UPDATE, 3.25pm: The Public Theater has now included a link to its statement regarding the show at this Web page for The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
Mike Daisey is absolutely right. As he tells Ira Glass on This American Life today:
Everything I have done in making this monologue for the theater has been toward that end — to make people care. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard. But I stand behind the work. My mistake, the mistake that I truly regret is that I had it on your show as journalism and it’s not journalism. It’s theater. I use the tools of theater and memoir to achieve its dramatic arc and of that arc and of that work I am very proud because I think it made you care, Ira, and I think it made you want to delve. And my hope is that it makes — has made — other people delve.
The definitions of and assumptions underlying the terms “journalistic truth” and “dramatic and theatrical truth” are often contradictory, and it is this contradiction on which Ira Glass and the staff of This American Life hung themselves with regards to their airing an excerpt from Daisey’s critically acclaimed monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Unfortunately Daisey is left hanging as well; as Glass tells him, sounding ever so slightly like a schoolgirl whose lover has betrayed her with her best friend,
I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk — people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying, “This happened to me.” I took you at your word.
It is not only the world of journalism, however, which has been caught off-guard by This American Life‘s retraction of their Daisey episode. Buried at the bottom of the New York Times‘ article on the retraction which appeared in today’s paper is a statement from the Public Theater, where Daisey is performing his show through tomorrow. Reporter Brian Stelter writes:
In a statement on Friday, the theater said that Mr. Daisey’s show reveals “human truths in story form,” and added, “Mike is an artist, not a journalist. Nevertheless, we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn’t his personal experience in the piece.”
This slightly mealy-mouthed admission of embarrassment might ultimately be even more damning than This American Life‘s hourlong retraction that runs on NPR this weekend, for it suggests that, even in the theatre community, the revelation of Daisey’s compositional practices elicited a sense of betrayal even among those who may share his definition of theatrical and dramatic truth.
Earlier in the article Stelter seems to engage in a bit of his own editorializing, gazing into the crystal ball towards the future of both Daisey’s reputation and the cause he’d hoped to promote. “By being tarred as a fabulist,” he writes, “Mr. Daisey risks hurting the cause he is championing.” Whether or not this is true — whether or not this will be an unfortunate footnote in Daisey’s biography or a turning point in his career — is a question beyond anybody’s capability of answering. After all is said and done, however, l’affaire Daisey does bring to the surface issues surrounding a political theatre practice which claims to be documentary in its form, whether political observations are made through an affable, talented storyteller like Daisey or through various forms of verbatim and documentary theatre from Erwin Piscator’s experiments in Germany in the 1930s through the Federal Theatre Project through Peter Weiss’ The Investigation and Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy up to The Laramie Project and The Exonerated — a tradition to which, in his own way, Daisey promised to make a contribution.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “suspension of disbelief” in his 1817 Biographia Literaria. He was writing about poetry, but it has come to be applied to every form of storytelling — including that of journalism. In this paradigm, the reader accepts implausibilities in a given presentation and shelves the critical faculty temporarily to receive a form of truth that lies beneath the given facts. We believe, in short, because we want to believe, and it is the responsibility of the artist to take us into his or her confidence. (This is not necessarily a hard thing for Daisey, who is a talented, entertaining raconteur, and the time I’ve spent in his company — both watching him onstage and in a very few personal encounters — has been nothing but pleasurable. And, because I like him [or his public persona] as a person, of course I want to believe him when he tells me a story.)
As I mentioned, this does not only apply to work labelled as poetry or fiction, at least not any more, and this testifies to the status of critical thinking, whether we’re watching a play or reading a newspaper. Because the Public Theater has not posted its statement on its Web site, for example, I assume that the New York Times‘ quotation of that statement is correct: the reputation of the newspaper rests on the readers’ acceptance that the details of this story are as accurate as those of other stories in the newspaper. I suspend my critical judgment — my critical disbelief — and take it as verifiable fact, though I don’t myself have the resources to verify every single fact in the New York Times. Now it’s true that, as the Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass affairs attested, I may be accepting this foolishly. But I must do so to a certain extent, if I am to believe that I have any kind of trustworthy knowledge about what may be going on in the world outside of my immediate surroundings. Responsible editors, journalists, and publications acknowledge this condition: it is why the op-ed pages are clearly identified as such, and why fiction is labelled as fiction.
