Blau: The Human Nature of The Bot cont'd

This is not to deny, however, that the substance of that insidious truth may be more or less diminished by the dubious presence of the actor in a facsimile of performance that, if occurring in real time, nevertheless feels like a rerun or rather embalmed in advance; without the stink of mortality that, as in the irrefutable testimony on the heath of King Lear, is the appalling truth of theater.

If bots are virtual entities that, because they are without biological presence or corporeality, are virtually immortal too, subverting "the centrality of the live, organic presence of human beings to the experience of live performance," they'd hardly have any presence at all, any sense of liveness whatever, were it not for the omnipresent shadow of the apparently vanished being, who, dead or alive, endows the notion of liveness with meaning or substance to begin with. Auslander says that the chatterbot "casts into doubt the existential significance attributed to live performance," but I'm not quite sure what sort of doubt he has in mind. We're obviously engaged with a technology of production capable of making of performance something other than "a specifically human activity," but it is the specifically human activity that—if not reproduced by the bot, which draws its material from data bases—remains the inalienable referent around which the data's collected, just as the human conversation is the datum from which, by whatever ambiguous means, the chatterbot proceeds.

It's certainly imaginable to me that a bot may chat not merely with humans but with other bots, or that at some millennial moment of simultaneity there may be in real time a performance without any human participants at all, even to be mistaken about what's real, what's not. But then it would seem that the question of liveness would have been not merely reopened and reframed, as Auslander says it is by the existence of chatterbots, but something of a non sequitur. It may be defined as live, but what can liveness really mean in the absence of a subject for whom what's real, what's not is of inarguable consequence on existential grounds. As for the performer, one wonders what accrues, or doesn't, to the growing immanence of the bot in the absence of those liabilities—stage fright, lapses of memory, a stomach ache on stage, a coughing fit, unscripted laughter—that give a local habitation, in the body, to the succinct and apposite admission of imperfection that no bot will move us by—"We are all frail"—no less the myriad inflections of a performance that, intended or unintended, really make it live. What we have through the digital technology is the invisible appearance of liveness, but not what—at the sticking point of performance, rarely to be sure—is its inarguable manifestation.

Herbert Blau is the author of many books on performance, including The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Trheater, 1976-2000, Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion, Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett, To All Appearances, and The Audience. He is the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities, Department of English, University of Washington, Seattle.