the audience as Stelarc or Orlan do, for it to be efficient and have
critical meaning. In an essay from the collection Ecrits, entitled “The Power of Tragedy”,
Roland Barthes belittled precisely the theatrical effect of some staging techniques that
advocated to represent the real act of sacrificing a chicken on stage: the dramatic act has to be
determined by a clear, explicit intention which for him is encapsulated in the symbol of the

3
Cf. Serres, Michel. Atlas. Paris : Flammarion, 1996, p135 chapitre « Le sujet, l’objet, noyés dans le réseau »:
« Accédant à l’univers, l’ancien sujet tendrait-il à s’objectiver ? Prolongé de la même manière, l’objet s’étend et
se connecte de sorte qu’il atteint les bornes du monde, comme j’ai dit ; mais du coup, le sujet se demande s’il a,
désormais, un objet devant lui. Que voudrait dire devant, dans un tel cas, et comment comprendre un objet qui
jouirait des mêmes facultés que le sujet même, connecté, conspirant comme lui, et, comme lui, doué de mémoire
et saturé d’images ? Accédant à l’univers, l’ancien objet devient-il un sujet ? (…) Si les sciences, aujourd’hui,
traitent, tous les jours, leurs problèmes, au sein de ce nouveau prolongement ou de cette nouvelle confrontation
du sujet-humanité-objet à l’objet-monde-sujet, si un nouveau droit y a pu concevoir un autre contrat, reste qu’en
retard d’une ère entière, la philosophie n’invente toujours pas les concepts propres à reformuler le travail, pour
nous délivrer d’atermoiements politiques et sociaux, dépensiers en vies humaines ».
 3

mask. The theatrical sign is manifest4. The truth of theatrical gesture is not “real”, it’s
fictitious, in other words it’s a figure belonging to the symbolic order, it’s a speech act.

Nonetheless, several issues are emerging from this new state of art: an issue about
performance speech, or more exactly the becoming of language in performance, the new
relationship between the text and theatricality (dialogue, stage writing, new media writing).
Do we have to oppose textual theatre to performance? To what extent? One observation
though: a lot of these performances provide soundtracks but are otherwise mute, there is no
articulate speech or dialogue. What does it change to the nature and complexity of
representation according to you? In fact, to be perfectly honest, this mutism often
intentionally reveals some sort of violence as with Fuerza Bruta which evokes in some shows
the Argentinean dictatorship, or in the performance of Kdanse. This poses a generic issue:
What about the growing fusion of genres (theatre and dance)? It seems indeed that thanks to
technology theatre percolates even more into dance and choreography orchestrates theatrical
performances, not to speak of cinema. (FTA theatre festival, Montreal. Emmanuel Shwartz,
CHRONIQUES, Mouawad, CIELS Jeremie Niel, CENDRES) We may surmise that what is
essential to these performances to be strongly emotional consists in its very hybridity: at the
same time human and virtual, focused on speech and figure. If it is only virtual and speechless
then it might gradually lose aesthetic significance and the audience’s interest as the stage
director Russell Fewster writes:
Working with the actual and the virtual needs careful handling in practice,
however, since if the performance is not engaging, audiences may find it
alienating, uninvolving and unmoving

Rather than post-human or post-dramatic which for me is an impossible concept, the

appellation “cyborg theatre” fleshes out this hybristic baroque new form. What is important
here is the materialization of the chaotic and the parasitic (but we will come back to this
“angelic” quality of digital performance). Another major issue: The metamorphosis of the
public, the audience, the community. Is the public the same as in classical theatre? Is it still a
collective body or is it separated into individuals in his response as we go towards a virtual
participatory, video game public. (cf. the “PROBES” project of Chartreuse, Villeneuve-lez-

