what is called presence
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What is Called PresenceGordon Coonfield & Heidi RosePublished online: 22 Jun 2012.
To cite this article: Gordon Coonfield & Heidi Rose (2012) What is Called Presence, Text andPerformance Quarterly, 32:3, 192-208, DOI: 10.1080/10462937.2012.691309
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What is Called PresenceGordon Coonfield & Heidi Rose
This essay rethinks what is called presence in a way that links important past and present
ways of thinking in performance studies. Bringing Wallace Bacon’s writing into con-
versation with Walter Benjamin we reflect from a phenomenological position on pres-
ence as an experience of ‘‘thisness.’’ Our aim is neither to defend presence as a simple,
ontological fact nor to dismiss it altogether as an anachronism of a premedia age. Rather,
we seek to affirm what is called presence as an historically situated mode of experience
with a view toward clarifying and revaluing the stakes performance studies has therein.
Keywords: Presence; Performance; Phenomenology; Wallace Bacon; Walter Benjamin;
Aura; Thisness; Sappho
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes withhumanity’s entire mode of existence.
*Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Mechanical Reproduction’’ (222)
‘‘Presence’’ was not always a word that encountered debate and resistance. Though
it may once have named, however silently, an ‘‘unproblematic field of experience’’ it
‘‘becomes a problem, raises discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces
a crisis’’ at a particular conjuncture (Foucault 74). In the spirit of an argument made
by Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, Jonathan Sterne observes in The Audible Past
that ‘‘authenticity and presence become issues only when there is something to which
we can compare them’’ (220).1
Communication technologies are at the center of these important ongoing debates
about both what performance is and what relation it does or should have (or not) to
presence. In response to Peggy Phelan’s insistence that ‘‘performance’s only life is in
the present,’’ that its being ‘‘becomes itself through disappearance’’ (‘‘Ontology’’ 146),
Gordon Coonfield and Heidi Rose are Associate Professors in the Department of Communication, Villanova
University. An early version of this paper was presented at the 2008 National Communication Association
Annual Convention, San Diego, CA. Correspondence to either author: Communication Department, Villanova
University, 800 Lancaster Ave., Villanova, PA 19085, USA. Email: [email protected] or heidi.
[email protected]. In addition to co-editors Bryant Alexander and M. Heather Carver, as well as the
anonymous reviewers, the authors wish to thank Bryan Crable and Shauna MacDonald for formative feedback
on elements of this argument.
ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) # 2012 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2012.691309
Text and Performance Quarterly
Vol. 32, No. 3, July 2012, pp. 192�208
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a number of scholars interested in the intersection of performance with new
communication technology have contested Phelan’s grounding of the ontology
of performance in presence (Auslander ‘‘Liveness’’; Chvasta; Fenske; Lindemann;
Weaver). We revisit this debate throughout this essay, but for the moment we simply
wish to remark that the anxiety about presence in performance is itself a product
of communication technologies. For instance, Auslander (‘‘Liveness’’) has argued
specifically with respect to Phelan’s claims about presence that our very notions of
‘‘liveness’’ are preceded by the condition of ‘‘mediatization.’’2
At issue in such debates about presence and performance is not exactly which
comes first*mediation or presence*for the relation between them might arguably
be deconstructed in the direction of either. We are not interested in returning to some
pure or*as Ong puts it in Orality and Literacy*pristine stage of human culture for
which presence without mediation was all there was. Nor are we advocating a return
to presence as a simple brute fact in order to stem the tide of the contamination of
(live) performance by mediation. The former is impossible and the latter untenable.
It is not the case, however, that ‘‘what is called presence’’ (Derrida 147) should
(or can) be reductively argued away or rendered anachronistic by communication
technologies*the rhetoric of advertisers and producers of such technologies
notwithstanding. Presence returns in those very arguments that would claim to
have done with it. For Auslander, presence returns as the historical and cultural
specificity of liveness and as that against which the struggle to elaborate mediatization
must be undertaken. For Chvasta, presence haunts the ‘‘virtual’’ in the being of the
performer before a mode of recording and in the being of the audience before the
mode of exhibition*however attenuated their relation. For Fenske, the metaphor of
answerability implies an aural-oral relation established by the aesthetic act through
which life-affirming finalization is achieved (for both performer and audience).
Presence grounds the metaphor upon which the ethico-aesthetic framework she
develops is built, but it also grounds the act of its constitution: ‘‘[t]he act of typing
these letters on this keyboard in this office at this time is never repeatable’’ (Fenske
11). Presence is there, in each case, as the trace of its other and as the movement in
which the ‘‘virtual’’ (an important new key term in the lexicon of performance) is
capable of actualization.3
The thinking of what is called presence, then, remains unfinished. We turn in this
essay toward a thinking of what is called presence and its relation to what is called
performance in an age of mediatization. This Special Issue of Text and Performance
Quarterly provides an opportunity to take up the problem of presence in the context
of our disciplinary past, of current debates and anxieties in performance studies
about media and its mediatization, and arguably of the future of performance.
We do so by returning to the work of Wallace Bacon to connect disparate areas of the
discipline, as Bacon’s understanding of text as Other, of performance as a ‘‘matching
process,’’ and of presence as experience forms a starting place for thinking presence.
We then turn to a phenomenological reading of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura to
elaborate an understanding of presence as an experience of thisness. In doing so we
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seek to think what is called presence in a way that links important past and present
ways of thinking in performance studies with a view toward clarifying and revaluing
the stakes performance has in presence. To begin, we turn to two cases that in many
ways constitute the heart of our concerns over, with, and for presence.
