From Theatrical Spectacle to Media Spectacle

In the framework of spectacle that underlies the concepts of “public performance and public theatrical event,” a showing and a looking,” and “a means to constitute political subjects” (Inomata and Coben 5), I have wrapped up thematic discussions of

Seven Jewish Children’s controversy and its theatrical experiments. I attempt to draw

the attention to another core issue problematized in the course of the play’s production and its circulation around the globe—the media dissemination of events, especially

war and conflict. Given the imperative role of media dissemination in the controversy surrounding the play, another important meaning of spectacle should be introduced.

The term spectacle in the light of Debord is “the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep” (qtd. in Escoda 54). This definition is grounded on the observation of a

“diffuse spectacle” intertwined with “commodity abundance associated with the undisturbed development of modern capitalism”(qtd. in Colleran 40). Moreover, war images circulated via multi-media devices herald the age of “media spectacle” and

“megaspectacles” as termed by Kellner for the analysis of “media events that distract the public from substantive understandings of public issues” (Colleran 16).

Since the 1991 Gulf War, media coverage has created a “total television”

phenomenon in which events are recorded and disseminated repeatedly on the screen (Colleran 34). Due to advanced information technologies, “the semiotic field is even more complex and fluid since the procession of media events, megaspectacles, and total television overlap” (Colleran 35). In the amplified circuit of information for its accessibility enabled by new technologies, Henry Jenkins provides that information is always “annotated, forwarded, archived, or otherwise used” (qtd. in Colleran 35).

Also, the line between real and the virtual is blurred as “information and technologies of simulation further complicate interpretation” (Colleran 35). As a result, the time and critical distance between an event and its media coverage is lost. It is an epoch of images that have already been “coded and part of a signifying chain” in the immediate reproduction of the events. In a world of “military-industrial-media-entertainment- network” as coined by James Der Derian, spectators are overwhelmed by “infinite choices” and mired in “a desert of judgment” when they “encounter the flux, speed, and recombinant possibilities of these boundary-blurring networks”(36). Furthermore,

buttressed by the development of information technology and Internet-based

economy, “spectacle culture is moving into new domains of cyberspace that will help to generate future multimedia spectacle and networked infotainment

societies”( Kellner 31).

Notably, media spectacle may “stupef[y] social subjects and distract[] them from the most urgent task of real life” as Debord’s critique of capitalist society predicts (Kellner 33). However, Kellner otherwise suggests to find “the contradictions and contestations of media spectacle within specific societies and to counter the notion that political spectacles are all-powerful and overwhelming” (33). Observing US-based media events, Kellner points out that research in British cultural studies has suggested the resisting power against excessive media exposure by affirming “the existence of an active audience that is not totally manipulated by the media”(33).

Similarly, in her approaches to the plays dealing with wars and media images of wars, Colleran argues that “theatre can, against media hegemony, offer itself as a critical alternative, addressing issues and enacting perspectives that are otherwise

unavailable”(10). As Peter Sellars comments, theater designates an “alternative information system that is able partially to humanize the denatured results of our vaunted and costly objectivity” (qtd. in Colleran 7) so that political and ethical critiques can still be enacted despite the media’s dominance in knowledge spreading.

In dramatic works taking the form of documentary or verbatim theatre, playwrights reject “the government’s rhetoric and the media’s depthless coverage,” offering counter-responses in an attempt of “’doing history’ and creating and performing their own first-hand observations or enacting the testimonies based on interviews they had conducted”(Colleran 136-137).

In Colleran’s observation, Churchill does not apply the technique of

documentary theater through direct reference to events and testimonies. Rather, by creating “a combination of faux realism, spectacle, and enigma” (120), Churchill’s dramaturgy targets the codified images of wars and calls into question public theatricality guaranteed media visibility. For example, Churchill challenges “the ambiguities of mediatized spectatorship” and “the complexities of political control” in plays like Far Away and A Number (127). I suggest to understand Seven Jewish

Children in the same trajectory as that in a theater of war and terror where

counter-responses to the mediated information are drawn out.

From BBC coverage of Gaza War to the after-show debates on various websites, media spectacle permeates everywhere right at the moment when a discourse is shaped in tandem with its dissemination. Seven Jewish Children’s controversy

poignantly illustrates the public theatricality of political argument, mediatization, and literary intervention in theater, in cyberspace as well as in real life. Yet this progress of theatricalizing events would not be so recognizable if it were not for the theatrical spectacle constructed by Churchill’s writing from which cacophonous narratives emanate. In this regard, theater’s ability to “discern different discursive formations at work and identify their rhetorical stance and implicit arguments” (Colleran 7) is highlighted. To this end, the play Seven Jewish Children demands that audiences with dual identities as both actors and spectators “understand the veiled power dynamics underlying specific kinds of brutality” and “consider connections between

representational violence and political violence” (Colleran 9).