A drama or theatre that claims to be a verbatim or documentary presentation of verifiable facts also must trust in the confidence of its audience to accept that these facts are true because the audience does not have the ability to assess this truth itself. We leave it to the artists, as we leave it to the journalists and editors, that what they are telling us is accurate in some smaller or larger sense. A political theatre that encourages audience members towards some kind of instrumental political or cultural action based upon the picture presented to them on the stage has the same obligation.
The larger truth of Daisey’s play may be valid in that artistic, and even in a journalistic, sense, but the discovery that a dramatic license may have been taken in the depiction of a few of the events he describes onstage undermines the whole. It’s not that if one event or fact is fictionalized for the sake of dramatic unity or a performative arc, all of the facts presented in the show have been thus fictionalized. The danger is that the work opens itself to that accusation, as Glass’ reaction implies, and thereby undermines its efficacy as a politically instrumental device. It becomes a good story. But for an audience member to make decisions about how to act in the world based upon that story also becomes far more problematic, and even unwise, for it is based on what is, at least in part, an ideologically-inscribed fiction. And there is no shortage of people who will recognize a chink in the armor as a place through which to thrust a deadly lance.
“My hope is that [The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs] makes — has made — other people delve” into deeper considerations about their place and responsibility in an increasingly globalized post-capitalist world, Daisey says, and indications are that many people have taken his words to heart. Nobody can take that away from him, and for that he should be commended. Whatever shame attaches to Daisey through this controversy is that the retraction of his story by This American Life (and a quasi-retraction of an essay he wrote for an October issue of the New York Times) will render the form of verbatim or documentary political theatre more suspect. Those of us who have always taken a critical regard to these works — who have always been aware that this material has been shaped by an aesthetic consciousness in the interests of making an engaging piece of theatre which justifies our suspension of disbelief — will be neither shocked nor surprised. Somehow the critical political theatre of Brecht’s Measures Taken has turned into its opposite. Far from a sense of critical detachment from the events taking place on stage, we are encouraged to accept them without question. What this means for any kind of truth, especially an aesthetic or dramatic truth, is profoundly ambivalent: it is our critical faculty that we leave at the door. Our naiveté, it seems, is more than welcome.
In other readings, Reuters’ Jack Shafer has an editorial on the controversy here; a transcript of today’s This American Life episode on the retraction, which includes reactions from Daisey, is here. The final Public Theater performance of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs takes place tomorrow. And in the meantime, according to USA Today, Apple has “another hit on its hands.”
It seems to me a simple case of competing ideologies.
From what I have been able to gather from afar, Daisey’s show leans on left-wing sympathies to fill the gaps, a particular standpoint that views shiny progressive objects as suspicious and is politically informed enough to compute the low probability of manufacting in China being all potpourri and lobster lunches. The story, that Apple exploits its Chinese workforce, is already in the mind of the audience, and it is a simple matter for the artist to articulate it. Whether or not the events he is speaking of are factual become irrelevant. This is not only Coleridge, but true of any newspaper or media that does not uphold journalistic standards, or some other ideal outside of circulation. (Any reporting about the current problems with immigrants and/or native indigenous populations of any given country seem to serve as example).
Brecht, I think, knew this formula, and its consequences, which is why his theatre became a reaction to it. It presented ‘false’ realities and in doing so became honest. The talent to create a reality is powerful, and power is one thing, but to what end we use that power is a political decision. As Karl Rove points out here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
This is the world we live in now, I reckon.
The savaging the Artist seems to be receiving for this incident is very unfortunate because of the possible victims you outline, but I also think it is a deserved fate for his work. Fighting fire with fire, in this circumstance, leads to a bigger fire. The Artist’s story can never be more powerful than that which is told about it, its form feeds disenchantment and mendacity, the philosophy those fables rely upon. The Artist cannot be more entertaining, more manipulative, more convincing than them. They do everything the Artist does, only better, faster and with more money. More and more.