Sappho on the Beach
Interaction between the art object and the spectator is essentially performative.*Peggy Phelan, ‘‘The Ontology of Performance’’ (147)
We are on the beach at dusk on the Greek island of Santorini.4 Twenty undergraduate
students are doing solo performances of short lyric poems they have derived from the
fragments of Sappho’s work. Because the vast majority of Sappho’s poems survive
only in fragments, some merely a word or two, it is difficult to perform her poems
intact. Thus, for this assignment students combine the study of Sappho’s form, style,
and themes with their own poetic creations. With the objective of evoking the
immediacy of a moment, feeling, or experience, they are asked to read through all
of Sappho’s fragments, making note of any words, lines phrases, or stanzas that speak
to them in some way. They then create their own poem from some or all of the
fragments they have pulled from Sappho’s body of work. They may use only her
words for the poem. As part of the process, the students are asked to select a location
and time at which to perform that helps them to articulate the particular time and
space in which they imagine the poem occurring. They are encouraged to use the
environment, to connect natural phenomena or human-made spaces or objects to
the heart of the poem, so that the setting figures prominently in the performance,
whether as a literal or symbolic space. Some performances happen indoors; many
more use the landscape and the sky*a performance at dawn, at dusk or sunset, or in
the dark of midnight; a performer wading into or emerging from the sea, addressing
a cliff overlooking the sea, digging in the sand, jumping from rock to rock, or curling
up on a hotel bed.
As they prepare for these performances, students’ emotional responses range from
terrified, to wary, to curious, to eager. I (Rose) have taught in this summer Greece
program for ten years, and in Summer 2011 the students created some of the most
nuanced, rich, and invested work I have seen in the program. Initially, however, many
students expressed levels of reticence and even resistance that belied their investment
in the process. After much ‘‘I’ve never written a poem,’’ ‘‘I don’t know where to
begin,’’ or ‘‘I want to use my own words, not hers,’’ when they at last allowed
themselves to sit with Sappho’s fragments, many of them expressed with surprise:
‘‘[t]he poem wrote itself.’’ This collaborative engagement between self and text
continued for many of them as they brought the poem to life for the class, with their
investment extending to the space and to each other.
Our mantra for all performance work became ‘‘be-here-now’’ as a way to
encourage and name the heightened awareness of full sensory immersion that
happens in performance. As many of us who teach performance have witnessed, the
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level of preparation and strength of commitment to be-here-now permitted
occurrences in the performances that could not have been planned or anticipated
but that each performer felt free to incorporate: tears flowing; sudden gusts of
wind that lent unforeseen meaning to a particular phrase; the angle of light on a
performer’s face revealing an unexpected expression in the eyes. This is presence of
the sort that Bacon describes, presence produced by and through the
relation of performer-text-audience-place and established by expressive embodied
acts.5
In recent years, but particularly in 2011, a striking disconnect has been noted
between the moments of being-here-now produced and experienced in the students’
performances and how these same students engage Greece in their daily lives during
the five weeks of travel. Armed with digital cameras and smart phones, they in-
creasingly mark and document their experience with intensely self-consciously posed
photos. They update their Facebook pages with these photos several times each and
every day. They grasp, grip, and attempt to fix and control their reality by recording
and posting. As Susan Sontag explains in On Photography, the students’ photographs
serve as a particular, peculiar kind of evidence. As documents of ‘‘sequences of
consumption,’’ they prove the trip was taken, the tour carried out, that fun was
had. In short, they are ‘‘a way of certifying experience’’ while necessarily and at the
same time a way of refusing it by reducing experience to a search for photogenic
happenings (10). As a form of ‘‘surrogate possession’’ the taking of photos and
updating of statuses give ‘‘an appearance of participation’’; these actions convert
experience into ‘‘an item for exhibition’’ (155).
The students’ experiences seem unlived until they are represented in a photo,
posted, and displayed, underscoring Phelan’s claim that ‘‘the meaning of originality is
dependent on the copy’’ (Ends 9). The students observe themselves living this
life; they are tourists not only of Greece but also of themselves, their relationships,
their experiences and their surroundings. No lived moment, no moment worthy
of acknowledgement, goes unmarked. The experience appears to become ‘‘real’’
for them through representation, reproduction, communication, and citation. The
‘‘be-here-now’’ of their performances is attenuated, or even lost to them in these
everyday experiences. The students are too busy experiencing the recording and
exhibiting of their moments to experience the moments they fervently endeavor to
capture.
If the Sappho performances describe Bacon’s sense of presence, it is clear that
presence exhibits movement toward becoming, an unself-conscious matching of
self, text, and audience that creates something irreducible to the sum of these parts.
In contrast, the everyday lived photo moments reveal a hyperconscious staging of self
in relation to others that attempts to freeze a reality yet to be experienced, describing
something quite other than presence. Understanding the difference between these
two examples is at the heart of this essay, and the contrast will become more salient to
our argument as we continue.
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Bacon: Presence as Experience
Art requires witnesses.*Jean-Francois Marmontel (qtd. in Wagner 61)
Wallace Bacon was an important leader in the field of performance studies dur-
ing the latter half of the twentieth century. Under the disciplinary moniker of
‘‘interpretation,’’ Bacon played an important role in cultivating from the disciplines
of literature, speech, and literary criticism the branch of performance studies now
closely identified with the field of communication.
