Theatrical Performance and the

Forensic Turn

Contemporary theatre, like so much of contemporary life, is obsessed

with the ways of which information is detected, packaged and circulated.
Running through forms as diverse as neo-naturalistic playwriting, intim-
ately immersive theatre, verbatim drama, intermedial performance, and
musical theatre, a common thread can be observed: theatre-makers have
moved away from assertions of what is true and focussed on questions
about how truth is framed.
Commentators in various disciplines, including education, fine art,
journalism, medicine, cultural studies, and law, have identified a ‘forensic
turn’ in culture. The crucial role played by theatrical and performative
techniques in fuelling this forensic turn has frequently been mentioned but
never examined in detail. Political and poetic, Theatrical Performance and the
Forensic Turn is the first account of the relationship between theatrical and
forensic aesthetics.
Exploring a rich variety of works that interrogate and resist the forensic
turn, this is a must-read not only for scholars of theatre and performance
but also of culture across the arts, sciences and social sciences.

James Frieze teaches contemporary performance practice and theory at

Liverpool John Moores University. His devised theatre-making centres on
the adaptation of non-theatre texts for site-responsive and other perform-
ance contexts. He is the author of Naming Theatre: Demonstrative Diagnosis
in Performance (2009) and the editor of Reframing Immersive Theatre: The
Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance (2016).
Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies

Titles in this series include:

Theatre, Exhibition, and Curation

Displayed and Performed
Georgina Guy

Playing Sick
Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine
Meredith Conti

Movements of Interweaving
Dance and Corporeality in Times of Travel and Migration
Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerko Egert and Holger Hartung

Performing Arts in Transition

Moving between Media
Edited by Susanne Foellmer, Maria Katharina Schmidt and Cornelia Schmitz

Incapacity and Theatricality

Politics and Aesthetics in Theatre Involving Actors with Intellectual
Disabilities
Tony McCaffrey

Women’s Playwriting and the Women’s Movement, 1890–1918

Anna Farkas

Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn

James Frieze

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre--Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS
Theatrical Performance and
the Forensic Turn

James Frieze
First published 2019
by Routledge
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Names: Frieze, James, 1967– author.
Title: Theatrical performance and the forensic turn / James Frieze.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |
Series: Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: Theatrical Performance in the

Forensic Turn 1
The Forum: Object Evidence and the Agency of Things 1
Popular Culture and the Embedding of Forensic Aesthetics 3
Language and Aesthetics 6
The Economy of Legibility 8
From Existential Actualisation to Interpellated Coherence: Ideas of
Self in the Forensic Turn 11
Illusions and Imperatives 15
The Forensic and the Theatrical: Forum and Theatron 20
Generative Doubt 22
Does the Human Have to Die for the Forensic to Begin? 26
Theatre and the Black Mirror 31

1 Data Chaos and the Verification Void 36

Darkness and the Bigger Picture 39
Life in the Verification Void 43
Enron and the Transparency Illusion 52
Landscape with Weapon 61
New Enlightenment Bubblethink 62

2 I’m Seen Therefore I Am: Romance in the Forensic Turn 68

Voyeurism, Screens, and Forensic Culture 74
The Heterotopic Capsule 78
Ghosting the Techno-Present Machine 81
The Epistemological Romcom 86
vi Contents

3 The Hypothetical Real vs. the Interiority Illusion 90

The Interiority Illusion 91
The Hypothetical Real 93
Entitled 96
The Events: Greig’s Rough Theatre vs. Baudrillard’s Informational
Event 106
Dis-integrating the Techno-Present Real 112

4 Life Throes: The Strange Case of the Diehard Corpse 116

Breathing Corpses 119
How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found 123
Theatrical Ghosts and Leaky Containers 127

5 Undead Domesticity: Naturalism and Home in the

Forensic Turn 130
The Half-Life of the Living-Room Play 130
Away from Home 132
Framing the Taming of Chaos 134
London Road: Choric Pathos 140
From Taine to Raine: Tribes and Translation Anxiety 143
The Game Family and the AFK Family: Neighborhood 3 150
The Open House 158
The Tabloid Forensic and the One-Room Drama 162

6 Open Dialogue as Prefigurative Performance:

Re-assembling the Forum (Part I) 167
Stringing Along: Participation in Crisis? 170
It Felt Like a Designated Participatory Opportunity 173
Building a Forum on Open Dialogue 178
The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland 181
what happens to the hope at the end of the evening:
The Prefigurative Power of the Dematerialised Stage 185
I Wish I Was Lonely 189
A Poetics to Dislodge Habit 192

7 Effects of Infinity: Re-assembling the Forum (Part II) 194

Direct Address 199
Necessities of Thought 204
Monologic Energy-Exchange and the Split Subject: Eno’s Ragged
Warriors 206
 Contents vii

Sustaining Fictions and the Failure to Undercut 210

Effects of Infinity 217

Epilogue 220

Bibliography 222
Index 233
Acknowledgements

Thank you to all those at Routledge who have worked on this book for your
support and professionalism throughout; I could not have hoped for better
collaboration.
While there are no large chunks of material within this book that have
been previously published, both the ideas within and the writing of the
book have been forged under the influence of a number of editors and peer
reviewers of journal articles and chapters who helped me to develop my
thinking over the last six years or so. Along with those who reviewed the
proposal for this book and those who read the manuscript, I want to thank
all of you, including those who are still anonymous to me.
At a crucial point in the drafting process, I was invited by a team of
researchers from the University of Potsdam to give a presentation at Kunst-
Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, as part of Regarding Objects,
a series of public lectures on the forensic turn. Though everyone kindly
denied it, my presentation was a horrible mess; working through the mess
at that point and, subsequently, engaging with the suggestions from that
smart and generous group was extremely valuable.
The book has been enriched along the way by discussion in highly varied
contexts. Some of the discussions that have made the most impact have
taken place in formal, academic frameworks. The Theatre and Performance
Research Association (TaPRA) in the UK has been, throughout its 15-year
history, an oasis of humane scholarship in a university culture that has
generally become more actuarial. At the wonderfully inter-disciplinary
conferences Theory, Context and the Internet (DIGCULT 12) and Texting
Obama, I was not only introduced to domains I knew little about, but
realised that there were people in these domains asking similar questions
to the ones I was asking—and finding their own, ingenious ways of trying
to answer those questions. Some discussions outside formal, academic
environments have been equally informative: listening to a distinguished
sixth-form music teacher lambaste trendy, ‘evidence-based’ approaches
that routinely dismiss local mores and customs; sitting in a soft play
centre while a parent who works for Liverpool FC parsed the impact of
 Acknowledgements ix

data analysis on academy systems in elite football as we watched our kids

engage in their own games.
Thanks to the many colleagues in various roles within Liverpool John
Moores University who have supported this project along its way. To all
the students I have had the privilege to teach, direct, supervise or examine,
thanks for helping me to learn with you. To all the practitioners who
have made resources available for my research and/or engaged with me
in discussions about their work, sometimes face-to-face in interviews or
co-teaching contexts, I could not have written the book without you.
My wife, Josephine, is so very wonderful I am finding it hard not to do
that thing of using public acknowledgements to convey my love and enor-
mous gratitude, but I will try to stay calm and say merely: thanks. The
period during which I wrote this book coincided with the arrival of Otis,
and then of Gilbert. Their passionate, inquisitive spirits have augmented
my own, more feeble energy.
Introduction
Theatrical Performance in the Forensic Turn

We live in a forensic turn in which ideas of truth are increasingly tied to

techniques of verification. In this cultural turn, ‘attention has shifted from
the physiological intricacies of the subject position to narratives led by
things, traces, objects and algorithms’ (Weizman 2017: 83). So where does
this leave theatrical performance, as a medium to which (what theorist
of forensic aesthetics Eyal Weizman has called) ‘the physiological intri-
cacies of the subject position’ are usually seen as integral? Contemporary
theatre, like so much of contemporary life, is obsessed with the processing
of evidence, with means of detection, with the packaging of informa-
tion, with how knowledge circulates. Across genres as superficially dis-
tinct as verbatim theatre, intermedial performance art, musical theatre,
intimately immersive theatre, and neo-naturalistic playwriting, a common
trend can be observed: theatre-makers have moved away from assertions
of what is true and attended instead to questions about how truth is identi-
fied. Although they respond in strikingly diverse ways to the forensic turn,
many of these theatre-makers—as this book will explore—critique and
resist the equation of truth with verifiability.

The Forum: Object Evidence and the

Agency of Things
This book is not the first to identify the emergence, both within and across
specific cultural domains, of a forensic aesthetics; neither is it the first to
argue that theatrical and performative elements are crucial to that aes-
thetics. Its ambition lies in addressing this aesthetics from a theatre/per-
formance studies perspective. In their short, seminal 2012 book, Mengele’s
Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman
identify the 1985 ‘trial’ of Josef Mengele’s skull as a catalytic event in
the emergence of a forensic aesthetics predicated on dramatic presenta-
tional techniques. I place ‘trial’ in inverted commas here because this was
not a trial to determine guilt or innocence—there was no question that
2 Introduction

Mengele was the physician who selected victims for the Auschwitz gas
chambers and performed experiments on prisoners during the Holocaust.
The question was whether a collection of bones exhumed in Brazil were his
or someone else’s. Keenan and Weizman situate the evidentiary techniques
used to secure a verdict in the Mengele trial in relation to the two pre-
vious, large-scale trials of Nazi war criminals: The Nuremberg Trials of
1945–1946; and the trial in 1961 of Adolf. Nuremberg prosecutor Robert
Jackson was so worried about the bias and the faulty memories of con-
centration camp survivors that he ruled out testimony as a basis of evi-
dence, conducting the trials instead on the basis of Third Reich documents
that had fallen into the possession of the victorious Allied forces. Fifteen
years later, however, in Jerusalem, the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial,
Gideon Hausner called survivors of the Holocaust as witnesses because the
emotional force of their testimony suited his conception of the trial as a
form of historical and political pedagogy. The Eichmann trial has been
seen by many commentators, including Shoshana Felman, to herald the age
of the witness, a turn towards testimony as the basis for considering and
healing crimes against humanity. But the Mengele trial marked a turn in
the opposite direction.
Identifying the bones as Mengele’s necessitated collaboration between
an array of specialists in their respective fields, including analysts of
handwriting, fingerprints, dental records and X-rays, of photographs,
documents, and clothing. Two experts took centrestage: osteobiographer
Clyde Snow, famous for his work in piecing together life stories by exam-
ining bones; and Richard Helmer, an imaging specialist whose innovations
in video and photography led to the coup de theatre which convinced the
world that the skull was Mengele’s. Once fragments of the skull had been
pieced together and gaps in it repaired, Helmer was able to superimpose
photographs of the living subject with photographs of the skull to bring
the dead to apparent life for audiences around the world via television and
newspapers.
In presenting their findings, Helmer and Snow demonstrated that ‘the
making of facts […] depends on a delicate aesthetic balance, on new images
made possible by new technologies, not only changing in front of our eyes
but changing our very eyes’ (Keenan and Weizman: 24). The forensic
consists of three elements: object; mediator; forum. The word ‘forum’, like
the word ‘forensic’, derives from the Latin forensis, referring to ‘the prac-
tice and skill of making an argument before a professional, political, or
legal gathering’ (Keenan and Weizman: 23). The forum is where the rhet-
oric that underlies forensic aesthetics is honed. Each new object, be it an
exhumed corpse or a set of data, poses a challenge to the mediator, whose
efforts to meet new challenges by devising new techniques leads to the
continual evolution of the forum. But new technologies do not constitute
forensic aesthetics, they can only fuel it. Forensic identification, even before
 Introduction 3

it reaches the stage of public persuasion, is more than a mechanical process

of revelation or uncovering. Its credibility rests on ‘protocols of appearance
and evaluation’. Far from confirming that forensic investigation is about
letting the evidence speak for itself, Keenan and Weizman argue that the
trial of Mengele’s skull was an object lesson in how the forensic’s deploy-
ment of ‘gestures, techniques and turns of demonstration, whether dra-
matic, poetic or narrative, can make things appear’ to speak for themselves.
The work of the team in the Mengele trial was an object lesson in how the
forensic’s ‘arduous labour of truth construction’, deploying ‘a spectrum of
technologies, and scientific, rhetorical, theatrical and visual mechanisms’
could make evidence speak, spectacularly, to a non-specialist audience (67).

