A Cultivated Mixture

Three years ago, I saw Sebastian Nübling’s production of Bizet’s »Carmen« in Stuttgart and wrote a review in »Theatre heute.« It wasn’t the first time I had written in this publication about how it appears that production ideas are strangely limited by a dogmatic belief in the inviolability of operatic musical scores, so the editors decided to put this discourse on the title page, headlined: »How much directing can opera tolerate?« The medical metaphor of tolerance was quite apt for describing the prevailing notion that it is the nature or physical constitution of opera to remain undirected, that opera sickens when humans interfere.
With regard to the subject of »intercreativity,« I wondered whether the demand for an encounter between the arts and practices in fact preaches to the converted, just like the famous, and by now notorious, interdisciplinarity of the sciences. Everywhere, and this is not new, the arts mingle as much as the sciences do. At the same time, the arrangement or hanging of the, not so much necessary as obvious, intermixture that unfolds almost naturally in a social and media framework has become the central component of a neoliberal flexibility in the arts that turns such encounters and transgressions into ends in themselves. Hence, some very good reasons why such mixed practices on the one hand must take place – namely, based on the logic by which artistic and scientific materials develop – come up short, while on the other hand the fact is that they often should not take place at all if certain inherent laws pertaining to aesthetic and sociocultural practices are observed. Perhaps the most interesting cases are therefore the ones where great effort is made to prevent any mixing of practices or of the intellectual perspectives surrounding these practices, as is the case with the inviolability of the written composition in musical theatre. The composition is allowed only to be interpreted, not modified, changed, adjusted or submitted to new ideas for staging and production. The conductor has overall responsibility, not the director.
Nübling’s idea was to display the heterosexual hell in »Carmen« as a blindly violent repetition compulsion, while at the same time duplicating the individuals involved: there was no way to get rid of these individuals as long as the violence directed at them was merely a symptom of something else; that pretty much sums it up. Think what you like about this interpretation, it was more or less successful on stage. The music in »Carmen« – only too well known – was ideally suited to be treated along the lines of contemporary digital music editing. Imagine loops, deliberately uneven loops that are layered and, phase-delayed with the musical structure, take up Nübling’s psychological idea in an almost uncannily fitting manner. »Carmen’s« at times riotous, exceedingly contoured composition would have been just the right material. I might not have liked the »implementation« – as it is referred to nowadays – of the idea at all, because it is just too evident, but of course at the opera house, I keenly felt the impossibility of even obvious intrusions into the holy material, and that made me realize that, apart from the borders you tear down and those that you better leave standing, there are borders whose inviolability does appear to reveal a massive cultural symptom.
In the following, I do not wish to focus on this symptom alone. Rather, I would like to try to connect developments in theatre and opera, which are already classically intermingled arts on the one hand but both also particularly well-protected and generously economically endowed, with recent debates in society that cast a light on the relationship between phenomena of transgression and mixture in places where they are not – as in digital cultures and subcultures – part of everyday life and what these phenomena really mean in a cultural and cultural policy sense.

Three observations form the starting point for my deliberations: first, a boom in the concept of opera in the fine arts as well as among literati and pop musicians. They all want to write opera, realize opera; they all want to designate as opera things that could easily be named otherwise. From Hans Ulrich Obrist’s and Philip Parreno’s »Il Tempo del Postino« in Basel, Edinburgh und elsewhere, which includes works by Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney, Tacita Dean, Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, Fischli/Weiss, Tino Sehgal, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Anri Sala, Rirkit Tiravanija and other heroes and heroines of relational aesthetics, to Cerith Wyn Evans’s und Florian Hecker’s opera »No Night, No Day,« performed in Venice, a whole host of artists are using the term, while theatre directors from Frank Castorf and Sebastian Baumgarten to David Merton increasingly tackle the adaptation of operas and install themselves as musical directors, and younger authors like Albert Ostermaier or Marcel Beyer turn out operas in large quantities.