4
« Je n’ai jamais vu de spectacle plus anti-dramatique qu’une pièce donnée dans un petit village basque, et où
une actrice d’extrême bonne volonté, censée égorger un poulet sur scène, s’était mise en tête de tuer réellement
la bête devant les spectateurs (…) ce geste réel n’avait aucune efficacité théâtrale, et toute l’agonie de la volaille,
par un fait exprès, fort longue, n’a pu constituer qu’un temps mort du spectacle, aussi gênant qu’un blanc dans la
mémoire d’un acteur. C’est que l’acte dramatique est toujours en rapport avec la clarté d’une intention, et sa
liaison (rapide) avec le reste du procès ». P40
 4

avignon, Centre d’écritures du spectacle5) I prefer to use the word “public” because of the
problem of the term “audience” in French. “Audience” mostly addresses televisual, Bernard
Stiegler would say telecratic audience. Stiegler makes a difference between the public of tele-
visual experiments and the audience of the TV industry. According to him, the TV industry
currently promotes an addicted ground zero existence of aimless drives (he mentions global
reality shows like the French American Idol called Star Académie). Stiegler presents new
technologies as a pharmakon6, that is to say as both medication and poison. The power of this
pharmakon consists in catching attention and offering the infinite possibility to express
ourselves interactionally.Relation Technologies give the audience an opportunity of
“transindividuation”, of transforming individual psychic drives into collective desire and
therefore social energy and civil hope which he calls “philia”. Following Stiegler, we could
conclude that new media theatre, being interactional, provides a platform for
transindividuation. But Stiegler urges us to think “philia” politically not as input-output
“communication” (the Augustinian model for Wittgenstein), or marketing. It is not enough to
have 1345 friends on facebook to be sociable. Indeed, the pharmakon can also be a poison if
attention is destroyed and turned into fascination (“obnubilation” in French that is to say that
your mind is foggy), if attention is being manipulated as with the TV industry or big
companies getting hold of internet’s free space. Interestingly for us, Stiegler quotes Freud
who asserts that only the poet can open this symbolic passage from the individual to the
collective because he represents the symbolic order. The figure and the face. Freud and the
philosopher George Simondon are his source of inspiration concerning the idea of invention:
invention goes beyond the community as it elevates the community above this ground zero of
thought, it gives social life its worth. However, another major issue emerges then for our new
media theatre: the problem of the physical presence and absence of the audience. Does the
public have to be at one point of the show bodily present at the show together to experience
theatre? In the same way, does the public have to be contemporary to the show? This is what
is usually discussed under the terms co-presence or classical presence and telepresence.To
what extent indeed can this platform really “assemble” the netizens in an actual collective
entity? Is not rather on the contrary the scattering of philia we’re witnessing? Does interaction
and participation guarantee transindividuation or should it not be experienced more physically
still in art?

5
http://sondes.chartreuse.org/
6
www.arsindustrialis.com
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2. The excitable space and time: thinking theatre out of measure

“Les autres le forment (l’homme), moi je le

récite”, écrit Montaigne. Les autres le formatent,
moi je l’excite.

Michel Serres, Rameaux.

a. Erotic space

Theatre has to be construed as a sensitive space rather than an “empty” or virtual space.
Theatre as an excitable or hysterical, vulnerable space susceptible to be closed at anytime and
disappear into ordinary space. Theatrical space is extraordinary. In that respect, the emptiness
of theatrical space resembles the emptiness of cosmic space full of dark matter and invisible
fluxes of information. In Mapping Intermediality in Performance, the authors point in the
introduction at the phenomenological experience of new media performance which
“resensibilises” the public.