Popular Culture and the Embedding of

Forensic Aesthetics
The surge in computing technologies and the increasing sophistication and
legal credibility of DNA matching techniques over the next fifteen years
would provide further impetus for the emergence of forensic aesthetics.
In the year 2000, a television show debuted on the (US) CBS network in
which these technologies and techniques were emblazoned within a popular
entertainment format. This spectacle of forensic investigation, CSI: Crime
Scene Investigation, spawned several franchises, becoming the most popular
show in television history and one of the most influential, fostering not
just a genre but a dominant sector of television programming. It was a
brand that offered a balance between thrills and comforts, the dizzying
spectacle of data resolved by the singular skill of the expertise to which we
were given armchair access. Moments before being bludgeoned to death in
her own home by her son, Joy in Jennifer Haley’s Neigborhood 3 tells him,
happily: ‘I’m watching a little CSI. I love how that forensic team figures
everything out in the end’ (96).
One of many vivid links between the Mengele ‘trial’ and CSI lies in the
figure of the lead forensic expert. Clyde Snow often told journalists that
the evidence would speak for itself, that bones, he liked to say, do not lie.
Echoing Snow, the motto of Gil Grissom, leader of the forensic team in (the
original) CSI, is ‘concentrate on what cannot lie—the evidence’. One of the
things to which the success of the CSI template bears witness, however,
is that evidence does not speak for itself. CSI pathologists, like Helmer
and Snow in their demonstrations, instrumentalise protocols of appearance
and evaluation as they bring objects, including human remains, back to
life for a television audience. We eavesdrop the show-and-tell—the main
mode of (direct yet indirect) address in CSI—in which the investigators
present their findings to one another and to us, the flies on the wall. It is
no ordinary wall, but a ‘smart’ wall, enhanced with cgi. As they establish
4 Introduction

their credibility by convincing their peers, we, the proxy investigators,

are treated to a visceral tour of the evidence without having to leave our
seats. As Derek Kompare states, the forensic is a making visible that is
‘structured around showing and telling: traces of criminal activity both
conspicuously displayed and conspicuously described’ (17).
In the last decade, the autopsy show-and-tell familiar to viewers of CSI
has become an aesthetic staple not only of crime-centred television, but
within emergent strains of reality and lifestyle programming. The televi-
sion pathologist treats the human body as a screen, an object that has to
be mediated to be real. The visibility of the autoptic technology does not
bare the device in any Brechtian sense but heightens the compulsion and
aura of the spectacle. Popular presentations of autopsy are not an entirely
new phenomenon: they began in Europe in the sixteenth century, evolving
from private lessons dating back to the thirteenth. Body Worlds, the trav-
elling ‘exhibition’ first presented in 1995 in which Gunther von Hagens
dissects plastinate cadavers containing real organs and organ systems, is
a conscious revival of Renaissance anatomy demonstrations. Viscerally
spectacular, von Hagens’ shows go conspicuously against the grain of the
digital era’s distancing objectification of the body via magnified, screened
images. José van Dijck describes how, when the anatomy lessons became
public events in the early sixteenth century, ‘the anatomist, rather than
the cadaver, constituted the focal point’. There were no big screens; very
few audience members could actually see what was happening. Anatomists
from Andreas Vesalius in the early sixteenth to William Harvey in the
seventeenth century were, more than anything, performers, ‘translating
their concrete tactile and visual perceptions into imaginative, oratory
narrative’ (32). Vesalius, one of the first public anatomists, was also one of
the first to attack Galen’s theocentric theory. Until that point, the actual
dissection was done in private by ‘relatively unimportant menials’ and a
lector (‘ostensor’) who pointed to the parts revealed. Vesalius insisted on
the value of tactile and empirical discovery: Maxwell states that ‘hands-on
contact with the cadaver was the exclusive privilege of the anatomist’. In
the sense that she is afforded hands-on access by proxy, today’s armchair tv
spectator is in a similar position to the spectator of Vesalius; today’s viewer,
however, has an armoury of representational tech bridging the gap between
‘hands-on’ and ‘proxy’. This technology realises, by paradoxically virtual
means, the literal definition of autopsy: seeing for oneself.
The show-and-tell autopsies of CSI have led to autopsies on hapless
bodies both dead and alive, and on extensions of the body such as the car
or the home. These lifestyle autopsies ask us: How clean is yours? We are,
of course, invited to turn the questions on ourselves, as this is all framed
as an opportunity to help ourselves manage our lives better. As in CSI, it
is not the real per se, but the expertise of those determining the real, and
our need to heed their warnings, that is on display in reality television.
 Introduction 5

Jamie Oliver brought in von Hagens to unpick the intestines of a cadaver,

warning us against unhealthy eating by showing and telling us what it
does to our insides.
Key to reality television’s show-and-tell is the notion of ‘control “at a
distance” ’ through ‘smart’ technology that gathers evidence forensically,
allowing us to measure ourselves biometrically so that we can ‘assemble
ourselves as flexible and enterprising commodities’ (Ouellette and Hay: 7),
players in a game of life that has become a private-public partnership.
Cementing this partnership, forensic culture justifies vigilant surveillance
by demonstrating risk, its dazzling and horrifying forms of show-and-
tell implanting magnified images of what can happen if we let our guard
down. As Laurie Ouellette and James Hay observe, ‘TV has reinvented
older formats such as drama and news around the expertise and authority
of technicians—profilers, doctors, lawyers, police, and other emergency
responders’. And as Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood suggest, ‘[r]eality
television’s forensic detailing of the performance of bodies, behaviours, and
practices’ readies every aspect of the individual and their everyday life for
processing as evidence. Through a steady annexation to the public gaze
of everything ‘previously designated “private”, some of us can be shown
to be valueable, whilst others, valueless depending upon their dispositions
towards working on themselves’ (113; italics in original).
In today’s forensis, ‘the language of enterprise has’, as Karen Lury puts
it, ‘colonised our interiors’ (K. Lury: 59). The notion of ‘a public gaze’
is complicated in the era of information technologies. Forensis originally
denoted ‘in open court, public, what is out of doors’. Gaston Bachelard,
the great poet-theorist of spatialising thought, explores the construction
of these boundaries in his Poetics of Space; he muses that ‘if one were to give
an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one
would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life’
(224). The mythology attached to doors is so deeply engrained, he tells us,
that we seem to carry a belief that ‘incarnated in the door, there is a little
threshold god’ (223). Today, the mythic charge of doors may have faded,
but their political charge is stronger than ever. Marc Augé reminds us that
households in classical Greece were:

watched over by two deities: Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, at

the shadowy, feminine centre of the house; and the outward-looking
Hermes, god of the threshold, protector of exchanges and of the men
who monopolised them. Today the television and computer have
replaced the hearth. Hermes has taken Hestia’s place.
(viii)

Through the television and the computer, we welcome into our home
not only information and entertainment but the ability to both bear and
6 Introduction

surrender ourselves to the machinic gaze. It is this gaze that promises to

help us control what most needs controlling in our globalised, informatic
world: thresholds, borders, mobility. Drawing (as I also do in Chapter 1) on
Ulrich Beck, Toby Miller asserts that we live in a risk society that generates
moral panics about personal safety. Kept alive by the flames of popular
journalism in ways that too often divert attention from ‘weighty topics of
national significance’ (51), these moral panics about personal safety exacer-
bate the epistemological uncertainties of postmodernism, making the
certainty of forensic logic seem reassuring. The forensic justifies vigilant
surveillance by magnifying (in dazzling show-and-tells) images of what
can happen if we let our guard down. Fear for personal safety leads to the
grudging surrender of control to external agencies as we place our lives in
the hands of those who promise to shield, to contain, to manage and pre-
sent information for us.

Language and Aesthetics

Former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard attempts to quell lingering
controversy surrounding a meeting, five years earlier, in which she is seen
to have ousted Kevin Rudd as Labor Party Leader by insisting: ‘In the end,
we can only have speculation about what happened that day; we will never
know forensically’. A suspect package is found in a London tube station
and we are told it will be ‘forensically examined’. The same phrase is used
during Prime Minister’s Questions in the British House of Commons, when
an MP requests that misconduct within Liverpool community health will
not just be examined, but will be—you get the idea.1 The word ‘forensic’
has long since implanted itself, and not just in politics. In car mainten-
ance, accountancy, anthropology, nursing or just about any other domain,
it is used as a catch-all term that renders investigation scientific, expert,
failsafe and adorns experts with gravitas.2 Sometimes, it expresses a more
purely technical rendition of depth, much like the previously fashionable
intensifier ‘hyper’. An analysis of trends in video gaming, for example,
asserts that games have become ‘forensically graphic’ (Brooker). You may
conclude from the above examples that the term ‘forensic’ does not, in
fact, mean very much at all. While it powerfully evokes, what it evokes is
decidedly vague. It is not a unique term in this respect: terms like ‘liberal’
and ‘democracy’ have functioned over centuries as glittering generalities or
empty signifiers, their emptiness and adaptability helping them to retain
their power rather than diluting it. I will argue that, just as the sheen of
‘liberal’ and ‘democracy’ is becoming tarnished, the ‘forensic’ is emerging
as the new, glittering generality.
Anatomist and forensic anthropologist Sue Black points out that,
though the term ‘forensic’ has, in recent times, been used as if it designated
 Introduction 7

a particular skillset, it does not. It actually designates the context within

which activity is presented: a legal trial or enquiry in which experts are
truth must be established. ‘There is no such thing as forensic science’,
Black insists. ‘There is science, and the forensic bit simply means that you
are taking that science into the courtroom’.3 Black’s observations about the
gap between what forensic has long meant and what people think ‘forensic’
means and has thereby come to mean. She pierces the recent swelling and
mystification of the term ‘forensic’, a term that has for centuries referred to
legal argumentation. Its etymological history is summarised in the lexicon
of the Forensic Architecture research agency:

The Latin adjective forensis originally meant ‘pertaining to the forum’.

The forum was a busy place: among other things, a market, a meeting
place, the place where the court convened. Cicero used the adjective
forensis in a number of his speeches, and while this was often in the
broader sense, as the general art of the forum, he seems at times to have
used it in the narrower, legal sense. In the Middle Ages, the Flemish
translator Willem van Moerbeke used ‘forensis’ to translate the Greek
adjective dikanikos which appears in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and which lit-
erally means judicial. This was an unambiguously legal use of forensis,
though restricted to the way lawyers plead. The English language only
absorbed the Latin term in the form ‘forensic’ in the seventeenth cen-
tury. […] Only in the mid-nineteenth century, during a time of great
scientific development, did the term forensic become used to denote a
legal-scientific investigation.