The second observation is related to the cultural war – a good twenty, thirty years old by now, but still flaring up then and again « – about what is known as director’s theatre. What is strange about this debate, which erupts for a different reason every single year, is that while the reasoning hasn’t changed in many years, it can always be brought forward with renewed force. Daniel Kehlmann rehashed the debate about a year ago; more recently, unsavory, even reactionary and suggestive texts by »SZ« and »FAZ« authors claimed to have discovered a moral-cultural abyss of child molestation and parasitism in Helene Hegemann’s book »Axolotl Roadkill – in its success and most of all in the supposed key role that plagiarized bits are said to play – for all of which they hold director’s theatre responsible because they say the author’s father, the dramatic advisor to the popular theatre Carl Hegemann, is most probably to blame for his daughter’s waywardness concerning matters of intellectual property (and not only that). Before that, it was the comical so-called »spiral notebook affair,« when an angry actor, whom director’s theatre had turned into a ruffian, physically attacked one of director’s theatre most outspoken critics and took away his spiral notebook: a castration.
The third observation, finally, concerns yet another of the noises the cultural conflict emits, one marked less by brief but violent eruptions like the debate about director’s theatre, but characterized instead by a slow, steady swell: the debates concerning the bourgeois way of life, then and now. Unlike the director’s theatre discussion, this debate is conducted at different levels across the German-speaking countries: more vehemently in northern Germany and in Baden-Württemberg than in the Catholic south or in Austria, for the bourgeoisie has less of a need to distinguish itself in Munich and Vienna, somewhat more in Hamburg, and most of all in Berlin. Concerns are first and foremost questions pertaining to ideologies and orientation, classic »How do we want to live?«-rhetoric, identifiable by repeated references to the following recurring motives: 1.) education policies, school, parenting; 2.) immigration, integration, predominant culture; 3.) the culture of memory. The debate’s intellectual as well as rhetoric engine is, however, that it specifically not only does not discern between the citizen as citoyen and the citizen as bourgeois. Rather, it intentionally mingles their meaning, thus constantly overlaying the question »How do we all want to live?« with the question »Which ruling class would we like to have and who gets to belong?«
The debate about fashionable opera and director’s theatre may not be particularly prominent, but they are recognizable sub-debates of the bourgeoisie debate. Just as the bourgeoisie debate deals with questions of drawing borders, and parses programmatic questions like: Who are »we« anyway, and who do we not want to be, that is: who doesn’t belong to us?, the two phenomena »longing for opera« and »contempt for director’s theatre,« which do not necessarily move in the same direction, offer input on all points inherent in the bourgeoisie debate: How do we deal with our past? Do we relate it to our present or do we erect a museum for it? May and should all different kinds of material be dealt with in our key cultural institution – theatre, that is? Is theatre our key institution in the first place?
There is a certain tradition in comparing the relationships among the arts with the arts’ relationship to reality or to the big picture. All aesthetic movements that have demanded that art be more closely related with the reality of the world have almost always also demanded the crossing of disciplinary borders, in short: a different relationship between the arts. Discipline was always what disguised an art’s mimetic deficiency: because painting couldn’t speak, music eluded concrete images, architecture skimped on symbols, they weren’t as close to reality as they could have been. In that respect, people who want to use art for revolutionary ends have one thing in common with people who want to use art for economic or didactic purposes. They regard the barriers between the disciplines to be just as obstructive to an improved instrumentalization of the arts as the individual art’s specific distance – due to that art or the media – from the world or from reality. Maybe the term instrumentalization sounds too harsh to some for what various applications and political practice had in mind for art, in particular because the alternative doesn’t seem to be much better, either. Here, you’ll find feudal and enlightened advocates of the disciplines’ entertaining themselves with their rules, formats and media. On one hand, those highly modernist representatives of autonomy, from Clement Greenberg to Theodor W. Adorno, on the other hand, the classic art disciples from Rudolf Borchardt to Stefan George, who are currently – and massively – being rediscovered by the perpetrators of the bourgeoisie debate and who are helping to orchestrate the conservative cultural policy hit of this past summer: secret Germany. In any case, both kinds of representatives of art’s internal law – leftist autonomists and right-wing hermeticists – each have a soul mate among the minglers and transgressionists. The classic art disciples are drawn, in varying degrees of intensity, to the synthesis of the arts as art’s total, even totalitarian, reconciliation; and the high modernists naturally connect with the avant-garde and their ideas on transgression.
