Overtly or covertly, the writers I just quoted valorize the live over the mediatized, as is evident in Molderings' contrast between "lively" performance and "petrified" video. Even Pavis, who argues that theatre needs to be seen in relation to other media, nevertheless refers to the influence of other media on theatre as "technological and aesthetic contamination" (134; my emphasis). All too often, such analyses take on the air of a melodrama in which virtuous live performance is threatened, encroached upon, dominated, and contaminated by its insidious Other, with which it is locked in a life and death struggle. From this point of view, once live performance succumbs to mediatization, it loses its ontological integrity. At one level, the anxiety of critics who champion live performance is understandable, given the way our cultural economy privileges the mediatized and marginalizes the live. In his analysis of the political economy of music, Jacques Attali describes the current historical configuration as dominated by a "network of repetition" in which only mass-produceable cultural commodities have value (87-132). In this account, live performance is little more than a vestigial remnant of the previous historical order, which can claim little in the way of cultural presence or power. Phelan claims that live performance's inability to participate in the economy of repetition "gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge" (Unmarked 148). I would like to suggest in passing that in the context of a mediatized, repetitive economy, using the technology of reproduction in ways that defy that economy may be a more significantly oppositional gesture than asserting the value of the live. I am thinking, for instance, of Christine Kozlov's installation, Information: No Theory (1970), which consisted of a tape recorder equipped with a tape loop, whose control was fixed in the "record" mode. Therefore, as the artist herself noted, new information continuously replaced existing information on the tape, and "proof of the existence of the information [did] not in fact exist . . ." (in Meyer 172). The functions of reproduction, storage, and distribution that animate the network of repetition were thus undermined by this way of using the very technology that brought that network into being. In this context, reproduction without representation may be more radical than representation without reproduction.

It is clear that the impulse to set live and mediatized forms in a relation of opposition is ideological in nature. Perhaps making a virtue of necessity, some theorists argue that live performance's existence on the margins of the economy of repetition makes it an oppositional discourse. Molderings describes performance art as a direct counter-response to television's banalization and objectification of the visual image (178-79). Phelan picks up this theme in a discussion of Anna Deveare Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, suggesting that Smith's performance, which incorporates, alludes to, and goes beyond the widely disseminated media images of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, "seeks to preserve and contain the chaotic flood of images the cameras 'mechanically' reproduced." Phelan observes that this way of seeing the relationship between the live and the mediatized is based on "an old boast--television cameras give you only 'images,' and theatre gives you living truth" and emphasizes the degree to which Smith's performance is indebted to "the camera that precedes and frames and invites" it ("Preface" 6). She goes on to suggest that Smith's performance "also offers another way to interpret the relation between film and theatrical performance: the camera's own performativity needs to be read as theatre" ("Preface" 7). Even though Phelan describes a subtle interaction between live and mediatized forms that goes beyond simple opposition, her suggestion that the action of the camera be seen as theatre tends to reinscribe the traditional privileging of the live over the mediatized: it is by entering the space of theatre, or being seen as theatre, that media images become subject to critique. I believe that the privileging of live performance as a site of critique is sufficiently engrained that if I were to insist that the relationship between Smith's mediatized sources and her live performance suggests that we should see her performativity as television, that characterization would be thought to imply that her discourse cannot function critically.

My purpose here is to destabilize these theoretical oppostitions of the live and the mediatized somewhat, first by reference to what might be called the "electronic ontology" of media (these initial observations will not pertain to film, of course, whose ontology is photographic rather than electronic):

the broadcast flow is . . . a vanishing, a constant disappearing of what has just been shown. The electron scan builds up two images of each frame shown, the lines interlacing to form a "complete" picture. Yet not only is the sensation of movement on screen an optical illusion brought about by the rapid succession of frames: each frame is itself radically incomplete, the line before always fading away, the first scan of the frame all but gone, even from the retina, before the second interlacing scan is complete. . . . TV's presence to the viewer is subject to constant flux: it is only intermittently "present," as a kind of writing on the glass, . . . caught in a dialectic of constant becoming and constant fading. (30-31)

Regardless of whether the image conveyed by television is live or recorded (and, as Stanley Cavell reminds us, on television there is "no sensuous distinction between the live and the repeat or replay" [86]) its production as a televisual image occurs only in the present moment. "Hence the possibility of performing the television image‹electronic, it can be modified, altered, transformed in the moment of its transmission, is a production in the present" (Heath and Skirrow 53). Although Heath and Skirrow are referring here to broadcast television, what they say is as true for video as it is for broadcast: the televisual image is not only a reproduction or repetition of a performance, but a performance in itself.

