Harun Farocki: Raising the Stakes of the Game

Brianne Cohen

In Harun Farocki’s two-screen video installation, I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000), the deaths of prisoners barely register on camera. What is most shocking is that the relentless banality of the black-and-white surveillance footage renders their deaths scarcely visible. In one instance, on April 7, 1989 at the Corcoran State Prison in California, it takes guards a full nine minutes to retrieve the body of a man, William Martinez, who is fatally wounded. He is shot in the prison yard by a guard up above for fighting with another inmate. Farocki provides intertitles throughout, but a human voiceover layers the video only when focused on these precise deaths, as if to lend them a certain corporeality and humanity again. I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts also reveals the fact that prison guards would arrange to have inmates with divisive cultural affiliations placed in the yard together, and then bet on the outcome of the expected fights:

The prisoners belong to prison gangs with names like “Aryan Brotherhood” or “Mexican Mafia.” They have received long sentences and are locked up far away from the world in a maximum-security prison. They have hardly anything but their bodies, whose muscles they train constantly, and their affiliation to an organization. Their honour is more important to them than their life; they fight although they know they will be fired on.”[1]

Betting in such an arena offers only a gruesome payoff, with casualties sustained in the yard by both gun and surveillance camera. Though far removed in one sense, it is not difficult to draw a connection between the austere gray box of the prison yard and the minimalist gray room where the installation viewer stands, also captured by surveillance cameras.

Farocki has long been interested in Jeremy Bentham’s ideal panoptic prison and Foucauldian disciplinarian structures.[2] I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts foreshadows a more recent, elaborate twelve-screen video production by the artist, Deep Play (2007), debuted at Documenta 12. The twelve screens displayed different angles on the 2006 World Cup final game between Italy and France. The hybrid black box/white cube space, moreover, was semi-circular. It was originally intended as a fully circular, 24-screen installation without interruption by curtains.[3] The specialized configuration evokes a panoptic-like space, and the soccer players, like the “gladiator” convicts in the disciplinary prison yard of I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, fight for their honor with only their bodies and cultural affiliations.

In his Theory of Legislation, Jeremy Bentham coined the phrase deep play. Basically it means that within gambling, a point is reached at which the stakes become so high that it is irrational for the bettors to continue their wager. In other words, the marginal utility of what one stands to win is less than the marginal disutility of what one stands to lose. In deep play, this is the case for both participants, and despite entering the bet in search of pleasure, the net pain will inevitably exceed the net pleasure.

Clearly, the guards’ gambling in I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts may result in a type of profound dehumanization and debasement – to bare life and banal death – but in the deep play of a soccer game, could the stakes be as dire? In his 550-page treatise, Theory of Legislation, Bentham only once mentions this phrase in a footnote, referring to it as the “evils of deep play.”[4] It is anthropologist Clifford Geertz, rather, who appropriated and fully developed the concept in perhaps his best-known essay, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.”[5] Geertz borrowed the phrase in order to understand gambling in the Balinese cockfight less as a matter of economic utility, and more one of social significance. In his analysis, the stakes are much more than material: they are bound up in esteem, honor, dignity, respect, and status. He asserts, “It is in large part because the marginal disutility of loss is so great at the higher levels of betting that to engage in such betting is to lay one’s public self, allusively and metaphorically, through the medium of one’s cock, on the line.”[6] So what was at stake in Farocki’s unveiling of Deep Play at Documenta 12, beyond the outcome of a World Cup soccer match that millions had already viewed?

In the broadest sense, Deep Play stages a Brechtian “epic” play to present a realistic picture of the world and to teach the greatest number of people about it. As a filmmaker based in Berlin since the late 1960s, Farocki has explored the Weimar intellectual legacies of Walter Benjamin and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Specifically, Farocki has established himself within the tradition of an “author as producer” – as Benjamin once described Brecht’s practice – constantly stressing his own role in the transformation of a class-based, exploitative process of production. Much of his film and video work utilizes the tools of Brecht’s epic theater and in particular, the alienation effect, in order to showcase the inequities of a capitalist economic order and the often deleterious effects it has had on resources and peoples worldwide.

