The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology

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Abstract
There is nothing in cyberspace and the screened technologies of the virtual that has not been already performed on the stage. The theatre has always been virtual, a space of illusory immediacy. 3 Yet the contemporary discourse surrounding live performance and technological reproduction establishes an essentialized difference between the phenomena. The difference is further concretized in the critical writings of theatre and performance studies that ignore such performative mediated forms as film, television, radio, and multimedia. Slavoj Zizek, in the introduction to Mapping Ideology, writes that it is a commonplace assumption that “virtual or cyber-sex presents a radical break with the past since in it actual sexual contact with a real other is losing ground against masturbatory enjoyment, whose sole support is the virtual other.” He dismisses that assumption by suggesting that “Lacan’s thesis that there is no sexual relationship means precisely that the structure of the real sexual act (of the act with a flesh and blood partner) is already inherently phantasmic—the real body of the other serves only as a support for our phantasmic projections.” 4 Lacan’s argument thus challenges the assumptions inherent in the constructed binary of the live and the virtual, and [End Page 383] thereby disputing the claims of immediacy and presence in live performance. 5 But it would be a mistake to imagine that what we experience in the theatre and recorded media is the same experience. It is the same, only different.

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