Three articles focus on the shifting of political spectacles from different facets: the evolution of theatre of being in the digital age; the specactors transformed from citizen to netizen; the new digital forms reform the political spectacles in the States.
CAT discusses their theatre form called the recombinant theatre and gives a closer look at the theatre in a chronological sense. The value of analogic and the digital, since the day digital appears, have been trading off with each other.In the analogic era, people have a sense of certainty about cosmo till it comes to digital era, for each principle analogic holds dear, the digital model proposes its opposite. (CAT,152)At the beginning of this coexistence, The anachronistic economy of artisans reproduces itself as a luxury economy(CAT, 153): As digital is a test of equivalence, its process offers an ongoing flow of sameness, of order from order(CAT, 154), the high end of value is still found in the analogic because digital reproduction is lack of Aura （Walter Benjamin）. Along with the discovery of DNA, the digital age developed into another level: since the origin of life is not analogic (order from chaos )but digital ( order from order)( CAT,155), both analogic and digital have the same value in the regime of art. When it comes to the age of Modern art, where the value is defined by context. The counterfeit was no longer the counterfeit if it met the expectation of sameness. (CAT,156)
Today as the segments of knowledge go deeper, it opens up possibilities for the theatre of everyday life. As the old form of the theatre of everyday life become the perfect representation of gender hierarchy found in ordinary social space, the usefulness of everyday life is waning. But the development of Theatre of information seems promising because of its intense level of technological mediation, the audience is a step down from actually attending the event. Comparing to the Virtual theatre where we find the feedback loops between electronic and the organic, it seems to have deepened the pedagogical dimension of resistant theatrical practice. (CAT, 165)
On the other hand, the definition of citizen changed a lot in the digital age. Balibar claims that man points to the same referents as citizens, the two are one. He does not agree that there is a duality of individual and the person engaged in political affairs. According to Balibar Man has to emerge in the political issue and become a citizen in the meantime. (Poster, 70)In Poster’s opinion, we also have to find a way to turn the defensive place for being a citizen into an offensive one in a digital age the most important thing is to take into account the intervention of machines to switch the Doctrine of human (Baudrillard) to the doctrine of human-machine. For instance, the digital age politics has become consumption,( like what is elaborated in Trump’s case) citizenship is a blend of autonomous individual of modernity with the postmodern neotraditionalist of identity politics, it becomes even more complicated in the borderless world of the internet.( Poster, 75) According to Poster, citizen evolve to netizen. This claim resonates with what is mentioned in the article of CAT: regarding the new potential of practice of the internet, and the transformation of the citizen, the theatre of becoming is for sure in its new stage of the process.
But Poster also reminds us that internet, not as a utopian realm but has its hierarchy and control, manipulation and risks. We have to analyze how political representation is reproduced and its repercussions on national sovereignty. (Poster ,84)
An impact on multiple aspects of globalization, including transnational flows of capital and people, which in turn led to the proliferation of new forms of communication and the ways in which culture circulated through the world, from satellite television to digital piracy(Edwards, 28) As Friend requests and followers are a perverse new form of social capital, as expressions like the selfie is “a new phatic agent in the energy flows between bodily movements, sociable interactions, and media technologies that have become fundamental to our everyday, routine experience of digital activities” (Edwards, 39 ), Trump’s twitter is par excellent an example of how the circulation of social media become the self-determined political spectacle for authorities, and how this has managed and regulating American citizens’ relationship to the world outside the united states.
Poster, M. 2006. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Duke University Press.
Edwards, Brian T. 2019. “Or the Selfie-Determination” 74 (3): 25–45.
Ensemble, Critical Art. 2000. “Recombinant Theatre and Digital Resistance.” TDR/The Drama Review 44 (4): 151–66.