Resisting Simulation: Heiner Muller's Paradoxical Approach to Theater and Audiovisual Media since the 1970s

Abstract

Heiner Maller's writing and theater productions, at least since the late 1970s, seemed to tie-in with and thus buttress the very socio-cultural realities and type of cultural performances they, at the same time, were expected to resist vehemently. It even appears as if they simply reversed or at least contradicted what the author/director was expounding time and again. Two examples: His articles and interviews emphasized that their was no end to history or, more precisely, that history was, finally, open-ended. Maller wrote in 1979 that, Foucault's question as to what revolution is worth which price is a privileged question. He added, when Victor Shklovsky describes Eisenstein's film October as the end of the world of commodities made visual, he knows that the masses experience this end, for the time being, as restriction of commodity production.' The same year MUiller rather coolly commented on postmodernist discourses as a typical phenomenon of privileged intellectuals in the First World. Referring to the murals [Wandbilder] of the minorities and the proletarian art of the subway in New York that occupy a territory beyond the market, he hinted at the underprivileged masses' desire for fundamental societal transformation and at his own view that history was as an open-ended project.2 In 1980 he did his first-ever theater production, premiering The Task in