Digital Tragedy-Towards Greek Drama as Noughts and Ones

Dramatic tragedy in performance in ancient Greece was a medium that explored what it means to be human in a world in which only partially identifiable and ultimately unknowable forces limit human understanding and agency. Moreover, when the gods squabble, and laugh, humans die by the scores. Greek Tragedy achieved this perspective by locating the live human actor at the centre of the performance. And for almost everyone in at least the Sixth and Fifth Century BCE, Greek tragedy existed as performance rather than as written text. But the actor was masked, and the effect of this, while remaining enigmatically difficult to pin down today, may well have been to bring long-dead Bronze-Age heroes into the here-and-now as if they were alive in the present time and space of the ancient Greek outdoor performance locations, where also living divine beings were immanent and influential.

Module 6 explores the extent to which the central insight of Greek tragedy is compatible with a depersonalizing trend in contemporary performance which culminates in a posthuman placement, firstly, of the live actor inside predominantly digital environments, and secondly, the total replacement of live actors on the tragic stage by digital entities. This Module raises, in a heightened form, many of the issues considered during earlier modules of the course. For in the ancient world, all endeavors relied on – and entire world-views centred on – the human body and what it could achieve unaided by machines, even if there were available to the Greeks some technologies of a rudimentary kind. Communication between human individuals primarily occurred by means of the spoken word, with the only other “social media” available being the written word (on wax or soft clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, or later codices, and inscriptions in stone) or the various media of material culture (coins, sculpture, vase or wall paintings, architecture, and so on). So by examining a medium such as Greek tragedy, which relied so strongly on the body of the live human actor, in order to discover how it is being reconceptualized in the digital world, this Module goes to the heart of a course that is focused on the reception of the Classical World in Digital Popular Culture.

Module 6.1 examines the nature of the medium that was Greek tragedy in Athens in the late sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Beginning with a consideration of the lenses we necessarily look back through in our effort to “see” the medium of Greek tragedy in performance, including the nature, broadly speaking, of theatre as a medium, 6.1 then lists the extant tragic plays, and considers the language of tragedy, its delivery in performance, the masked tragic actor and chorus, the physicality required and generated by masked acting, and the fact that dance and music were central aspects of tragic performance. The nature of “the tragic” in Greek tragedy is then briefly considered; the central focus of this section consists in “the sense of struggling to understand the factors that ultimately determined human lives” which, writes Hall (2010), “was incorporated forever in the medium” (8). Perhaps the most important aspect of tragedy to understand, however, when considering how receptions of tragedy in the digital world might render the aim of the medium to express what it means to be human in a world in which only partially identifiable and ultimately unknowable forces limit human understanding and agency, is the fact that the personae of tragedy cannot in any sense be thought of as being the “modern subject” with independent will and the agency to put that will into effect. In ancient Greek thought and myth, both of which tragedy expressed, human agency in the world is limited by, and shared with, supernatural forces thought of as divine beings. As Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1990) comment, “[s]ince the origin of action lies both in man himself and outside him, the same character appears now as an agent, the cause and source of his actions, and now as acted upon, engulfed in a force that is beyond him and sweeps him away…depending on the point of view, these same actions present two contrary yet indissociable aspects” (77).

