Glitch in the Machine

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Notes

¹Hotel Modern is a theatre group established in 1997. Its members are actors Arlène Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker and visual artist Herman Helle. In Kamp, they collaborated with sound artist Ruud van der Pluijm. They blend visual art, puppetry, music and film in evocative productions. <http://www.hotelmodern.nl/_shared/download/hm_kamp_pressrelease_en.pdf>

²According to Foucault, biopower is interior power; it regulates social life from its own body and every individual reactivates it. No one can escape the exercise of biopower; it works on both the dominated and the dominant.

³See Žižek's concept of ideology that aims at concealing or harmonizing the spectral otherness (Žižek 1997).

⁴On this topic see Postone and Santner(2003).

⁵This is again an issue of contingency, of glitch. During the conference PSi #15, 24–8 June 2009 in Zagreb, I attended an annual theatre festival – EUROKAZ (artistic director Gordana Vnuk). It was a public holiday, and the city was strangely empty despite numerous billboards advertising EUROKAZ depicting the inmates of Auschwitz. Only after taking a closer look was it possible to detect that these inmates were not real people but puppets. I had almost finished preparing my conference paper ‘Glitch in the Machine’ when I saw the performance of ‘Kamp’ and decided to incorporate it into my presentation.

⁶Hotel Modern's statement about ‘Kamp’ is: ‘We normally materialize and memorialize this place in a very literary way. We re-enact this event in miniature, onstage, because we want to be eyewitnesses and to let the audience become eyewitnesses too. We want the literary to face this truth about humanity, and to share it directly, in order to search for a way to deal with it. The production is also a kind of ritual and memorial.’

⁷Speaking with the actors after the performance, I was a little surprised by their statement that they strongly believed in the emotions they acted, in their missionary roles, that it was possible to change roles, to animate their puppets who represented German guards with anger towards inmates.

⁸Žižek describes selekcija in his book In Defence of Lost Causes (2008).