Yet Deep Play offers a critical point of departure in Farocki’s recent work as well, not only for its staged, expanded spatial design, but also for its shift towards a greater emphasis on the critical role of the audience. The first part of this essay will investigate Farocki’s long-running adaptation of Brechtian theoretical, pedagogical models in his artistic career, particularly the enacted Gestus (socially-based attitude), which scholars have not examined in any detail. The following section will delve into his transition from filmwork to video installation in the last fifteen years, providing a close analysis of his film, In Comparison, contrasted with its installation equivalent, Comparison Via a Third. Each features basically the same material vis-à-vis an anthropological gaze: examples of brick production techniques from around the world. Their differing formats, however, offer an avenue to explore the implications of Farocki’s broader shift from black box cinema to white cube mediascapes since 1995, in terms of audience viewership. Lastly, the essay will examine Deep Play as it uniquely models a 21^st century, global epic theater, problematized as it is within a panoptic design. Farocki’s career-long strategies of “artist as producer” and “artist as ethnographer” take backstage to the newly featured emphasis on spectators, as collective participant-observers.

When there are no longer actors on the epic stage – in the sense that those actors are dehumanized to an unprecedented degree by a controlling, automated apparatus, like in I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts or Deep Play – then spectators must learn to engage a new site of struggle, not one of class per se, but more fundamentally, of cultural production and representation. Deep Play signals this struggle vis-à-vis the under-whelming footage of French soccer player Zinedine Zidane’s historically-specific, impassioned head-butt of an Italian player for a xenophobic slur. Spectators in many cultural arenas today, like sports viewers, are placed frequently at the center of elaborate, technological dis-plays and bombarded at all angles by a nonstop flow of mundane data. In his most recent installations, such as Comparison Via a Third or Deep Play, Farocki stresses the participative, ethnographic fieldwork necessary on the part of exhibition visitors to filter and interpret this information. Above all, Farocki is concerned with discovering a theater of his own time, as was Brecht. In a search for cultural significance and the status of the human in the twenty-first century, Deep Play offers the ultimate betting ring – and ultimate stage – for a “sporting” public.[7]

The Artist as Producer

“We pin our hopes to the sporting public.”

-Bertolt Brecht, “Emphasis on Sport” (1926)

“At the center of [Bertolt Brecht’s] experiment stands the human being. […] He is subjected to tests, examinations. What emerges is this: events are alterable not at their climaxes, not by virtue and resolution, but only in their strictly habitual course, by reason and practice. To construct from the smallest elements of behavior [Gesten] what in Aristotelian dramaturgy is called ‘action’ [handeln] is the purpose of the epic theater.”

–Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” (1934)

Farocki’s work is profoundly indebted to the theories and praxis of Brecht, and many scholars have analyzed the manner in which his oeuvre has redeployed and adapted Brecht’s methods for a later, specific historical moment. Thomas Elsaesser, above all, in his essay “Political Filmmaking After Brecht: Harun Farocki, For Example,” provides one of the most nuanced analyses of Farocki’s interest in the playwright’s work, contextualizing it within a 1970s European filmmaking discourse. The question then was the continued applicability of Brecht’s ideas. Elsaesser claims that most of the New German Cinema filmmakers during that post-’68 era borrowed primarily from Brecht’s practical, interventionist strategies, engaging in institutional battles and tactical strategies, for example, introducing their films to live audiences or taking up social issues as their subject matter.[8] In contrast to Brecht’s institutional, public sphere interventionism, however, practical necessities – such as lack of funds – marginalized filmmakers who would have continued to engage exclusively with Brecht’s theories of disjunctive formal experimentation. Moreover, for those who were preoccupied with a theoretical discourse at the time (namely feminists, according to Elsaesser), Brecht’s radical concepts of “distanciation” were coming to be displaced by a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective that promoted a more deconstructive approach to tackling the illusionism of spectacle culture. The notable exception to this trend was work by Farocki, who continued to interrogate the continued applicability of Brecht’s ideas within such a conceptually-evolving topography. As evidence, Elsaesser provides a close reading of Farocki’s Before Your Eyes – Vietnam (Etwas Wird Sichtbar, 1980), as it spoke to this shifting discursive terrain and still engaged a Brechtian notion of function versus appearance. Before Your Eyes highlights the problem of uncovering political realities behind certain images, in this case iconic photographs from Vietnam. In his essay, Elsaesser establishes concretely Farocki’s early dialogue with a Brechtian tradition as one that could still productively inform a changing filmic discourse.

