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The Afterlife of Performance

2020; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 46; Issue: 2-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.2020.a903545

1913-4835

Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Darren Wershler,

Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

The Afterlife of Performance Jason Camlot (bio), Annie Murray (bio), and Darren Wershler (bio) The afterlife of performance is riddled with assumptions about life, death, and time. One major assumption is the possibility of distinction between liveness and something else—not so much death as the "afterlifeness" of various theorizations of media in the age of the zombie (Žižek, Parikka and Hertz, Sconce). Philip Auslander is particularly helpful on the subject of liveness when he identifies it as a historically contingent and relational concept "used to distinguish among cultural forms and experiences," and then, on the matter of method, remarks that "the values attributed to live performance must be discussed from the perspective of particular cultural contexts" (63). While we agree with Auslander that any attempt to generalize assertions about a live performance are bound to be flawed, in this article we are not really interested in how particular instantiations of liveness or presence are produced (Gumbrecht, Production of Presence xiii–xvi). Rather, we are concerned with the particulars of how the afterlife of performance is produced, managed, and maintained by the application of various cultural techniques, in Bernhard Siegert's sense. Cultural techniques incite "a more or less complex actor network that comprises technological objects as well as the operative chains they are part of and that configure and constitute them" (Siegert 11). In our case, [End Page 19] we want to consider how a network of particular people using particular hardware to capture a performance in a particular space on particular kinds of storage media combines with specific techniques such as mastering, editing, filing, labeling, holding (that is, long periods of neglecting), digitizing, remastering, and circulating in order to produce our sense of the relative worth of a recording of another group of particular people chanting, talking, and reading. What we can see in this assemblage, if we examine it closely, is the inner workings of a mechanism that produces literary value. The afterlife of performance begins with an understanding of the infrastructure that supports its birth and lives on in our critical accounts of its circulation. Our particular object of study is a recording of Allen Ginsberg's 1969 reading as part of the "Poetry 4" series at Sir George Williams University (sgwu) in Montreal. This 1969–1970 iteration of the decade-long reading series was mostly organized by George Bowering. Ginsberg was the third reader in a series that included Jerome Rothenberg, bill bissett, Milton Kessler, Gladys Hindmarch, Stan Persky, Diane Wakoski, Frank Davey, Robert Hogg, Ron Loewinsen, David Ball, Tom Raworth, Al Purdy, and Joel Oppenheimer. A digitized version of this recording is available as part of the SpokenWeb project (Ginsberg). This recording was never designed to circulate as a final product; it is documentary in nature. We describe it as a material trace of a performance—it provides a sense that something has taken place, probably something important, but it is not a finished object in the way that even a live album is finished. The status of this object is never very clear-cut, and our collective sense of it can and does change as the recording circulates. The Ginsberg recording is an excellent example of how close reading methodology fails when confronted with the afterlife of performance. Infamously, Ginsberg brought members of the Montreal Hare Krishna sect to the performance with him, and they chanted for an indeterminate amount of time before Ginsberg began to read and sing himself. Rather than an instrumental communication act that strives to convey some vital piece of information, chant itself is a form of what James Carey would call "ritual communication." From a ritual perspective, "communication is linked to terms such as 'sharing,' 'participation,' 'association,' 'fellowship,' and 'the possession of a common faith' … A ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs" (15). Through the creation of a specific type of temporal experience, ritual communication builds a [End Page 20] sense of belonging, and the exchange that occurs is affective rather than semantic. It is impossible to record...