For Bacon, the text was central*not as a permanent, unbending, unitary object
or communicative force divorced from the knowledge of the body*but as an Other
to be grasped, engaged, understood, interpreted, and embodied by the performer
who wished to know it. Bacon’s approach both derived and deviated from the mid-
twentieth century development of New Criticism, a text-centered theory of reading
in which the meaning of a text is posited to reside neither in its historical or cultural
context, nor in the intentions of the author or its reception by an audience, but
within the form, contents, and structure of the text itself (‘‘From Elocution’’). In such
criticism, interpretive truth is stabilized and fixed by the interpretive object, the text,
read as if it were inside a box whose contents include all the parts needed to assemble
an adequate interpretation. The best interpretation is the one that uses all the pieces
in the box in the best way.
Bacon was influenced by the New Critics, but for him meaning resides not in
the text-as-object, but in an encounter with the text as an Other with whom the
performer develops a relationship. The performer studies the language of this Other
and brings it to life through what Bacon termed a ‘‘matching process’’ (The Art
37�38). If the performer successfully matches her/himself with the self/selves of the
text, then s/he will create a new ‘‘reality’’ in performance. This ‘‘reality’’ is for Bacon a
desire for a fusion of these selves, but a desire that is always frustrated by the very gap
that makes possible and sets in motion the process.6 It is this new reality which
creates an immediacy, a ‘‘be-here-now’’ quality that makes the performer vulnerable
to the text/Other and the audience/Others. The realization of this new reality is by no
means guaranteed. It may not happen at all. But Bacon describes what occurs in the
moment of performance when the body of the performer and body of the text come
thus so close as a ‘‘new presence’’ and ‘‘a joyful transcendent body’’ (‘‘One Last Time’’
357). The matching process, like Fenske’s ethico-aesthetic of answerability, is a non-
negative mode of finalization in which its Others (whether text or performer or
audience) are rescued from pure potentiality by the aesthetic actualization of a
‘‘new presence’’ that brings them together in contemplation and organizes them as
selves (9).
The two selves which engage in performance*performer and text*are delimited,
but the boundaries that separate them are permeable and, in a performance that
achieves a successful matching process, may become blurred to the extent that
parsing them becomes, if not impossible, irrelevant. Thus, though complete fusion
between these two selves is neither possible nor desirable, performance is fueled by a
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desire that might be characterized as a movement to decrease the distance.7 When the
text lives in fullness through the performer (and vice versa) to touch an audience,
in that elusive moment, a new presence emerges. Bacon provides an archetypical
example of this experience when he describes the solo performance of a scene from
King Lear by a student who had, prior to this performance, perceived himself solely
as a comic actor: ‘‘[t]he moment the performance began, all of us in the room
sensed that we were seeing someone we had never seen before, and that feeling of
transcendence lasted throughout the scene’’ (‘‘One Last Time’’ 357). This encounter,
in which an audience bears witness to a striking embodiment of a text by a performer
and a performer moves beyond self as s/he experiences the Other-text is what Bacon
means by ‘‘presence.’’
This is not a definition so much as a ‘‘calling’’ of the sort Derrida describes as the
movement of difference: the calling of what is called presence. The ‘‘what’’ in this case
is not the coincidence of time and space. On the contrary, it is described by Derrida
as ‘‘spacing’’ and ‘‘temporalizing,’’ understood as the un-nameable ‘‘primordial and
irreducibly non-simple’’ synthesis of traces that signification fixes as time and
space (143).
We turn to Derrida at this point partly to elaborate the sense in which presence
is less a context or setting in which experiences occur than they are experience of
something*of a ‘‘what’’ called presence. But we also do so to make clear that the
dismissal of presence in Derrida’s name is only partially accurate when it derogates
presence as empty ‘‘metaphysics,’’ as simply a play of traces of absence. It is true
Derrida critiques the ‘‘metaphysics of presence’’ in Husserlian phenomenology, but
his critique offers differance as the name for what is un-nameable: what is called
presence.
The second, more substantive reason for introducing Derrida is to signal our
desire to engage what is called presence phenomenologically. His name is typically
associated with deconstruction, but Derrida’s writing on differance is arguably
a phenomenology of communication, as is made clear by the title of the book (Speech
and Phenomena) in which the essay on differance appears. In Birth to Presence,
Jean-Luc Nancy approaches presence phenomenologically and, similarly, describes
presence as beyond description:
Before all representational grasp, before a consciousness and its subject, beforescience, and theology, and philosophy, there is that: the that of, precisely, there is.But ‘‘there is’’ is not itself a presence, to which our signs, our demonstrations, andour monstrations might refer. . . . Presence does not come without effacing thePresence that representation would like to designate. (4�5, original emphasis)
Nancy suggests that both the subjectivity of the subject and the objectivity of
the object emerge from a relation which the movement of each toward the other
effects. They are not impermeable, nor are they prior to that movement. And it
would be incorrect to insist on either as over or against, always-already-there for
or in-opposition-to, the other. The object, in all its concreteness, is not some
thing, silent and indifferent to perception, no more than a cogito is always already
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there, waiting for (or inventing) a world of sensible objects toward which its
sense might direct itself. The ‘‘subjectness’’ of the subject and the ‘‘objectness’’ of the
object appear together, simultaneously on the stage with which phenomenology is
concerned.