The rampant spread of the term ‘forensic’ is symptomatic of what forensic

aesthetics responds to: a large-scale breakdown of certainty about the basis
of truth. While ‘forensic’ still connotes experts processing the evidence
of crime, at crime-scenes or in laboratories, all scenes of behaviour are (as
the examples in the previous paragraph illustrate) treated as crime scenes,
withholding their secrets in ways that need to be overcome by expert inves-
tigation. ‘The’ forensic—as a cultural logic and political aesthetics—fosters
a criminological approach to society. It claims to protect citizens by solving
what it deems to be problems, neutralising what it deems to be threats.
Its modes of activity are investigation and presentation: first gathering and
processing of evidence, it then makes a spectacle of its findings. Forensic
aesthetics casts itself not as constructive but as responsive, presenting its
work as reparatory to breaches or potential breaches of trust and order.
Formulating problematic behaviour criminologically means that this
behaviour can be labelled aberrant, thereby obviating rather than stimulating
debate about cultural norms.
As Hobsbawm suggests (see Chapter 5), the proliferation of ‘post-’
terms in the third quarter of the twentieth century marks this breakdown.
8 Introduction

I would add that the fourth quarter saw the term ‘postmodernism’ emerge
as a last word in ‘post-’ terms, a grand attempt to chart the disintegration
of grand narratives and to articulate in a totalising way the effects of that
disintegration. In the wake of postmodernism, the forensic leads us to what
Baudrillard refers to as ‘the technical realization of the real’. The forensic
is an attempt to wrest back certainty by technical means, transcending the
messiness of subjectivity. Paradoxically, it promises to dissect and regu-
late human behaviour, scrutinizing all aspects of human activity, while
claiming to stay above the level of the human.
The phrase ‘forensic aesthetics’ is appropriately oxymoronic given the
tension which lies within the idea of a forensic aesthetics. The New Fontana
Dictionary of Modern Thought states that ‘aesthetics’ is ‘commonly held to be
a style of PERCEPTION concerned neither with the factual information
gained from the things perceived, nor with their practical uses, but rather
with the immediate qualities of the contemplative experience itself’ (Bullock
and Trombley: 12; capitals in original). To define the forensic as an aesthetics
is immediately provocative, because the forensic denies that is anything but
a set of ‘practical’ skills via which ‘factual information’ can be established. In
legal contexts, ‘aesthetics’ is associated with manipulation, and the forensic
intensifies this association. My theorisation of the forensic as relying on
protocols of appearance draws on Rancière’s staking out of aesthetics as:

a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of

speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the
stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what
is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see
and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possi-
bilities of time.
(14)

Rancière is keen to break ties that might exist in the minds of some readers
between aesthetics and artistic form; and quick to stress that the term
‘aesthetics’ does not imply that there has been or that he is imposing an
‘aestheticisation’ of politics. His readings of art and art criticism assert
continuity between artistic, theoretical and scientific discourse, supporting
his central idea that works of art can exert a cultural re-distribution of
the sensible. My readings, similarly, assert continuity between discursive
domains as a set of ‘contours and standards’ (as Will Eno puts it) that shape
behaviour and perception across discursive and cultural domains.

The Economy of Legibility

Forensic logic’s promise to eliminate doubt is a kind of divine intervention
into the human that reflects the waning of traditional forms of divinity. As
 Introduction 9

Lindsay Steenberg puts it: ‘systems of mathematics and forensics are all that
remain when religious certainties of good and evil no longer apply’ (17). At
the same time, however, the forensic is haunted by ‘nostalgia for the cultural
moment that saw faith replaced by the certainties of mathematics and foren-
sics’ (Turkle: 11). The contradictory role that forensic expertise performs in
relation to the human is invoked by the two, related but paradoxical meanings
of the word ‘divine’. Deriving from the Latin, divinus, it refers both to that
which is outside the ontological realm and to intuitive deduction—a capacity
for which is ontological. The claim made by the forensic, as a post-religious
form of divine intervention, reflects this paradox: it promises to help us overcome
(what were previously) barriers to knowledge, but assures us that we are less
able than ever before to ‘see’ the truth without extraordinary assistance. In
so doing, it valorises ‘irascible deductive reasoning’ and ‘lack of faith’ in the
intuitive, embodied faculties that support ‘human testimony’ (Steenberg: 25).
That the Mengele trial there was a relatively clear-cut ‘yes or no’ case made
it the perfect platform for demonstrating the efficacy of forensic techniques.
As Keenan and Weizman argue, this performance of efficacy marks a shift
from the living subject to the data object as the locus of truth. With this
shift comes anxiety that ‘truth discourse is no longer human’. In its 1998
Report, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC), aiming to help
South Africa move toward a post-Apartheid future while accounting for
systemic crimes against humanity, found themselves having to manage this
anxiety. The Committee had wrestled, painfully, with similar questions to
those that confronted the prosecutors in the Nuremberg and Eichmann
trials, including the question of whether testimony should be relied on as
evidence. In its ‘final’ (though subsequently much-challenged and multiply
amended) Report, the Commission suggested that there was a need to dis-
tinguish, and to enshrine, four kinds of truth: forensic (which the report
defines as scientifically corroborated, factual, and objective); personal or
narrative truth, based on a culmination of individuals’ subjective stories
to provide a multi-layered set of experiences; social or dialogic truth,
constructed through the debate and discussion of facts on a collective level;
and, finally, healing and restorative truth, which places established facts
‘in context’ in an attempt to acknowledge individual experiences. What
the TRC Report recognises is that there will always be contradictions not
only between a state and its citizens, or between different communities,
but within different groups and even within individual testimonies; and
yet, it is both possible and desirable to determine what truly happened, to
sketch a narrative that is broadly coherent. For the Forensic Architecture
team it is, as Weizman (2017) articulates, similarly important to recog-
nise both the possibility of determining what happened and the inevit-
ability of contradictions and ‘unknowables’. Indeed, Forensic Architecture
‘record the situated perspectives and divergences and regard them not as
falsehoods, but as information in their own right’ (128).
10 Introduction

Forensic Architecture’s approach to doubt and the inevitability of

contradiction is in stark and deliberate contrast to forensic aesthetics
as a cultural turn. The cultural imperative for justice not only to be
done but to be seen to be done has never been stronger than in (what
I call) the economy of legibility in which we now live. This impera-
tive demands that everything, including aspects of consciousness, be
readable and transmittable as information. Though the Human Genome
Project (HGP)’s mapping of the genetic constitution of the human body
in the last quarter of the twentieth century was, on the face of it, a
purely bioinformatic exercise, the cultural effects of representing the
human body as information have been profound, reinforcing informatics
as a dominant cultural logic that instrumentalises the forensic’s promise
to colonise knowledge. As Maaike Bleeker argues, ‘making bodies vis-
ible or readable is to gloss over that moment when something happens
which cannot be fully folded into the known’ (20). Co-terminous with
the HGP was the VHP (Visible Human Project): both projects were
conceived in the mid-1980s and were completed in the very first years of
the new millennium. While the HGP laboured to map the body as bits
of coded and non-coded information, the VHP endeavoured to make the
body readable by slicing particular bodies (deemed to be representative
ones) into increasingly thin cross-sections which could be used for ana-
tomical visualisation apps. Whereas dissection establishes the Cartesian
subject, the HGP and VGP’s new anatomy ties identity to prosthetic
affordances—bits of code that can be functionally isolated and poten-
tially modified.
Una Chaudhuri describes how, ‘[o]nce contextualised outside of reli-
gious ideology, the unknown appears not as mystery but as enigma, conun-
drum, and puzzle, a region not merely hospitable to but positively begging
for colonization by powerful explanatory systems’ (31). Informatics both
stimulates and promises to satisfy this demand for ‘powerful explanatory
systems’, exploiting and intensifying the age-old tendency to associate
visibility with democracy (Maxwell). In Eurocentric societies, democracy
has long been sutured to visibility through dissection, a suturing reliant on
the assumption that we all humans are roughly the same because they all
have bodies that are roughly the same. The HGP and VGP re-chain dem-
ocracy to anatomy, just when faith in the power of democracy as an idea and
reality is being challenged by the effects of globalisation.
Even things we might traditionally think of as abstract or immaterial,
such as ideas and emotions, can and must be datafied; that is, they must
make sense as parcels of information. As Marc Bousquet observes:

we continue to have and handle material objects (more and more of

them, at least in the thing-rich daily life of the northern hemisphere)
but we have and handle these objects in what Mark Poster calls ‘the
 Introduction 11

mode of information’, which means that we manipulate objects as if

they were data. It’s not that we don’t have car parts, novels, and armored
divisions—only now we expect those things to be available to us in a
manner approximating the way in which information is available to us.
(60)

The forensic’s informatic logic impels all things to be rendered as machine-

readable information commodities: data. Weizman recounts how, in the
show-and-tell of the first- and second-century Roman forum:

small things, such as coins or daggers, could be physically displayed,

but things abstract, far away, or too large, such as rivers, territories,
wars, towns, famines or empires had to be made vivid by the power of
representation or aural demonstration—by what Quintilian referred
to with the rhetorical trope of ‘prosopopoeia’—the attribution of a
voice to inanimate things […] Conviction, he believed, requires not
so much the objective weighing of facts as the placing of an invisible
reality before the public’s eyes—something achieved by what he called
energeia, ‘vigour of style’.
(65)

Data objects are concrete and self-evident, whereas human subjects are
inconsistent and not always what they appear to be. Rhetorical powers and
subjective perception are what datafication promises to eliminate.

From Existential Actualisation to Interpellated

Coherence: Ideas of Self in the Forensic Turn
The self of identity politics has waned within critical discourse. Critical dis-
course does offer new paradigms of the self in relation to technology and
globalisation but these paradigms—the cyborg self, the prosthetic self—are
paradigms of problematic selfhood, paradigms which strain against the very
notion of a self. In existential concepts of the self that underpin identity
politics, actualizing selfhood is a slow process of becoming, authentically,
oneself. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s prosthetic self is a freely self-
determining individual who adjusts their performance to particular stages by
choosing ‘which dispositions to hide and display depending on the encounter
and the audience’ (C. Lury 2008: 54). Extending Strathern, Celia Lury
describes how new forms of photographic imaging, display, and distribution
increase the reach of, but also reach beyond, the body. Mobile communications
similarly extend the reach of the human, but also extend beyond the human,
testing its limits. Lury sums up this paradox as ‘I can, therefore I am’.
Richard Gilbert and Andrew Forney assert close correspondence between
the constitution of the self and the communicative interfaces of a particular
12 Introduction

era. What Gilbert and Forney term the Multiple Self of postmodernism
is ‘an entity capable of “maximising” or “minimizing” multiple aspects of
identity according to personal desires and the demands of a particular con-
text without regard to whether they form a consistent, coherent structure’
(25). This postmodern, Multiple Self corresponds, they argue, to a computer
‘operating system that manages a shifting collection of active and waiting
processes’ through windows that can be minimised and maximised. What,
they suggest, is still emerging is the next paradigm, that of the Distributed
Self, in which ‘consciousness and aspects of the self will be increasingly
externalised and distributed into three-dimensional digital forms (i.e.,
avatars) reflecting any number of combinations of age, gender, body type,
race, ethnicity, style, personality, and physical health’ (26). More than ever,
they argue, ‘operations of personality will take on the quality of perform-
ance art’. Fin Kennedy’s self-inventor, Mike (Chapter 4), exploits the avail-
able interfaces to perform himself, finding new ways to adapt, mutate, and
display attributes. But when Charlie uses these techniques to re-invent him-
self as Adam, he feels the emptiness of the performance. Theatrical auteur
Richard Foreman, like Caryl Churchill, links this emptiness to our means
of processing information, which, he claims, foster a ‘self that needs to con-
tain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance’. In
the programme notes for The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (2005) Foreman
worries that, evolving ‘under the pressure of information overload and the
technology of the instantly available’, we are fast becoming depthless. Void
of ‘complex inner density’, the self is stretched ‘wide and thin as a pancake
because thanks to the next link we are constantly jumping from one piece
of information to another’. In this more cautionary reading of the scenario
outlined by Gilbert and Forney, we risk becoming as flat as the screens
that afford us the opportunity to appear; it is a reading that chimes with
Churchill’s Love and Information.
A quarter of a century ago, the word ‘identity’ conjured the association
‘identity politics’, which in turn would conjure images of self-identified
social interest groups holding literal or metaphorical placards. Today,
‘identity’ is more likely to connote a concern with the procedures and
mechanisms that determine and safeguard identity-recognition: iden-
tity theft; identity fraud; leaked data that reveals identity; the ethics of
disclosure and anonymity. Identity has increasingly come to be seen as a
matter of making oneself, or resisting making oneself, legible as informa-
tion. Identity politics has been succeeded by information politics. In data
terms, ‘identity’ means coherence; but this is a far cry from the coherence
of the existential project of self-actualisation.
According to Sartre, one may have contradictions, and these are valu-
able, but the goal is to be able to resolve these contradictions to an extent
that one actualises oneself by finding a sense of consistency, coherence,
and continuity. Within the economy of legibility that instrumentalises
 Introduction 13

forensic aesthetics, coherence is interpellated because the formation of the

self is managed technically, personhood rendered objecthood. As theorist
of new media Ganaele Langlois suggests, new information platforms and
systems that she terms ‘semiotechnologies’ subsume users ‘as content’,
individuating them for regulatory and marketing purposes. Agamben’s
view (in 1993) that the biggest threat to the contemporary state is not
those who strongly identify but of those who cannot easily be identified,
the ‘whatevers, without an identity’, is truer than ever following the rise
of social-networking sites that impel display and sharing of information,
lubricating the attention economy’s drive to make selves legible. Social
networks encourage us, as Langlois argues, to see meaningful relationships
as ‘just a question of fostering the meaningful links—other friends, similar
likes, and so on—that will enable the actualization of friendship’ (24).
Actualisation of the self, in this scenario, is no longer existential but tech-
nical, dependent on mastery of online, participatory, media platforms in
which ‘user input is constantly augmented, ranked, classified and linked
with other types of content’.
While it is easy to be paranoid about platforms and algorithms, it is
undeniable that they promise transparency and access while actually trans-
lating information in ways that are invisible to the user. In his analysis of
the structuring of webpages, David Golumbia argues that the software
platforms and screens we use to interact with the world do not just process,
display and record information but are the means by which we are impelled
to render ourselves legible:

the screen breaks down into more or less discrete units, served up
in interaction with masses of data and statistical sampling that are
by definition not available for the user to examine or understand.
Instead, through such probability- and category-driven conceptions
of ‘personality’, subjectivity itself is presented whole, pre-analyzed,
organized, almost always around a central metaphorical goal, usually
an economic one.
(90)

