On Aesthetic Theory

Aesthetic theories seem to fail insofar as they forgo their obligation to accept themselves as subjective. Kant seems least to attempt to disguise this fact. Judgment as a word retains its true subjective uncertainty. As used in court (and at court, perhaps?) to judge is to weigh the basic facts and come to some conclusion, a conclusion which context gives the weight of some specific set of ethical standards. But if aesthetic judgment is to avoid populism (as it ever seems so determined to do), it must take on a belief in some true standard of objectivity while simultaneously and steadfastly refusing to subject its conclusions to testing.

Kant exposes this. He knows that no matter what conclusion is drawn by another regarding beauty, we are always inclined to a personal experience. The desire to test for ourselves. In this way, social conceptions of beauty, which characterize much of the interest in popular culture, act as aesthetic conduits. And so any totalizing aesthetic theory acts as nothing less or more, in any logical sense, than a preference for the movies of François Truffaut over those of Jean-Claude Vann Damme. It seems to me, then, that the denigration of the opposite opinion must necessarily be based on ethical grounds. According, that is, to some idea of the 'right' or 'just' way, to some act of judgment. To do so in the name of aesthetic theory, then, looks like just the type of political aestheticism which Benjamin warns us so vehemently against. From here my concern regarding Adorno arises. By drawing such a large part of human artistic production under a single net, and then condemning it outright, Adorno draws a most personal line between himself and any concept of mass. Mass is the medium with which Benjamin (and Marx) were so fascinated. Mass is the medium of the revolution, and yet for Adorno, the masses have been massively mislead, and his aesthetic theory attempts single-handedly to 'right' their course. I am lead by Benjamin to suspect such a presumption. For Benjamin, the masses which arose as a result of the industrial revolution will necessarily lead to their redemption. He mostly avoids any attempt to make judgments regarding the objects of consumption, except to acknowledge them as significant, and to acknowledge in technological change an infinite capacity to shock us. His love for movies stems for their capability to appropriate masses. He understands that mass reaction contains something qualitatively different than that found in individual contemplation. He may well lament the relative scarcity of human contemplation (many like him still exist, Adorno), but he understood the potential for change to reside not in an individual understanding, but as the result of mass (re)action.

Adorno's aesthetic, because it positions itself in opposition to the entire realm of popular arts, because it qualifies every potential artwork in relationship to its status as a commodity, leaves literally no object to judge but the viewers own mind. We might justify this in the music industry by some concept of 'selling out.' Such and such a band were so dope, man, until they sold out. Now they just make music for the masses. But not only does this justification seem to suggest its own two-dimensional quality, it also does not help us with regards to other artists, nor in the ever-growing complexity of other media. For example, what do we make of a film which gets maid by a major motion picture company, under a descent but not unreasonable budget, for an all but non-existent audience. If the film is sophisticated (say for example, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), it might merit Adorno's classification as art. Here it is, it has navigated (as it must) the evil, collusive complex of the culture industry, and it has retained some aspect of its resistance to commodification. It represents itself as a hero to the cause of the worker. It represents itself as art by denying itself. So far so good; until such a movie gains a wider audience. Friends tell friends, and in true Gladwellian style, the fashion tips, and suddenly everyone is watching it. Now the film seems to defy the nature of Adorno's aesthetic. It seems that it is not nearly so difficult as everyone supposed, and so perhaps does not resist in the way that we thought it might it's own easy consumption by the masses. What are we to make of this? Adorno's aesthetic again seems reduced to no more than some petty and conflicted notion of 'selling out'.

This tendency is seen on a broader (read: more massive) scale in the social tendency to deny the quality of a film that has been made based on a favorite book. While there my be a relatively small number of people who lament the fall of literature from Franz Kafka to Dan Brown, there are many more who might lament the shift from page to film for works such as The Lord of the Rings (or even more democratically, for Harry Potter). Here we have a much broader group of people making what is ostensibly the same judgment that Adorno makes, but in order to distinguish between a group of aesthetic objects all of which might be classified by him as pure commodity. I can hardly see Adorno granting Harry Potter the status of art object. (If he might perhaps for Sorcerer's Stone, than certainly not by the release of The Chamber of Secrets--obvious as the product of an industrial complex.) However, someone who decries the movie versions of these books invariably does so by recourse to some notion of difficulty as related to mass appeal. It doesn't allow for your imagination. It changed some of the best parts. The movie just got Voldemort all wrong. A fan of the book pre-film-adaptation qualifies himself as such through his reaction to the film as much as through his reaction to the book. To say nothing of the millions of new readers who flock to the book as a result of the movie. Adorno may well point to the conspiracy between J. K. Rowling, Scholastic, and Warner Brothers, it would be harder to explain away had the original book qualified for him as art. Suddenly, with a million new readers and a revived printing cycle, the book doesn't seem so steadfastly to refuse its commodity status.