In other words, as Husserl famously stated, perception is perception of something.8
It is not a capacity of subjects prior to things. Neither is that ‘‘something’’ a quality
that exists independent from and indifferent to perception. Slipping from the trap of
either idealism or realism, phenomenology maintains that there is a commensurate
call and movement on both sides. The gridding of that movement (of difference,
of the there is prior to our representations) into Subject and Object constitutes
a retroactive projection of positionality upon a movement which ontologically
precedes both.9 The movement (of what is called presence) is ontologically prior to
its fixing and freezing into those temporal and spatial positions into which we place
things and individuals.
Playing off of Husserl, and to return to our claim of presence as experience,
presence is presence of something. Read phenomenologically, the several selves in
Bacon’s account*of performer, text, and audience*are invited to appear in an
experience of what is called presence. Bacon’s use of the word ‘‘presence’’ to gesture
emphatically at what is important about performance should not be taken as a simple
formulation, as what Ong describes in ‘‘here-and-now existence and activity’’ or
simply ‘‘actuality’’ (‘‘Presence’’ 112, 111). In the context of performance, what is
called presence should not be understood as some sort of Ur-setting, a context of
contexts enveloping any subjects, objects, and activities that co-occur. What is called
presence is more productively understood as an experience of acts occurring. It is
from that initial force, the movement of what is called presence, that performer, text,
act, audience, setting, and even ‘‘time’’ and ‘‘space’’ come to be named and nameable.
Building from this phenomenological perspective, and to develop further Bacon’s
conceptualization of what is called presence, we turn to Benjamin’s writing on aura
and ‘‘thisness.’’
Benjamin: Presence and Thisness
Critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin is undoubtedly most well known for his
essay, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’’ And that essay is
most well known for the conception of aura Benjamin develops as a way to explain
what is altered or affected by mechanical reproduction. Before moving directly
to those places in the essay that explicate aura, it is important to consider where
Benjamin begins. Like Walter Ong, Benjamin begins by contextualizing his arguments
in the cultural-historical and phenomenological shifts precipitated by technologies
of reproduction. He observes that perception, far from being a universally fixed
capacity, is influenced by historical and technological changes: ‘‘[t]he manner in
which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accom-
plished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well’’
(‘‘Mechanical’’ 222). Unlike Ong, however, Benjamin focuses on communication
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technologies without postulating a pure, originary state of presence and without
assuming presence as a universal, metaphysical quality of human being that has
become progressively twisted by technology.
The title of the most frequently cited version of the essay10 signals the tendency of
scholarship to focus attention on the ‘‘work of art’’ and on ‘‘mechanical reproduc-
tion.’’ This is consistent with the view of Benjamin as a Marxist critic whose method
was dialectical. Aura, in such a view, tends to be read as a quality of particular objects
(art) that is changed with the introduction of technological reproducibility. For
example, Owen Chapman claims aura is a ‘‘quality possessed by finished art objects’’
that ‘‘withers’’ under the condition of mechanical reproducibility (244). Douglas
Davis argues that far from aura’s being finished off by mechanical reproduction,
it is a quality transferred to copies from the originals via digital mediation (381).11
Aura is sometimes confused not with objects directly but indirectly, by equating
it with authenticity (Weaver 424). For example, examining the relationship between
live (‘‘original’’) and mediatized (recorded) performance, Auslander argues that the
perceptual category of ‘‘the auratic’’ as original, unique, or authentic is becoming
increasingly distorted or compromised, or is even disappearing, with the growing
encroachment of the mediatized into the live (‘‘Orchid’’).
However, we suggest a different emphasis: on Benjamin’s phenomenological
premise that history and technology shape perception and consciousness. From this
perspective, aura is first and foremost a ‘‘phenomenon’’ that ‘‘appears’’ (‘‘Mechanical’’
222), rather than a quality possessed by objects.12 Aura should thus be understood
neither as a quality inherent to objects nor a power inherent to subjects. It is rather an
experience. The quality and force of this experience is something Benjamin argues
artworks have that their copies lack. But it is important to note that art is not
Benjamin’s first (or only) example. He writes:
If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain rangeon the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience theaura of those mountains, of that branch. (‘‘Mechanical’’ 222�23, emphasis added)
It is an experience*of those mountains, of that branch*which allows us to form an
initial premise relevant to performance: aura is an experience of thisness.
The phenomenological emphasis in Benjamin’s discussion of aura and presence has
significance for understanding presence in relation to performance. Benjamin writes:
‘‘[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its
presence in time and space, its unique essence at the place where it happens to be’’
(‘‘Mechanical’’ 220). A thing, this thing, is subject to the vicissitudes of material
existence: weather, temperature, humidity; the environment in which it is stored,
displayed, or transported. In addition to air and atmosphere, it may be subjected
to sunlight, smoke, or water. It will likely have changed hands, and thus have been
handled many times. Historical circumstances may sweep it along in upheavals, wars,
conflicts, crimes. Technological change may alter its face as others seek to ‘‘restore’’
what has been damaged. The impressions of all these forces are part of its presence*they are the phenomena (the accumulated traces of having been), which Benjamin
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insists are ‘‘transmitted’’ in its being. Its ‘‘presence’’ is the condition of ‘‘authenticity’’
and not the other way around (220). In other words, its ‘‘history’’ from inception
to its thisness-in-perception is that condition on which the claim that it is in fact
itself is founded. And while mechanical reproduction may never physically touch the
artwork, Benjamin claims, ‘‘the quality of its presence’’ is nevertheless ‘‘depreciated’’
by its being reproduced (221). The only thing that can transmit presence fully*its
‘‘substantive duration’’*is itself (221).