In terms of his later work, Christa Blümlinger provides a thoughtful analysis of Farocki’s first video installation, Schnittstelle (Interface, 1995),[9] as a distinct and complex foregrounding of the “author as producer.” According to Walter Benjamin in his eponymous essay, the “place of the intellectual in the class struggle can be identified – or, better, chosen – only on the basis of his position in the process of production.”[10] Critically, Schnittstelle’s two-screen video display disrupts the illusion of the filmic apparatus by highlighting Farocki’s own role in the social production of images, fragmenting and recombining his past works. It recursively portrays screens within screens, implicates the artist as he reiterates voiceovers from past films, and emphasizes his hand as it materially frames or interacts with the film strip or the video button. One scene illustrates Farocki handling money, describing how in this gesture, it is easy to understand how little appearance and essence actually coincide. Clearly, even with his shift to video installation, Farocki has continued to apply Brecht’s dictum to engage a means of production and not just the products, in the hopes of altering an apparatus of mass consumption.

There is, however, another quite specific, Brechtian concept that is not identified by scholars in their analyses of Farocki’s “instructional” films from the 1980s and 90s, up until the present. That is Brecht’s notion of the Gestus – the combined bodily gestures and posture, tone of voice, facial expression, language, and habits that together reflect specific social, historical processes and relationships.[11] “Gestus” does not translate as mere gesture, but rather as an adoption of particular behaviors and bodily attitudes that reveal broader social laws governing a collective.[12] These behaviors and language are alterable. Thus, while it may seem that the human species, at times, progresses according to an underlying, inexorable fate, the actual state of affairs – political and economic – is contrived, constructed by humans, and is, therefore, alterable by human behavior in its smallest acts. Brecht’s epic theater worked to break this illusion of a “natural” human course and to point to the historical specificity, and the class struggle, of his own time. Among other methods, his actors were charged with demonstrating particular social Gesten through episodic interruption, or to show the showing of these Gesten. This encouraged a spectator to become an informed observer, rather than a hypnotized subject, by pedagogically displaying to him/her how to recognize, imitate, and change human behavior and ultimately, historical circumstances, in a quite material way.

A significant number of Farocki’s films, such as Indoctrination (Die Schulung, 1987), How to Live in the FRG (Leben – BRD, 1990), What’s Up? (Was ist Los?, 1991), Re-Education (Die Umschulung, 1994), The Expression of Hands (Der Ausdruck der Hände, 1997), and The Interview (Die Bewerbung, 1997), investigate microcosms of human gesture/language/mood in social situations. This mostly involves occupational training and performance testing in workplace settings, but also includes “how-to” instruction for the management and administration of activities in all spheres of quotidian life. In How to Live in the FRG, for instance, police practice how to arrest suspects who resist, midwives are shown how to deliver babies safely, children are taught how to cross the street, and much more. Art historian Hal Foster notes how these “lessons in proper behavior shade into forced socialization,”[13] and Elsaesser identifies how the training often commodifies and objectifies the very people that it aims to empower.[14] Blümlinger, in turn, elaborates on how these films offer a “reflection on disciplinary institutions as precursors of control societies,”[15] which clearly ties them to the artist’s later video installations focused on prisons, shopping malls, grocery stores, and sports arenas. There is no doubt that these films project a dark image of human order and “progress” in different public and private spheres.

They also, however, reflect a certain Brechtian hope for social change. To be sure, they betray moments of rupture in the overall Grundgestus [basic Gestus] of human training and mechanization. Farocki states:

I am stylistically indebted to the early Brecht: his idea of ‘man is man.’ It has to do with the fact that Man himself is not that great, he is the raw material to be constructed. Both Brecht, in his play on British colonialism [Mann ist Mann], and I, in my film on Vietnam, abhor the abuses that took place, but we also find that there are possibilities hiding in those situations.[16]

Blümlinger observes a moment in How to Live in the FRG, for example, when a workplace trainer plays his role badly with a “young and rather attractive” woman, revealing a crack in his professional façade when he suggests that she use her (girlish) charm. Role-playing and reality, through Farocki’s careful editing, are shown to misalign in this instance, thus betraying and unhinging the social laws that govern such behavior. Rather than an individual human attitude, a social Gestus is revealed. While this documented workplace is no epic theater in the literal sense, with no professional actors such as Peter Lorre in Mann Ist Mann to exhibit the showing of Gesten, Farocki is able to edit footage in order to punctuate episodically gestic language and behaviors in another social arena.[17]