Nowadays, it is of course old-fashioned to speak about »the« arts at all as a string of distinct and relatively autonomous practices and traditions, without having solved the afore-named or other, older, conflicts. Depending on political conviction and surroundings, people instead speak of cultural practice or creative industries. It is rare for artistic action to find legitimacy by specifically referring to a medium, a craft, or a given body of rules. The new terms however – cultural practice and creative industries – are already the results of intermixture and transgression that were achieved during the heyday of modernism. The question remains not only whether we want to live with these results, but also, how we have been living with them all this time. It is my assumption that the current and recurring references to director’s theatre and a certain interest in opera are efforts at restoring the arts’ capacity to act as arts and restoring the illusion that allowed people to believe that the organization of the two major and central bourgeois arts, theatre and opera – which for one thing were always hybrid arts and, second, always had a symbolic relationship to the self-image of the respective historical bourgeoisie, which regarded itself as the ruling and culturally leading class – is what organizes society itself. And although I call this an illusion, I believe that you can only reach a more serviceable position if you deal with the settled and the unsettled problems that flare up in current yearnings, desires and mock debates.
Accordingly, the bourgeoisie debate would want to have theatre and opera back, or keep them alive, because they can counter what – since the technical armament of the cultural industries at the beginning of the 20th century – has become an unavoidable mingling of the arts; they are, so to speak, two hybrid arts that not only constantly mingle with the world at large and become one with its economic logic like the cultural-industrial practices of the creative industries, but also do not directly merge with the pragmatism of interventions like many a cultural producer’s critical practice. They both cultivate a tendency toward a certain level of mixing, which arises from the arts’ intrinsic logic as well as from the supposedly uncontrollable dynamics of media technology and cultural industries. Theatre and opera as focal points of an aesthetic admixture ratio among the arts as well as between art and world thus remain a nostalgic motif of a largely disempowered old European bourgeoisie searching for something to counter this powerlessness and the by now unsightly, culturally indifferent and confusing ruling structure that has replaced it. At the same time, these two internal phenomena – director’s theatre and a desire for opera – are different symptoms of this nostalgia.
Now, this nostalgia should also not merely be dismissed out of hand as reactionary, even if that is true to a large extent. For in another sense, the mobilization of the difference between the artwork and the world, the fact that it does not become one with intervention, or advertising or decoration, is also a starting point for utopian energies and passions for what is not identical. We will only make headway if we take a look at the forms and formats of current hybrid arts, especially with respect to their historic moment. They all evolved and have found a form that is meant to solve or answer a problem from among those faced by the self-image of Western bourgeoisie as described above. All of them are counter-proposals or triumphs over a respective historical state of affairs.

Autography and Allography
Theatre and opera are hybrid arts that – according to what has in the meantime become their largely fantastic self-image – have not yet been made what they are by industrial, technical and organizational force but which each still entirely derive from the artistic legitimization debate that founded them: Reinhardt, Kortner or Zadek are not media standards. Director’s theatre is the result of a critical reflection on this error in reasoning that recognizes only technical-medial determination or liberal arts. So-called director’s theatre marks the moment characterized in the fine arts by »institutional critique« and which formulated and produced an art of critiquing art that did not derive the formats from the required technical media or the acting geniuses, but instead the acting geniuses and media’s function from the history – in a political sense – of the institutions, in this case bourgeois theatre.