We are thus able to clarify what is diminished by mechanical reproduction: it is
a capacity, perhaps even a desire, for experiencing thisness. If ‘‘production’’ is, as
Gumbrecht suggests in The Production of Presence, a bringing forth, a movement
prior to object and subject, time and space, then re-production seeks to bring forth
again. But such an effort causes that which is brought forth to differ from itself.
The movement of what is called presence is arrested through the special kind of
signification that is characteristic of mechanical reproduction.
Benjamin explains more directly that under the conditions of mechanical re-
production, a thisness-in-perception can be ‘‘comprehended as decay of the aura’’
(‘‘Mechanical’’ 222). Aura is defined as ‘‘the unique phenomenon of a distance,
however close it may be’’ (222). Re-production of those geologic formations or of
that painting is, Benjamin explains, an effort to overcome a distance, however close.
That diminution is accomplished by simultaneously ‘‘overcoming the uniqueness’’
and bringing the object ‘‘‘closer’ spatially and humanly’’ through placing its re-
productions in hand (223). A phenomenon of perception, then, is made an object
(a commodity) which, unlike the phenomena of those mountains and that branch, can
be expediently and endlessly (and cheaply) reproduced. We can then ‘‘get hold of an
object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction’’ (223). In place of
distance, uniqueness, and permanence, we are supplied with proximity, transitoriness
and reproducibility.
Benjamin then turns his reflections to photography and film. He juxtaposes the
‘‘artistic performance of a stage actor’’ presenting ‘‘to the public’’ himself ‘‘in person’’
to the screen actor who presents his performance to the camera, which then presents
it to the public via the exhibition technology of projection (another element in the
mechanics of reproduction) (‘‘Mechanical’’ 228). The theatrical actor’s performance
is ‘‘an integral whole,’’ whereas the screen actor’s is not necessarily so (and in fact,
even in recordings of ‘‘live’’ musical concerts or plays, there are multiple camera
positions from which the single unifying view of an editor is constituted and imposed
on the ‘‘integral whole’’ happening before the audience in the theater) (228). The
audience does not experience ‘‘personal contact’’ with the screen actor, and their
identification is thus with the camera and not the actor at all (228). For the film
actor, a body’s ‘‘corporeality’’ is lost. He
has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied tohis presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanatesfrom Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. (229)13
200 G. Coonfield and H. Rose
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In the case of film, the camera substitutes for the audience of the play, with
the consequence that the ‘‘aura that envelops’’ the actor ‘‘vanishes’’ (229) and the
audience experiences in its place a proximity (re)produced by the camera*proximity, but not thisness.
We are not claiming that the auratic as we describe it (an experience of thisness) is
only possible in the presence of great artworks, beautiful scenery, and exceptional
performances. Auratic experience is not limited to a class of objects, only to expe-
riences of thisness. For example, Carolin Duttlinger convincingly suggests the ways in
which Benjamin’s ‘‘auratic model,’’ since it implies from a phenomenological point of
view a ‘‘reciprocal encounter,’’ might relate to photographs (98). Aura may be taken
not as a quality of the object, of particular objects or classes of phenomena associated
with particular domains of aesthetic activity, but rather as a quality that emerges
from one’s encounter with, and perception of, thisness under particular conditions*those that induce ‘‘a distance, however close.’’ If we see a reprint of a famous photo in
a museum, we encounter it under conditions similar to that of a painting*and not
only because it is in a museum setting. Duttlinger argues that portraiture, especially
for example a photo from a family album of a deceased relative, is especially con-
ducive to such an encounter. Encountering thisness then resists the rendering of that
which is over against us as proximal, reproducible, transient.
Benjamin extends these reflections in an essay on book collecting. The occasion is
the unpacking of his library after two years without it, and after talking about the
thrill of acquiring a book, he writes: ‘‘[t]he period, the region, the craftsmanship, the
former ownership*for a true collector, the whole background of an item adds up to
a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object’’ (‘‘Unpacking’’ 60).
It isn’t simply that it is any book*as if any copy will serve*it is this book. It has a
distance (even as I touch its binding with my hand), a singularity, and specificity.
Its ‘‘essence,’’ which is diminished under the conditions of mechanical reproduction,
is not that which makes it a member of a class*its ‘‘book-ness’’ in some idealist or
formal sense. It is its thisness: that which causes it to differ from all others of its kind
and indeed from everything not itself. Mechanical reproduction in a digital age
means we can have ‘‘the same’’ book on our Kindles, in Penguin classics paperback,
as a photocopy, in a signed first edition, etc. Each is ‘‘just as good’’ or ‘‘the same’’ as
the others in the sense that they contain the same words in the same order. But the
thisness of a book, of a photo, of a print, is an experience from which mechanical
reproduction has tended to alienate us.
Auratic perception happens, and it happens in a moment of encounter, interaction,
perceptual engagement between self and Other*self and artwork, self and text,
performer/text/audience. Like Benjamin’s copy of Spinoza’s Ethics, a performance is
not just any performance*it is this performance of a work that is a text (not any text,
or even the same text twice). Though the text may have the same words, appearing in
the same order, and may even be spoken by any person*each time it is encountered
in a performance it is a text, this text.