Rather than ‘a medium for transmitting and sharing human language’,

Golumbia sees ‘the proliferation of computer networks as part of an
ongoing effort to shift the basis of language use toward one appropriate
for an informatic economy’ (86). In Chapter 5, I argue that Nina Raine’s
Tribes, too squarely labelled by some critics an ‘issue’ play about deafness,
is also a play about how (as Golumbia argues) language increases in import-
ance in our informatic economy. Evoking the ways in which language and
identity are co-terminously managed and changed by systems that afford
access, Raine’s surtitles are, at first, translation tools that seem like helpful
aids. As they start to speak subtext, then imagine it, the surtitles become
14 Introduction

the voice of an author who suddenly finds herself in the spotlight, her
characters effaced by her efforts to translate them.
The entire ontology—and, specifically, what I am situating as the
interpellated coherence—of the self in the forensic turn is constrained
by the operations of what Donna Haraway terms ‘techno-presence’. The
‘techno-present’, she observes, is ‘a very thin way of thinking about time
that loses track of the thickness of history or the complexity of lived time’
(Nakamura). Manuel Castells argues that in network society

relationship to time is defined by the use of information and communi-

cation technologies in a relentless effort to annihilate time by negating
sequencing … compressing time (as in split-second global financial
transactions or the generalized practice of multitasking, squeezing
more activity into a given time).
(35)

In his Introduction to the second (2008) edition of Non-Places, Augé

articulates the techno-present in spatial terms that complement and
align with Haraway’s temporal analysis. Like Haraway, he characterises
the apparent richness of the techno-present as a ‘mirage’ that disguises
its evisceration of our ability to reach beyond its spectacular surface, to
contextualise:

High office blocks and residential towers educate the gaze, as do

movies and, even more significantly, television. The smooth flow of
cars on a highway, aircraft taking off from airport runways, lone sailors
circumnavigating the globe in small boats witnessed only by the tele-
vision audience, create an image of the world as we would like it to be.
But that mirage disintegrates if we look at it too closely.
(xiii)

Augé’s phrase ‘éduque le regard’, translated in this English version ‘educate

the gaze’, might better be translated as ‘condition the gaze’: it is not a posi-
tively valenced form of training, but a sinister one. That sinister quality is
insightfully dramatised by Fin Kennedy in How to Disappear Completely and
Never Be Found. Charlie is seen as a freak by his corporate colleagues because
he stops to see, to reflect, to contemplate. He is a visionary, leading himself
out of the ‘grey sludge’ by examining it closely and by stepping back and
away, seeing the bigger picture.
Charlie is beset by a buzz that is literal and metaphorical. In a key-
note address to the ATHE Conference (Toronto, 1999), director, trainer,
and commentator Anne Bogart depicted the great challenge posed by the
information age is being able to breathe and think amidst the currents of
communication that condition us with their incessant buzz, affording little
time for the kind of reflection needed to see, let alone adjust, one’s own
 Introduction 15

perspective. In an inspiring collection of essay manifestoes on ‘making art

in an unpredictable world’, Bogart (2007) expounded on her continuing
sense that the ‘buzz’ keeps us living at what she calls ‘middle distance’ to
ourselves, in a state of diminished participation:

In a culture of manufactured paranoia and consent, we are indeed

ambushed by middle distance. Middle distance creates a kind of buzz.
A blur. Fox News Channel, for example, and even CNN, produces an
annoying buzz that makes it hard to hear, see or think in a differentiated
manner. Middle distance ambushes your perceptions. As an antidote
to the buzz, listen below the buzz. Move in close, then, alternatively,
make distance. Alternate near and far. Study an issue in great depth.
Then move away and see the context in which it resides. If you remain
at middle distance from whatever issue you are grappling with, the
middle distance itself will diffuse your perceptions and lead you to feel
lost. You will get lost. Nothing will matter. Because it makes every-
thing seem vague and general, the buzz, the middle distance leads
to inaction. Engagement from the middle distance seems futile. But
when you lean in or reposition yourself by changing your distance and
posture, the movement itself helps to clarify issues.
(100–101)

In all my readings, we will encounter characters who oscillate between

intense close-up and intensely detached, cosmic (or ‘Martianist’) perspectives.
Though this oscillation is usually triggered by trauma, the ability to shift
perspective from the intimate to the epic is empowering because it allows
characters who have become trapped to step outside middle-distance,
techno-present living. As Bogart suggests, this stepping out is necessarily
a temporary stepping outside the self, an ecstatic (ex-stasis) seeing that
theatre has a propensity to afford.

Illusions and Imperatives

As I argue across the chapters of this book, the contours and standards of
forensic aesthetics are supported by three illusions and two imperatives.
These illusions and imperatives operate together to prepare the ground
against which truth can be made to appear. Firstly, there is the interiority
illusion, which holds that there is a kernel of truth waiting to be discovered.
Second is the solvability illusion, which holds that the need to identify
truth is a problem that can be solved with the right expertise and kit.
And third is the transparency illusion, which holds that things can only
be true if they are exactly what they appear to be, because truth cannot be
opaque or ambiguous. These three illusions are upheld by two imperatives
which are cultural, but also personal and personalising: the imperative to
innovate and the imperative to interact. Society must innovate, and this
16 Introduction

innovation must enable interactivity. We express ourselves as individuals

by embracing innovation and embracing the chance to interact via innov-
ation, enriching our knowledge and experience by taking advantage of
opportunities to gain hands-on, close-up access tailored to us that will make
us feel both more individual and more participatory.
The three illusions are instrumentally linked: once we have released
the kernel of truth to view it will appear transparent; but it can only be
released with the right use of the right equipment. They are sequentially
linked, mirroring the three phases of forensic process: discovery ➔ inves-
tigation ➔ revelation. Each phase rests on a particular illusion: discovery
is dependent on the illusion of interiority ➔ investigation depends on the
illusion of solvability ➔ revelation depends on the illusion of transparency.
The interiority illusion holds that truth lies beneath a deceiving surface,
and only an expert can help us to excavate it. The personal and cultural
importance of interiority as a site of emotional and social investment is
not new. Bachelard reminds his readers what culture trains us to forget: ‘an
interior is just an exterior lying further back’ (230). As I address in sev-
eral chapters, the interiority illusion is crucial to one of capitalism’s most
powerful strategies: the stimulation of a need for ownership that must
never entirely be satisfied. Forensic aesthetics makes the execution of this
strategy a priority. Undiscovered truth-objects, whether these consist of
new knowledge, hidden talent, or hitherto undetected deceit, must appear
to be hard to access, lying in wait to be rescued from invisibility.
In Chapter 1, I argue that Baudrillard’s influential portrayal of the First
Gulf War as a paradigmatic ‘virtual media’ paradoxically (and problem-
atically) reinforces the interiority illusion. His view, outlined in enter-
tainingly dystopian fashion in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, is that
war (and, thereby, truth) was ‘stripped bare’ by Pentagon ‘technicians’ and
‘reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics, as though with a
second skin’ (2009: 64). Framing their role-playing, virtual theatre war-
game, Desert Rain (1999), Blast Theory cite Baudrillard’s description of
contemporary reality as an ‘oil-soaked sea-bird’ (2009: 10, 32) encrusted
with capitalist reality-effects generated by a US military-economic com-
plex of which Hollywood is the cultural face. As I suggest in Chapter 3,
Baudrillard’s oil-soaked sea-bird is, in more ways than one, an unfortunate
vehicle. In perpetuating the idea of truth/reality as natural/organic, sus-
ceptible to smothering by parasitic reality-effects, the sea-bird holds onto
nostalgic, Enlightenment notions of interiority. This notion of reality as
natural/organic, but polluted beyond recognition by reality-effects, informs
diverse forms and methodologies—indeed, it is what is shared by works as
different in form as Anna Deavere Smith’s influential verbatim piece Fires
in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992) and Sarah
Kane’s in-yer-face play Blasted (1995). Both of these works strive, like Desert
Rain, to reclaim journalism and politics from an etiolating culture of spin
 Introduction 17

and soundbites. All three present images of reality smothered in an invis-

ible informational skin, a parasitic disguise coating events and identities.
Several of the works I read confront our investment in notions of inter-
iority and resist the diagnostic gaze that these notions justify. As Bleeker
theorises, the culture of dissection (traced by Sawday) ‘marks the beginnings
of what Michel Foucault has analysed as the “surveillance” of the body
within regimes of judgement and punishment, as well as an early crystal-
lisation of the modern Western sense of interiority’ (Bleeker: 14). Peggy
Shaw’s Must (2009) performs this resistance by counter-forensically un-
mapping and subjectively re-mapping her body. Though very different in
their methodology, Entitled and The Events debunk the interiority illusion
by finding, at the heart of life-changing events, not hidden answers but,
as Greig’s Boy says of himself, ‘a blankness out of which emerges only
darkness and a question’ that has no singular answer, a question which
ties the factual and metaphysical together: What is true? Entitled and The
Events subvert the familiar image of truth as kernel surrounded by a skin
of information, an idea that truth lies in wait at the interior of the event,
waiting to be excavated and realised by experts trained to distinguish truth
from falsity. In contrast, truth here emerges as something dynamic, some-
thing constructed, contested, asserted, and fought over and interrogated.
Truth is not lying in wait to be identified and decoded by those with the
skill to do so but is formed by endeavours to make sense.
The solvability illusion holds that individuals and societies must be
protected by the recognition and elimination of threats to the status quo.
These threats are sometimes crimes (deliberate transgressions by iden-
tifiable perpetrators) and sometimes lingering ambiguities (systemic
problems) that can be solved by experts whose training, and whose spe-
cial instruments of repair, bring closure. In cultural terms, what this
illusion promises to ‘solve’ is the confusion caused by what John Fiske
calls ‘post-Enlightenment’ forms of education and entertainment (137).
Post-Enlightenment media, such as television and the Internet, engender
an overwhelming relativism because it is not in their nature to provide
singular truths, but to air competing perspectives. The information revo-
lution itself engenders relativism, despite its promise to contain it. And, as
Baudrillard argues, today’s media trade on relativism: ‘[t]he proliferation of
archival information including taped audio-visual records allows the event
to become utterly dispersed into a morass of conflicting interpretations’
(2009: 14). As organs of (late) capitalism, media stimulate uncertainty, cre-
ating a moral vacuum while promising to fill it. In Chapter 6, I invoke
David Foster Wallace’s important essay, ‘E Unibus Plurum’ (1993), to link
this idea to the emergence of immersive theatre as a genre.
Cutting through, and promising to cure, the relativism identified by
Fiske, Wallace and Baudrillard comes my third illusion: the transparency
illusion. This illusion holds that, once revealed in their true, unvarnished
18 Introduction

