Dramaturgy vs. The Algorithm

Wrestling is on the mind after seeing a new play reading produced and directed by one of my dear friends. The play’s about a high school girls’ wrestling team.

Welcome to Art and Survival, a weekly-ish newsletter documenting one theatre-loving boy’s attempt to build a secure life filled with creative acts. You can find out more in the introductory post here.

This week: thoughts on the differences between personal curation and the feed.

---

There are objects she likes to keep on the desk, objects which are precious to her. Taking a photo of the cherry wood desk, you begin to understand her life.

Begin with the paper, and the pens spilling out of the periwinkle pot. Look to the envelopes, unaddressed, and the stamps beside them. Take stock of the twenty frames on the wall before the desk, each holding a photograph-sized print of an artwork. Note the glass of water, half-full, and the dry mug ringed by coffee that was consumed long ago.

Her room smells like dust, not because anything is old or dirty, but because nobody’s been in the room since you began to look closely. She is somewhere else, or else she’s dead, and either way you know she is hole in your life, and knowing this, you form a picture of the whole she was before left by looking at the thing she collected and displayed.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from the things she found in gift shops.

[Kurt Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse Five.]

In telling this brief story, I hope to illustrate what I mean when I say dramaturgy, or when I describe the dramaturgy of a person, or an artwork. Dramaturgy is the fascia which links it all together; it’s the substance artists draw on – consciously or not – when they create.

Dramaturgy is personal meaning-making, and when meaning-making is outsourced to machines, meaning is lost.

Speed is queen, today, and dramaturgy takes time, so dramaturgy is in danger. When you last listened to music, how did you do it? Did you open Spotify or something and tap on the first album or playlist or daylist or daily mix it presented to you? Or did you let your mind and memory play, and find a song, some song that an artist left ringing inside you, and then did you use Spotify (etc.) as a tool to play that song?

There is a distinction between our being presented with something, and our choosing to seek something out. The latter action – which is something we do, not something we receive – is recall. Quick and playful recall is a marker of a healthy memory. Memory, in the unique way we experience memory – when the smell that hits our noses takes us to our Auntie’s kitchen; when the song takes us back to our wedding – is something that defines our humanity. That nonlinear experience of time that happens when we remember and sense is part of the joy of being alive. When we give up the delight of recall for a stream of easy entertainment, some nugget of soul is lost, however pleasurable our experience of that feed is.

Personal meaning-making and curation (dramaturgy) is meaningful, whereas machine-curated threads of content are pleasurable. The distinction between pleasure and beauty? Beauty arrests and enriches our experience of being in the world; pleasure is a quick rush of dopamine that helps us feel good for a beat and then no longer. Take it from Immanuel Kant, who distinguishes objects of beauty from objects which bring sense pleasure, or satisfaction, or are morally good:

Reason can never be persuaded that the existence of a man who merely lives for enjoyment (however busy he may be in this point of view) has a worth in itself… Only what he does, without reference to enjoyment, in full freedom and independently of what nature can procure for him passively, gives an [absolute] worth to his presence [in the world] as the existence of a person.

[From Critique of Judgement, Section 3.]

In the age of the algorithm, much of what is presented in the feed appeals to our sense of satisfaction, or of something being morally good or bad. But the genuine free play of the mind (and spirit, if you believe in that) is an enriching thing; when the mind is left to wander and bounce across all of its experience, and to forge new connections, the reverberation across memory and sense and time is something which contributes to a person’s sense of wholeness. In these times of perpetual fragmentation, wholeness is an essential way of grounding in and experiencing the world. If we all were firmly rooted in this place, and the constant field of changing sensations and electric vibrations and temperatures and so on, we might meet each other on a ground that helps us find liberation.

The algorithm has its place as a tool, and can make a home for itself happily, alongside the hammer and the wheel and the drill and the crane. If you are a DJ, and you want to explore music in a given genre, Spotify’s algorithm might be able to help you find songs and artists you would never have come across otherwise (though perhaps someone who works at a record shop could do the same). But the moment we begin to lean too much on algorithmic curation – the moment we turn to our feed for a distraction from being in the world and feeling feelings, like I do when I’m waiting for the train on a hot platform – we lose something. We turn inward, and away.

I’d like to think there’s another way. Even on the feed itself, there are some creators who are functioning more as curators than creators, “human guides to help us decide what’s worth paying attention to.”

But paying attention to digital content is still leaning into the feed, and not into the world. Content is not knowledge – not pure knowledge, or pure art – because it has not been created for its own sake, or for the sake of sating curiosity. Instead, it’s been created in order to get a bell to chime, or in order to market a product. It’s a commissioned work, only the patron of the work is a machine whose underbelly is sort of mysterious, maximizing our attention and our incited engagement. When I read a book and someone tells me to visit their blog at the end of every chapter, I want to cry out, “I’ve already bought your book! What more do you want from me? What more do you hope to squeeze out of me by placing me in your customer funnel?”

The internet has not always been like this. Once upon a time, the internet was beautiful. It was a refuge for queer boys living in hetero places, for autodidacts who could learn whatever they wanted to learn. Once upon a time, the internet was like a library, where we could gather information with the help of curatorial guiding lights (librarians), and where we could learn and practice craft.

The beauty of the library is that the patron of the library chooses a place to begin to look, or else they might surf the shelves until something catches their eye, and then let that work bring them to the next, and so on. The dramaturgical thread that takes you from one scrap of knowledge to the next and the next is a work of art you create as your personal research unspools.

If you are a citizen of the internet, and if you are so inclined to publish and share yourself, I hope you will not optimize your internet-based contributions to this great electron library for attention. I hope you will optimize it for you-ness. I hope you will commit to your own dramaturgy, and choose a question that tugs at your heart, and follow it wherever it goes. The human heart – that dramaturgical organ – makes leaps in its logic, leaps that can hardly be comprehended and which make their own beautiful sense. The logic of a being with a beating heart is unlike anything else in the world; it’s all soft edges, confusion, brief ecstasy, sudden anguish. The questions raised by the heart could busy a person for a lifetime.

[P.S. if you actually want to know more about dramaturgy, like as a job in theatre, I recommend reading this, listening to this, and paying attention to this. It’s an amorphous job, and the people I know who practice it are some of the most diligent people I’ve ever met.]