In What’s Up?, likewise, Farocki focuses on the socially-based, gestic language of chance and order. The film provides intertitles with word pairs such as “fortune/destiny” to chart different human attempts to create controlled, rationalistic environments/processes against the backdrop of unpredictable forces. Bank managers weigh investment risks, companies balance the replacement of laborers by Japanese-imported robots, and business researchers calculate consumer reactions to television advertisements. Like How Live in the FRG, the camera anthropologically targets and hones in on the body language, mannerisms, speech intonation and word choice that are employed in these different economic exchange rituals. At one point there is even “how-to” instruction for holding chips properly at a gambling table. The implication is that with proper handling, there can be more adept gambling, or better management of monetary risk. What’s Up? depicts the Grundgestus of attempting to manage and control every aspect of one’s life through the “equalizing,” “universalizing” medium of capital.

Fiscal security and control in the film, however, are stripped of their illusory character through the capturing of anomalies in social habit and speech. Farocki updates the class struggle of Brecht’s era in terms of the broad financial deregulation and “casino capitalism” of the 1980s, which reflected the increasing significance of financial speculation over industry.[18] In one scene, an investment broker, sitting at an office desk in front of diagnostic line graphs on his computer, contacts a potential buyer with a “sure bet.” His software analysis indicates that investment today is guaranteed to bring dividends tomorrow. The phone line is symbolically weak, however, and the conversation begins poorly. Once the buyer finally hears what the broker has to say, he challenges the caller’s confidence, citing his own life experience with an always unpredictable market. What was originally a routine sales call turns into a subtly antagonistic debate concerning the risk of the stock market. The broker, above all, seems offended that the potential buyer would view it as a “game.” With clearly Brechtian methods in What’s Up?, Farocki exposes a historically-specific moment, and points to the transformative potential of experience-trained, cognizant human behavior.

The Artist as Ethnographer

In the last few years, particularly since the exhibition of Deep Play at Documenta 12, critical interest in Farocki’s oeuvre has accelerated. Since the late 1960s his work has played a key role in German aesthetic circles, but as of the mid-1990s, with his incorporation of multiple-screen, moving-image works into the museum-gallery nexus, his work has attracted more international attention.  In 2004, for instance, Hal Foster introduced the “old ’68er” to an Artforum public, highlighting the artist’s complexly intertwining thematic concerns, such as forms of “everyday” socialization and training, the instrumentalization of modes of representation, and the military-industrial-complex.[19]

Schnittstelle (1995) began this transition, as Farocki’s first video installation. Since then, the artist has continued to expand his practice spatially and temporally, including more screens and more innovative layouts in museum and gallery settings. Of about a hundred works, approximately twenty of these have stretched beyond a single-screen cinematic environment, and among these twenty, most juxtapose two screens. Recently, however, with Deep Play, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik in elf Jahrzehnten, 2006), and Feasting or Flying (Fressen oder Fliegen, 2008), the artist’s displays have expanded to six or twelve screens.

A number of scholars have posited various reasons for this critical move. Film historian and artist Chris Pavsek worries that Farocki’s later works register and mimic an increasing process of dehumanization in the larger visual field – that it suggests there are no longer collective subjects to catalyze amidst the bombardment of a spectacular media culture.[20] With his initial foray into filmmaking in the late 1960s, Farocki produced overt agit-prop material, and his now classic essay films from the 1980s and 90s have been characterized as didactic.[21] Pavsek suggests that the artist’s new installation pieces betray a certain cynicism concerning 21^st century visual culture, one which fails completely to edify.[22] Beyond literally mobilizing viewers in a controlled museum environment, how can these installations still hope to incite spectators to political resistance and action?

Invariably, there will be many factors that play into Farocki’s evolving practice, mostly involving funding opportunities, the desire for creative and intellectual experimentation, and an awareness of a radically changing social-visual field. Yet his installations do offer a new kind of hope for subjective agency and collective mobilization, one that implicates viewers in a new and transformative manner. Referring to Farocki’s “direct cinema” of the 1960s and ‘70s, Elsaesser posits that “… he has probably remained too much of an agitator-activist to create the openness that usually gives the viewer the illusion of entering into the ongoing events as a participant or co-conspirator…”[23] With his shift to installation, Farocki’s practice has moved precisely in this direction, in that it often now designates much more trust – or rather responsibility – to the embodied spectator.[24]

In this regard, his aesthetic transition resonates with a growing trend in the art world since the 1990s to engage spectators collectively and inter-relationally. The most critical difference between his work, however, and much artistic production that falls under the rubric of relational aesthetics, for example, is his continued political commitment to contesting exploitative systems of production and to fostering thoughtful, politically-charged dialogue within a public sphere. His work attempts to initiate discussion – like many interactive installation pieces today – but not necessarily for convivial, “playful” exchange. Rather his challenging projects call for contestatory voices and a frank debate over current, macroscopic social and economic problems.