This frisson of perceptual instability explains the excitement of the experience of

being inside such an immersive environment.
An indexicality of the embodied experience is common to all of the terms, em-
phasising that intermediality in performance is, indeed, very much a matter of
redefining our senses and resensibilising our perception through bodily encounters
with (digital) technologies. (29)

Incidentally, contrary to what may be thought the aim of new media theatre is to recover the
power of the body. That is exactly what Maaike Bleeker emphasizes in her article “Corporeal
Literacy: new modes of embodied interaction in digital culture”:
It proposes that theatre practices create situations in which communication happens
through several sensory modalities at once. The perspective brings out the
performative character of processes of perception and cognition, focusing particularly
on the corporeal dimension of these practices. Accordingly, it draws attention to how
perception is performed and also to how theatre performance involves complex
processes of selection and combination of sensory input.7 (…) Famously (or
infamously) the conventional theatre set-up, putting the audience in the dark in front
of a brightly lit stage confirms modes of perceiving of the so-called disembodied
I/eye, the (supposedly) passive observer of a world existing independently from her
perceptual engagement with it.

7
cf. ibid., p39.
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With intermedial theatre we experience the body as a newborn. However, to me new media
theatre reaches precisely beyond phenomenology, almost towards a modern metaphysics
since it does not only make us think about how we construct the object of our perception as
Maaike Bleeker explains but it deeply moves us, and that happens collectively. From
perception to emotion then. Something happens, and this is still drama, even if out of frame.
b. The digital “trace”

The emphasis which is put on sensibility recalls what Lévinas calls the “caress” reviving the
heuristic quality in our sense of touch. Theoreticians of digital theatre, which besides can also
ironically refers to the “digits”, that is to say the fingers, really insist on this haptic quality of
new media theatre:
It suggests a more immersive engagement in which the principles of composition of the piece create
an environment designed to elicit a broadly visceral, sensual encounter, as dis- tinct from conventional
theatrical, concert or art gallery architectures which are constructed to draw primarily upon one of the
sense organs – eyes (spectator) or ears (audience).8

Here is the definition Levinas gives of the “caress” in a famous passage from Time and the
Other:
The caress is a modality of the subject, where the subject, through the contact of the
other, goes beyond contact. Contact as sensation belongs to the world of light. But
what is caressed is not only touched. It is not the silky and lukewarm hand given in
the contact, which the caress seeks. What the caress seeks constitutes its very essence
because the caress doesn’t know what it is looking for. This not knowing, this seminal
disorder, is the essential.9

More than sensitivity then, eroticism or excitability (Serres), provoking energy or creating a
warmth of meaning out of sensitivity. Like an excitable atom producing energy, the erotic
theatrical space creates desire and enables us to get out of ontology and reach towards ethics.
Because new media theatre reverberates this erotic power of theatre, it is often very badly
judged and unpopular in some academic contexts, rejected by a certain bourgeois audience
who prefers commercial vaudeville. New media theatre is remodelling spatio-temporal
architectures in order to perfect this physical “immersion”. Theatrical space and time can also
be seen as cultural constructs.

8
Mapping Intermediality.p46.
9
« La caresse est un mode d’être du sujet, où le sujet dans le contact d’un autre va au-delà de ce contact. Le
contact en tant que sensation fait partie du monde de la lumière. Mais ce qui est caressé n’est pas touché à
proprement parler. Ce n’est pas le velouté ou la tiédeur de cette main donnée dans le contact que cherche la
caresse. Cette recherche de la caresse en constitue l’essence par le fait que la caresse ne sait pas ce qu’elle
cherche. Ce « ne pas savoir », ce désordonné fondamental en est l’essentiel ».
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A highly illuminated phenomenon (since the advent of the earlier technologies of gas and
electric light), the staged performance in Western culture was historically presented in a
darkened auditorium where the stage event is typically observed from a significant distance.
The spatial relations emerged in their physical arrangement in theatre buildings as developed
during the period from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. The spectatorial
relations inviting the eye to observe and feed the mind likewise arose from the enactment of
the Renaissance perspective. 10