If we shift our gaze from the electronic writing on the glass to consider, for a moment, the nature of the magnetic writing on a videotape, another issue comes to the fore. Cubitt posits as a crucial feature of the medium "the phenomena of lost generations" resulting from the various stages of life a video image is likely to pass through, "from master to submaster, to broadcast, to timeshift, where it begins to degenerate with every play" (169). Video shares this characteristic with other means of technical reproduction, including photographic and sound recording media. Since tapes, films, and other recording media deteriorate over time and with each use, they are, in fact, physically different objects at each playing, even though this process may only become visible when it reaches critical mass (e.g., when the film or video develops visible flaws). Each time I watch a videotape is the only time I can watch that tape in that state of being because the very process of playing it alters it. The tape that I initially placed in my VCR or audio player started disappearing the moment I began watching it or listening to it. Disappearance, existence only in the present moment, is not, then, an ontological quality of live performance that distinguishes it from modes of technical reproduction. Both live performance and the performance of mediatization are predicated on disappearance: the televisual image is produced by an ongoing process in which scan lines replace one another and is always as absent as it is present; the use of recordings causes them to degenerate. In a very literal, material sense, televisual and other technical reproductions, like live performances, become themselves through disappearance.

I want to worry this question of reproduction in one last context, by considering the related issue of repetition. Writing on the experience of film, Cavell observes that movies . . ., at least some movies, maybe most, used to exist in something that resembles [a] condition of evanescence, viewable only in certain places at certain times, discussable solely as occasions for sociable exchange, and never seen more than once, and then more or less forgotten. (78)

It is remarkable how closely Cavell's description of the film experience parallels descriptions of the experience of live performance. The fact that Cavell is talking about the past, probably about the heyday of the American film industry in the 1930s and 40s, and about a way of experiencing film that we no longer believe to be typical, is critical. Film is no longer an unrepeated experience confined to particular places and times; people frequently see their favorite films multiple times, and have opportunities to do so afforded them by the movies' appearances on cable and broadcast television, and videocassettes. If we want to, we can own copies of movies and watch them whenever, and as often, as we wish. Whereas film was once experienced as evanescence, it is now experienced as repetition. The crucial point is that this transition was not caused by any substantive change in the film medium itself. As a medium, film can be used to provide an evanescent experience that leaves little behind, in the manner of a live performance, or it can provide an experience based in repetition and the stockpiling of film commodities. Cubitt makes much the same point with respect to video, arguing that repetition is not "an essence in the medium" (92). Rather, "the possibility of repetition is only a possibility"; the actual use of the medium is determined by "the imaginary relation of viewer and tape . . ." (93). Repetition is not an ontological characteristic of either film or video that determines the experiences these media can provide, but an historically contingent effect of their culturally determined uses.

Just as recording media like film and video can provide an experience of evanescence, so, too, live forms such as theatre have been used in ways that do not respect, or even recognize, the ostensible spatial and temporal characteristics of live performance. One such example would be the WPA Federal Theatre's 1936 production of It Can't Happen Here, which opened simultaneously in eighteen different American cities. The intention of this experiment is clearly suggested by a contemporary account which observes that the Federal Theatre produced the play "after a motion picture corporation decided not to do it" (Whitman 6). To take a more current example, producers of the genre Elinor Fuchs has called "shopping plays" envision live performances as repeatable commodities. Barrie Wexler, the California producer of Tamara, "franchises . . . Tamara worldwide, replicating the product in exact and dependable detail. 'It's like staying in the Hilton,' he explains, 'everything is exactly the same no matter where you are'" (Fuchs 142). In both these cases, live performance takes on the defining characteristics of a mass medium: it makes the same text available simultaneously to a large number of participants distributed widely in space. In fact, Hollywood saw the Federal Theatre as a competitor, and opposed it (Whitman 130-32). It is crucial to observe that the intentions underlying these two examples of this use of the live medium are very different, and each is arguably reflective of its historical moment. Whereas the Federal Theatre Project's practices grew out of a generally left-populist attitude, shopping theatre "mimics in its underlying structures of presentation and reception the fundamental culture of contemporary capitalism" (Fuchs 129). The ideological positioning of these productions is determined not by their shared use of live performance as a mass medium, but by the different intentions and contexts of those uses. Ironically, shopping plays like Tamara commodify the very aspects of live performance that are said to resist commodification. Because they are designed to offer a different experience at each visit, they can be merchandised as events that must be purchased over and over again: the ostensible evanescence and non-repeatability of the live experience become selling points. This may be what Fuchs has in mind when she says that "In this theater . . . we are seeing the commodification of the theatrical unconscious" (129).

