Determinism as Liveness: *Salome.exe* and the Theatrical Stakes of a Deterministic Generative Paradigm

Abstract  摘要

This paper takes *Salome.exe* — a work in which body, sound, and light are co-generated from a single Qimen Dunjia chart at a single moment — as a case through which to interrogate three theoretical lineages that a deterministic generative theatre necessarily touches, yet none of which anticipated it. Against postdramatic theatre's decentering of the authorial text, this paper argues that deterministic generation does not restore the author it displaced, but replaces the dramatic text with a non-authorial, non-narrative structure that is nonetheless legible — pushing the postdramatic beyond the mere absence of text toward a text that is present but unauthored. Against performance art's ontology of liveness, in which Peggy Phelan's thesis of disappearance holds that performance's value lies precisely in its resistance to reproduction and documentation, this paper proposes a revision: deterministic generation does not contradict unrepeatability but re-grounds it — no longer as an ontological disappearance that leaves no trace, but as a verifiable singularity, since the same chart, cast again at a different hour, would necessarily generate a different result, a fact that can be checked after the performance rather than merely asserted. Against decolonial formalism's long-standing suspicion of non-Western symbolic systems being extracted from their epistemic context and reduced to exotic ornament for a Western or Western-adjacent gaze, this paper argues that the disenchanting move central to the method — stripping Qimen Dunjia of its divinatory truth-claim while retaining its full symbolic grammar — constitutes not an act of appropriation but its structural opposite: a refusal to consume the system as content, and an insistence on using it only as form, on exactly the same theoretical footing as the twelve-tone row. The paper closes by returning to *Salome.exe* itself to show how these three theoretical frictions converge and are held, rather than resolved, in the same performance.

本文以《莎樂美.exe》——一部身體、聲音、燈光皆由同一張奇門遁甲盤、於同一時刻共同生成的作品——為案例，藉此考察三條確定性生成劇場必然觸及、卻無一預先設想過它的理論脈絡。針對後戲劇劇場對作者性文本的去中心化，本文論證確定性生成並非重新召回被驅逐的作者，而是以一套非作者性、非敘事性、卻依然可被讀取的結構取代戲劇文本本身——這將後戲劇的處境從單純的「文本缺席」推進到「文本在場卻無作者」。針對表演藝術的現場性本體論——菲蘭(Peggy Phelan)的消失論斷認為，表演的價值恰恰在於它抵抗複製與紀錄的能力——本文提出一項修正：確定性生成並不與不可重複性相矛盾，而是為它重新奠基，使其不再是不留痕跡的本體論消失，而是一種可被事後核驗的一次性——因為同一張盤在不同時刻重新起局，必然生成不同結果，這一事實在演出之後仍可被查核，而非僅能被斷言。針對去殖民化形式主義長期以來對非西方符號系統被抽離其知識脈絡、簡化為供西方或親西方目光消費的異域裝飾這一疑慮，本文論證這套方法論核心的去魅動作——完整保留奇門遁甲的符號機制、徹底剝離其占驗真值主張——並非挪用行為，而恰恰是它的結構性反面：拒絕將這套系統當作內容來消費，堅持只將它當作形式來使用，與十二音列處於完全相同的理論地位。本文最後回到《莎樂美.exe》本身，說明這三重理論摩擦如何在同一場演出中匯聚、並被承載，而非被解決。

Keywords — deterministic generative theatre · postdramatic theatre · liveness · Peggy Phelan · decolonial formalism · Qimen Dunjia · *Salome.exe*

關鍵詞 — 確定性生成劇場 · 後戲劇劇場 · 現場性 · 菲蘭 · 去殖民化形式主義 · 奇門遁甲 · 《莎樂美.exe》

1 · A Paradigm That No Genealogy Anticipated

一個沒有任何脈絡預先設想過的範式

*Salome.exe* does not sit comfortably inside any single existing theoretical lineage, precisely because deterministic generative theatre was not the problem any of these lineages set out to solve. Postdramatic theatre, as theorized by Hans-Thies Lehmann, diagnosed a historical shift in which the dramatic text's centrality dissolved, replaced by parataxis, simultaneity, and the body's own presence — but Lehmann's diagnosis presumed that what filled the vacuum left by the text would be the director's or performer's own decision-making, not a symbolic machine that generates structure with no decision-making at all. Performance art's ontology of liveness, most forcefully articulated in Peggy Phelan's claim that performance's being lies in disappearance — that the moment it is documented or repeated, it becomes something other than performance — presumed that unrepeatability was achieved through the performer's live, embodied presence resisting reproduction, not through a deterministic chart that could, in principle, be recalculated and verified after the fact. Decolonial formalism's critique of intercultural theatre, developed across theorists concerned with how non-Western performance vocabularies circulate globally, presumed that a symbolic system's use would either honor or violate its epistemic origin — it did not anticipate a method that deliberately hollows out that origin's truth-claim while keeping its grammar, a move that sits uneasily on either side of the honor/violate binary.