Equally relevant to this problem might be the Oprah effect, which, while initially reserving for itself books that might fall well short of Adorno's critical gaze, more recently has adopted some titles which before might have found their way onto his list (2005: The Sound and the Fury; 2007: The Road, Love in the Time of Cholera). Adorno might only explain this extreme commodification by making some claim to his own 'correct' reading of the texts, as opposed to the message of subjugation which is inevitably inscribed upon the texts by the culture industry. But to do so is either to call into question any immanent critique which may have lay dormant in the work while it was still difficult and unpopular--while it still seemed to resist its own commodification--or to admit Oprah Winfrey (the culture industry might find no one better qualified for its own embodiment) as a potential disseminator of objects of true aesthetic quality. Either of these options seems to undermine Adorno's entire point of view.

Benjamin celebrates the transition from the primacy of the page to the seduction of the screen, not because he understands film to be in any way a better medium (I think he still might hold the opposite opinion), but because he understands in the transition to mass-media an entire revolution in the patterns of human thought. He glimpses the fact that, in a mass-media environment, recourse to any single medium, or the patterns of thought required in the processing of single media (of which he mentions contemplation) might seem antiquated, quaint, and tirelessly ideological.

This is the trap into which Adorno seems to fall. He fails to recognize, to inhabit, the shift in consciousness which is afforded--insisted upon--by the advent of mass-media. He insists upon a hierarchy of art which is grounded equally--and no more innocently--in ritual and its power structures as is the body of work which he casts aside with a grimace by employing his epithet, "the culture industry." And so he comes across sounding like a crotchety grandpa lamenting the music of 'kids these days!', with no more grounding for his disparagement of Weezer than they have in their distaste for Glen Miller.

However, I find myself to be sympathetic to Adorno, if only because I perceive as well as he the capacity for Capitalism to produce ever larger amounts of self-fulfilling, self-actualizing, internally-promotional bullshit. I might even be inclined to associate my own ethical views with his, had they not lead him to so undemocratic a conclusion. As an attempt to recuperate what seems useful in Adorno's theory, it might prove fruitful to consider artwork in general, even (perhaps especially) that class of artwork which seems most conducive to consumption, as containing within it something akin to Adorno's immanent critique. This, to me, seems more dialectical: to wonder how a multi-million dollar blockbuster might contain within it the suggestion of its own denial. To tease out the ways that Spiderman 2 expresses a refusal to allow an identity between the universal and the particular, and especially the ways that it does this without recourse to pre-mass patterns of thought, through a Benjaminian reception in distraction. Capitalism, according to Marx, contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. If we take him at his word, it seems unlikely that these seeds would not be germinating in the symbol-rich soil of the culture industry.

Teaching Benjamin

"The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" (reprinted in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents my first exposure to the work of Walter Benjamin. Since I first read it over the summer, in preparation for Dr. Rasula's course on Metropolitan Modernity, I have read many more of his short essays as well as a large chunk of The Arcades Project. It was therefore exciting to revisit this essay in the context of teaching it to a group of students, many of whom may have been experiencing Benjamin for the first time.

It became clear to me as I reread the essay (my fourth reading, I think) just how it has become such a pivotal piece of writing in so many fields. Each reading, after time has passed and outside study undertaken, brings a whole new set of ideas to the fore, possibilities for understanding which had not exposed themselves until the current moment. In this sense, Benjamin achieves stylistically and rhetorically what he sets out to achieve historically, a series of discrete "dialectal images" which constitute "the relation of what-has-been to the now" (Arcades Project 462).