A provocative example of the contrast between Farocki’s film work and video installation would be his recent one-channel, cinematic In Comparison (Zum Vergleich, 2009) versus its two-screen counterpart, an installed Comparison via a Third (Vergleich über ein Drittes, 2007). Both utilize the same material, but the different formats subtly alter the effect of the larger message. The footage in both depicts a spectrum of brick production methods: from highly industrialized, automated machine-work in Germany to purely communal handwork in Burkina Faso, and a mixture of both in Indian cities. The film In Comparison unfolds as an episodic “narrative,” interspersed throughout with authorial intertitles and diagrammatic inter-images. The artist once again reveals his thumbprint with montage and commentary, and carefully identifies specific temporalities and locations (cities and towns in Burkina Faso, India, France, Germany, and Switzerland). The film charts a historically-situated conversion from manual to machinic labor across these different sites – presenting it “one brick at a time” – beginning with the mixing of raw material in Burkina Faso to the final shot of a digitally-designed, elaborately-constructed building in Switzerland.

Whereas the first half of the film appears to proceed in an uncomfortably linear fashion, the second half shuffles around between different production sites, problematizing an association of temporal or historical progress with cultural “development.” Indeed, the first half chronologically situates a sequence of production plants: from one in India that has had the same routine since 1930, to a French plant operated by Moroccan workers since 1945, and lastly to a fully machine-operated plant constructed in Germany in 2003. The second half of the film, however, fragments this progression by jumping more dramatically among production techniques and sites and by offering authoritative judgments (as for a building being constructed in Gando, Burkina Faso): “Nothing is imported for this building and only human energy is expended;” or for a firing kiln in Toutipakkam, India: “The socially minded idea: the building is fired and the heat is used to fire bricks as well.” The film also displays European architectural students in India, sketching and laying bricks, and learning by both ethnographic observation and participation.

The double-screen, moving-image projection Comparison via a Third, on the other hand, eschews text or voiceover, instead presenting a soft montage of the same images of brick workers in Germany, India, and Burkina Faso.[25] Art critic and historian Helmut Draxler correctly raises the question of a “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” in Comparison via a Third. In other words, the installation challenges a conflation of notions of temporal and historical “development”(from categories of the primitive to developing to highly developed) that are often employed to assign value to different methods of cultural organization and production. Farocki does not juxtapose an image of communal hand labor with that of automated machine work in order to either value the former as ideal or “natural,” or to devalue it as rudimentary or “primitive.” Rather, the images are placed temporally and spatially contiguous, not hierarchically, via the two screens.

In discussing his 12-screen installation, Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006), which utilizes basically the same material as his earlier one-channel essay film, Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), Farocki explains that in the case of the 12-screen version:

Film clips from the past 110 years are shown simultaneously. The succession of montage allows one shot to replace the next and the message is: this image, not the one before. Simultaneity, on the contrary, expresses: this shot and at the same time this other one.[26]

Draxler suggests that the “third” element referred to in the title marks a different mode of comprehending social production altogether, but understood more simply, the third element in this composition, beyond the two contiguous screens, may refer instead to the viewer.

Rather than depict anonymous architecture students (footage that is removed in this version), Comparison Via a Third challenges gallery visitors not only to register conceptually both screens simultaneously, but also to embody both distinct ethnographic roles of observer and participant. The film In Comparison attempts to present an anthropological, pedagogical description of global brick production methods, but the installation places much more responsibility on the viewer. In Comparison offers precise dates and locations, whereas Comparison via a Third does not. Instead, the installation situates the viewer phenomenologically, as a de facto, necessarily implicated participant, in a state of contemporaneity with the filmed subjects, focusing on the simultaneity of present modes of being and working in an increasingly proximate international context.