I argue that the spectacle of Seven Jewish Children can counteract the media spectacle. The play and its after-show drama not only serve as a parallel to the complexity of the Gaza question. On top of that, it reveals the particular value of

theater in which alternative perspectives are brought to light for further contemplation on the report of war and conflict. The media spectacle dominates the reportage of political events; moreover, guaranteed critical visibility in media events to an extent affects people’s comprehension of the complex Israel/Palestine issue. That is, media dissemination empowers those who remain visible “through media, through

performative politics and through censorship” (Colleran 214). Theater spectacle otherwise disturbs us, forcing us to witness the violence caused to the precarious, invisible life.

Epilogue

Before I conclude my thesis, I would like to introduce Israeli-American director Udi Aloni and his engagement with the Israel-Palestine conflict. To explore the Israel/Palestine question in his What Does A Jew Want, Aloni opens up dialogues with Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou, three salient figures tackling Israeli and Middle Eastern politics among other intellectuals. In his book, Aloni makes several appeals to practitioners and activists in the fields of art and the humanities to address his concerns about the essential problems latent in artistic productions and their political gestures. For example, writing in the form of a letter to the celebrities involved, he discusses the case of the 2009 Toronto film festival. Collaborated with Tel Aviv, the festival promoted the city as “a young, dynamic city that, like Toronto, celebrates its diversity.”

During the festival, Aloni worked with prominent artists, academics, and writers to engage in a boycott in order to protest against the festival’s decision to spotlight on the Israeli city. Not surprisingly, the protest was followed by the counterattack from many famous Jewish people, claiming that “the films are in no way a propaganda arm for any government policy. Blacklisting them only stifles the exchange of cultural knowledge that artists….” In the observation of the event, Aloni concludes:

I think we should be asking ourselves not why Israeli directors create films about Lebanon (it makes sense that people will deal with their own scabs) and not even why Israel’s government supports these films and uses them for its own aims. The real question is why the image of an Israeli soldier, agonizing and crying, is so appealing to festival curators and audiences of the Western world? (136)

In addition to the critique of the conflicting realities, Aloni aims to provide different narrative dimensions of the Israel-Palestinian conflict in his film productions. As Badiou comments, “you see to what degree Udi Aloni’s film is ramified as each of the element of its construction is grafted onto others in such a way as to make narrative fiction also become artistic allegory, psychoanalytic interrogation, historical

meditation, and spiritual proposition”(192). Offering abundant philosophical insights based on his reading of Edward Said and Walter Benjamin, Aloni’s provocative accounts designates concepts of binationalism, expecting the next generation to achieve a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this respect, emphasizing the importance of Aloni’s work, Žižek also seeks the “site of possible event,” to draw on Badiou’s theorization, which indicates emancipatory potentials for miracles that seem impossible to happen at the present time (176-178). Overall, Aloni’s activism is approved of by Žižek, Badiou, and Butler, who all are actively involved in the current political and social situations occurring in Israel and the Middle East.

In view of the notions mentioned above that confirm the artistic efforts in trying to make a difference in a quite arduous political situation, I interpret Churchill’s Seven

Jewish Children in the scope of theater’s emancipatory breakthrough. As stressed by

Badiou in correlating theater with politics, “what does theatre talk about if not the state of the State, the state of society, the state of revolution, the state of consciousness relative to the State, to society, to the revolution, to politics” (36)? Starting with the response to the Gaza War, the long-standing Israel/Palestine question, and the BBC news coverage, Churchill’s activism through the dramatic work facilitates the balance/counterbalance of discourses in view of the play’s after-show controversy.

Responding to Churchill’s political involvement, the pro-Israel critics also pursue a balancing narrative to her critical posture. Nowadays, a dramatic piece, a review, and

a debate can be immediately and incessantly reviewed in different ways and in various kinds of artistic productions. The production of the play and its after-show dramas therefore serve as counteracting effects to each other, providing complementary plots for the audience to take sides with certain ideologies and identifications.

The subjects discussed in this thesis suggest that the controversy caused by the play is symptomatic for the difficulties in achieving an acceptable version of telling facts about Israel and Israeli-Palestinian situation. Yet, constructing a spectacle of the cacophonous narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from which various

discourses emanate, Seven Jewish Children reveals the particular value of theater in which alternative perspectives on the issue are invited for further contemplation.

Opening up and articulating various discourses in the course of debates and theater-making, the play also signals positive outcomes of the political controversy. This effect corresponds to the theory by Badiou that theater is “the figurative reknotting of politics” (13).

On the whole, I argue that Seven Jewish Children creates a discursive and theatrical spectacle in which a radical departure of seeing, thinking, and telling is called upon and necessitated. This artistic effort also corresponds to Alice Walker’s conviction to overcome speechlessness when confronting difficult human crises:

“…though the horror of what we are witnessing in places like Rwanda and Congo and Burma and Palestine/Israel threatens our very ability to speak, we will speak” (72).

We will speak. Hopefully, we will speak to reach out to the invisible and the

precarious as Churchill makes the seven Jewish children present in every audience’s mind.

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在文檔中 《七個猶太小孩》的論述與戲劇奇觀 (頁 86-96)