Situated Knowing

Epistemic Perspectives on Performance

Ewa Bal, Mateusz Chaberski, Ewa Bal, Mateusz Chaberski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367512941
• eBook ISBN: 9781000082142
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Performing Arts
• Index: Social Sciences

Situated Knowing aims to critically examine performance studies' ideological and socio-political underpinnings while also challenging the Anglo-centrism of the discipline.

This book reworks the concept of situated knowledges put forward over thirty years ago by American biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway in order to challenge the Enlightenment paradigm of objectivity in sciences by emphasising the role of the embodied and partial socio-cultural perspective of the scholar in the production of knowledge.

Through carefully selected case studies of contemporary natural, cultural and technological performances, contributors to this volume show that the proposed approach requires new genealogies of traditional concepts, emerges from encounters with contemporary performative arts or contact zones and may potentially go beyond the human in order to include non-human ways of being in the world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of performance studies, cultural studies, media studies and theatre studies.

Part 1

Knowing and alternative genealogies

Ewa Bal

Introduction

In a 2015 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk, Marina Abramović presented the aims and principles of the Marina Abramović Institute she was currently establishing. In her multimedia talk on the presence of artists and participants as inherent to performance, she set forth a vision of a new performative laboratory of knowing, clearly modelled on scientific experiments. Its participants enter the institute in white laboratory suits, having left their clothes in a cloakroom. They spend six hours separated from everyday life. Equipped with headphones and glasses, they move through consecutive halls, following a strict protocol, focusing on a deep and unmediated process of experiencing the world. After leaving the institute, they receive a certificate which resembles a traditional university diploma. The connection between performance art and laboratory in Abramović’s work evokes Sue Ellen Case’s reflections on theatre and the sciences:

Both the laboratory and the stage construct a space that is organized as alternative to the ubiquitous, pedestrian realm. Acting within that space requires particular codes of behavior, traditions of costuming, and training in specialized gestures or functions.

(2007, p. 2)

Case’s main aim was to show that the sciences and theatre similarly frame their actions to achieve a particular epistemic ‘truth’ effect. This is probably why the discussion on the liveness of performance (understood as the unmediated, ‘here-and-now’ relation between the performers and spectators) and its ephemerality (its brief duration and the impossibility of its documentation) has long dominated performance studies. The aim has been to explore the epistemic perspectives of performance and its ontological foundations (Phelan, 1993; Fischer-Lichte, 2008). It was this liveness and ephemerality associated with the aforementioned scientific procedures that problematised the epistemology of performance and created difficulties in transmitting knowledge about performance, other than as re-experience. This, in turn, eliminated the possibility of obtaining repeatable results (which became the object of reflection of various PAR methodologies; see Arlander et al., 2017), due to the changeability, fallibility and indeterminacy of human behaviour.

The theories of Peggy Phelan and Erika Fischer-Lichte have mainly been challenged by scholars exploring contemporary media culture. Philip Auslander, for one (2008), proved that new media such as television and the Internet, in showing the world in close-up and high definition, more efficiently produce an effect of unmediated and intimate contact with an object than such traditional, ‘direct’, physical forms as theatre and performance art. Thus, so-called ‘liveness’, understood as a product of realness and directness of experience, has no ontological basis, since it is in fact a historically contingent category, depending on perceptual habits and the degree and quality of mediation of contemporary culture. Through Auslander’s work, however, the category of liveness began to be associated with contemporary technological developments, and performance theory became entangled in the capitalist paradigm of incessant economic and technological growth (McKenzie, 2001), in a way losing contact with past cultural experiences.

A truly revolutionary reformulation of ‘liveness’ came in the work of Rebecca Schneider, who effectively undermined the ephemerality of performance. She was less interested in the ontological status of performance (as first-hand or technologically mediated) than in how performance changes our approach to the past as irretrievably lost, and the future as not yet available to us. Schneider proved that performance challenges our Western linear model of time as a constant progression towards the future. This is why her influential Performing Remains (Schneider, 2011) analysed performances which, in one way or another, revealed transformations of the past by reusing its traces. Those performances, including re-enactments of historic battles and re-performances of artistic actions, prompted spectators to examine strategies of framing the past in the present which transform the meanings and functions of the former. Focusing on the misrepresentations, gaps or overt manipulations of the past in the performances she analysed, she aptly demonstrated how performances unleash the creative, performative potential of the archive signalled by Jacques Derrida (Derrida, 1995). In these transformations, archives also evoke vivid future scenarios. Thus, performance as defined by Schneider ceases to be an activity whose laboratory agency is constrained to the here and now; it becomes a polyvalent tool for analysing a cultural reality in its relationship with both the past and the future.

In her recent publications (Jucan, Parikka, Schneider, 2019) drawing on new materialist philosophies (Parikka, 2012; Bennett, 2010), Schneider reflects on the relationship between the human body and matter, which even more effectively undermines the liveness of performance as defined above. Schneider questions the binary opposition between ephemerality and endurance: “the rapid slough of skin cells and the slower slough of stone might suggest that ephemerality and endurance are simply matters of temporal and material scale” (see Schneider in Chapter 1 of this book).