《莎樂美.exe》無法安穩地被歸入任何一條既有的理論脈絡之中，原因很簡單：確定性生成劇場，從來不是這些脈絡試圖解決的問題。萊曼(Hans-Thies Lehmann)所理論化的後戲劇劇場，診斷的是戲劇文本中心性瓦解、被並置、同時性與身體在場性取代的歷史轉向——但萊曼的診斷預設了，填補文本留下的真空的，將是導演或表演者自身的決策，而非一台不做任何決策、卻自行生成結構的符號機器。表演藝術的現場性本體論，其中最有力的表述來自菲蘭對表演「以消失為其存在方式」的論斷——一旦被紀錄或重演，它就變成了別的東西——這一論斷預設了不可重複性是透過表演者在場的、抵抗複製的身體性來達成的，而非透過一張原則上可以被重新計算、事後核驗的確定性盤面。去殖民化形式主義對跨文化劇場的批判，發展自一系列關注非西方表演語彙如何在全球流通的理論家，其預設是：一套符號系統的使用，無論如何，終究要在「尊重其知識脈絡」與「違逆其知識脈絡」這一二元對立中選邊——它並未預先設想過一種刻意掏空該脈絡真值主張、卻保留其語法的方法，這一方法在該二元對立的兩端都顯得格格不入。

This paper's method is therefore not to force *Salome.exe* into any single lineage, but to place it at the friction point of all three, and to ask, in each case, what the friction itself reveals about a limit already latent within the existing theory — a limit that the theory itself could not have made visible without an object like this one to press against it.

因此，本文的方法並非把《莎樂美.exe》勉強塞進任一單一脈絡之中，而是將它置於三條脈絡共同摩擦的節點上，逐一追問：這一摩擦本身，揭示了既有理論內部一個早已潛藏、卻唯有透過這樣一個對象施加壓力才能被顯現出來的界限。

2 · Beyond the Absence of Text: A Structure That Is Present but Unauthored

超越文本缺席：一個在場卻無作者的結構

Lehmann's postdramatic diagnosis is often read, reductively, as a simple claim that "the text has disappeared." A more precise reading is that dramatic causality — the logic by which one event necessitates the next through character motivation and plot — has disappeared, while the stage has been repopulated with other organizing principles: the body's materiality, the simultaneity of unrelated actions, the audience's own perceptual labor. What remains an open question within postdramatic theory itself is what, if anything, organizes this repopulated stage once dramatic causality is gone — and the most common answer, even among postdramatic practitioners, has quietly been the director's or deviser's own compositional taste, functioning as a kind of unacknowledged authorial residue inside a theory that officially declared the author dispersed.

萊曼的後戲劇診斷，常被簡化地讀作「文本消失了」這一單一論斷。更精確的讀法是：由角色動機與情節推進所構成的戲劇因果性消失了，舞台則被其他組織原則重新填充——身體的物質性、無關動作的同時並置、觀眾自身的感知勞動。後戲劇理論內部至今懸而未決的問題是：一旦戲劇因果性消失，究竟是什麼在組織這個被重新填充的舞台——而最常見的答案，即便在後戲劇的實踐者之間，往往悄悄地變成了導演或編創者自身的構成品味，這一品味在一套官方宣稱「作者已然消散」的理論內部，構成了一種未被承認的作者性殘餘。

Deterministic generation offers a different answer to this open question, one that postdramatic theory did not anticipate but that extends its own logic further than it has typically gone. If the vacuum left by dramatic causality is filled not by an undeclared authorial residue but by a chart — legible, verifiable, generated independently of anyone's taste at the moment of casting — then the stage is organized by a structure that is genuinely non-authorial, rather than a structure that merely disguises its authorship. This is the sense in which *Salome.exe* pushes the postdramatic beyond mere absence-of-text toward a text that is present but unauthored: the chart functions exactly as a text does, in that it can be read, cited, and referred back to, yet it was composed by no one, only cast at a particular hour. Postdramatic theatre thereby gains, through this case, a concrete answer to a question it had left rhetorical — not "what replaces the author" in the abstract, but a specific, inspectable mechanism that replaces authorial decision without reintroducing it under another name.