Module 6.2 surveys dominant trends in the reception of Greek tragedy in modern, pre-digital performance, primarily through the lens of productions and adaptations of four tragedies: Prometheus Bound, Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Medea. It is essential to outline this era of reception in order to understand what is happening in the digital world now, both because certain trends evident in this era have flowed through into digital receptions, and because, on the other hand, key problems experienced by modern dramatic receptions of tragedy have, arguably, been at least partially overcome by digital receptions. 6.2 examines the reception of Greek tragedy as modern drama – primarily a realistic and dialogue-bound format that relies on the conflict of wills and agencies embodied in “modern subjects” – through four categories or perspectives: “Spectacle,” “Emotion,” Sexual Politics,” and “Politics” more broadly. “Spectacle” especially involved the spectacular display of the Promethean “grand narrative” of human progress and self-reliance, and spectacular performances involving masses of extras and chorus members. But the grand narrative might be overturned, too, by Oedipean blindness and ignorance of the limitations of human knowledge. Under the banner of “Emotion” is found, naturally, an account of Freud’s development of the “Oedipus Complex,” but also the divided female self with her rapidly shifting emotional extremes. This phenomenon is examined by means of the persona of Medea, who from the eighteenth century onwards perfectly embodied what increasingly female audiences wanted to see, namely rapid shifts in emotional extremes skillfully displayed on the stage. Medea also expressed issues from the third category, “Sexual Politics,” especially female emancipation and empowerment, most powerfully in the context of legislative changes in Nineteenth-Century England (and then elsewhere) regarding the property and custody rights of divorced women. “Politics” more broadly encompassed diverse political causes, including rebellion against tyranny and postcolonial resistance, with Sophocles’ Antigone and variations of it seen to be the perfect vessel for these considerations.

Module 6.3 then traces the reception of Greek tragedy into the digital age, starting with the highly charged events of 1968, seen in retrospect to be the catalyst for the emergence of a new era in many aspects of human life, not least digital technologies. The advent of new means of rapid and global communication has, since that time, intensified the political and metaphysical focus of receptions of Greek tragedy, which in the ancient world always incorporated just this twin focus. But the specific focus of 6.3 is the increasing depersonalization of the tragic actor, who has transformed from being embodied in the modern subject and its counterpart, the modern dramatic character, to being either asked to act like puppets or being replaced by them, to being dwarfed by increasingly alienating digital environments, and to finally being discarded altogether in favor of digital avatars. This tendency encompasses what is now widely called “post-dramatic” performance, that is, performance in which the assumptions and representational conventions of modern drama have been largely rejected and replaced by more presentational styles of performance in which the “modern subject” is not the primary vehicle for the expression of a what is it to be human.

The Module concludes with an examination of the way in which the ontological ambiguity of the puppet, the uncertain status of the postdramatic actor immersed in digital environments, and the notion of the “posthuman” that encompasses these phenomena, are all surprisingly appropriate for the expression of the ancient Greek concept of tragedy. The reception of a key aspect of the Classical World thus finds its most vivid new life as “noughts” and “ones” within a digital world.

Recommended Reading

1. Monaghan, Paul. “The Complete Eradication of the Live Actor from the Tragic Stage: Pre- and Post-Human(-ist) Confluences in Contemporary Productions of Greek Tragedy.” In Rodosthenous, George and Angeliki Poulou, eds. Greek Tragedy and the Digital. Bloomsbury, 2022 (forthcoming), Chapter 11 (pages as yet unassigned).
2. Sidiropoulou, Avra. “Digitizing the Canon: Mediated Lives and Purloined Realities in Jay Scheib’s The Medea, Wooster Group’s To You, the Birdie! and Persona Theatre Company’s Phaedra I.” In Rodosthenous, George and Angeliki Poulou, eds. Greek Tragedy and the Digital. Bloomsbury, 2022 (forthcoming), Chapter 3 (pages as yet unassigned).
3. Gane, Nicholas. “Posthuman.” Theory, Culture and Society 23:2-3, pp.431-34.
4. Eckersall, Peter. “Towards a Dramaturgy of Robots and Object-Figures.” TDR: The Drama Review, 59:3, pp.123-31.
5. Monaghan, Paul. “Aeschylus as Postdramatic Analogue: ‘A Thing Both Cool and Fiery’.” In Constantinidis, Stratos, ed. The Reception of Aeschylus’ Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers. Brill, 2016, pp.250-79.
6. Piris, Paul. “The Co-Presence and Ontological Ambiguity of the Puppet.” In Posner, Dassia N, Claudia Orenstein and John Bell, eds. The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance. Routledge. 2015, pp.30-42.