The Stakes of Deep Play

Deep Play implicates spectators to an even further degree than Comparison via a Third. Rather than a third actor between two channels, the viewer is placed at the center of a massive, twelve-screen mediascape, a configuration that mimics a semicircular panoptic viewing space. Visitors become the guards/observers of an extensive, horizontal tableau of the 2006 World Cup final game. Time is integral to the video presentation (set at a specific two hour fifteen minute interval in history), but it is looped, endlessly repeated, and immutable. It is an object fixed in time, lending itself more to a synchronic “reading,” such as in anthropology, rather than a historical, diachronic one. Spectators are integral to the “fieldwork” of the soccer game. In the Balinese cockfight, as Geertz concludes, the audience gambles in deep play despite inevitable economic loss because the enterprise involves much more than monetary value: it garners social status, honor, respect, and dignity. The event also allows the Balinese audience an opportunity to tell a story about itself to itself, to better understand moments of profound social meaning within its own culture. Likewise, visitors to Deep Play are challenged to realize an event of deep social significance within their own ritualistic game, and it is this ability, just as much as any wager, that is at stake.

Insofar as Deep Play de-emphasizes Farocki’s own authorial hand in its construction, it marks a divergence from his past single-channel films. While Farocki has been quite attentive to crafting sound in his films, in Deep Play, however, sound is entirely diegetic, with no voiceover and nothing altered from the noise of cheering fans to the television director’s quick camera instructions. Nor does the installation include inscriptions that are essential to his essay films. No text supplements the installation except for the piece’s title, which is, strikingly, given in English with no German translation. The one exception to Farocki’s diminished authorial presence is the very first, split-screen channel on the left, which recursively displays screens. On this channel, we see a game analyst watching a television screen with the soccer match on, and on the second, we see the analysts’ hand marking down information from what he views. This evokes the self-referential editor in Farocki’s Schnittstelle, providing a close-up of the analyst’s hand in juxtaposition with his watching a screen. It is the only channel among the twelve that implicates via an obvious substitution the “artist as producer” through the use of montage.

In the first channel, one gathers that the game analyst will interpret players’ movements (“twitches”) into strategically-significant actions (“winks”). According to Clifford Geertz, to note a mere twitch of the eye would be “thin” description, only transmitted data, but understanding a socially-significant, polysemous wink would necessitate “thick” description on the part of a cultural analyst or ethnographer. For Geertz, the idea of culture is fundamentally semiotic. Ethnography works to discern the difference between twitches and winks, movements and gestures (or Gesten as the case may be). This is the “interpretive turn” in anthropology that Geertz introduced and advanced. His essay “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” perhaps best exemplifies this commitment to an interpretative method of “thick description.”[27] With enough thick description – derived from long-term, quantitative and qualitative, highly participative, and microscopic observation – an ethnographer can essentially “read” another culture’s webs of social signification as texts.

Ostensibly, Deep Play presents more than enough information to develop a “thick description” of the World Cup final, but the quality of that information remains inferior to the statistical quantity. According to the anthropologist, one gains access to the signs of another imaginative universe by inspecting events, not by “abstract[ing] entities into unified patterns.”[28] Deep Play, however, presents approximately twenty-seven total hours of game coverage as exactly that: abstracted, aestheticized patterns. A constant theme in Farocki’s work is the critical necessity to distinguish between mere data-gathering, and understanding or interpreting that data. In Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), for example, he explores the multivalent character of Aufklärung, as either “reconnaissance” or “enlightenment,” data-gathering or human intellectual illumination.[29] He also notes multiple translations of the German word erkennen: to “perceive,” or on the other hand, to “recognize” in the sense of “understand.” Deep Play also offers surveillance but not human cognizance.

Indeed, the eighth and twelfth screens stream only surveillance footage: a view of the Berlin Olympic Stadium from up above as the sun sets, as well as fans throughout the stadium. The final channel in the installation monitors not only the spectators of the game, but also ironically, the guards around the perimeter of the field that also survey the crowds. Just as in the maximum security prison of I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, every corner of the stadium, and every player of the game, is supervised and controlled through visual access. Bodies are rationalized as abstract material. Deep Play attempts to present the centrally-located viewer with every possible, panoptic line of sight into the game.

Dehumanization occurs on multiple levels. The tenth screen, with edited live footage, reduces players to statistical numbers with real-time miniature speed charts on the bottom of the screen. The seventh screen focuses on the French and Italian coaches, capturing them behind digital, “chalk” game boards as if containing and caging them; and the third and ninth screens evoke individual players’ vital signs, with line graphs (for rates of speed) that mimic medical heart monitors.