確定性生成為這一懸而未決的問題提供了一個不同的答案，一個後戲劇理論未曾預想過、卻將其自身邏輯推得比通常所及更遠的答案。如果戲劇因果性留下的真空，填補它的不是一種未被聲明的作者性殘餘，而是一張盤——可被讀取、可被核驗、在起局那一刻獨立於任何人的品味而生成——那麼舞台就是被一套真正非作者性的結構所組織，而非一套僅僅偽裝了作者身份的結構。這正是《莎樂美.exe》將後戲劇推得比「文本缺席」更遠之處，推向一種在場卻無作者的文本：這張盤面的功能，與文本完全相同——它可以被讀取、被引用、被回溯查核——卻不是由任何人所撰寫的，只是在特定時辰被起出來的。後戲劇劇場因此透過這一案例，獲得了一個具體的答案，來回應此前一直停留在修辭層面的問題——不是抽象地問「什麼取代了作者」，而是提供一套具體的、可被檢視的機制，取代作者性決策，而不是以另一個名字將它重新請回舞台。

3 · Verifiable Singularity: Revising the Ontology of Liveness

可核驗的一次性：對現場性本體論的修正

Peggy Phelan's thesis, articulated in *Unmarked: The Politics of Performance*, holds that performance's ontology is bound to disappearance: its value lies in being unrepresentable within the economy of reproduction that governs other art forms, since the moment it is recorded, it enters that economy and ceases to be performance in the strict sense. This thesis has been immensely productive for performance art, giving theoretical weight to the ephemeral, the live, the unrepeatable — but it also carries an implicit assumption worth isolating: that unrepeatability is secured negatively, through resistance to documentation, rather than positively, through any structural property of the event itself. Under Phelan's thesis, a performance's singularity is, in a sense, unfalsifiable — one cannot verify that it was unrepeatable, only that no acceptable trace of a repetition exists.

菲蘭在《未標記:表演的政治》中所闡述的論斷認為，表演的本體論與消失緊密相繫：它的價值在於，它無法被納入支配其他藝術形式的複製經濟之中——一旦它被紀錄，它便進入了那套經濟體系，在嚴格意義上便不再是表演。這一論斷對表演藝術極具生產力，為易逝性、現場性、不可重複性賦予了理論重量——但它也攜帶著一項值得單獨拈出的隱含預設：不可重複性是透過抵抗紀錄這一否定性方式被確保的，而非透過事件自身任何結構性屬性以肯定性方式被確保的。在菲蘭的論斷之下，一場表演的一次性，某種意義上是不可被證偽的——人們無法核驗它確實不可重複，只能核驗不存在一份可被接受的重演紀錄。

Deterministic generation revises this thesis without discarding it. *Salome.exe*'s unrepeatability is not secured by resisting documentation — the chart can be fully documented, the truth table can be fully published — but by a structural fact that documentation does not threaten: the chart cast at that specific hour is mathematically distinct from the chart that would be cast at any other hour, and this distinctness can be checked, after the performance, against the Qimen system's own rules. This yields what this paper terms verifiable singularity, as opposed to Phelan's ontological disappearance: the performance's unrepeatable status is no longer a claim that must be taken on faith because no trace survives, but a claim that can be independently audited precisely because a trace does survive. This does not refute Phelan's insight that reproduction changes what a work is — a video recording of *Salome.exe* remains categorically different from attending its live casting — but it detaches the value of unrepeatability from the fragility of undocumentedness, relocating that value instead in a structural property that documentation cannot erase. Performance art's ontology of liveness, confronted with this case, must therefore reckon with a mode of singularity it had not previously distinguished from mere secrecy or ephemerality: a singularity that survives full transparency.