Benjamin begins the essay with an appeal to Marx's theory of political economy, stating that when Marx set out his ideas regarding base and superstructure, Capitalism was still in its infancy. Benjamin asserts that only now (in 1936, almost seventy years after the publication of the first volume of Capital) can we begin to analyze the effects of the base on the formations of the superstructure. Benjamin acknowledges that Marx was acting as a prognosticator, and that his own work must also "meet certain prognostic requirements" (1052). This is one of those places where I feel like Benjamin is talking to us. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin explains that "history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state" (471). His interest in Paris in the nineteenth century (to which he dedicated a large amount of time and effort in compiling The Arcades Project) sprang from his understanding of a certain confluence between that time and his own, like a window into the past that might bring the present into clearer focus. This same window, I suspect, we sense when we approach much of Benjamin's work, and especially the "Artwork" essay. He looks back 70 years to Marx; we look back 70 years to him. And so much of what he is exploring in the "Artwork" essay has become, in true prognostic style, central to the modes of our everyday existence.

A Quick Look at (McKeon's) Structuralism

Walter Benjamin (in “The Storyteller”) laments the loss of reminiscence represented by Modernity. He relates this form of memory to the storyteller, who has his roots in oral tradition. These days, he argues, we are attracted by the verifiability of information, its capacity to give us a coherent story. This is reason at it’s best, Nietzsche’s Apolline, which claims that it can fit each piece into the puzzle. Thus, Benjamin argues, rememberence is “dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle” (Theory of the Novel, Micheal McKeon ed., p. 86).

Modernity’s information-driven consciousness lends itself to a linear (i.e., ultimate) conception of historical understanding, which Levi-Strauss juxtaposes with the repetitive nature of myths (which, like Freud’s dream-content, employ layers of overdetermined meaning). He positions an initial break from myth-mindedness at the moment man adopted writing (“From Tristes Tropique”, in NATC, 2nd Edition, p. 1282). As a contrast to Modernity, Levi-Strauss points to all ancient civilization and a few contemporary societies (dwindling in number) which continue to live outside of history, relying instead on repeated cycles (e.g., seasons, lifetimes) to pattern an existence which resists the idea of permanent and irrevocable change (“The Savage Mind”, in Theory of the Novel, Micheal McKeon ed., p. 98-99).

Frye attempts to mark our descent into historical time onto the development of fiction. He sees modern literary development as a displacement away from myths--which like Freud’s dream-wish, represent “the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire”--and toward the “verisimilitude” represented in realist and naturalist fiction (126). However, what Frye takes for realism, for the “plausibility” realized in modern fiction, is nothing more than that same ‘historical’ conception of our surroundings which Modernity has helped to develop in us. (Frye's definition of "real" is precisely opposite to Nietzsche's.) In an attempt to follow his analysis to its dialectical end, Frye usefully suggests that the most recent, ironic, mode of fiction might represent the beginning of a move backward along the axis.

Indeed, Marxist dialectic adopts the cyclical understanding of the myth-mind and applies it to swaths of time and space (i.e., to societal dream-content) which are possible only in their historical relationship to the linear, text- and information-driven history represented by Modernity. Marxism represents a post-historical, post-Enlightenment understanding which is also evident in post-modernism.

Metadrama and Metacinema

Insofar as a play is metadramatic, it is a commentary on social conditions. By commenting on its own status--as play, as entertainment--it comments also on the status of the play as philosophy, i.e. it comments on its own performance in society. Metadrama might be called a commentary of the plays performative aspect: what does the play do to its audience as a performance? Any single performance which comments on its own artifice, calls into the mind the artifice of performance in general, and so casts the audience's gaze back on itself, in search of final meaning. In this regard, metadramatic performance is a true mirror held up to nature.

It might be that all performance is metadramatic in some sense. Does performance, which places in front of us an imitation of human action--be it "realistic" or stylized, do we not still understand it as imitated--naturally encourage its audience to reflect on human action in general, to wonder about its status as reality? The reflection that the metadramatic performance induces is political only in a sense: The play encourages its audience members to analyze the broader systems of performed action in which they are embedded.

With regards to films it seems that, as with most art in the mechanical age, this metadramatic quality becomes strictly more political. Certainly we also recognize the actions in a film as being imitations, but the spacial and temporal, as well as social, mediation that the film medium represents perhaps obscures for us the same capacity to recognize the imitated action as being human. That is not to say that plays are unmediated (I have explored the notion previously), but in performance, generally those responsible for all mediation and artistic interpretation are at hand, vis-a-vis the performers themselves (and, at the Globe theater and elsewhere, even often the playwright). Perhaps it is because in film we recognize the anonymity of these mediators (their anonymity glares in the metacinematic quality of the film itself) that film, rather than calling into question the audience's role as performer, instead calls into question its own status as qualified performer.