state, things are perceptible in their entirety. The rhetorical energy that
fires forensic logic is expended in convincing us of its own power to
show us things exactly as they are. Prebble’s Enron is a horrifying por-
trayal of the rhetoric of transparency. Enron’s chief economist of legibility
is Jeffrey Skilling, a masterful rhetorician who promises an ‘open, trans-
parent marketplace’ that will replace ‘the blind, dark system that existed’
heretofore.
Many of my case studies debunk the transparency illusion by exposing
the labour required to make authenticity appear. As I address in Chapter 4,
to appear authentic is to do, it requires effortful presence, and corpses
cannot do so because they cannot labour to appear. Corpses, as Nield puts
it, ‘cannot imitate; they cannot “pretend” ’ (40). As my reading of Will
Eno’s monologues in Chapter 7 argues, the transparency illusion relies on
the pretence of appearing to be, self-evidently, oneself.
The innovation imperative keeps forensic aesthetics taut to a capit-
alist, patriarchal narrative of progress. The forum advertises and advocates
its own continual innovation, laying a trail toward future fora by show-
casing new techniques, methods, and protocols. The innovation impera-
tive inculcates the belief that truth can only be accessed by the new: new
methods that apply new ideas and deploy new products. The innovation
illusion’s valorising of novelty works to conceal the political conservatism
of the forensic. The Latin novare, which is the root of ‘innovate’, means to
make new, to renew: it is the established that is made new by the forensic.
Innovation and interactivity are politically crucial, because they are
the means by which forensic aesthetics promises and limits participation.
Bauman argues in Liquid Life that ‘only by demonstrating their own use-
value can consumers gain access to consuming life’; designated oppor-
tunities are the means by which consumers ‘demonstrate their use-value’
(10). The offering of designated opportunities to participate embeds the
assumption that designated opportunities are empowering, obscuring the
ways in which these chances to tick and click prevent more wholesale,
substantial forms of inclusion in decision-making and policy formation.
Cultural theorist Theodor W. Adorno famously suggested that anyone who
was eager to participate in his (1947) F-scale personality test—designed
to measure a person’s propensity toward fascist tendencies—was likely
to possess such tendencies. In his Guardian column ‘This Column Will
Change Your Life’, Oliver Burkeman (2011) identifies the construction in
the British public’s imaginary of a Science of Happiness, the prevalence of
which can be seen in (then-Prime Minister) David Cameron’s ‘happiness
index’. Burkeman argues that ‘even the best scientific studies can’t fully
penetrate the experience of being you’:

You can never perfectly communicate, even to your closest friend,

your experience of subjectivity. That doesn’t mean scientists can’t
 Introduction 19

study consciousness – they do so all the time – but it does mean that
to talk about things like happiness, science must translate what you
mean when you say ‘I feel happy’ into something more objective: your
responses to a questionnaire.

As Lisa Nakamura argues, our culture has been ‘invaded’ by a ‘cor-

porate rhetoric of “quality” ’. Subjecting everything to quantification,
questionnaires assure us that we are being included. Such designated
opportunities for interaction are key to the regime of forensic aesthetics
because they allow us to be stationed within its circuits of knowledge.
They are collection-points that make users visible as content. As the term
‘attention economy’ suggests, the tracking of the ways in which we process
information through interactive opportunities makes us information.
To maintain this economy of legibility, in which our attention is cur-
rency, forensic aesthetics stimulates desire on the part of the user to be vis-
ible as content. Baudrillard suggests that the contemporary economy of
legibility casts us as a species that needs to ‘see itself continually on the
videoscreen of statistics’ in order to feel that it matters (Poster: 210).
Maintaining what Baudrillard calls the ‘continual voyeurism of the
social in relation to itself’ is crucial to brand-building. As Celia Lury
and Andrew Barry detail, the commercial exploitation of data and of
interactivity installs a regime in which consumption is a site of con-
trol (C. Lury 2004: 131). It is a regime in which the imperative of
‘you must’ has been replaced by the deceptively coercive promise of
‘you may’: this is control through the affordance of permission. Elise
Morrison observes that:

the ‘user-friendly’ software interface has become a slick new site of dis-
cipline, through which individuals are conditioned to use everyday sur-
veillance systems in ways that are consonant with the financial, legal,
and ideological goals of state and corporate entities. Such interfaces
subtly dictate modes of usership while simultaneously tracking and
sorting individuals according to their personal data, as risk-analysing
algorithms determine the access, mobility, and prioritization an indi-
vidual user should receive.
(6)

Opting out of a questionnaire, or even all questionnaires, does not remove

one from the cultural effects that are instrumentalised by questionnaires.
Building on Žižek’s (1997) suggestion that we should, in this scenario of
machines acting on behalf of their users, speak instead of ‘interpassivity’,
Robert Pfaller argues that contemporary interactivity rarely leads to
embodied engagement, but to something almost opposite: it cultivates an
epidemic of indifference, an ironic distancing of oneself from one’s own
20 Introduction

beliefs. I would argue that this is not a new or specifically contemporary

phenomenon. The stealthy normalisation of a grudging, perfunctory com-
pliance with data-gathering is alienated and illustrated in a 2013 episode
of the satirical radio sketch show, The Secret World, in which playwright and
diarist Alan Bennett receives a cold call from his gas and electricity pro-
vider, Eon, wanting to know if he is Very Satisfied/Quite Satisfied/Fairly
Satisfied/Not Very Satisfied/Very Unsatisfied with his energy supply. Free
from animosity or even irritation, Bennett treats the questions as mean-
ingful ones, a genuine opportunity to reflect. His dry, stoic rumination
highlights the absurdity of anyone addressing such questions thoughtfully:

ALAN: ‘Very Satisfied’ suggests that there is a sense of completion. It’s a

state one attains only fleetingly in life.
EON: I just need to know if you’re Very Satisfied; Quite Satisfied; Fairly
Satisf--
ALAN: When one is fairly satisfied, one tends to wonder all the time
whether a greater satisfaction is possible. It’s the most elusive thing, so
that being fairly satisfied is really an invidious kind of despair, a pact
with mediocrity—
EON: Shall I put ‘not satisfied’?
ALAN: The French word ennui would perhaps best describe how I feel about
Eon Power.
EON: Yes, er, I don’t have a box for ennui.
ALAN: One can’t help but recall Oscar Wilde. Lord Henry Wootton says to
a young Dorian Gray that the only horrible thing in the world is ennui.
EON: Right. Shall I just put don’t know?
ALAN: Aye, that’ll do.

While we see something like the ironically innocent resistance of Bennett’s

responses in many of the works I will discuss, that strategically ironic
innocence will be deployed in more probing fashion, interrogating and
re-shaping theatre’s relationship to the forensic turn.

The Forensic and the Theatrical: Forum

and Theatron
Keenan and Weizman’s assertion in Mengele’s Skull that forensic aesthetics
relies on theatrical techniques is reiterated, but again not fully explored, in
Weizman’s Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (2017).
In the final sections of this Introduction, I will consider the relationship
between the forensic and the theatrical, framing the ways in which the works
I read illuminate and meet ethical challenges posed by forensic aesthetics.
The forum and the theatron are historically and structurally related as
culturally demarcated spaces for looking and for making apparent. Both
 Introduction 21

theatrical and forensic method make human behaviour the object of arch-
aeological enquiry. Both treat their subjects as evidence. Character, in
both contexts, affirms the evidentiary principle: by the demonstration
of a person’s actions, we come to know them. This principle (a focus of
Chapter 7) is important in maintaining the illusion that evidence speaks
for itself, that it is ‘found’ rather than constructed. For actions to be evi-
dentially significant, they must be extracted through authorial desecration
of context, ripped from their space and time and re-planted in the con-
trolled environment of the forum/theatron. Through these acts of spatial
and temporal violence, the forum and theatron tame the chaos of nature
and reduce the complexity of culture. Invoking Agamben, Weizman
described the forensic in a lecture for the Liverpool Biennial (2018) as a
de-contextualising sanctification of crime-scene space, which his (Forensic
Architecture) team’s methods ‘profanate’ (render profane) by re-attaching
investigation to context in all its rich, messy history. This re-attachment
entails pulling from ‘microphysical details the longer threads of political
and social processes [to …] reconnect them with the world of which they
are part’ (Weizman 2017: 9). It is this kind of re-attachment to rich, messy
history on which the theatre I address is intent.
As I argue in Chapter 5, ‘natural’ has, in the forensic turn, become para-
doxically synonymous with ‘closely observed’. In early theatrical naturalism,
‘the quotidian becomes the materialization of a historical moment: mun-
dane things come to carry the baggage of history […] transform[ing]
the effluence of history into objects worthy of study’ (Shanks et al. in
Steenberg: 82). What Zola apologised for as an unwanted corollary of this
transformation—the influence of the observer in filtering mundane things
through a naturalist lens—has become a hallmark of what we brand as nat-
ural. This tying of reality to close and conspicuous observation is essential
to the ‘reality effects’ that define reality television, immersive theatre, and
verbatim theatre, all of which (as Chapter 5 argues) continue the naturalistic
project.
For actions to function evidentially, they must seem to be found rather
than authored. What spectators encounter in theatre is, as in popular
representations of forensic, constructed to appear found. In other words,
this foundness is aesthetically unmarked, diverting our attention away
from the construction—that is, the selection and identification—of evi-
dence. In immersive theatre, foundness is fetishised. Baudrillard’s notion (see
Chapter 1) that truth must be rescued from the staging of information is
made flesh in so many immersive theatre pieces, which are configured as
puzzles that we solve through our promenade investigation. In this forensic
promenade, we are charged with foraging for truth amidst found spaces
littered with red herrings. The buildings that becomes sites of perform-
ance in this kind of theatre become, indexically and symbolically, crime
scenes. Rosemary Klich points out that in 2009, intermediality theorist
22 Introduction

Marie-Laure Ryan felt the need to add a new facet to her influential typ-
ology of the kinds of immersion operative within videogaming. Previously,
she had conceived three kinds: spatial, temporal, and emotional. Now, she
added the epistemic, which isolates as a form of immersion the participant’s
search for knowledge. Ryan states that the ‘prototypical manifestation of
epistemic immersion—the desire to know—is the mystery story. The
player impersonates the detective and investigates the case through the
standard repertory of computer game actions: moving the avatar through
the game world, picking up tell-tale objects, and extracting information’
(Ryan 2009: 55). When this epistemic immersion occurs in promenade
theatre, there is often an added sense of adventure and even danger as the
role-playing unfolds in ‘real’ space. As Colette Gordon observes in her dis-
cussion of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, ‘audience members proceed as if
issued with a search warrant’ (Gordon in Klich: 226).
Despite these similarities between the detective work of the spectator
in theatre and that of the forensic investigator, however, there are crucial
differences. As theatre and performance scholars including Marvin Carlson
and Alice Rayner have explored, presence in theatre is always ghosted by
absence. Much of the charge or frisson of theatre arises as the live, quick
body of the performer colludes with that of the spectator/participant to
summon that which is not actually present, and, sometimes, that which
has never existed. But while ghosts in the machine are a source of fascin-
ation within theatre, the forensic strives to banish them. Theatre’s raison
d’être is the holding in simultaneous view of life and death, presence and
absence, whereas the forensic endeavours, at all cost, to keep them separate
in its presentation of evidence. Only in this way can the forensic elim-
inate doubt. Antagonistically to the forensic’s teleological methodology,
the works I address in this book harness doubt as a generative, radically
purposeful force.