確定性生成修正了這一論斷，卻並未捨棄它。《莎樂美.exe》的不可重複性，並非透過抵抗紀錄來確保——這張盤可以被完整紀錄，這張真值表可以被完整公開——而是透過一項紀錄本身無法威脅到的結構性事實：那個特定時辰起出的盤，在數學上與任何其他時辰起出的盤截然不同，而這一差異性，在演出結束之後，仍可依照奇門系統自身的規則被獨立核驗。這正是本文所稱的「可核驗的一次性」，與菲蘭的「本體論消失」相對而言：這場演出的不可重複地位，不再是一項必須因為沒有痕跡留存而被信以為真的斷言，而是一項恰恰因為痕跡確實留存、才能被獨立稽核的斷言。這並不反駁菲蘭的洞見——複製確實改變了一件作品的所是，《莎樂美.exe》的錄像紀錄，與親臨其起局現場，始終是範疇上不同的兩件事——但它把不可重複性的價值，從「未被紀錄的脆弱性」中脫鉉出來，重新安置在一項紀錄無法抹除的結構性屬性之上。表演藝術的現場性本體論，面對這一案例，必須正視一種此前未曾與單純的秘密性或易逝性區分開來的一次性模式：一種即便完全透明、依然存續的一次性。

4 · Disenchantment as Anti-Appropriation: A Defense Against Decolonial Suspicion

去魅作為反挪用：對去殖民化疑慮的一次辯護

Decolonial formalism's long-standing critique of intercultural and cross-cultural theatre is well founded and should not be waved away by any single defense, including this paper's. The critique, developed across scholars concerned with how non-Western performance vocabularies travel through global stages, typically targets a specific pattern: a symbolic or ritual system is lifted out of the epistemic community that gives it meaning, retained as visual or gestural surface, and re-presented to an audience — often Western or Western-trained — as exotic content, atmosphere, or spectacle, while its own claims to knowledge are quietly discarded or never taken seriously in the first place. Under this pattern, the system is consumed, not engaged; it decorates a work rather than structuring it.

去殖民化形式主義對跨文化與跨文明劇場的長期批判，有其堅實的理論根基，不應被任何單一的辯護——包括本文的辯護——輕易抹去。這一批判，發展自一系列關注非西方表演語彙如何在全球舞台上流通的學者，其矛頭通常指向一種具體的模式：某一符號或儀式系統，被從賦予其意義的知識社群中抽離，僅保留其視覺或姿態層面的表層，再被呈現給——往往是西方或受西方訓練的——觀眾，作為異域內容、氛圍或奇觎，而其自身的知識主張，則被悄悄棄置，或者從未被認真對待過。在這一模式之下，該系統是被消費的，而非被真正對話的；它裝飾了一部作品，而非構造了它。

This paper's defense of the disenchanting move at the center of its method rests on a structural distinction the decolonial critique's own logic makes available, once pressed: the difference between extracting a system's surface while discarding its grammar, which is the pattern the critique rightly names as appropriative, and extracting a system's grammar while explicitly discarding its truth-claim, which this method does instead. Qimen Dunjia's full symbolic machinery — the sovereign, the envoy, the nine stars, the eight doors, the ten stems' generative and destructive relations — is retained in its entirety and put to structural work; nothing about it is simplified into a visual motif or an atmospheric gesture for an audience unfamiliar with its workings to admire from outside. What is discarded is only the claim that the system predicts or governs actual human affairs — a claim this method never asked the audience to believe in the first place, and one whose absence does not reduce the system to spectacle but rather insists that it be engaged on the same formal terms as the twelve-tone row: a rule system whose authority is procedural, not metaphysical, and whose use requires no belief, only rigor. Read this way, the disenchanting move is not a lighter form of appropriation but its structural opposite — it refuses the very operation the decolonial critique names as harmful, which is the reduction of a knowledge system to consumable content, and insists instead on preserving exactly what a purely decorative use would discard: the grammar itself, kept intact and functioning.

本文對這一方法核心的去魅動作的辯護，建立在去殖民化批判自身的邏輯一旦被追問便會顯現出的一項結構性區分之上：其一是抽離一套系統的表層、同時捨棄其語法，這正是該批判正確地命名為挪用的模式；其二則是抽離一套系統的語法、同時明確捨棄其真值主張，而這正是本方法所採取的做法。奇門遁甲的全部符號機制——值符、值使、九星、八門、十干之生克關係——被完整保留並投入結構性運作；沒有任何部分被簡化成供不諳其運作機制的觀眾從外部欣賞的視覺母題或氛圍性姿態。被捨棄的，僅僅是這套系統能夠預測或支配真實人事這一主張——而這一主張，本方法從未要求觀眾相信，其缺席也並未把這套系統降格為奇觎，反而堅持要求它在與十二音列完全相同的形式條件下被對待：一套權威是程序性的、而非形而上學性的規則系統，其使用不需要信念，只需要嚴謹。如此理解，去魅動作並非一種較溫和的挪用形式，而恰恰是它的結構性反面——它拒絕了去殖民化批判所命名為有害的那一操作本身，即把一套知識系統簡化為可消費的內容，反而堅持保留了純粹裝飾性用法必然會捨棄的東西：語法本身，完整且運作著。

None of this forecloses further scrutiny — a decolonial reading might still ask who benefits from this structural use, in what institutional context it circulates, and whether disenchantment itself is a move more available to certain positions than others. These are legitimate questions this paper does not claim to fully settle. What this section has argued is narrower and more precise: that the specific mechanism of disenchantment used here does not fall into the appropriative pattern the decolonial critique has most forcefully named, and in fact structurally opposes it.