You can only be more ‘actual’, and more human. This is what Daisey should be doing, in my opinion. The biggest loser in this case is that his audience becomes even more disenchanted, betrayed, they withdraw even more than they were before Daisey first asked them to ‘delve’. In this, it is possible he has acheived less than nothing.
On Youtube there’s a clip of one performance of his being interrupted by about 100 people storming out and someone tipping his water on his notes. It is interesting the way he responds. He begins with a “what’s going on?” look. There is a real moment of shock in his eyes as the man intervenes with the water, which is beautiful to watch because it is such a vulnerable performance moment in which a bold and thick performance veneer vanishes. After this moment of reality, he begins to perform again. But he cannot. He looks to the audience for sympathy. He seems hurt. He has a wounded tone in his muttering with the stage management. Then, Sheen-esque, you see the thought, or perhaps performance instinct, cross his mind – “OWN IT!” He gets up, wanders to front of stage. “Hey, do any of you want to stay and talk about this or do you wanna run out like cowards”. It is not a genuine offer.
Watching this, I think it is a cowardly response from the artist. He is met here with a resistence to his work, admittedly seems like an overreaction, but a rejection which takes the transgression of theatre etiquitte as its action. There is an opportunity for the artist to heal, to forgive, to review his work, to look inwards and create something new, to make a different and revolutionary offer. He cannot do this. Instead, he scores points from the retreating audience, taking pot shots long after they’re gone, infers they are infants, still sounding wounded, patronising even. He is not honest enough to be truly hurt. He fights their ignorance with his own.
It is a painful moment, to watch this opportunity denied, to have it presented to you on Youtube as if to say, again, “look what happened to me. I am the victim here”. If the artist is not capable of revolution, how can you ask it of your audience? How can you ask for change?
It is one and the same. If he got bigger, I think he would become Apple.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IeMtQ-SZtA
(attack at about 1:00)
Thanks for the round up, George. It seems Daisey – unwittingly, I think, in that I don’t believe he did anything in bad faith – encouraged people to do think of his work in the ways it was received. There’s no doubt that the facts he’s retailing are pretty much true, whether or not he personally witnessed them, as anyone who reads the accounts of Foxconn elsewhere would know; but putting his work in the context of TAL would only make the distinction between the ethics of journalism and theatre more confused. There’s a larger question underneath there, about the illegality of imagination in contemporary culture, and the passive acceptance of various kinds of authority, that I find disturbing. I haven’t seen Daisey’s shows, but it seems clear that he’s not making verbatim theatre, where one might be on surer ground. But he has created a persona who acts very much like an investigative journalist, and that brings him up front in conflict with the ethics and responsibilities of journalism. My first thought was the scandal around the fictionalisations of the Independent journalist Johann Hari, whose career was basically destroyed when it was discovered that he was taking imaginative liberties in his stories, placing himself at the centre of events or conversations where he was not present and, worse, which might not have happened. This is the same problem, but from a different practice in which fictionalising is part of the practice.
But I agree, what’s mainly disturbing is the complacent acceptance of the “authentic” in the audience. Brecht’s practice was about stimulating the performance of thought, both in his actors and in the audience. This is the reverse of that: it’s about different kinds of authority which annoint the transmission of information with veracity, and that veracity then driving action. I am mainly surprised, perhaps because I haven’t seen Daisey in action, that so many people who ought to know better took Daisey’s monologues as literal fact, which suggests a shocking naivety: it’s like those people who send wedding presents when characters get married in soap operas.
Just a note on the “willing suspension of disbelief”: Coleridge specifically was speaking of the fantastic, works like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in which it was wholly clear to any reader that the story wasn’t “true” in any factual sense. “My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” In other words, the disbelief comes first, and then is suspended. This work, it seems to me, asked for belief without any sense of disbelief, and therefore contains no moment of suspension, or of movement to what Coleridge calls “poetic faith”: and that is clearly its problem.