Generative Doubt
Like theatre, the forensic is an art of enabling things to appear by speaking
for them. In theatre, this entails an often conspicuous slippage of positions as
a performer stands in for a character, and as audience members are invited to
imagine themselves in the shoes of performer and/or character. Intent as it is
on keeping subject and object positions separate, the forensic’s reconstructions
work to deny, or disavow, this slippage. The forensic avoids presenting itself as
theatrical; it wants to be seen as a purely rational system of diagnosis.
To strengthen its disavowal of theatricality, the forensic must keep
subjects in their cleanly individuated place. Hyper-suspicious of forms of
pretence or doubling in which subjects fail to appear as they really are, the
forensic is always ready to punish duplicity. Suspicion and punishment
of doubling figure prominently in televisual representations of forensic
 Introduction 23

investigation. In CSI, making oneself up as something else—in episodes

about burlesque, freak shows, even an over-enthusiastic Sherlock Holmes
society that involves fans impersonating the great, fictional detective—
leads with apparent inevitably to crime being committed. Given that this
is Las Vegas, a city built on burlesque, imitation, and over-enthusiastic
play, the forensic team will never be short of work. As Steenberg argues,
doubling is aligned with a femininity that compromises the work of the
forensic investigator. Experienced CSI Catherine Willows, for example, fre-
quently finds herself empathising with female victims in ways that her
closest counterpart, team leader Gil Grissom, cautions against. While a
proper investigator must maintain objective distance, keeping their own
reality out of the case, Willows frequently finds herself getting too close to
the victim/object position.
In contrast, doubling features prominently in the works I read, not as
a source of suspicion that needs to be quashed, but a source of generative
doubt. In How to Disappear Completely, missing person Charlie is reborn as
Adam, but carries almost as much baggage as his Edenic namesake. The
eponymous Thom Pain (based on nothing) speaks to us with the dubious aid
of a plywood cutout of himself. Much of his address is a grappling with
his childhood self, as a double he struggles to produce clearly enough to be
able to compare it to his adult self. Other works are productively haunted
by difficult doubles, slippery stand-ins, and ghostly fusions of absence and
presence, including corpses and zombies. The difficult doubles include
murderers doubling as investigators (The Events). Greig’s affirmation of the
ritual power of theatre to transform consciousness, to imagine a different
materiality, draws on African theatrical and European agit-prop traditions
of doubling—traditions which are distinct, but which overlap one another,
particularly in the work of second- and third-wave feminist dramatists.4
Greig, Kennedy, Wade, Eno, and Churchill all deploy doubling to forge
connections based on empathy—an approach that opposes the forensic’s
eschewal of empathy-based connections. The various deployments of doub-
ling in these plays are not softly empathic but are a means to alienate the
attraction of closure, of easy distinctions between home/away. According to
the forensic aesthetics espoused in shows such as CSI, we see through the
eyes of the experts and our sense of middle-distance objectivity is enabled.
In these works, the bleeding of subject into object lubricated by doubling
highlights the ways in which our eyes and our empathy are trained by
forensic aesthetics and helps us to re-train.
In A Grammar of Motives, American literary theorist Kenneth Burke
offers the following schema of ‘master tropes’ to frame the ways in which
rhetoric shapes aesthetics (politically and culturally): metaphor, which is
a substitute for perspective; metonymy, a substitute for reduction; syn-
ecdoche, a substitute for representation; and irony, a substitute for dia-
lectic. Forensic aesthetics is fundamentally metonymic, extrapolating its
24 Introduction

findings from trace evidence, hidden details that, with the correct means of
exposure, will reveal a truth lying in wait to be discovered. The so-called
‘CSI shot’ (K. Lury; Gever), a digitally enhanced snap-zoom in extreme
close-up following the track of a bullet or other form of violence to the
body, is a key device within this metonymic aesthetic. As Karen Lury
and Martha Gever have argued, the CSI shot is the forensic equivalent
of pornography’s ‘money-shot’, signifying proof (of desire and pleasure on
the one hand, and of violence on the other) and resolution. I link the CSI
shot to what Wood and Skeggs call the ‘metonymic morality’ (106) of
reality television, in which close-ups magnify body parts to a damning
scale, exposing the failure to perform the self properly that is not just a
physical but a moral problem. The same aesthetic strategy can be found,
in any supermarket or news stand, in the magazines magnifying bits of
celebrity bodies captured on camera. While the drawing of attention to
the size of a B-lister’s stomach might seem trivial, it is through this meto-
nymic approach that the forensic instrumentalises an optics of truth across
cultural domains.
What Steenberg terms ‘knowledge icons’ valorise the forensic’s machinic,
metonymic analysis, vaunting the forensic’s ability to extend the reach, and
defy the limits, of human observation. These ‘knowledge icons’ assume
‘immediate and recognisable currency as truths. The DNA database in
forensic fiction, with its stylised graphics, faultless accuracy and indisput-
able determination of guilt, is a perfect illustration of the knowledge icon’
(8). Countering this metonymic show-and-tell are the failing vision of Max
in Going Dark, the clunky desk microphones and tiny video monitors of
Phil Porter’s play, Blink, and the painstaking get-in of Quarantine’s Entitled,
all of which emphasise the working-out and the thick context hidden by
metonymy. They are grounded in material effort to discover and express,
the limits to knowledge, the blind spots that make us human. Unlike the
forensic’s spectacle of data, in which showing and telling are sutured, these
works open a space between exhibit and interpretation, between objects
and rhetoric about objects.
In opposition to the reductive power of forensic logic, which works
toward closure, the works I read harness the generative power of doubt
which is so integral to theatre. They combat the forensic’s optics of truth
with a poetics of truth rich in metaphor and irony. This poetics martials to
political effect the metaphorical properties of theatre as an art form which
works through analogy and substitution. As Max Black observes, ‘metaphor
creates similarity’ rather than ‘formulat[ing] some similarity antecedently
existing’ (284–285). Whereas theatre produces evidence, using metaphor
and substitution to do so, the forensic always starts from evidence that is
aprioristic or ‘antecedently existing’. Wittgenstein’s theory and practice of
a politically progressive pedagogy that is fundamentally ‘poetic’, driven
(as I discuss in Chapters 6 and 7) not by the transfer of factual information
 Introduction 25

but by demonstration rich in metaphor and irony, is a useful reference-point

in exploring theatre’s counter-forensic5 germination of truth. The theatre-
makers I include in this book share an interest in the methodological and
political differences between (so-called) scientific and (so-called) artistic
experimentation. In the scientific experiment, the tool, in Heideggerian
terms, does not disappear into usefulness; it is not used up through func-
tionality (States: 2). The forensic, teleological as it is, foregrounds the
efficiency, the ‘functionality’ of its experiments. Countering this sense of
deterministic inevitability, London Road, Entitled, The Events, and Going
Dark all feature rehearsals for performance, while tropes of rehearsal figure
in Tribes, Blink, How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, Colder than
Here, and what happens to the hope at the end of the evening all adopt a rehearsal
methodology, in which false starts, retreats, re-conception are shown to be
pedagogically valuable. As a scientific endeavour, experimentation is care-
fully framed within forensic investigation as being rigorously controlled.
Forensic experiment promises to contain truth within what Bachelard
calls ‘circuits of knowledge’. The works I read are lessons in ‘reverber-
ation’, soulful rejections of singular, mechanistic, causal explanation in
which, as Bachelard says of poems, ‘forces are manifested…that do not pass
through the circuits of knowledge’ (xvii). What we see in these works is
the effort and failure to contain through logic—those elements, in other
words, excluded in the forensic’s presentation of its findings. I suggest in
Chapter 5 that forensic presentation revives the fatalism of early natur-
alism, in which, as Bert States puts it, ‘an action finally com[es] to rest in
the rigid state prepared for it in advance’ (70).
While metaphor has long been a disputed subject in critical theory,
irony has been, and continues to be, even more contested. The works I read
support William Curtis’s view that irony is, like metaphor, a creative
force, engendering ‘the power of redescription, of changing the terms by
which we know ourselves and the world’. The idea that irony can work as
a potent, creative force, working in tandem with metaphor in a Burkeian,
dialectic fashion, informs all the chapters of the book. While it is crucial to
remember that irony takes many forms, and its efficacy cannot be judged
except in context, on a case-by-case basis, the works I read challenge
Hayden White’s proclamation that irony ‘dissolves all belief in the pos-
sibility of political action’ (75–76), and Lewis Hyde’s similarly pessim-
istic view that ‘it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their
cage’ (37). Love and Information, Blink, Thom Pain, and The Eradication of
Schizophrenia in Western Lapland evoke Rolf Breuer’s view that irony is ‘a
symptom of the disturbed relation of the author to his text or to his public.
One level higher, however, it is really harmony, in that the crisis to which it
is a response is not merely spoken of as an interesting topic but is actually
shown’ (Breuer: 116). Irony may indeed express ‘the voice of the trapped’,
but the ability to articulate the disjuncture felt between oneself and the
26 Introduction

world is, as Breuer argues, a sign of resourcefulness. While Breuer speaks

of irony in terms of schizophrenia, he does so—as Ridiculusmus do in
Eradication—not to consign irony to a pathological few, but to suggest
that schizophrenic perception has much to teach all of us about perception
in general.

Does the Human Have to Die for the

Forensic to Begin?
At the start of their turn-of-the-millennium collection, Posthuman Bodies,
Halberstam and Livingston declare that ‘a posthuman condition is upon us,
and that nostalgia for a humanist philosophy of self and other’ is ‘merely the
echo of a battle that has already taken place’ (vii). This obscures the extent
to which most ideas of posthumanity are themselves nostalgic—ideas that do
not take us beyond the limitations of the human but recover the belief that
these limitations can be overcome. This nostalgic quality of the posthuman,
I suggest, infuses forensic aesthetics in ways that are far more political,
and far less inevitable than the declaration by Halberstam and Livingston
suggests. Tabloid forensic science, ‘whether on reality television or in a
videogame, remains fixed in a period of Enlightenment humanism and fre-
quently elides the controversies, anxieties and inconsistencies circulating
around science in postmodernity’ (Steenberg: 16). Steenberg’s argument is
that the tabloid forensic indulges nostalgia for a prior (‘Enlightenment’)
humanism in which the rational capacity of humans to apply knowledge
is a source of certainty. The tabloid forensic is a stealthy ‘coupling of the
nostalgic with the hyper-modern’.
In asking the question ‘does the human have to die for the forensic to
begin?’, I refer not to my wife’s entreaty for me to get this Introduction
finished so that we can do more things as a family, but to Hélène Cixous’
remark that ‘the woman has to die for the play to begin’. Cixous, who
made the observation in a 1984 essay ‘Aller à la Mer’, was referring to the
ubiquity of patriarchal narratives in which the deaths of female characters
(usually virgins/victims, occasionally villains/‘whores’) serve as catalysts for
a story in which male characters take the active roles. In this deep-seated
scenario, the female remains a site of mute passivity; women are spoken
for. In many accounts of how the dead are treated in scientific research,
like the following one by Ewa Domanska, there are more than analogical
connections to Cixous’ essay:

[In the] dehumanizing exhumation process… the treatment of dead

bodies as evidence introduces radical distance between the researcher
(subject) and the object of analysis (the body), forcing the reflection
into scientistic patterns of discourse about scientific truth, object-
ivity, and the logic of argumentation, in the name of struggle for
 Introduction 27

justice. When the remains are treated as an ‘object of study’ or ‘object

of mourning’— the word ‘object’ alone implying the dead body’s
helplessness to resist the violence of a variety of discourses—they are
separated from a particular personality and become a thing.
(403)

The discursive violence to which the objectified corpse is subject ‘in the
name of struggle for justice’ is continuous with Cixous’ view of the object-
ification of women as continuous with the killing of the body. In forensic
television shows, as Steenberg details, female investigators are portrayed as
limited by their empathy with victims, which clouds their judgement. It is
a portrayal that accords with Sandra Harding’s observation that ‘a woman
scientist cannot be the Enlightenment transhistorical, unitary individual’
because women are ‘bound to their bodies’ (Harding in Steenberg: 94).
‘Through an insistence that it exists outside gender (or any other) bias,
forensic science’, Steenberg argues, ‘becomes a way of managing and
denying feminism in postfeminist culture’ (14).
Forensic science works hard to conceal its politics. It is ‘supposed to be
objective, free of bigotry and above the projects of empire’ (Steenberg: 37),
concerning itself with identification and distancing itself from moral
judgement. But the forensic’s reduction of social problems to the actions
of singular perpetrators revealed by DNA databases that ‘out’ the bad
apple that would otherwise remain unidentified ‘separates personal and
historical trauma from social causes and repercussions by identifying them
as individual pathologies and responsibilities’ (Steenberg: 82). Laying
the blame with individuals draws focus from laws and institutions, so
that hegemonic values remain unchallenged. Annalee Newitz describes
how George W. Bush made himself ‘the nation’s forensic analyst’ in
his response to 9/11, characterising ‘perpetrators as motiveless and the
attacks as individual acts of violence’ masterminded by ‘a pathological
serial killer’ (50).
Aiming to transcend judgement and suspend emotion, Anna Deavere
Smith couched her investigation of ‘American character’ in remarkably
similar rhetoric to that of forensic investigations as portrayed on televi-
sion. Distancing herself both from ‘conventional’ media commentary, as
well as from the police and the justice system, Smith’s almost mechanical-
seeming rendition of non-fluencies and hesitations were a demonstration
of the performer-creator getting out of the way, suspending not only their
opinion but their very subjectivity. Ultimately, though, as Smith was
careful to point out, the effectiveness of her work lay not in her ability to
disappear, but in the ‘gap’ between ‘the real person and my attempt to be
them’ (xxviii). While Smith tries to suspend her body, taking herself out
of the frame, Peggy Shaw’s Must: The Inside Story, makes her body subject
and object.
28 Introduction