Recent aggressive criticism of director’s theatre does not accuse it of settling comfortably into the status quo reached already around 1970, at the latest 1980, and nowadays merely reproducing symptoms instead of advancing criticism of art as art with respect to the institution as object; no, it accuses it – and this is a relatively new development within this largely old debate – of not handling traditional texts in a way that is in keeping with these texts (the questionable term that surfaces again and again is »faithful to the original«). In other words, that is does not contribute to a project of giving theatre a museum-like quality, which, after all, exists without objection in many aspects of operatic culture.
In fact, it would appear that, when bourgeois performing arts entered the stage of institutional criticism, the prize was divvied up in a kind of compromise: the critical faction got theatre, the museum-bound group got musical theatre. The fact that there once was something akin to musical theatre critical of the institution, say with Mauricio Kagel or Pierre Henry, has successfully been delegated to festivals and shows off the beaten track, away from the large, wealthy theatre houses and festivals that are the classic institutional foundation of state and metropolitan theatre. But in the case of both performing art forms, the debate focuses on the question of to what extent the allographic script, whether made up of musical notes or letters, can be modified. In both director’s theatre and opera crossovers, the »intercreative« punch line is not so much that yet another art form or another media format is to be integrated, but rather that a reference to reality or to the world should be balanced in some other manner. The aim is to strengthen the autographic portion versus the allographic part.
On this level, we come across another similarity, although slightly misaligned historically, between the political-critical and instrumental-industrial reference to the arts. Political art, in particular critical political performing art, has boosted the autographic portion inherent in its art; autographic, non-scripted formats however also happen to be a hugely booming branch in the culture industry. Thus, it is not merely the genre of performance art, the mainly autographic rival business to classic performing arts, that attacks or rebuilds the latter with their lacks of connection to reality; it is also the fact that cheaply made, uncritical TV formats, so-called TV for the lower classes (reality TV, reality soaps, talk shows, candidate soaps) replace the script with self-portrayals. Theatre reformers, as critical as they are speculative, put self-promoting egocentrics on stage or increase the self-promoting share of their performance. Not only can the script be reframed and rewritten, it can also be replaced by something that is no longer a script – thus inching closer to the performative categories of other arts and other forms of entertainment.
The autographic pole where critical and exploitative forms meet in a variety of guises stands opposed to the bourgeois-reconstructive motive that has recently gained a certain desirability for that very reason: by virtue of its anachronistic singularity. A museum-like appreciation of theatre plays a large role in efforts by the bourgeoisie debate to reconstruct bourgeoisie as a heroic counterweight that stands apart from the course of time, apart from leftist-critical trends on the one hand and vulgar-commercial developments on the other. Of course, this attractiveness is also one of the reasons for the interest displayed by the fine arts in opera, even if this interest needs to be described in more detail.
Artistic developments do not just unfold because someone is »ahead of his time, or because someone has »invented« something: in the field of technology, the arts or the media. They are the result of something being visible. What follows on the heels of this visibility is not always readily recognizable. Of course, there is always opposition, which should not be underestimated; nor should heroic efforts to prevail against the resistance be overestimated. Visibility means that perspectives on artistic practice become clear and allow its transformation. From an outside point of view, the practice can be recognized in its creation, its conditionality, and it can be treated as material, although not like the material that has become visible through well-rehearsed practice: so-called content. Institutional criticism was such a moment. Meta-artistic questions are characteristic for those moments, or breakthrough situations. Meta-artistic thinking enables not only reflection on the object of one’s own or of a more distant artistic practice, but also on the so-called arts in their so-called entirety. The decisive point is that they no longer appear as the summation of arts, that the meta-artistic point of view comes up with a different result every time. It is by no means a neutral point of view, the kind that eager hikers could reach in selfless self-discipline; instead, its formation and whatever comes into its line of vision are subject to historic developments onto which previous, even immanent, efforts cast their specific and concrete shadows.
