Word Unbecoming Flesh

When we are born, we cry that we are come/ To this great stage of fools.
(Shakespeare, King Lear)



Why do we return to speech after such epic wandering in the wilderness of text?

Why do we crave the intimacy of a lover's sigh upon the neck, when so many postmodern theories have tried to undo that presence and demote that person to a stand-in performing the role only as long as desire fizzes through what passes for their body?

What remains of our hopeless self when we have forced all our senses through the imperious screen and reduced them to the flickering of eyeballs and other peripheral glitches - twitching legs, tapping fingers, murmuring lips?

Is this return to the fleshy mechanics of mouthing words nothing more than what you thought you ought to feel when someone who meant the world to you suddenly deletes you from their address book?

Maybe your performative strategies, your repertoire of heart-breaking emotional motivations, your soul-searching existentialist ravings have all been cut and pasted from the web. So, the question emerges - why bother staging 'the thing itself'? As some self-delusional fix that there could ever be an after-text, which reassuringly replaces the old-fashioned hope in an after-life?

After their temptation in the world-wide web, Uninvited Guests' return to speech is made with a well documented experience of the kinds of mischief text makes with the faux virginity of the staged word. But this knowing return is also ventured upon with a certain sweet-sour innocence: that desire, however inherited and constructed, is always made in the moment; and that the total combinatory logics of any system cannot finally account for the future, which is still out there, for better or worse, for, to some indeterminable extent, our own making. In Offline, this manifolding of on-line and on-stage, of the experience of Text and the innocence of Speech, explores two claims to two very different kinds of presence, which haunt all performance, whether everyday or theatrical.

Firstly, at some former time and in another place, something was written, implying there was in deed a mind engaged with a technology which entered text into the digital. Secondly, now, in this time and place, what was written then by that other is being spoken by this performer to you. Despite the gender switching and sexual swinging, what really, that is, in the event, binds particular words to particular fleshes is not some profound level of self-evident here-now-ness, whatever that might be (though it is there or thereabouts). It is this absent author who was able at that other time and place to write desire. What renders this performative present so prescient to us is the presencing of that past scene of writing: that the author in that event was present to themself in such a way they had to write it down, to realize that presence in words, which this current event uncannily re-articulates or re-members. And since no writing, particularly that on the web, forgets the conditions of its own becoming, Offline's strategy of speaking the text cunningly reminds us of its writing through a dislocation of technology. The absence of fancy electronics on stage merely points archly to the presence of the oldest technology - the word spoken. That reminder in its turn re-minds us of the subject with its mind that must have written - with such casualness and passion, such callousness and longing.

Furthermore, this return to speech invokes a great deal that on-line writing alone would forget: the agency (however qualified) of the individual, whence a sense of responsibility of persons to persons (however loosely defined), whence ethics. To say, in the event, actions (including enunciative acts) matter, necessarily says people matter, and finally, matter matters. So, speech exposes this technology's tendency of loosening the ethical bonds between persons and words. It resists this anti-annunciation, where word un-becomes flesh and flees towards the absolute fluidity of one abstracted and ghostly dimension - that of Text. Here the endless and totalizing exchange of word with word encourages an equivocation of things and words, which eventually produces the obscene logic of a final solution or the end of History in the Year Zero. Sent into the void by its author, this writing without flesh enables a remarkable phase-transition in the evolution of the technology of Text. A hitherto impossibly self-sufficient auto-expression is generated, that needs no recipient, no interlocutor, and hence communicates nothing. However, this info-byte, circulating the digital in the place of the Human, does disseminate a pure and ubiquitous (but only on this virtual plane of abstraction) effect of the Real. As a strange kind of part-object, it behaves like a virus whose latent functionality is, in effect (never in deed), entirely haphazard and opportunistic, and in the final analysis, despite all its dangers - irremediably banal.

But to speak aloud or in some special whisper these text-quanta is to realize their potential at this edge of the Inhuman: to explicate (because performed) the profound terror of the alone that lives coiled up at the heart of every 'everyday' person. Offline (and in the event - all good theatre) performs this gathering of the asocial, literally giving fleshliness (however contingently) to the only thing we have in common - our loneliness, the only thing that binds us - our misanthropy. The web masks this exhilarating horror in the (apparently natural) inter-activity and openness of on-line gatherings, chatrooms, discussion groups, 'communities', all blissfully utopian or terrifyingly accessible - depending on your politics. Whereas performance reveals all the possibilities of our inhumanity (always where the future of the human is to be found), in endlessly expressing the potentiality between the plane of Text and the event of Flesh.

And maybe that's Offline's final reminder: that these calls from the void cannot be answered; that these longings of the soul, howsoever beautifully or mawkishly phrased, must remain un-addressed. Even were we to recognize the sender, we could never return the call, because our text would remain unvoiced. Paradoxically then, the performer's voice not only stands in for the now lost ecstasy of inscription, but also stands in the way of eventual recovery, cruelly revealing the fallacy of autobiography and confession. No matter whom you tell, no matter with how many other anonymous or identifiable handles you share, however large the chatroom, however user-friendly the message-board, however incredibly deep the reach of this technology, you will be alone when you write, alone when you die, and, believe it or not, alone when you speak. My words may not be mine, but they are certainly not yours. However close we cleave them to our hearts and commit them to memory (for the purposes of re-living the past or performance), words are inalienable, promiscuous, utterly other than us. From us, through us, with us, but not of us. The first technology to come to mind.

Say it like you meant it.