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Performance as Thisness
Reflecting on this discussion of experiences of thisness, we argue that one of the ways
what is called presence has become obscured in performance studies literature is
through its conflation with liveness. Just as ‘‘oral’’ entered the vocabulary with the
proliferation of emphasis on what is ‘‘written,’’ liveness entered the vocabulary of
performance when communication technologies introduced the language and reality
of recording and mediation into our everyday vocabularies and experiences. Presence
as we discuss it here may have its clearest manifestation in performance but,
importantly, what we have explored here establishes that liveness is not necessarily
a predicate for experiences of thisness. Rather, as Auslander emphasizes in Liveness,
it has become a way of experiencing, of talking and thinking about presence that is
culturally and historically specific.
Our earlier discussion of students’ Sappho performances contrasted with their
daily experience in Greece brings into sharp relief the recognition that a phenomenon
may occur under conditions marked (aesthetically, discursively) by ‘‘liveness,’’ but
these may not be marked by the production of presence as discussed here. As the
Facebook example demonstrates, most ‘‘live’’ moments are not characterized by
experiences of thisness; rather, students’ ‘‘live’’ moments were marked, preserved,
and posted as evidence of living, of having lived. The liveness of a moment is
neither unique nor distant nor permanent in the sense Benjamin describes. No ‘‘new
presence’’ emerges in such encounters. Contrast such characteristically mediatized
instances with ‘‘thisness’’ as characterized by the Sappho performances*a particular
audience encountering a particular performer’s expressive enactment under parti-
cular conditions. A fragile encounter, an experience of thisness, is invited and
emerges. With this sense of what is called presence more clearly an affirmatively
distinguished from ‘‘liveness,’’ we return to Bacon, to some of the roots of per-
formance studies, to offer a view of presence that links past and present and helps
make clear the place of presence in performance, with or without reference to the
complications of mediation.
The preoccupation with the opening statements in Phelan’s essay, ‘‘The Ontology
of Performance,’’ might lead one to conclude that presence is simply the ‘‘now,’’ the
specific ‘‘time/space frame’’ in which a limited number of people share in the
proximity of living bodies an ‘‘experience of value’’ that leaves no visible trace (149).
True, there is a definite sense in which presence is tied to immediacy and temporality.
Looking further, however, the essay suggests alternative connections. Phelan also
describes performance as ‘‘nonreproductive’’ (149) and unrepresentational, as thus
embodying something other than its documentation. She suggests it ‘‘implicates
the real through the presence of living bodies’’ (148), which might be reread as
implicating bodies in experiences of thisness. When we consider these statements
in light of the heart of her essay, especially in view of her extended discussion of
women’s bodies and ‘‘ordeal art,’’ the time-space frame appears as a retrospective
gridding (as Massumi puts it) of an ‘‘experience’’ of bodies stressed, exhausted,
hurting*and the nonreciprocal suffering of those witnesses who endure their
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witnessing, the suffering in the witness for the suffering in the performer without the
ability to share or ameliorate or dismiss it. Phelan suggests an ‘‘emptiness’’ which
performance can ‘‘revalue’’ that shares in auratic experience’s induction of a distance
that cannot be brought near and that is unrepeatable as such. Whether it is a function
or effect of witness (or vice versa), presence emerges in acts and experiences not only
of ordeal but of witness, both of which are sustained by the vulnerability of bodies.
The suffering body of the witness and the body of suffering are not unqualifiable
‘‘things.’’ Insofar as there is an ethical encounter here, it is one constituted and
sustained in an experience of thisness. That encounter, the answerability of an ethico-
aesthetic act and the opportunity it affords for finalization in a witness, are grounded
in an experience of thisness that, we suggest, may be understood as the calling of what
is called presence.
Those of us in performance studies who were mentored by scholars like Wallace
Bacon and Dwight Conquergood carry with us three foundational understandings.
First, literature is an act of speech; in other words, for a work of literature to live it
must be embodied and its written words given voice and action. Literature is not
written to be read; rather, the writer translates thought to speech and then speech to
writing. A reader who either silently or aloud re-animates these words performs a
third level translation as words become animated and re-formed and reperformed in
a reader’s voice. In this action a reader gives a text presence*gives the text breath,
iterates something again; it becomes not a text, certainly not the text, but this text.
Viewed another way, speaking involves the experience of a process happening,
whereas writing involves an effort to congeal, compress, and control time (Carson
121). It is in that temporalizing process that we experience the ‘‘be-here-now’’ of
presence. When reading or writing, a given word ‘‘stands to you in a somewhat
perverse relation, permanent and transient at once as it is’’ (Carson 121). Re-
animating that word by performing its third level translation creates a relationship
and constitutes an experience of ‘‘thisness’’ involving speaker-performer and word
that cannot live in the text alone.
Second, performance [nee interpretation] actively cultivates a sense of the Other;
qualitatively stronger than perspective-taking, the sense of Other permits the per-
former to live inside an Other’s words, thoughts, emotions, and ways of being in the
world. The attempt to gain a sense of Other admits at the outset its impossibility; the
process is always imperfect. The process of gaining a sense of the Other suggests
that performance is always performance of culture and always involves an awareness
that text, character, author, voice, etc. are Other(s), distant and unique, commu-
nicating their duration. These must be understood in their distinction from the
performer, as a radical alterity. The work of an ethnographer, to reach beyond self to
gain a sense of the Other in the field, mirrors that of the performer encountering,
inhabiting and animating a text.