這並不封閉進一步的審視——一個去殖民化的讀法，仍然可以追問：誰從這種結構性用法中獲益，它在何種機構脈絡中流通，去魅這一動作本身，是否對某些位置比對另一些位置更容易取用。這些都是本文並不宣稱已經完全解決的正當問題。本節所論證的，範圍更窄、也更精確：此處所使用的這一具體去魅機制，並未落入去殖民化批判最有力命名的那種挪用模式之中，事實上，它在結構上正與之相反。

5 · Where the Three Frictions Converge: *Salome.exe* as a Held Contradiction

三重摩擦的匯聚之處：《莎樂美.exe》作為一個被承載而非被解決的矛盾

*Salome.exe* does not resolve the frictions traced above into a tidy synthesis; it holds them simultaneously, and this holding is itself the work's theoretical contribution. Within the same performance, body, sound, and light generated from a single chart at a single hour instantiate the postdramatic's structure-without-author; the same performance's unrepeatable, auditable casting instantiates verifiable singularity rather than mere disappearance; and the same performance's retention of Qimen Dunjia's full grammar, stripped only of its truth-claim, instantiates the anti-appropriative use of a non-Western formal system. None of these three theoretical stakes is staged separately — they are three readings of the same structural choice, which is consistent with this paper's companion research on cross-medial coherence: just as body, sound, and light are not three coordinated tracks but same-origin, isomorphically-derived readings of one chart, so too are the postdramatic, the performative, and the decolonial not three separate achievements of the work but three disciplinary lenses trained on that same structural choice — a claim about shared origin and parallel derivation, not a claim that these theoretical categories are themselves properties of the event.

《莎樂美.exe》並未把上述三重摩擦收攏為一個工整的綜合；它同時承載著它們，而這種承載本身，正是這部作品的理論貢獻所在。在同一場演出之中，由同一張盤、於同一時辰共同生成的身體、聲音與燈光，體現了後戲劇的「結構無作者」；同一場演出的不可重複、卻可被稽核的起局，體現了可核驗的一次性，而非單純的消失；同一場演出對奇門遁甲全部語法的保留、僅剝離其真值主張，則體現了對一套非西方形式系統的反挪用用法。這三重理論賭注，並非分別被搬演出來——它們是對同一項結構性選擇的三種讀法，這與本文姊妹研究對跨媒介一致性的論證是一致的：正如身體、聲音、燈光並非三條被協調的軌道，而是同一張盤的同源、同構推導讀法，後戲劇性、表演性與去殖民化性，也並非這部作品分別達成的三項成就，而是三種學科視角對準同一項結構性選擇——這是一項關於共享起源與平行推導的主張，而非主張這些理論範疇本身就是該事件所攜帶的性質。

The theoretical stakes of a deterministic generative theatre are therefore not adequately captured by any single lineage's vocabulary. It requires postdramatic theory to specify a non-authorial structure it had only gestured toward; it requires performance theory to distinguish verifiable singularity from the disappearance it had assumed was liveness's only guarantee; and it requires decolonial theory to sharpen its own critique by distinguishing disenchantment from appropriation, rather than treating any use of a non-Western symbolic system as suspect by default. In each case, the paradigm does not simply borrow legitimacy from an existing lineage — it returns something to that lineage that the lineage did not yet have.

因此，確定性生成劇場的理論賭注，無法被任何單一脈絡的詞彙充分捕捉。它要求後戲劇理論具體化一種它此前僅僅指向、卻未曾具體描述過的非作者性結構；它要求表演理論將可核驗的一次性，與它此前預設為現場性唯一保障的消失區分開來；它要求去殖民化理論磨利自身的批判，將去魅與挪用區分開來，而非預設任何對非西方符號系統的使用皆屬可疑。在每一個案例中，這一範式都不僅僅是向既有脈絡借取合法性——它同時把某些既有脈絡此前尚未擁有的東西，回饋給了那個脈絡本身。