As such, situatedness of knowing as we understand it here is clearly not tantamount to liveness of knowing in its traditional sense. The chapters by Rebecca Schneider and Fabrizio Deriu gathered in this section attempt to debug performance theory and the philosophy of science of the ideology of technological progress. They follow a strategy put forward by Sue Ellen Case (Case, 2007) in reconstructing alternative genealogies of epistemological categories. Case departed from the dominant definition of the virtual as existing only in digital simulation. Drawing on the Latin etymology of the term ‘virtual’ and its definitions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dictionaries, she asserted that the virtual points to the potentiality of knowledge. This potentiality materialises in the figure of the avatar, which foregrounds the interrelations between spiritualism, artistic performances, and outdated and modern technologies. According to Case:

[w]hether considered as an actor on stage who corporealizes a character, or as an online figure that represents the user at the computer terminal, the avatar’s negotiation between the virtual space and the ‘real’ one is through performance. It acts in a way that bridges known experience with the unknown: the familiar with the strange.

(Case, 2007, p. 164)

The chapters in this section share the conviction that, in contemporary culture, the situational process of knowing is inherently channelled through various media – corporal, material and immaterial – and thus intrinsically carries the geological structures of ancient layers of experience and traces of the past. Schneider and Deriu put forward new genealogies of ‘medium’ and mimesis, indicating the epistemological consequences of reformulating concepts crucial to Western systems of representation and practices of knowledge-making.

In Chapter 1, ‘Slough Media’, Rebecca Schneider draws on the Latin etymology of ‘media’, defining them as intermediaries brokering human experiences and making knowledge possible through different historical moments. From this perspective, Schneider challenges received binary oppositions such as new/old, present/past and lived/mediated inherent to the discourse of both performance and media studies. Examining a remnant of the Roman Empire, she investigates how it affectively crosses various technologies (smartphone, computer), sites (laboratory, museum, performance scholar’s study) and bodies (living and non-living). On the one hand, drawing on the findings of media scholar Wendy Chun (2016), she focuses on the obsolescence of media. In her view, obsolescence is not about vanishing, but rather about a paradoxical process of media producing and consuming their new variations, which has become the very condition of their existence. The remains of the past, as they circulate from body to body through time and space, become obsolete, yet refuse to vanish. This media obsolescence becomes a condition of knowing, while neither essentialising events as archival objects nor fetishising their ephemerality. On the other hand, drawing on Jussi Parikka’s geology of media (Parikka, 2012), Schneider takes a closer look at slough media in order to show that they are not passive things, but sedimented sets of performances (live and mediated), which may travel back and forth in time, leaving affective residue in bodies they traverse. Thus, depending on the performance scholar’s physical, intellectual or affective point of access to animate and inanimate remains, they may offer yet another version of the past, present and future. This means that slough media are not stable carriers of meaning, history and knowledge, but rather constantly partake in the process of generating new ways of knowing.

Historicity and mediatedness of situated knowing is also the topic of Fabrizio Deriu’s chapter. In ‘Performing Arts as “Cognitive Hybrids”: The Power of the Performatic Spiel-Raum’, he proposes taking into account mimesis as a fundamental way of knowing in Western culture, though not in the more conventional aesthetic sense of representation (used in the arts from Plato until the present), but rather in a radical post-modern or pre-Plato sense of the word, as embodiment and re-enactment. He supports his thesis by making use of three scholars who have focused on mimesis in different ways: Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘mimetic faculty’, Eric Havelock’s analysis of Platonic refusal of mimesis and neuroscientist Merlin Donald’s theory of the evolution of the human mind (Donald 1991, 2001, in which he locates the pre-verbal stage of ‘mimetic culture’). Critically analysing the works of these authors, he amply demonstrates that mimesis, onto which ever-new representational strategies are mapped, is enshrined in the historically changing contexts of technological and social development. Thus, Deriu follows Hansen’s lead in offering an alternative understanding of mimesis: less a category of representation, pertaining to a particular relationship with a referent, than a relational practice – a process, “an activity of ‘producing similarities’ […]; a mode of access to the world involving sensuous, somatic, and tactile, that is, embodied forms of perception and cognition; a noncoercive engagement with the other that resists dualistic conception of subject and object […]” (Hansen, 2012, p. 147). Moreover, echoing Donald, he claims that mimesis as embodied knowing is entangled with cognitive habits and experiences accumulated in different epochs. This new representational system remains in our current mental architecture, so that the modern mind is a ‘mosaic structure’ of cognitive vestiges from earlier stages of human emergence. This means that each layer, is ‘encapsulated’, so to speak, into the next – and the opposite, each new layer ‘encompasses’ the previous one. From this perspective, human minds are thus “hybridizations, highly plastic combinations of all the previous elements in human cognitive evolution, permuted, combined, and recombined”. This means performance activities, and especially the performing arts, can be viewed as cognitive hybrid practices, constituting the most important Spiel-Raum (‘room-for-play’) for these leaps into our cognitive past.

References

1. Arlander, A., Barton, B., Dreyer-Lude, M., and Spatz, B. (eds.) (2017) Performance as research: knowledge, methods, impact. New York/London: Routledge.
2. Auslander, P. (1999, 2008). Liveness: performance in a mediatized culture. New York/London: Routledge.
3. Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
4. Case, S.-E. (2007) Performing science and the virtual. New York/London: Routledge.
5. Chun, W. (2016) ‘Did somebody say new media?’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Anna Watkins Fisher (eds.), Old media, new media. New York: Routledge, pp.1–16.
6. Derrida, J. (1995) Archive fever: a freudian impression. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
7. Donald, M. (1991) Origin of modern mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Previously published material
• Introduction: Situated knowing: From performance art to the laboratory of knowledge-making
• PART 1 Knowing and alternative genealogies
• PART 2 Knowing with performative arts
• PART 3 Knowing in contact zones
• PART 4 Knowing beyond the human
• Index