Third, to cultivate this sense of the Other involves what Bacon called the matching
process, the dialogic encounter between performer and text. Or as Conquergood
restated, the encounter involves one in an ethically based dialogic engagement
between performer/ethnographer and text/Other that acknowledges and respects
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identity and difference, and allows new ways of knowing, perceiving, and feeling
to be created. Conquergood can be seen as the bridge between performance of
literature and performance ethnography. Learning from and teaching with Wallace
Bacon, Conquergood met literature as he met people, through dialogic engagement
and respect for difference. This relationship with texts and performance gave
Conquergood a language and method for doing ethnography, creating a ‘‘matching
process’’ in the writing and performing of Others.
Extending the work of Victor Turner, Conquergood provided a profound com-
munication and performance-centered approach to ethnographic work, drawing
particular attention to the ways in which the ethnographer’s body matters in its
interaction with, and representation of, the Other, just as the performer’s body
matters in interpreting and performing the Other. Influenced by his own encounter
with Bacon, Conquergood changed performance studies when he focused our
attention on ethnography.
What may we understand, then, about presence-as-thisness from these three
foundational concepts*literature as an act of speech, performance as cultivating and
valuing a sense of the Other, and the matching process*introduced by Bacon,
reframed by Conquergood, and advanced by numerous other teacher-scholar-artists
in performance studies? At its most basic level, what is called presence comes to be,
emerges from, lives, and thrives in the energy generated among performer, text, and
audience. The body, voice, and self of the performer engage the text in a matching
process and draw the audience into a newly created world. Opening one’s self to
a text/Other changes both, and in the be-here-now of performance, it changes the
audience as well. The me, not-me, not-not-me recognizes the personal, the relational,
and the transcendent that comes to be in performance.
Bacon’s language of matching process and gaining a sense of the other through
performance supports and parallels Anna Deavere Smith’s description of her method
as ‘‘[p]lacing [her]self in other people’s words’’ (12). Whether the nomenclature is
documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, or performance ethnography; despite some-
what different metaphors and vocabulary; and despite different references to ‘‘text,’’
these two artist-scholars from the former and contemporary worlds of performance
studies recognize and celebrate the me, not-me, not-not-me, and the Other inherent
in performance. When we look closely at the past and present of performance studies,
we can see in the performance of literature and in performance ethnography the
central place of what we call presence as the performer attempts to gain a sense of
the Other. Whatever component of the process*observing, memorizing, learning,
dialoguing, rehearsing, interviewing*the doing of performance creates the possibility
for change: ‘‘‘Now’ is the moment when change erupts’’ (Carson 150), and this sense
of urgency in eros entails a sense of vulnerability to self and other. ‘‘Be-here-now’’ we
say aloud over and over in Greece, to absorb as fully as possible the need to attend,
both as performer and as audience. Contrasted with the lover [performer] who
relinquishes control and abandons her/himself to eros, the nonlover ‘‘does not invest
in the single moment that is open to risk, the moment when desire begins, ‘now’’’
(Carson 150). This ‘‘now’’ of performance creates the potential for change, another
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way of actualizing the virtual, within and outside ourselves, through an experience of
thisness.
Performance involves a momentary creation of something that is both real
and unreal, not-me and not-not-me. When we insist that performance is making-
not-faking (Turner 93) we highlight the truth that emerges from an encounter,
an experience of thisness that is bounded, cordoned off from other elements of life,
and aesthetically created*but we need also to highlight the power that derives from
knowing that performance is fictional and constructed. It is certainly no coincidence
that theatre evolved in ancient Greece out of religious ritual, that the Greeks
understood Dionysus as god of both theatre and wine, and that they called Sappho
the ‘‘tenth Muse.’’ As fictional encounter with truth as much as truthful encounter
with fiction, performance simultaneously takes us out of ourselves and deeper into
ourselves both as performers and audience; as a consciously constructed reality,
performance allows us to approach the Other, narrow the chasm between ourselves
and the Other, and through this transcendent moment create a space for truth to
enter our personal and collective being.
Conclusions: Imagining Presence
In this essay we are calling for a reconsideration and revaluation of some of the key
figures and debates that have shaped performance studies. We have attempted to
understand why presence continues to matter in performance and how through
performance we may consider and explore presence in relation to our contemporary
world. We are not interested in defining presence, not only because what is called
presence is by our own argument the movement of that which ultimately both
precedes and eludes the trap our definitions and representations set. The sort of
closure such a practice accomplishes is neither productive nor, perhaps, ethical. We
do not seek to retreat behind presence as actuality or the coincidence of space and
time, as if that would distinguish performance from mediation(s) or protect it from
mediatization. Rather, in emphasizing the movement and doing of presence, not what
presence is, we describe the vulnerability that experiencing thisness requires. In the
be-here-now of performance we are aware of the edges around us and the distance-
however-close that separates us. The reaching of performance, whether this reaching
is between performer and text, between performer and audience, between student
and teacher, between lovers (or all at once), is less a desire for proximity than for
the auratic, for an experience of thisness. Performance matters not because of its
occurrence at the coincidence of time and space but because it cultivates encounters
with an experiences of thisness: this performance of a text before an audience. The
performer knows the fragility of thisness. As Bacon writes, ‘‘[t]ext and performer
meet, and each time they come out somewhat differently, but the ‘place’ where they
come out is created by the interaction’’ (‘‘One Last Time’’ 357). Like eros, the
reaching for an Other may happen again, but when it does it will be anew and it will
be different in a way that makes a difference.