When an actor portrays a character on stage, or a musician plays and sings his song, or a politician comes before us to speak, we are aware to some extent of an ultimately accountable individual for this individual performance. In a film, such accountability is not immediately apparent. Indeed, it is part of the artifice of the film that any concrete accountability is continually obscured. Benjamin points out:

“The shooting of a film...presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to the spectator a single viewpoint which would exclude from his or her field of vision the equipment...unless the alighment of the spectator’s pupil coincided with that of the camera.” ("The Work of Art," Second Version, published in The Work of Art... (2008). Harvard UP, pp. 34-35)

The film, with its single point of view, its multiple cuts, its artificial lighting, its shifts in time and space, does not allow us to identify with any element of the human agency that is so crucial to live performance. We understand in the film that the actor is not performing the actions portrayed; these actions are performed rather in the lighting lab and the editing room. Just as we understand that is not, indeed, we who are watching the actor, but the camera itself. We are consigned to watch the machine. Our anxiety over this fact often makes us suspicious that the machine watches us in return (cf. Orwell, Clark & Kubrik, the Wachowskis).

The play reflects the audience only in its nature as a live performance. This immediate human interaction cannot be underestimated. By putting before us a human like us, the play participates in a reenactment of the Hegelian struggle for identity. If we leave the theater questioning the motives behind the performances of others, it is only because we have first reflected on the motives of our own performances. This is a philosophical reflection.

Because the film can reflect on itself without in doing so reflecting its audience as individuals, it does not tend immediately toward matters of philosophy. Rather, if the film calls for reflection at all, it calls for social and political reflection, in that it calls into mind man's relationship to the machine. It is likely, however, that film doesn't immediately call for reflection of any kind; its capacity for a distracted reception, as outlined by Benjamin, suggests that any natural tendency toward reflection that film inherits is is refracted by the immediacy of the film medium itself. Any attempt to interpret a film as metadramatic performance, to read its interaction with the audience, tends either to feel pressed and somewhat hollow, or else endlessly complicated by matters of Marxist materialism.

Reception in Distraction, or the Habitual Aesthetic

Walter Benjamin is extremely interested in the phenomenon he calls "reception in distraction" (The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduciblity and Other Writings on Media, Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 40). He sees this sort of experience as central to our understanding of architecture. While we may stand at a distance and look at a building, admiring it on some visual, contemplative level, the majority of our experiences with architecture are primarily tactile and distracted. There seems, in fact, to be something about the entire sensory apparatus involved in touch that demands a certain distraction. Dr. Rasula made the point by an example: it seems perfectly natural for someone to say, "look at this," or even "listen to that," but it strikes us as odd to be told to "touch" something. Our tactile experience is not attuned to focused attention.

Benjamin sees in film this capacity for reception through distraction, for learning not by way of direct contemplation, but through the development of a sort of habit. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller also seems to place the ideal receptive environment for Art in the realm of distracted attention. When meeting your audience, he advises the Artist:

The seriousness of your principles will frighten them away, but in the play of your semblance they will be prepared to tolerate them; for their taste is purer than their heart, and it is here that you must lay hold of the timorous fugitive. In vain will you assail their precepts, in vain condemn their practice; but on their leisure hours you can try your shaping hand. Banish from their pleasures caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, and imperceptibly you will banish these from their actions and, eventually, from their inclinations too (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 492).

Schiller here is still interested in preserving the concept of high Art, which Benjamin largely rejects in his attempt to reframe the debate around a consideration of all those things which are considered outside the realm of Art and thus are ignored by the critical eye. However, the similarity between their suggestions for ideal audience reception cannot be denied; both have something to do with entertainment.

The passage from Schiller also contains an undercurrent of the propagandistic, as if the artist must be quite sneaky in the insertion of his "principles." Even Schiller's phrasing smacks of the manifesto. He paints the audience as a "timorous fugitive" which the artist must "lay hold of," and the current customs of the audience (his frivolity) the artist must "banish."