Additionally, a number of other screens schematize the whole match as if it were a video game. In his discussion of I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, Farocki writes, “The fights in the yard look like something from a cheap computer game. It is hard to imagine a less dramatic representation of death.”[30] Like the convicts who are represented as track-able, computerized dots on screen for their guards, made possible by electronic ankle bracelets, the soccer players of the Deep Play Ascencio software analysis also materialize on screen as mere dots, connected to other players by outward radiating lines. Interpretative text is created by the computer software itself. The screens appear diagnostic and predictive, rather than spontaneous: any idea of a “gamble” vanishes in this game.

To be sure, analysis becomes purely machinic, completely disembodied from humans and “safe” from human error or chance. It recalls the camera-equipped, heat-seeking missiles depicted in Farocki’s earlier installation piece, Eye/Machine I, II, and III (Auge/Maschine I, II, and III, 2001-03) that were developed as intelligent killing machines. Of course this is the extreme example, but Farocki’s incorporation of this type of machine vision software points to a threatening scenario of dehumanization. There is a certain violence in the representation of those players through such stark visual abstraction.

Rather than this mundane statistical data, what most fans will remember from the game was French player Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt of the Italian player Marco Materazzi. Immediately afterwards, there was widespread speculation about what provoked the act, and it was only much later that Materazzi revealed his exact words, a racially-based insult aimed at Zidane’s sister’s honor. In fact, the full-game fifth screen replays this moment several times. It schematizes the two men’s bodies into lines and dots and isolates them in different replays, highlighting both the movement of the abstracted figures and the fact that it can offer no substantive interpretation of the act itself. Furthermore, after Zidane receives the red card for misconduct, his representative bar in the lower graph of players’ speeds transforms into a stationary red block. Because he no longer functions in the game, his involvement is neatly struck out, even though despite the offense, Zidane went on to win the Golden Ball award for best player of the tournament. His ejection from the game also marked the end of a tremendously popular and successful soccer career.

More than Italy’s victory, this is the moment that arguably defined the 2006 World Cup final. Zidane’s head-butt, otherwise a routine soccer movement like a Geertzian “twitch” rather than “wink,” was not only a shocking gesture. It was a social Gestus in the sense that it signified, and continues to signify, increasingly profound tensions in Europe concerning immigration, community, and cultural difference. Algerian-born Zidane’s raw and instantaneous backlash against Italian player Materazzi’s xenophobic slur, disrespecting his sister, cut to the core of deep-seated divisions on the continent. Brecht provides a compelling example in the theater that resonates with Zidane’s unbridled act:

“Woman in a play has not gotten compensation for a hurt leg in a traffic accident: Working without the A-effect, the theatre was unable to make use of this exceptional scene to show the horror of a bloody epoch. Few people in the audience noticed it; hardly anyone who reads this will remember that cry. The actress spoke the cry as if it were something perfectly natural. But it is exactly this – the fact that this poor creature finds such a complaint natural – that she should have reported to the public like a horrified messenger returning from the lowest of all hells. To that end she would of course have needed a special technique which would have allowed her to underline the historical aspect of a specific social condition. Only the A-effect makes this possible.”[31] [my emphasis]

In Zidane’s case, spectators were jolted by the soccer player’s extraordinary action; footage spread like wildfire across internet and television outlets. It was more of a street-fighting move within the carefully regulated scenario of soccer. Yet the endlessly replayed footage, as well as the act’s abstract schematization in Deep Play, only aid in making the head-butt appear natural, like any other normal soccer movement or “twitch.” No actor in this panoptic theater, not even the superstar Zidane, could intentionally perform it as a signifier of a “bloody epoch,” could alienate it as a sign of growing cultural hostilities and discrimination in all European nations and the European Union against “foreigners.” The World Cup final game, a symbolic international arena for the peaceful mediation of different cultural affiliations, and played between two major European nations in 2006, set the perfect stage for the thick significance of this violent Gestus to be revealed. Yet televisions cameras could only register Zidane’s head movement as thin description.