New media Performance invites us to think upon the multidimensionality of human

experience. It is closely linked for example to the interrogations of modern cosmology on
baby universes and white fountains11. On stage, we hop from one universe to another via
different screens or projections. New media theatre exposes several timelines on stage.But
isn’t the question rather: What does this uphinging, this “out of joint” time and space tell us
about our “contemporary” time and space? I prefer the concept of contemporary rather than
modern or post-modern. Here, I will only allude to the definition Giorgio Agamben gives of
what is “contemporary” as what is paradoxically out of phase, anachronistic and in which I
also see what Levinas calls “the trace”, the imprint, the digital one maybe….The
contemporary turns out to be necessarily “delayed” just like Alice’s White Rabbit. What if is
digital theatre revealed performance art as the art of the “contemporary”? Digital art shows
time as we refuse to see it: not just a pointed arrow but a tubular network of spectral
possibilities, duration constantly interrupted by new births or discontinuities. What Serres
calls ramifications. Digi-time and digi-space infinitely and naturally diffracts our 4
dimensions.

3. The Angelic quality of digital performance: materializing the “risk” of the

encounter

a) An Aesthetics of Serendipity (Serres, Rameaux)

To describe this encounter with contingency, Michel Serres uses the English word of
“serendipity” (Rameaux) which for him finds no equivalent in French. Interestingly enough,
the director Russell Fewster uses the same term:

10
Mapping Intermediality.
11
Etienne Klein, Discours sur l’origine de l’univers (2010).
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In exploring the staging of The Lost Babylon, planned strategies were supple- mented by
serendipity, as noted, in the transmission of a live screenplay. Through the use of video
capture and projection, a tension was found between the live presence and the virtual
presence of the actors. (Mapping Intermediality Fewster, p67)

The texture of new media theatre is made of interwoven architectures of digital networks. It
has a seminal “hermetic” essence, from the god Hermes which Serres also calls angel, cherub,
etc. On stage, the characters (although this concept should find another more appropriate
word more like “be-ings”) that belong to this stage-world are hybrids: everything is possible
as noted Ryngaert and Sermon in Le personage theâtral contemporain: decomposition,
recomposition. They can be animate or inanimate, animals or human beings, possible or
impossible12. The “character” is envisaged as texture, a web of oral, technical and written
elements, a material web of symbols. But angelic informed matter… Serendipity also refers
to participation, the interactional capacity of the web: the contingency of the encounter with a
2.0 spectator or what we could call the new spectropoetics of the stage. The spectator is also
virtually present on stage13 and participates to the invention of the collective work.

b) Interfaciality : praxis of the approach

We might then wonder, if our ethical approach is based on Levinas, where responsibility in
theatrical performance and especially new media performance lies. It is our contention that
responsibility of performed actions resides in the public. Indeed, the actor or performer is
obviously not personally responsible for the acts he represents. This is all the more evident as
the being on stage is an avatar or a cyborg, a spectre, a zombie or an animal…. The de-
humanization of the stage conjures up a re-humanization of the public by emphasizing their
charge of social debt. First, what is the nature of theatrical action? Of “ACTING”? Is it only
a game as the word “jeu” in French or “play” related to theatrical writing in English seem to
infer? All the more so since new media theatre is more and more akin to the practice of video-
games, and more particularly in the conception of a participative audience. Interestingly
enough for us the “game” of scenic reality for Levinas is the total absence of responsibility:

12
Sermon, Ryngaert p57 : « Les auteurs manifestent clairement le désir qu’ils ont de composer une faune
théâtrale irréductible, un microcosme autonome, a-référencé, du moins fondé sur le mélange référentiel, ; sur
scène, se trouvent indifféremment appelés à se côtoyer, humains, et animaux, êtres animés et inanimés, possibles
ou impossibles, réels ou fantasmagoriques, mêlant les lieux et les âges, à l’encontre du vraisemblable et des
attentes rationalistes du spectateur, les auteurs choisissent d’accorder la parole à l’ensemble de la création »
13
Cf. Motel numérique. www.selfworld.net
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La réalité scénique – et chose remarquable, cela ne s’est jamais dit ni d’un poème, ni
d’un tableau – a toujours été interprétée comme jeu. En tant que réalité, elle ne laisse
pas de traces. Le néant qui la précède est égal à celui qui la suit. Ses événements n’ont
pas de vrai temps. Le jeu n’a pas d’histoire. Il est cette existence paradoxale qui ne se
prolonge pas en avoir [...] Il ne lègue rien après son évanouissement, sombrant «
armes et bagages » dans le néant [...] Un théâtre vide est affreusement désert. (DEE,
p35)