Benjamin saw in film's capacity for "reception in distraction" the possibility of a great boon to the proletariat, who might be educated by film of man's relationship to the apparatus. Schiller, too, saw in this receptive mode the capacity for positive social change. History, unfortunately, has played out quite differently. The film medium was hugely successful in spreading the propaganda of the Nazi regime, and continues to be dominated by those interested in personal economic and political gain. So too are many of the media forms that represented Benjamin's great hope for the proletariat's recognition of itself as a class - the television, the radio, the newspaper. And the type of Artist which Schiller was interested in developing remains designated largely to obscurity: in art schools, in English departments, in Music programs, in theaters, Schiller's Artist is still largely studied only in contemplation, rather than in distraction.

Wordsworth seems to recognize (and to some extent embody) this continuing contradiction. He at once recognizes the dilapidated state of the High Arts, which are "driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse" while he at the same time attests to the "indestructible qualities of the human mind" (Norton, p. 564). The eventual triumph of art (which in his mind is not too far off) he places in the hands of "men of great power" who will oppose the "degrading thirst" of popular culture "with far more distinguished success" than he himself can offer (564). How ironic, though, that Wordsworth insists on the employment in high poetry of the language and of the common man while simultaneously turning his nose up at the types of diversion that same common man seems to enjoy best. And he makes no attempt to explain how his "men of great power" might draw the major portion of humanity away from the "gross and violent stimulants" of popular entertainment (563).

It is part of Benjamin's interest to rectify this imbalance. If we are to make this transition toward the Good or True, he seems to say, it will not be by shifting the interests of the larger population to align with our ideas about Art, but rather by realigning our interest in the aesthetic to include those forms that interest the larger population to begin with. This idea in the hands of those who seek power, however, can have some very negative implications. Benjamin closes the Artwork Essay by attributing to the National Socialist movement the motto "fiat ars--pereat mundus" (Artwork, p. 42). And this condemnation of Nazi political aestheticism mirrors perfectly the words with which Schiller closes his Aesthetic Education:

Surround them, wherever you meet them, with the great and noble forms of genius, and encompass them about with the symbols of perfection, until Semblance conquer Reality, and Art triumph over Nature (Norton, p. 492).

This charge, minus the last 5 words which identify the Ideal in the outcome, suggests what all the greatest propagandists in history have realized. Namely, that if you can surround them "wherever you meet them" you can eventually reach the point when your Semblance, whatever it might be, will conquer Reality, will indeed become Reality. The Third Reich surely recognized in this charge a very specific opportunity, that very opportunity which Benjamin identifies as the "aestheticizing of politics" (Artwork, p. 42). By realigning the Ideal that is Art with their own political motivations, they could lay claim to that same Ideal.

These dangers (inevitabilities?) are latent also in Kant. I have already explored the difficulties which I see as arising from Kant's concept of a disinterested aesthetic, but that same disinterest quickly becomes dangerous when taken up as the ideology of a despotic political regime. Kant anticipates as much:

...however much debate there may be about whether it is the statesman or the general who deserves the greater respect in comparison to the other, aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the latter. Even war, if it is conducted with order and reverence for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and at the same time makes the mentality of the people who conduct it in this way all the more sublime, the more dangers it has been exposed to and before which it has been able to assert its courage; whereas a long peace causes the spirit of mere commerce to predominate, along with base selfishness, cowardice and weakness... (Norton, p. 439)

Compare this with Benjamin's assertion that

All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements of the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations (Artwork, p. 41).

Both Benjamin and Schiller have high hopes for the ability of art (variously defined) to move people toward the morally good, but they both fall short of defining the method by which this movement should best be accomplished. They differ from Wordsworth, who still looks forward to a return to more concentrated study of Art. Benjamin and Schiller both hope to locate the work of Art before an audience who is distracted, who is not interested in "learning" or "contemplating", who is entertained and thus can be influenced on an level analogous with Freud's unconscious. However, they (and we) continually run up against a public whose distracted attention seems more naturally attuned to the influence of powerbrokers.

Or, is there something about the mediums of mass that make them more useful to the propagandist than the artist?

The Role of Performance, The Roll of Print

Marshall McLuhan saw a certain affinity between Shakespeare's time and our own. Both times, argued McLuhan, represented periods of transition in the status of print media. Of course, Shakespeare and we stand on opposite ends of the spectrum. What for his time was a growing acquaintance with print must be for ours a mounting estrangement. Which transition will prove more bitter? And for whom?

