Glitch in the Machine

Pe rf o rm a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 5 ( 2 ) , p p . 1 1 0 1 1 7 © Ta y l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 01 0 D O I : 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 3 5 2 8 1 6 5 . 2 0 1 0 . 4 9 0 4 4 2 In Brecht’s parable ‘Hardships of the Best’, Mr K was asked, ‘What are you working on? ’, and Mr K replied, ‘I’m having a hard time. I’m preparing my next mistake. ’ Here Brecht describes a paradoxical human position: one can’t prepare or plan a mistake, since in that case it would not be a mistake at all, and yet, in spite of this, there is a constant tendency to avoid mistakes, failures, misreadings, especially in social systems that wish for perfection. So it also is with a glitch in a machine: a machine, like any functional system, is supposed to run smoothly without a glitch, but in spite of all calculations and probabilities, the glitch is impossible to erase entirely since it is the incalculable and the unpredictable. It was Bergson who related a machine to the human body and devised a fitting axiom – when the human body acts and moves and thinks like a machine, we have a formula for the comic (Bergson 1911). However, the question is, what happens when bodies are machine-like, and then a glitch occurs? What happens when a mistake occurs in the bureaucratic machine, which is designed to run the social perfectly? Are there still residues of the comic there, or do they vanish completely? The most horrible realization of a machine-like system was the Holocaust. In this paper, by proposing a fundamental (mis) reading of Bergson’s position, by dismantling it, by accumulating and amassing different glitches in different machines, I will try to analyze the possibility of their presentation. In doing so, I will focus on presentations of Auschwitz. I will probe the very structure of a society which, like a horrible machine, was designed to exterminate the Other. I start with Agamben’s The Remnants of Auschwitz (1999) and compare his analysis of ‘testimony’ to such a horrible event with a presentation of life in Auschwitz, and what happened there, as depicted in the play KAMP performed by the theatre group Hotel Modern.1 Finally in the dialectic between the witness and the testimony, in this final (mis)performance, in this final ‘mis’ through which the inhuman produces the human, or vice versa, I argue that humour coincides with horror. What is the horrible laughter vibrating through Agamben’s structure, if not old-fashioned Evil, if not the demonic diminishment and deconstruction of any meaning? In Bergson’s essay ‘Laugher: An essay on the meaning of comic’, there are many ‘mis’es – misreading, misconception, misfiring. All these processes of failure, of generative fecundity, of ‘mis’ are interwoven together in the final paradox condensed in the relationship between the machine and the human. The comic is a product of the human body; the body is a spectacle of the comic: slipping on banana peels, bumping into objects (and sometimes harshly and painfully being punished for delusionally misinterpreting objects, as did Don Quixote). Repetition of movement is related not just to bodies but to thoughts as well; something mechanical in the thoughts of comic characters that pushes them to desire the repetition of their actions (e.g., Molière). Bergson believes that the human body – its gestures, its movement, its attitudes – Glitch in the Machine