Must is a dialogue between body as subject and body as object. Through

songs created and performed with the Clod Ensemble, directed by Suzy
Willson, set-piece monologue and performance-art confessional sharing,
and the projection of cartoons and anatomical details in microscopic
close-up, Shaw speaks back to medical assessments, performing a counter-
forensic reading in which the singularity of her own body and the life to
which it testifies is articulated with complex histories of racist and sexist
constructions of bodies. Shaw subverts a foundational principle of crim-
inological forensics: ‘everything real leaves a trace.’ As Lisa Cartwright
states: ‘we have come to read the imagery projected from the body as more
accurate than the body itself’ (Cartwright in Steenberg: 170). The body’s
‘indexical significance’ is, as Bleeker puts it, more important in forensic
culture than ‘the very materiality, the fidgety “liveness” of the flesh’. This
fidgety liveness irrupts to tell its story in Must, as it does to tell other
stories across the chapters of this book. In Going Dark’s Max, Phil Porter’s
Sophie (Blink), Fin Kennedy’s Charlie (How to Disappear Completely), and
Laura Wade’s Jim (Breathing Corpses), we encounter characters whose
visceral reactions defy the logic of visibility.
Mark Coniglio of experimental dance company Troika Ranch, motion-
capture pioneers, reflects that ‘there is a serious compositional problem
when attempting to combine technologically advanced visual imagery with
content-based performance, because that imagery (especially shown in a
large scale) is inherently seductive in a way that is quite difficult to control’
(82). In Troika Ranch’s 16 (r)evolutions (2006), dancers tell simple stories
that are complicated by the visual fixing of the traces left by their bodies
via Isadora, an innovative imaging software. A battle plays out between
what is captured in the motion-capture technology—the movement of the
body—and what is not—the spontaneous, organic, ephemeral creativity
of the body that can only be represented. Less conspicuously innovative,
Must deploys mixed media to similar ends, testing the ability of the body
to sound through diagnostic, imaging systems. While Shaw projects onto
us, her body is projected onto by images she sometimes tries to evade.
The images include comic cartoons of skeletons romping in a graveyard,
and a series of electro-microscopic plates of body parts: a hair cell in the
inner ear, the wall of the uterus, motor neurons in the spinal cord, and
a section of the cerebellum. As the piece progresses, Shaw increasingly
contends with, obstructs, and flirts with the images. At certain points, she
allows herself and us to stop and study them. The microscopic images are
what they are, but they are seen so closely that they appear to be something
entirely different. The closer the inspection gets, the more ‘foreign’ the
body appears to be.
The title Must refers to a condition that, notoriously, eludes diag-
nosis. Musth (alternatively spelled must) is a condition in bull elephants,
characterised by highly aggressive behaviour. Whether the massive surge
 Introduction 29

in testosterone is the sole cause of musth, or merely a contributing factor,

is unknown—scientific investigation of musth is problematic because,
during musth, elephants that are otherwise placid may try to kill humans.
Shaw breaks the diagnostic chain of symptom-reading ➔ identifica-
tion of condition ➔ prescription. While this chain is kept tight by the
cleanliness of forensic logic, Shaw breaks it by saturating the body with
cross-currents of words, ideas, and emotions. Must takes all the med-
ical diagnoses that have read Shaw’s body from the outside in and diag-
noses them in counter-forensic fashion. Unmasking is a key trope of the
forensic, a metaphor which it projects as part of its own image to assert
its ability to get beyond the veneer of decoy information, red herrings,
sabotage, falsely staged truths. But the credibility of the forensic’s claim
to unmask depends on a masking of the investigator’s subjectivity, their
partiality. In Must, not only is the investigator the subject, but the sub-
jectivity and partiality powerfully steer the investigation. The piece fig-
ures information as that which circulates within, through, and between
bodies, including those of the performer and spectator. Shaw spotlights,
and begin to break down, the diagnostic imperative. They lead us toward
an experientialist economy in which the entwinement of the fictional and
the actual is seen not as contamination but as the friction necessary for
imaginative rationalisation.
Must foregrounds the de-humanizing tendency of forensic culture to
see the body primarily as an object, ready to be strip-mined for data it
can provide, machinically stripping the body of the limitations, excesses,
and idiosyncrasies of the human. Shaw is no more anti-machine, or anti-
science than Sound&Fury, Caryl Churchill, Lucy Prebble or Jennifer Haley
are: their works want to re-awaken us to differences within the categories
‘human’ and ‘machine’ that the universalizing tenor of forensic culture
erases. The work that the piece performs is akin to that of osteobiographer
Clyde Snow. But Snow, tied as he is to the illusions of forensic aesthetics
(interiority, solvability, transparency), zeroes in. As I discuss in Chapter 7,
theatre is uniquely disposed to produce what Will Eno calls ‘effects of
infinity’, multiple and oscillating perspectives that can change our view
of human being in a heartbeat. Must is full of such layered and oscillating
perspectives. As it’s sub-subtitle suggests, Must: The Inside Story; a Journey
through the Shadows of a City, a Pound of Flesh, a Book of Love is a mapping of
the body in which the literal and metaphorical, and the material and spir-
itual, are radically fused.
Echoing Wittgenstein’s opposition of mechanical to ostensive ways of
articulating the world in words, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that
objectivity and subjectivity are held apart as poles in Western culture by an
agreement that words have ‘fixed meanings’, whereas ‘metaphor and other
kinds of poetic, fanciful, rhetorical, or figurative language’ do not. Objectivism
(the dominant pole) holds that the latter can ‘and should be avoided, since
30 Introduction

their meanings are not clear and precise and do not fit reality in any obvious
way’; whereas subjectivism holds that such fancy ‘is necessary for expressing
the unique and most personally significant aspects of our experience’ for which
‘the ordinary agreed-upon meanings that words have will not do’. Lakoff and
Johnson argue that, ‘[s]ince the categories of our everyday thought are largely
metaphorical and our everyday reasoning involves metaphorical entailments
and inferences, ordinary rationality is therefore imaginative by its very nature’
(187–188). A Gulliver’s Travels for the era of third-wave feminism, Must links
exterior and interior in an imaginatively rational, experientialist synthesis.
It does not so much pit subjective against objective knowledge of the body
as obviate the distinction between subjective and objective, collapsing the
binary on which diagnosis depends.
Early in this Introduction, I located the trials of Nazi war criminals
as critical events in the ongoing debate about the value of subject versus
object evidence. I cited Shoshana Felman’s reading of the prevalence of tes-
timony in the Eichmann trial as a reaction against the suppression of testi-
monial evidence in the Nuremberg trials immediately following the end of
the war. In 1985, the year that Keenan and Weizman published their work
on the Mengele trial as the dawn of forensic aesthetics (and, as I discuss in
Chapter 1, Flusser published his book on ‘technical images’), Lanzmann’s
epic Holocaust documentary, Shoah, was released. Shoah consists—nearly all
nine hours of it—of interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators.
Lyotard describes it as a uniquely successful response to the Holocaust,

since it scarcely offers a testimony where the unrepresentable nature of the

Holocaust is not indicated, be it but for a moment, by the alteration of
the tone of a voice, a knotted throat, sobbing, tears, a witness fleeing off-
camera, a disturbance in the tone of the narrative, an uncontrolled gesture.
(26)

As Michal Givoni argues, however, the work of Lyotard, Felman, and

Giorgio Agamben (1999)—all of whom root their analysis of the ethical
power of witnessing in the Holocaust—has paradoxically exacerbated the
exclusion of witnessing from the political sphere by equating witnessing
with trauma, and with limitations on the ability of the witness to provide
representation. Lyotard regards the valorisation of testimony as ‘revenge’
against institutional failure to prevent political violence. But he also frames
it as a loss—of the unified, collective subject. He frames this as an agon
between universalism and fragmentation. On the one hand, he argues,
there are ‘teleological interpretations of the Holocaust as an ethical crisis
that ultimately promotes the vision of a unified humanity’ (Lyotard: 98–
99); on the other, there are interpretations that acknowledge the impos-
sibility of objective witnessing, since witnessing is, in its very essence
(according to Lyotard, Felman and Agamben), partial. The challenge today
then, remains: to make witnessing count, politically.
 Introduction 31

Running through this book are examples of the testimony of traumatised

bodies struggling to sound within, and resist being obliterated by, an
economy of legibility. In simple terms, an antithesis emerges between con-
sciousness and datafication: the voice of the existential self versus the graphic
proof of the forensic’s ‘spectacle of data’. This agon is most visible in the
many moments in which we traverse the boundary between life and non-life,
a boundary less substantial than forensic culture would like us to believe.
In Blink, a young woman is kept alive with the help of a young man who
is the closest person to her, but whom she has never met. The young man
is told by a doctor how to use the Glasgow Coma Scale to measure her pro-
gress, reading the signs to see how alive or dead she is. In Breathing Corpses,
the trauma of silence reveals that an ‘ordinary’ housewife and mother needs
constant noise to feel alive. In Colder than Here, another wife and mother gets
in a coffin while still alive, to practice for her imminent death. Her husband
is horrified by the PowerPoint presentation she has prepared to explain her
end-of-life requests. Like so many images, the presentation is a reminder that
the only thing that is immortal is information. Death is no barrier to the flow
of information that is the lifeblood of the forensic; and, in forensic culture,
information seems not only to cheat but to exert death.
Lucy Prebble’s account of patients and doctors in a trial for new drugs
to treat depression (The Effect) and her dramatisation of how a corporate
monster was created (Enron) are both plays in which the devaluing of sub-
jective testimony is opposed to judgement based on numbers. London Road
presents a clear opposition between the techno-present media’s reduc-
tion of the civic to a data bank and the existential selves that resist being
consumed by datafication, refusing to be ‘used up’ by the forensic meth-
odology that Blythe and Cork appropriate. Thom Pain, The Open House,
Neighborhood 3 and Tribes deploy metaphor and irony counter-forensically
to combat the cultural pressure for verification.

Theatre and the Black Mirror

What happens in the void left by verification? The sense that testimony is
no longer needed to guarantee truth leaves a need to find places where tes-
timony does matter. In Chapters 2, 4, and 5, I suggest that social media and
Internet ‘confession sites’ fill the verification void in this way, providing new
outlets and new fora. The broad opposition of existentialism to datafication
emerges as a struggle to be seen in a world of mechanical observation (sur-
veillance cameras, politics driven by optics). These chapters provide a twist
in the familiar tale of surveillance anxiety: the anxiety is not about being
looked at, but about not being looked at. For Sophie in Blink, being seen
means being seen by a machine with the attentive gaze of a human being
at the other end. Sophie’s relationship with Jonah highlights the fact that,
as Casetti points out, modern surveillance systems are not usually engaged
in active seeing: ‘The new screen is linked to a continuous flow of data but
32 Introduction

it is not necessarily coupled to an attentive gaze, to a world that asks to be

witnessed or to a subject that is reflected in what it sees’ (28).
Theatre-makers have, I think, sometimes been too ready to situate their
craft in polar opposition to communication via machines. In an interview
with Matt Trueman (2013), playwright Simon Stephens (Trueman article
on Internet) asserts that online communication is not, in his opinion, the
stuff of drama:

What we deal with is behaviour; the things people do to one another.

When we use the Internet, we’re gazing into the black mirror, doing
things to ourselves. It’s insular and profoundly unbehavioural. That’s
fundamentally not dramatic.