George -
The crux of this particular brouhaha is, as you rightly point out, the contrast — even conflict — between the standards of journalism and what Mike Daisey does, “theater” “peformance art” or whatever. Complicating the issue is the format of “This American Life.” The shows I’ve heard usually include narratives of various aspects of “this American life” that don’t fit into the strangling confines of mainstream journalism: strange, funny, scary, moving or just plain bizarre stories (often all of the above). The form is open, but often divided into “episodes.” In most cases, either Glass, a staff member or a freelancer is present in the story to some degree, entering from time to time to comment on and shape the story line. The presence, however discreet, of someone wearing the “journalist” hat allows the listener to assume that the tale being told is “true” in a factual sense — the events actually happened to the people who say they experienced them (or at least they aren’t lying); the attributed sources actually said this and that. When necessary, some details are altered to protect privacy or safety, and the listener is informed of this.
So far, so good. “This American Life” does, however, sometimes run excerpts of performances of the type that Daisey apparently does (I’m not familiar with his work). But again, the audience is informed of context, and the show’s staff apparently assumes we are aware that such a segment is distinct and not subject to the same standards as the “journalistic” segments.
However, if the show consists only of one such performance, then the boundaries will not appear as distinct. Glass and his staff are at fault for not, apparently, making this distinction clear. They should have asked more questions and either stated at the beginning that Daisey’s show was a “theatrical performance’ or whatever they wanted to call it, and that not all factual claims could be verified, or they shouldn’t have run it.
The rules of journalism are clear, or ought to be: Don’t make anything up, don’t exaggerate, don’t report anything you didn’t verify, don’t use hearsay; the journalist is not at liberty to fudge the facts in pursuit of some “larger truth.” If you’re doing theater, of course, the standards and different and perfectly valid in that context. In this case, the context itself was muddled.
I haven’t had time to collect my thoughts about Daisey, but I do want to point out that Ira Glass has had “fabulists” on his program before without too much in the way of ensuing controversy. We all know by now that David Sedaris – one of Glass’s biggest discoveries – fabricated much of his supposedly “biographical” stories. Okay, he’s just an entertainer – but he, too, is taking advantage of the “true story” buzz in an intriguing way. Then there’s the well-known case of Malcolm Gladwell’s fabrications on a different edition of “This American Life” (I believe slate.com debunked Gladwell some time ago). Mention has been made here of “verbatim theatre,” so I’d like to point out that years ago, the CBS show 60 Minutes pointed out many distortions and caricatured elements (generally of its Jewish characters) in Anna Deavere’s Smith seminal performance, “Fires in the Mirror.” And Ira Glass might take a hard look at other art works with claims to being “journalism.” Tom Wolfe has been accused of several fabrications, Hunter S. Thompson made things up wholesale, and of course by now Capote’s “In Cold Blood” has been picked apart as a crazy quilt of imagined or falsified scenes stitching together the occasional chunk of hard data. So why aren’t Wolfe, Capote, Thompson, Smith, Gladwell, and Sedaris being repudiated the way Daisey is (in some quarters)? The answer, of course, is that it is politically expedient to bury Daisey’s narrative, which if not personally true, is nevertheless journalistically true, in that as I understand it all the conditions he describes have been documented by, yes, journalists. The point is that maybe the rules of journalism should be clear, but in practice they rarely are; and I think in the end Ira Glass is shocked, shocked by Mike Daisey merely because Daisey lied to HIM, personally; to most journalists that’s the only real ethical no-no.
Also, the way for this blowback was prepared through the literary world’s (and, NPR’s) recent promotion of The Lifespan of a Fact, a book that documented one fact checker’s resistance to one author’s creative nonfiction techniques… and deprecated the idea of necessary truthfulness further, by being constructed using creative nonfiction techniques.
Combined with the ‘death of journalism’ constantly discussed in that same media, I think the era of book publishers marketing fictional memoirs as nonfiction at least is openly stated as standard operating procedure. This, in its way, is a failure of publishers in considering true nonfiction as worth the expense. It’s the smart set’s equivalent of accounting control fraud — if the truth no longer sells, then make bank until the system collapses.
