#2 Reflection

This blog post will reflect on scenography.

The set is a place for the making of sensorily engaging books for adults. Of course, this setting, full of sensorily rich objects, feels distant from Beckett’s barren, “empty” stages. Ringing in my mind was Adorno’s concept that Beckett offers a “negative imprint of the administered world”.[1] What might a negative imprint of the administered world of the internet look like? If a website, such as an Etsy store, is an attempted simulation of a business, a “place” where products are displayed, considered, bought, and sold, then I imagine this stage is the negative of that simulation. The set is what the website is simulating or what a store might look like if one had never been in a store, but tried to design an actual store based on an online store. It is an attempted negative of the administered world of the online store. However, this place is never described as a store in the play in part because once removed from the immediate online network, it fails at its task, it cannot sell its wares. There is no way to come through the door and look around. I emphasize at the beginning of the play that the characters or workers are not receiving money for their labor because I imagine they have reached a point where they do what they do for reasons that have long since been lost. In his essay, “How To Do Things with Memes”, Eric Thurm quotes Wittgenstein to describe how online things rapidly slough off their origins and reasonings through exhaustive iteration until they simply become what is said or done - “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’”.[2] Of course this turned me towards Beckett again, how exhaustive iteration can lead to threshold of unforeseen possibility. I hoped to place the characters in a setting where this is what they do, the reasons exhausted. Also, the indistinction between work and life seems like an inherent part of the postdigital condition, not only because of the working conditions of late capitalism and the commodification of all online interaction, but because of the ontological indistinction between work life and “non-work” life when the internet is both how I write this entire dissertation, and how I talk to my mom.

But I feel I do still need to account for the materiality of the stage, so different from Beckett’s sparse sets. I have conflicting desires when faced with the internet. There is the feeling that Dandi Meng has articulated, born from a life crafting an identity in the form of MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok fodder – “the desire to stich a blanket of screenshots together, to feel the force of every overexposed minor affect concentrated in one place, heavy and warm” – in other words, to make the extremely online, that which shapes your life, feel “real”.[3] And there is also the sublime horror at what the internet is able to articulate, the incomprehensible “positivism with a pixelated face”, its ability to turn anything into a brand name that we didn’t know we needed.[4] This engenders a deep desire not to physicalize the internet into a quilt I can hold, but to stop it from naming things and profiting off of those names. These desires are interconnected in that once you have made a blanket of your screenshots, eventually that blanket can disintegrate and die in a way far more tangible than the delete button allows.

But I think my staging of the extremely online does not come from the idea that I have made the internet “real” and thus am allowing it die, or to force the online into a temporality that feels conceivable and controllable. I am interested in the fact that this feeling of control, of accessing the real, that one has when one holds a quilt of their screenshots in hand, is still a false feeling. And I am interested in how actuality effects the experience of the online form. Julia Jarcho writes that, “Beckett’s settings, with their minimalist precision, suggest a world whose specificity derives from language – a space which harbors no refuge from, no excess beyond what has been written”.[5] I am hoping to create a stage with precision, but it is a world whose specificity derives from the language of online and its unique capacity for articulation. If a person, like Estragon, could describe a dream and in doing so make it terribly real, the internet would turn that dream into an infinite number of t-shirts, mugs, and picture frames. I hope to register on stage a space that harbors no refuge from, or excess beyond online’s form of articulations, but in placing those articulations onto a stage I can delve into an ontological complexity that lends itself to negation (hopefully the utopic, determinate kind). I don’t feel entirely convinced by my abandonment of Beckett’s minimalism, but this is where I landed with the scenography.

Lastly, to reflect a bit on the use of books. I chose to make this a place for the making of sensorily engaging books because book-reading is often seen as a form of touching grass not because of the reading but because of the materiality of the experience. And I also chose books because of the line Bernard Stiegler draws between them and the digital – “…the digital is a new kind of writing. Now, what is writing? It is what I call a tertiary retention. Tertiary retention is, for example, an artificial object; it is the beginning of exosomatization, that is the production of artificial organs”.[6] Which brings a whole new meaning to Jan’s organ paper! Though they have significant differences, there is a line between the tertiary retention of digital space and the pages of a book. And the characters have transferred much of online logic to the books before them. We discover in the end that the book that is always printed inside these objects of sensorial engagement is a novel called I Hope This Finds You, author unknown, and that the books are being placed on a bookshelf where they sit without being “read”. “I hope this finds you” is of course the beginning of the common email phrase “I hope this finds you well”, which has been turned into a meme that always starts with “how this finds me – insert image here”. But it also refers to the failure of the books to find a reader, the flawed “making-having” system that Jan describes. Here I was thinking of Balazs Rapcsak’s essay on Rough for Theatre II which “presents a stage reconceived as a technical transmission system, in which the basic operation is that of making or breaking contact” and where messages fail to deliver.[7] I hope to make the books a sort of a “dead letter”, sent to the faulty address of the bookshelf, which is not directly connected to the online network. The system that gives the books communicative use value is disconnected.