For McLuhan, our alignment with print media meant a transition into linear thinking patterns. Patterns which favor logical order, cause and effect, and individual attention. It shifted the function of words, too. Literate culture shifted "from the notion of words as resonant, live, active natural forces to the notion of words as ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’ for minds” (McLuhan, from his book The Gutenberg Galaxy, excerpted in The Essential McLuhan, 1995, Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., p. 114). It was probably with this mental and cultural realignment that Shakespeare was actively participating. McLuhan sees many of his plays as direct interaction with the themes of a new lifestyle influenced by print. (See his brief discussion of King Lear on pp. 108-109).

McLuhan continues: “Aquinas considered that neither Socrates nor Our Lord committed there teaching to writing because the kind of interplay of minds that is in teaching is not possible by means of writing” (p. 119). It seems to be this resonant and active character of language and interaction that performance to this day attempts to recapture.

Performance is, by definition, ephemeral. A video recording of a theatrical production does not constitute a performance. It is only in the immediate and fleeting interaction of artist and audience that we experience performance. It is an art form which cannot be captured and retain its status as Art. The oral tradition, in which performance plays a key role, demands the acceptance of a passing beauty. The tradition of visual media, including print, makes no such concession. Indeed, it is partially its physical permanence, its capability to speak to our own time and the next, which qualifies visual art as Art.

What role does performance play in what McLuhan considers our postliterate society? Some people go to plays, still, I suppose. More likely, they go to rock shows. Rock shows are almost entirely nonliterate. I don't see written music as playing a large part in the creative process of most rock and roll bands. Even lyrics fail to gain any real status in print. They are entirely aural within the context of performance, and in CD distribution appear only occasionally in tiny print in the liner notes. In fact, the pervasiveness of the (authentic or faked) photo reprint of the "original" handwritten lyrics of rock artists suggests, often written on napkins, scraps of paper, the back of a receipt, suggest their negligible status as written material, even for the artists themselves. With the rise of online music distribution, written lyrics are available online in several places, but have lost almost entirely any official status.

Knowing the lyrics is a different story. And of course written lyrics help with that, on a mass scale. However, most people learn lyrics to songs by listening to them often, and rarely by studying the written lyrics. (Consider the humorous stereotype: a person finds that they have been singing the lyrics wrong all these years. They shout, "Oh, is that what they're saying?") Personally, I find that reading the lyrics, especially while listening to the music, detracts significantly from the beauty of the experience. It can make the lyrics more difficult to internalize. It feels false, like I'm trying to hard to gain information from something that has it's home in emotion.

I like to characterize Performance as an especially tactile artform. In a performance, there is a limit to our concept of mediation. That is, mediation seems limited, though it may not actually be. What mediates a modern performance of Hamlet? The sound system, which is perhaps the most technologically advanced medium of modern theater, projects the performers' voices and is a very literal and limited mechanical extension of their capacity to speak. Make up and electric lighting play a similar role for their capacity to be seen, which in itself is an interesting necessity that is absent from almost all other art. It might be said that in performance, makeup and light play the same role in mediation that for television and film requires an entire technological apparatus.

And architecture plays a key role in the mediation of Performance. Benjamin, in the Artwork Essay, considers our reception of architecture to be especially tactile. In Performance, it is largely architecture which provides the boundary line (such as there is one) between Artist and audience. David Byrne gives a TED Talk regarding live music's relationship to architecture. He discusses the ways in which changes in architecture, essentially changes in potential venues and the accompanying shifts in acoustics, influence the choices that musicians make about how to create. The same could be said for any performance, which must inevitably be fit to the space in which it will be experienced. Architecture also plays a part in the auditory reception of the audience. It can even help to determine their expectations of the performance. One does not expect the same sort of performance at The 40 Watt as one might expect at Hodgson Concert Hall. For the philharmonic and the rock band to arbitrarily switch venues would create quite a stir. We as audience interact with the architectural environment of the performance in very specific ways. The same can be said for the performers.

I feel like in the case of live performances even those things we see in front of us (that is, those things we experience primarily visually) must be considered differently in that they are stricken through with the tactile. Performers, with their wigs, their make up, their costumes, are all a jumble of texture; the sets are simply architectural elements; the electrical lighting only serves to heighten this effect. The voices we hear are real human voices (we recognize them as such, even when amplified electronically, because of their immediate relationship to the performer we see in front of us); when Claudius storms offstage, we can feel his footsteps reverberate into our seats. This might be the reason that the experience of 'watching' a performance and watching a video of a performance differ so drastically. The video has been stripped of the tactile.

What relationship exists between rock lyrics and playtexts?