Because, once the environment of defamation litigation catches up with this blurring of lines, our system of protecting truth-tellers from larger forces *will* collapse. If everyone who writes a memoir, and ultimately, all nonfiction, could be assumed to be lying, the truth no longer exists as its own defense. Like a witness impeached through a trivial lie on the stand, any narrative that can be found to have flaws in it will be torn apart.
If I were conspiracy minded, I’d assume that intelligence groups and private political factions fostered the development of creative nonfiction as they did abstract expressionism, to make consumers of said art more detached, cynical, and certainly less susceptible to non-standard political persuasion.
One of the more interesting dimensions of the New Journalism of the 1970s (Wolfe, Capote, Thompson, Didion) — and This American Life‘s rather watery version of it, in its personal essays and anecdotal monologues — was not necessarily that the journalists themselves were unreliable narrators. They were. But one of the implications and lessons of that New Journalism was that we should accept that ALL narrators, whether in novels or magazines or newspapers, are unreliable to a greater or lesser extent. Capote was not there to record verbatim the dialogue between Herbert Clutter and Perry Smith; one of Wolfe’s targets was the susceptibility of the liberal classes to more politically radical rhetoric; and of course Thompson describes ingesting an impressive amount of psychoactive substances. That said, Thompson’s books on the 1972 election and the ideals that Las Vegas and the American Dream represent are still memorable and insightful.
The Culture Industry has encouraged us to lose ourselves in the constructs of entertainment (and news has become a form of entertainment too), whether it’s presented as fiction or fact. The last thing it wants us to do is to exercise our responsibility and agency as audience members to question what we’re being told from the outset, especially from those people who say, “I am telling you the truth” — often an indication that we’re being lied to. This isn’t nihilistic cynicism; it’s healthy skepticism. We all wish that those who watch Fox News would question what they’re being sold as truth on that network; we’re hypocrites, especially if we go into a theatre (which is the site of aesthetic fiction — the lie that tells the truth, as Picasso put it), a site of imagination and dreams, if we don’t do the same.
I think the point is that Mike Daisey “told the truth” about Apple, even if he lied to Ira Glass, and even if he pretended to witness things at Apple’s factories that did in fact happen, but which he wasn’t personally party to. He certainly was as truthful as Capote or Thompson (and probably more so). But it seems that the construct of “New Journalism” can be flipped at will, if enough political pressure is applied.
That certainly seems to be the case here. I haven’t heard about Glass retracting the podcast of the Gladwell piece that Art talks about today, or the Santaland Diaries that TAL runs every December (or the “Peter Pan” piece that runs every pledge week), because they’re not factually verifiable.
Nonetheless, I do think that my original points about the ways in which this compromises the popular notion of documentary or verbatim theatre still stand — not as a final word about it, but as a revelation of the audience’s assumptions towards such theatre pieces, and the extent to which performers and artists play into these assumptions.
Framing is crucial. Although TAL has run creative responses before, they were always prefaced with an introduction that indicated precisely what they were. In this case, the program presented a work of theatre, on Daisey’s say-so, as if it were as subject to verification as a work of journalism, and found out that on the contrary, it was a work in which imagination had been used to embellish the known facts. (And if it was broadly true, the result was, as labour activists in China have pointed out, also misleading in several ways).
I feel some sympathy for Ira Glass: in a world in which much journalism is dodgy, he clearly values the integrity of his program highly, and felt betrayed. The only way to restore it was by hanging Mike Daisey, which of course focused attention on TAL’s attention to factual evidence and restores their reputation, and then some. That retraction is certainly some extraordinary radio, and makes vastly uncomfortable listening.
Frankly, as far as journalism or evidence-based argument is concerned, I think Glass was absolutely correct to do what he did. And the whole story shows what evidence-based argument is about, and fosters a critical approach to reporting of all kinds. In days of constant unchecked and damaging disinformation, cheerfully retailed by the media, about almost every major issue – especially, say, the libellng of scientists on the issue of climate change – such work is admirable and necessary. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think, in the broader reactions to this sorry tale, that there’s not a lot of pious hypocrisy going on within journalism. If journalism has problems in the perception of its ethics, journalism itself is mainly to blame. Creative nonfiction has nothing to do with this. For one thing, it’s been around a long time – think Daniel Defoe’s Diary of a Plague Year.