I am suggesting that thinking about the relationship between live and mediatized forms in terms of ontological oppositions is not especially productive, because there are few grounds on which to make significant ontological distinctions. Like live performance, electronic and photographic media can be described meaningfully as partaking of the ontology of disappearance ascribed to live performance, and can be used to provide an experience of evanescence. Like film and television, theatre can be used as a mass medium. Half jokingly, I might cite Pavis's observation that "theatre repeated too often deteriorates" (101) as evidence that the theatrical object degenerates in a manner akin to a recorded object! The more serious point is that to understand the relationship between live and mediatized forms, it is necessary to investigate that relationship as historical and contingent, not as ontologically given or technologically determined.

As a starting point for this exploration, I have proposed that, historically, the live is an effect of mediating technologies. Prior to the advent of those technologies (e.g., sound recording and motion pictures), there was no such thing as "live" performance, for that category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility. The ancient Greek theatre, for example, was not live because there was no possibility of recording it. In a special case of Baudrillard's well-known dictum that "the very definition of the real is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction" (146), the "live" can only be defined as "that which can be recorded." (Although I realize this is a contentious point, I will stipulate that I do not consider writing to be a form of recording in this context, for several reasons. Scripts are blueprints for performances, not recordings of them, even though they may contain some information based on performance practice. Written descriptions and drawings or paintings of performances are not direct transcriptions through which we can access the performance itself, as are aural and visual recording media. In everyday usage, we refer to "live" or "recorded" performances but not to written performances or painted performances, perhaps for this reason.) This means that the history of live performance extends over approximately the past 100 to 150 years, and is bound up with the history of recording media. To declare retroactively that all performance before, say, the mid 19th century was "live" would be an anachronistic imposition of a modern concept on a pre-modern phenomenon. There is a question of whether to date the precise point at which live performance came into existence from the advent of photography or that of sound recording. Although my point here does not depend on making a choice, I will suggest that whether or not photographs can be seen as recordings of performances depends on the degree to which extension in time is considered an essential characteristic of performance. If still photographs capture only individual moments in time, can they be said to record performance, which Herbert Blau has described as an intrinsically "time-serving" form? Inasmuch as performance documentation is one of the emergent issues of this conference, I hope that this question can serve as the basis for futher discussion.

On this basis, the historical relationship of liveness and mediatization must be seen as a relation of dependence and imbrication rather than opposition. Similarly, live performance cannot be said to have ontological or historical priority over mediatization, since the live was brought into being by the possibility of technical reproduction. This problematizes Phelan's claim that "To the degree that live performance attempts to enter into the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology" (146), not just because it is not at all clear that live performance has a distinctive ontology, but also because it is not a question of performance's entering into the economy of reproduction, since it has always been there. My argument is that the very concept of live performance presupposes that of reproduction, that the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction.

I have borrowed these catgeories from Patrice Pavis's "Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference." They are two of fifteen vectors identified by Pavis along which live performance and media may be compared.

Attali ascribes the development of the network of repetition to the invention of sound recording technologies (32).

Phelan describes Smith's Twilight as signalling a shift in the relationship between television and theatre: "formerly, live theatre hoped to find itself preserved on television, while Smith's performance transforms the "raw" televised story into stylized, well-rehearsed drama" ("Preface" 6). I tend to see Smith's work as belonging to a general cultural trend in which mediatized events are reconfigured as live ones. This trend dates back at least to the mid-1950s, when television plays like Twelve Angry Men and Visit to a Small Planet were presented on Broadway, and has accelerated in recent times with the restaging of music videos as concerts and of cartoons as live musicals. In considering the relationship between theatre and television, does Smith's derivation of her performance from documentary sources constitute a new development, or the extension of an established cultural trend into a new area?

Kozlof's tape recorder installation replicates this process of the continuous replacement of electronic information. The difference is that whereas in the normal usage of video this process is, the necessary condition for the creation of a perceivable image, it becomes, when applied by Kozlof to sound recording, a way of making an imperceptible sound image that exists only theoretically.

The quotation embedded in this quotation is from Christian Metz.

It is worth wondering about the implications of digital reproductions for this position, since at least some digital media ostensibly do not degrade. My present feeling is that it's too soon to tell whether or not that's true.

My insistence that how technologies are used should be understood as effect rather than cause derives from Raymond Williams's critique of technological determinism in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (113-28).

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• Cubitt, Sean. Timeshift: On Video Culture. London, New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.
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• Phelan, Peggy. Preface: Arresting Performances of Sexual and Racial Difference: Toward a Theory of Performative Film. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. 6.2 (1993): 5-10.
• - - -. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London, New York: Routledge, 1993.
• Whitman, Willson. Bread and Circuses: A Study of Federal Theatre. New York: Oxford UP, 1937.
• Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. 1977. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1992.