In that case, theatre should never be linked with any form of ethical or political responsibility
nor action. It is anti-ethical as fears to suggest Nicholas Ridout. Game over. The temptation is
great to evacuate ethics from theatre and performance then. However, it is not so simple.
Because the stage is not theatre. Theatre is the equation of a stage/scenic reality and a public.
But we can descry here the danger of the model participation of the public in a video-game
type which could mean for the show to lose gravity. Consequently, a critique of theatrical
action proves necessary. Maybe we should invoke Hannah Arendt as the best thinker of
action. Arendt exposes in Condition de l’homme moderne, that action is not the consequence
of a willing subject but that the subject is born from his actions. Action is spontaneous, it’s
the incarnate “new”, essentially inchoative. The subject is the effect of action. Theatre is born
out of actions and the effect of theatrical actions is the public: the public is born out of
theatrical actions, not before. There is no public without performance. The word performance
precisely tells us this fact.

Conclusion: What is the effect, or purpose, meaning of performance?

New media theatre belongs to Cultural Politics: be it digital or classical, theatre still has to say
something and participate in the creation of a social poetics, an inventive collectivity says
Stiegler (“collectif inventif”, Télécratie p250) Digital theatre should preserve its dynamic
anti-dogmatic hybridity by continuing to surf and reflect on the contingency of IT aesthetic
possibilities. There is, in France, a reaction against new media theatre a fear of this new
cultural form that some scholars call “enchanted barbarity”14: this prejudice is based on the
idea that the virtual reality would cancel imagination, that it is inauthentic and controlled by
market forces. This Big Brother complex fails to see the aesthetic possibilities of new media
and the connection of this art with the most contemporary conclusions of modern physics
about the nature of time and space. More importantly, it fails to see the political possibilities
of new technologies which can precisely free the public of the market by questioning it

14
cf. Valérie Arrault in La Création artistique face aux nouvelles technologies. Klincksieck.
 10

collectively. This might be the sense of Christopher Kondek’s Dead Cat Bounce performance
and it is the sense of Stiegler’s association Ars Industrialis. New media performances are
highly intuitive and creatively anticipatory, and that it deserves more scholarly attention. New
media poetry resists and fascinates because it tells us something we can hardly put into
concepts, it reinvents, resensibilises, and wakes up the public’s attention.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Arendt, Hannah. Condition de l’homme moderne. Agora.

- Critchley, Simon. Ethics, Politics, subjectivity: essays on Derrida, levinas and
contemporary French thought. Verso, 1999.
- Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Le Theâtre Postdramatique. Paris: L’Arche, 2002.
- Lévinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. Martinus Nijhoff, 1978.
- Lévinas, De l’Existence à l’existant. Vrin, 1963.
- Lévinas, Totalité et Infini. Martinus Nijhoff, 1951.
- Mapping Intermediality in Performance. ed. by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt,
Andy Lavender, Robin Nelson. Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
- Ronell, Avital. The telephone book: technology, schizophrenia, electric speech.
University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
- Ryngaert & Sermon, Le personage théâtral contemporain: decomposition,
recomposition. Editions théâtrales, 2006.
- Serres, Atlas. Flammarion, 1994.
- Serres, La légende des anges. Flammarion, 1999.
- Serres, Rameaux. Editions Le pommier, 2008.
- Stiegler, La télécratie contre la démocratie. Flammarion, 2008.