The questions for theatre are more complex, and here I agree with George. Perhaps the sense of betrayal and dismay that many members of Daisey’s audience are expressing is most pertinent. If Daisey’s perceived personal experience underwrote the emotional power of the show, which seems to have been the case, and that experience turns out to have been untrue, then that sense of betrayal is understandable. It’s also maybe the most damaging aspect of the whole sorry affair, since by accepting the terms of journalism as being the same as those of theatre, it undermines and obscures what truthfulness might be in the theatre,
Look, it’s time we all grew up about “verbatim theatre,” okay? I have to post about this in depth, I know. No one has really probed verbatim theatre for the disturbing things it says about our current stage culture – the way it reveals our distrust of authorial imagination, the way it pretends to an “objectivity” that maybe fools undergraduates but should never fool an adult. It’s part of a whole phony millennial cultural discourse – from “Freakonomics” on down – that imagines it has triumphed over received political attitudes with some sort of theatrical empiricism (but often only re-inforces received political attitudes).
And sorry, Allison, but I have to disagree with you. Glass’s program is hardly “evidence-based journalism;” it’s amusing to me that you could recoil from Daisey and yet still be tricked by Glass’s only-slightly-more-sophisticated new-journalism schtick. We’re not discussing black and white here; we’re arguing about a light shade of gray getting up in arms about a darker shade of gray.
I also have to re-iterate my impression of Glass: he is reacting to a personal betrayal; Daisey did, indeed, trick him, and for once he was out of control of the level of fudging on his own program. I understand that reaction, of course, but I can’t put Glass on a pedestal for it.
Well, I made the point about authorial imagination in my own post on the matter, and have made it several times in reviews of works of theatre. And also have expressed my scepticism about much of the journalistic reaction to this story, although I think the TAL retraction is, in fact, an excellent work of journalism. (I initially trained as a journalist, and did my cadetship on a daily paper here, so I do know how it works in action). My belief in the necessity of authorial imagination also makes me think that evidence-based argument is a necessary part of the public discourse. And it’s hard to deny in the wacko arguments that are occurring in the public sphere – on evolution, women’s rights to their own bodies, climate change and so on – that’s something that has been swept aside in favour of a paranoid irrationality that is predicated on scorn for “expert” knowledge, and which only serves to make a public manipulable to powerful interests. Artistic imagination offers something else to this, something equally essential to understanding. I think they both need each other, and the degradation of one goes hand in hand with the degradation of the other. Not that you’ll convince many journalists of the multiple nature of truth.
My understanding of verbatim theatre (as opposed to documentary theatre) is that it is so called because it employs text that is on record. Eg, Weiss’s The Investigation. That doesn’t preclude it from imaginative treatment, if it is used in a work of art.
When Mike Daisey says in the program that this is a work of nonfiction, it seems to me that he’s stacked the deck. He’s no longer leaving it to our imagination as an audience to decide what’s embellished, he’s telling us that it’s all true – that he heard every quote, met every person he mentions in the monologue.
It’s like writing a mystery novel and leaving out one fact until the very end so that it would be impossible for the reader to guess the outcome. You just end up feeling angry and cheated.
Personally, I wasn’t completely taken in from the beginning. The quotes and scenarios sounded too perfect to be true. I mean, we’ve paid $80 – we want drama, emotion, conflict. I wondered what was embellished. I also wondered how someone who didn’t speak the language or know the culture could get workers who live in a repressive, totalitarian country to talk to him so freely, even through an interpreter.
So I can’t say I felt disappointed but rather validated that my skepticism turned out to be warranted.
I continue to be a bit perplexed by the willingness with which so many respondents to this issue — not here, so much, but elsewhere — have abdicated their responsibility to determine whether a story they’ve been told is the truth or not (or somewhere in between). Personally, I never abdicate this responsibility. In the contract I make with a storyteller (to use Oskar Eustis’ phrase), I am a willing and conscious signatory. I know the risks, and if (as in this instance) I make a bad deal… caveat emptor. I’ll be smarter the next time around.