One cannot, although that would have seemed obvious following present considerations, advise theatre and the fine arts to simply pick up their projects of a meta-artistic and institutional-critical practice where they left off historically. The central change that has occurred is that the critical hybrid forms and the critical techniques trying to force a reference to the world are in the same boat with neo-liberal liveness exploitation. In the broadest sense, this a process that has to do with these practices’ success, although success is not the reason they find themselves in these circumstances, as thinking in terms of distinction with its discourse of fear of so-called co-opting would like us to think, but because it has not taken into account changed social conditions, i.e. the crossover from a distracted cultural industry of spectacles and mindless entertainment to a cultural industry of mobilization and participation. The other part of this change is the proximity that older, stricter avant-garde practices – in modern music, for instance– suddenly feel to elitist hermeticists. The wrong answer would be something along the lines of Alain Badiou’s, who builds his aesthetic theory on the basis of the old high-modernist canon – Beckett and Schönberg.

The right answer would still have to ask what it is that institution-critical meta-artistic points of view recognize nowadays when they scrutinize the differences between the practices, i.e. what used to be known as the arts. The established meta-artistic point of view of the fine arts apparently sees something desirable in opera, assuming we’re not talking only about glamour, apparatus envy and other megalomaniacal projections. It might be opera’s special protocol character, its high degree of determinacy – traits that its conservative and orthodox advocates also appear to value while fighting tooth and nail for the inviolability of the musical score. There is a good, topical historic reason to value the characteristics of determinacy, a reason that in fact has to do with the dubious character of certain participation and mobilization reflexes and with the way that classic critical artistic vocabulary is beginning to wear thin. But it would be completely fetishistic and non-dialectic to search for these characteristics in the very place where they would remain untouched due to convention: in the musical score. Instead, it’s a case of treating material that is visible and available today – up-to-date, sub-culturally developed, refined social knowledge, the grandeur of the immense accessibility of archives and large amounts of data, the non-European-white-hetero-male historic abundance of perspectives – in a manner that uses and expands opera’s definitions.
The opposition of allography and autography might be handled in a similarly dialectic fashion. I have already suggested that in many genres of theatre, performance and music, artistic development has meant strengthening the autographic parts – historically, this is not unjustified but it is a bit simple – and assuming that one can thus improve unfavorable representational ratios by taking short cuts. Here, too, many examples – René Pollesch is one of the most prominent – show how redistribution would be more successful than expansion. The actors perform a script – that is, allographically – but they don’t do so in an actor-role relationship but rather following other, initially artificial rules. That sets free a totally different energy that enables them to develop on their own an autographic portrayal of their work and their professionalism. Pollesch, for instance, by defining the performance of a play as appropriate only when certain actors are involved – as did Thomas Bernhard with »Minetti« and »Ritter, Dene Voss,« calling performances of the same play with other actors »bootlegs« – introduces something akin to a coached autography, while in other systematic parts of the artwork, he boosts the script’s complexity and hence its recognizability, and with it the allographic aspect. But that is not enough: this script is heavily based on quotes which then in turn, in titles adopted verbatim, such as »City as prey« and »Here’s looking at you, society’s dazzle,« reveal the play to be an adaptation of a text from a different, non-fiction, theoretical genre, which serves to yet again enhance the allography.
These are mere examples meant to show something else. There is a material state of artistic techniques in a very broad sense that arts’ genres no longer correspond to. But simply submitting to this fact by opening the gates and devaluing practices, flexibly and at the respective weakest point of determination, by letting them flow together indifferently, is as wrong as the orthodox defense of history. Be it in the bourgeoisie debate or in participation formats aiming at mere amusement, be it in art or on private television channels, the old established class differences are allowed to be responsible yet again for the development of the arts: citizens have a well-defined, conventional one and that of bohemians and the lower classes is flexibly undefined. The degree of precision more or less corresponds to the level of economic security of those concerned. The term »material state« allows for the perception of artistic possibilities as also being social, cultural-political and interventionist, as beyond imprinting by concrete classes and their cultures. What is termed »intercreativity« must develop from there on.