The Spectator as Observer-Participant

In his Return of the Real (1996), art historian Hal Foster suggests that there has occurred a paradigm shift in much avant-garde artistic production from the left: that of the “author/artist as producer” to the “artist as ethnographer.”[32] He posits that the subject of association has changed: the new site of struggle will be located not in terms of economic relation, but rather, cultural identity. The artist will locate his/her practice not through solidarity with the worker, but through the other. Astutely, Foster warns of the pitfalls of this “ethnographic turn” and elaborates on practices within anthropology that have worked to reformulate culture as text, thereby reducing it and “decoding” its society (Geertz would fit within this model). He also cautions against old primitivist fantasies and advocates “parallactic work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other.”[33]

Farocki’s artistic career clearly challenges such a dichotomy. He has long worked within both paradigms, of both “artist as producer” and “artist as ethnographer.”  Though many scholars, for instance, point to How to Live in the FRG as a classic leftist film – by which it identifies instances of worker training and mechanized socialization in every sphere of life – the film also clearly places an ethnographic lens on the artist’s own culture. Indeed, rather than exoticize or superficially ally himself with an “other” culture, one for which he lacks thick description, Farocki interrogates the “natural” processes of his own. In the last decade in Germany and the European Union, the most pressing site of struggle – both economic and cultural – happens to be the formation of a heterogeneous “European” community, threatened by entrenched xenophobia and material insecurity throughout the continent.

How can one begin to address this problem, however, when pieces like Deep Play reveal only alarmingly dehumanized and abstracted “actors” on the world stage? Farocki recalls his experience producing Indoctrination (1987), a film that documents business managers training role-playing during training to improve their performance:

When I saw the manager training, how the managers played workers, I thought: man, this is finally Brecht! That’s how you’d have to stage the Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis [The Baden Cantata of Consent, 1929]. In his most extreme period, Brecht demanded that the learning play was only for the actors who played it. With these role plays it’s the same thing: the role play is not so much intended for a viewing public but as an instruction for the actors.[34]

Ideally, in Brecht’s time, actors would not only edify themselves, but also teach an audience through their Gesten, to show the significance of moments in their narrative by alienating critical episodes for spectators to observe with care. The spectators, in turn, were expected not to empathize with illusory characters, but to comprehend the significance of such human behavior within the space of their own historically-specific lives.[35] Deep Play is a filmic update on the epic theater as Brecht would have intended it: the playwright stressed the need to reach and instruct as many people possible. The World Cup soccer game, in this sense, was a model arena, viewed by millions of fans around the world. Yet in Deep Play, a different apparatus of our own time – of panoptic surveillance and machinic observation – strips actors/players of their agency to an unprecedented degree. In 2004, Foster noted this in relation to Farocki’s Eye/Machine triptych. He asks how a Brechtian alienation effect may contend with a “world of hyperalienation,” as depicted in Eye/Machine: “In short, [Farocki] traces such a grim telos that it threatens to nail us all…”[36]

In Deep Play, with no epic actors to manifest the presenting of collective, historically-specific human behavior, all that remains are spectators, taking center stage in the elaborate twelve-screen panoptic mediascape.[37] In other words, when players in a prison fight, soccer game, or any other socially-loaded ritual are abstracted and stripped of the unique cultural differences that mark them as humans, then spectators must recognize a different type of “A-effect.” In Brecht’s time, the informed observer was needed to recognize class conflict and to incite the working class into appropriating and transforming an unjust means of production. The stakes of this present-day, increasingly globalized theater is the ability not only to recognize an inequitable capitalist order, but also to interpret human culture and contestation itself, above and beyond an omnipresent, machinic eye.

The museum or gallery space, itself a controlled and surveyed environment, but one also geared towards thoughtful reflection, is a reasonable location to expect such a shift in engaged perception. The spectator’s cognizant observation is still crucial, but added to the toolbox, s/he must also adopt an ethnographic gaze – one of participative, embodied simultaneity – to combat such an entrenched, panoptic design in the broader social field. Moreover, as in Geertz’s analysis of the Balinese cockfight, this must be a collective shift in awareness.

What distinguishes much of Farocki’s new multi-channel installation work, as I have attempted to suggest with close analyses of Comparison via a Third or Deep Play, is its attempt to superimpose more responsibility on spectators, or as Benjamin would attest, “…this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is readers or spectators into collaborators.”[38] Throughout his practice, Farocki has self-reflexively acted as an “artist as producer” and attempted to catalyze intelligent viewing by an audience – with the aim of producing more informed collectives. Here that collective spectatorship is challenged once more: to transform an increasingly consuming, passive, spectating, panoptic, and objectifying eye – into an ethnographic gaze. Not only as expert observers, but also as observer-participants, through thick description, viewers will be able to interpret the objectifying yet discriminatory social forces that govern a contemporary world and to recognize critical Grundgesten such as Zidane’s head-butt. Farocki has raised the stakes of the game: in a theater of increasing alienation, we must learn to tell a story about ourselves to ourselves through deep play.