Anyone familiar with plays like Motortown and Punk Rock within Stephens’
extensive oeuvre will know that what he finds ‘dramatic’ is, very often at
least, visceral, face-to-face conflict. Although there can be little quarrel
with his observation that Internet communication is generally between
people who are physically remote, Stephens’ claim that the Internet is ‘fun-
damentally not dramatic’ fails to recognise the parallels between online
connection and the similarly strange intimacy of theatre, in which what
happens on stage is processed both socially, in the collective consciousness
of the audience, and privately, in the individually sealed world of each spec-
tator. Eno’s Thom Pain highlights the exciting instability of this condition
in ways that remind us that the black mirror is, in fact, a ‘fundamentally
dramatic’ idea. Theatre has frequently, since long before the contemporary
era, been championed as a bastion of subjectivity-affirming, face-to-
face encounter in a world in which experience is increasingly mediated.
Deliberately complicating this view, Eno’s characterisations point up the
fact that face-to-face exchange is, paradoxically, a seeing-place for evasions,
manoeuvres, pretences. His monologues remind us that direct address in
theatre is rarely, in practice, direct.
The ways in which ‘gazing into the black mirror’ distorts our perception
of social reality, refiguring what we experience as action, conflict, and commu-
nication, has increasingly become the stuff of drama across many different
forms. Plays such as Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s Proper Clever (2008) and Enda
Walsh’s Chatroom (2010, written originally as a screenplay) do emphasise
(as Stephens does) the strangeness of ‘the black mirror’. These plays push at
narrative and theatrical conventions, urging the incorporation of the black
mirror into what we think of as ‘dramatic’; watching them staged6 proves
Stephens’ point that online dialogue does not, in itself, involve direct
action. Churchill’s Love and Information, is a more holistic, and more for-
mally experimental take on knowledge transfer in the age of information.
Twisting conventions of characterisation and dialogue, it is a disturbing
presentation of characters whose presence to themselves and one another
 Introduction 33

seems compromised by the need to process and produce information. There

is a conspicuous yearning for expertise, for authority, in a world more than
ever confused by rumour, myth, and a habitual dependence on second-hand
affirmation. The play wonders whether access and opportunity afforded by
the Internet democratise knowledge, and what aspects of being human are
altered in the process?
The anxiety engendered by this devolution of control was the subject of
James Graham’s play, Privacy (2014), at the Donmar Warehouse (London).
I say ‘was’ because when I asked if there was any kind of script available,
the Donmar seemed extraordinarily keen to cover all traces of what was
a box-office sell-out having ever taken place. Presumably, this is to min-
imise the risk of litigation: the play featured a plethora of audacious,
verbatim-style, testimonial impersonations of entrepreneurs including
Clive Humby (inventor, in collaboration with his wife Edwina Dunn, of
the Tesco Clubcard), politicians including Shami Chakrabarti, academics
including Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, and journalists including Ewan
MacAskill (who was centrally involved in The Guardian’s publication of
the files Edward Snowden gleaned from the US National Security Agency).
The wave of documentary theatre that emerged the 1990s was notable
for its intensely reflexive qualities, an obsession with procedure influ-
entially exemplified in the UK by Tricycle Theatre (Frieze 2009). More
playful and more self-consciously neurotic than most reflexive documen-
tary theatre works, Privacy is ostensibly about the effects on the self of an
attempt to make a piece of documentary theatre that is—as the show’s
producers and newspaper features both put it—‘forensic’. What Graham’s
protagonist, referred to as ‘The Writer’, seems to fear most—is not the overt
threat posed by sinister incursion of states and corporations into ordinary
lives by data collection, but what the research is doing to him spiritually.
Each of the play’s two halves begins with a therapist’s couch, orienting us
to the idea that this is a counselling session that is private and public at the
same. The therapist is Josh Cohen, real-life psychoanalyst and author of the
influential academic study of image-ideals, The Private Life.
Privacy (if the production did take place at all, Kathy Burke a few
seats down from me leaving at the interval the day whereas Benedict
Cumberbatch near the front was clapping enthusiastically at the end)
confirms Lieven De Cauter’s hypothesis (see Chapter 1) that ‘the more
control is externalised, the greater the encapsularisation of our environ-
ment’ (130). The intensification of (the need for) information management
accelerates the atomisation of society. In the participatory performance I
Wish I Was Lonely, Hannah Jane Walker looks around her at her fellow
travellers and sees ‘little gods doing monologues, atomised in crowds’
(Thorpe and Walker: 3). From this perspective, the entrepreneurial, nar-
cissistic individuals of neoliberalism appear more plaintive—as what De
Cauter calls ‘an archipelago of insular entities…capsules in a sea of chaos’.
34 Notes

For Sophie and Jonah in Blink, encapsularisation is a way to evade the aes-
thetic effects of networks, to recover a sense of control over what and how
we share.
In one of Baudrillard’s more dystopian analyses (even by his standards),
Baudrillard proclaims in The Intelligence of Evil that there can be no ‘ethics of
information’ now that information is conveyed primarily through screens
because there is no possibility of dialogue, no response to those we are
looking at nor even any registering that they see us. In terms that reflect
his theatrical background, he insists that

the sphere of the Virtual—of the digital, the computer […] is not
a “scene” and there is neither distance nor a critical or aesthetic
gaze: there is total immersion and the images that come to us from this
media sphere are not of the order of representation, but of decoding
and visual consumption.
(2005: 77)

Anxieties produced by the blurring of distinctions between virtual and

real, including anxieties about the erosion of personal and domestic space,
are addressed by Haley in both Neighborhood 3 and The Nether, by Raine
in Tribes, and by Chris Thorpe and Hannah Jane Walker in I Wish I Was
Lonely. The latter, along with Blink, Enron, Love and Information, all explore
how what we share with those physically/biologically/emotionally close to
us has been re-defined by information platforms that engender techno-
logically and kinaesthetically new kinds of sharing.
As rich interventions into forensic culture, the works I read in this book
are deliberately varied in form and focus. Opposing notions of truth, as a
multi-perspectival poetics, to the (singular) truth, as an information-driven
optics, they all, however, take a longer view of human being and behaviour
than forensic culture’s techno-present economy of legibility conditions us
to take. In the same vein, I take a longer view of theatre than the actuarial,
academic culture of currency and genre compartments tends to foster.

Notes
Introduciton
1 Gillard was speaking in an interview on BBC Radio 5 Live Afternoon Edition,
22 June 2015 about a meeting in 2010. This particular (and typical)
announcement that a found package would be ‘forensically examined’ appeared
on the BBC News website on 21 October 2016.
2 Steve Hewlett observes an agreement amongst politicos that ‘Andrew Neil is
currently the best political interviewer the BBC has got’, they ‘point to his
encyclopaedic knowledge of politics, his obvious fascination with and interest in
 Notes 35

his subject, the sheer amount of preparation he does, and, critically, his forensic
approach’. Steve Hewlett, ‘Politicians are frightened of me: Andrew Neil’, Radio
Times, 6 May 2015, p. 28.
3 Black makes these comments in an episode of Infinite Monkey Cage on Forensic
Science (BBC Radio 4, 10 August 2015).
4 While a wide variety of drama, including Blink, uses doubling to underscore the
testimonial qualities of enactment, such deployment of doubling is acutely pur-
poseful in many feminist, post-colonial works such as Cherrie Moraga’s Giving
up the Ghost (1989), Werewere Liking’s Singue Mura: A Woman’s Life in Nine
Movements (1990), and Lisa Evans’ Shouting, Stamping and Singing Home (2006).
5 I use the term ‘counter-forensic’ to describe performances that invoke forensic
aesthetics in order to highlight, critique, and resist it. This is largely in
keeping with the use of the term in the work of Allan Sekula, documentary
film-maker and photographer, who I first discovered through Keenan’s (2014)
essay on Sekula’s Fish Story. The Forensic Architecture agency’s lexicon defines
‘Counter-Forensics’ as:

1. A technical term in criminology referring to efforts designed to frustrate

or prevent in advance the forensic-scientific investigation of physical or
digital objects, including documents and photographs as well as bodies,
soil, weapons or their residues, buildings, etc. An often-sophisticated
operationalisation of the dictum “leave no traces,” counter-forensic
practices seek actively to block the deposition or collection of traces and/
or to erase or destroy them before they can be acquired as evidence.
2. A term coined by the photographer and writer Allan Sekula to describe
the deployment of forensic techniques, derived from police methods,
by human rights investigators and their colleagues (including forensic
anthropologists, photographers, and psychotherapists) in order to
challenge oppressive regimes or respond to their aftermath.

6 I saw Proper Clever in premiere at Liverpool Playhouse in 2008, and Chatroom in

a student production at Liverpool John Moores University in 2011.

Chapter 1
1 As an express consequence of the Enron scandal, the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of
2002 regulated mark-to-market by forcing companies to implement stricter
accounting standards.
2 The extent of Lay’s lobbying, and of his connections to Reagan and the Bushes,
is detailed in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), the documentary
directed by Alex Gibney, and in the book of the same name, by Bethany McLean
and Peter Elkind, on which the film is based.
3 The staging I refer to is the West End transfer (January 2010) of the original
Headlong production at Chichester Festival Theatre.
36 Notes

Chapter 2
1 This ire is discussed by Alison Flood in an article titled ‘1984: The Romantic
Film. Love the Idea?’, The Guardian, 15 January 2014.

Chapter 3
1 Such journalist-turned-playwrights include Katharine Viner, the first female
editor of The Guardian, who collaborated with Alan Rickman to script My Name
Is Rachel Corrie (2005); Victoria Brittain, who teamed up with Gillian Slovo to
write Guantanamo (2004), and New Yorker staff writer turned playwright George
Packer, author of Betrayed (2008).

Chapter 4
1 Mengele’s Skull describes in some detail how working on the Mengele ‘trial’ led
osteobiographer Clyde Snow to develop techniques that he went on to use in
larger-scale investigations of ‘the disappeared’ in Argentina and Guatemala.
2 This note is an excuse to mention the superb 2012 production of Colder than
Here at Theatre-by-the-Lake, Keswick.

Chapter 5
1 Another play that Sierz too readily consigns to the domestic stasis camp is
Penhall’s Haunted Child, in which a father is lured from his wife and son by a
guru who promises to fill the void in his being with certainty. This apocalyptic
play is about the power of the self-appointed expert in an era of self-help, and
about the dark places to which we can be led by risk society’s warnings of the
need to secure ourselves.
2 Spargo makes these remarks in her reading of a visual artwork by South African per-
formance artist/photographer/academic Kathryn Smith. In Psychogeographies: The
Washing Away of Wrongs (2003–2004), Smith presents twelve prints containing
photographs and handwritten texts, depicting her tracing of elusive Scottish
serial killer Dennis Nilsen through visits to his various addresses in England,
where he murdered at least 12 young men between 1978 and 1983. Drawing
on Derrida, on art historian Charles Merewether, and on Smith’s own analysis,
Spargo argues that all art ‘works’ through the inscription of traces. She explores
the ways in which artists such as Smith, whose work consciously engages with
the idea of art as a forensic text, reveal and play on the inherent violence of this
inscription, violence in that it annihilates whatever it traces.
3 Alf Garnett in British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (BBC 1965–1975) inspired
the creation of Archie Bunker in All in the Family (CBS 1971–1979); both are
examples of patriarchs who frequently hid behind, and ejaculated their reactions
to, the daily newspaper.
 Notes 37

Chapter 6
1 Ess made this comment during an interview on BBC 5 Live Drive (5
January 2017).

Chapter 7
1 Isherwood is vexed:
A particular offender from last season was the Kristoffer Diaz play “The Elaborate
Entrance of Chad Deity,” about the colorful world of professional wrestling. I’d esti-
mate that at least three-quarters of the play consisted of, um, elaborate monologues
from one or another character describing events the playwright was unable to
dramatise or chose not to. This secondhand description was particularly frustrating
in a play about a sport that thrives on the display of combat. Conflict, that key
ingredient in drama, is hard to come by when the characters in a play refuse to
engage with one another.
Contrary to Isherwood’s claim that Diaz ‘was unable to dramatise or chose not to’
dramatise conflict, the conflict of the play (which was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer
Prize for Drama and received the 2011 Obie Award for Best New Play) is a rhetorical
one, about commentary, schtick, manipulation by talking heads on television and the
Internet. Diaz uses direct address with subtle and savage irony to make socio-political
points through the metaphor of wrestling in which ‘real’ conflict is complicated by
monologic pacts between performer and audience.
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