565

"People are often confused by the ideas of recombination and digitality. The former typically connotes scientific esoterica pertinent to molecular biology, while the latter is associated with information and communication technology. Indeed, these associations are correct, but very reductive. Recombination and digitality are not so specialized. As we shall see, they are the foundation of a new cosmology —a new way of understanding, ordering, valuing, and performing in the world. While some cultural vectors have been faster to embrace digital models than others, no area remains untouched. Theater, like all of the fine arts, is now in the process of constructing a relationship with this new paradigm, and this is at times a very embittered struggle. The elder model of the analogic, deeply embedded in cultural institutions, is not voluntarily sharing any territory.

(...)

Much more is at stake than the configuration and appearance of theater in the next century; the formation of digital theater (in the widest sense of this term) is a struggle over the micro-sociology of the performative matrix of everyday life. The digital model, like the analogic, contains both apocalypse and utopia, and the applications constructed now will in part determine the directions in which digital processes will later flow. Capitalism is primarily a digital political-economy, much as the medieval economy was primarily analogic. Pancapitalism’s use of the digital thus far has been horrifying, whether one considers the pathological separation and alienation of Taylorist production, the false democracy of consumption, the repressive apparatus of surveillance, or the biotechnologies of eugenics. Digital culture is on this same trajectory, with its primary manifestation being an invasive mass media that functions as a re-production and distribution network for the ideology of capital.