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We hope for a space in the field of performance studies (indeed, for the discipline
of communication) for grappling with, rather than assuming, clinging to or dis-
missing, what is called presence. What is called for is a thinking of what is called
presence as an exploration both of those places where it thickens into consistency
as well as those where it thins. We call for considering carefully what is at stake
for performance in the problem of presence, the ways in which presence marks
a problem or crisis, especially in light of a potential future in which it becomes
increasingly tenuous.
Notes
[1] Sterne’s argument is connected to a tradition in media studies founded on the work
of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter Ong. This scholarship emphasizes the
historical and phenomenological impact of communication technologies on culture. As Ong
explains in The Presence of the Word, our very ‘‘awareness of the succession’’ of media stages
from oral-aural culture, to alphabetic script culture, to the electronic and mass commu-
nication age, as well as our ‘‘wonder’’ about their significance ‘‘are themselves the product of
the succession’’ (17).
[2] Following Krotz (‘‘Mediatization’’), whose work figures prominently in the literature, we
distinguish ‘‘mediated communication’’ or mediation from ‘‘mediatized social and cultural
phenomena,’’ or mediatization (26). Krotz describes mediatization both quantitatively ‘‘as a
historical, ongoing, long-term process in which more and more media emerge and are
institutionalized,’’ and qualitatively as ‘‘the process whereby communication refers to media
and uses media so that media in the long run increasingly become relevant for the social
construction of everyday life, society, and culture as a whole’’ (24). It would be misleading
to suggest conceptual clarity and consensus in the literature on mediatization. However,
for purposes of this project, we suggest Krotz’s distinction of mediation (as a descriptor for
mediated communication generally) and mediatization (as an attempt to conceptualize the
deep and pervasive implication of media technologies, institutions, and processes in every
aspect of social and cultural life) is helpful in the context of our argument.
[3] Fenske and Chvasta have introduced the concept of the virtual to performance studies
drawing chiefly on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus
and What is Philosophy?) and Brian Massumi.
[4] The Villanova Department of Communication sponsors a yearly 6-credit summer study
abroad program in Greece, called Rhetoric and Performance in Ancient Greece. The assign-
ment described here was for the course Performance of Greek Literature which Rose teaches.
[5] We use this language of presence as produced in a manner consistent with Gumbrecht’s in
The Production of Presence. We return to this more directly in the section on Benjamin.
[6] We wish to evoke Carson’s insight in Eros the Bittersweet: that desire is a three-part structure
comprised of the ‘‘lover, the beloved, and that which comes between them’’ (16).
[7] We acknowledge the apparent terminological contradiction involved in describing Bacon’s
desire as a move to reach across a distance between performer and text. Benjamin describes
aura as ‘‘the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close’’ (‘‘Mechanical Reproduction’’
222), which would appear to make the desire for proximity Bacon expresses a desire that
destroys aura. For Benjamin, however, it is the condition of mechanical reproduction (of this
performance) that causes its aura to wither. For Bacon the desire to reach across the distance
is a desire for engagement and experience that can never be fully effected. For both,
understanding this distance as existing, ‘‘however close,’’ fittingly expresses experiences of
presence of the sort each values.
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[8] Husserl’s famous statement is actually ‘‘[a]ll consciousness is consciousness of something’’
(qtd. in Sartre 393, original emphasis). His point is that consciousness does not exist apart
from the life world of sense and experience. Though we are creatively misquoting, our point
for doing so is to clarify the important issue not only for Husserl, but for others in the
phenomenological tradition who have undertaken to develop and refine precisely this claim
about consciousness and perception, and on the basis of whose insights we have developed
the present argument (see Lyotard; Merluea-Ponty).
[9] We are drawing this notion of gridding and positioning as retroactive operations from
Massumi.
[10] Two distinct versions of Benjamin’s essay appear in English. The first appeared in
Illuminations, the first volume of Benjamin’s work to appear in English. A second version,
‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,’’ is collected in a book
bearing the same title. Additionally, material from the ‘‘Work of Art’’ essays, including
discussion of aura, appears in an essay titled ‘‘Little History of Photography,’’ which appears
in the same collection.
[11] Davis comes to a somewhat different conclusion, one that seems contradictory given the
positions he develops throughout:
We reach through the electronic field of ease that cushions us, like amniotic fluid, through
the field that allows us to order, reform, and transmit almost any sound, idea, or word,
toward what lies beyond, toward the transient and ineffable*a breath, for example, a pause
in conversation, even the twisted grain of a xeroxed photograph or videotape. Here is where
the aura resides*not in the thing itself but in the originality of the moment when we see,
hear, read, repeat, revise. (386)
Aura then becomes temporal, a quality residing in time rather than in objects. In a sense, this
brings his position closer to what we are claiming: that aura is thisness. But it does so by
returning to what we would describe, following Derrida, as a metaphysical conception of
presence.
[12] Hannah Arendt, who was both Benjamin’s personal friend and the editor of the volume in
which his ‘‘Work of Art’’ essay first appeared in English, asserts in the introduction that
‘‘what profoundly fascinated Benjamin was never an idea, it was always a phenomenon.’’ She
notes that ‘‘the wonder of appearance . . . was always at the center of his work’’ (12).
[13] The use of the masculine is reproduced here as it appears in the translation.
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