In the latest issue of Performance Philosophy Journal (vol 9) Theron Schmidt writes about the problem of the online lecture and refers to performative writing and performance writing in ways that reminded me of ‘the problem of the performative text’ and the book that Pilvi Porkola edits, where I am supposed to write about my Sundays with a Pine. In the following I am thus not referencing the main points of the text but pick some quotes of interest for my concerns.
 
Schmidt defines performance as “that which attempts to hold that within which it itself is held”, and “may take the form of an explicit theatricality, foregrounding and reflecting upon the conditions of being seen and being heard”, with “both dramatic as well as political dimensions.” This leads him to Hannah Arendt’s descriptions of ‘spaces of appearance’, which predate a formal constitution of the public realm. “‘Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them. The stage is common to all who are alive’ (Arendt 1978, 21).” Since this stage is not common, one definition of politics could be a distinction between what is and what is not common to all. This brings him to Judith Butler, who writes that “certain actors and actions are deemed ‘prepolitical’ or ’extrapolitical’; ‘they break into the sphere of appearance as from the outside’ (Butler 2015, 78)”. Butler “argues that ‘any conception of the political has to take into account what operation of power demarcates the political from the prepolitical’ (Butler 2015, 205). This, in turn, leads him to “Jacques Rancière’s provocations around the distribution or apportionment of what is and isn’t sensible”.
 
Schmidt states that “the appearance of politics is dependent upon a politics of appearance, one that attends to the conditions that make politics possible”. Following Butler, he notes that “the claiming of the right to appear is a performative politics, where the performative is that which generates the conditions that allow the performative to be recognized as such.” He thereby suggests “that a self -reflexive attention to the conditions of appearance — the stage that supports certain kinds of speech and action —is, or at least can be, a political domain.” According to him “words and gestures that are explicitly framed as ‘performance’ can also reach outside their frame from within, claiming the circumstances under which they are produced as the material of the performance itself.”
 
Schmidt uses as an example a piece of performance writing using the page as a stage, which is “performative in that it not only describes these dimensions and affordances of the printed page, but also enacts those encounters. It is bound up in its own material conditions even as it analyses them.” Performance-writing is characterised by “its self-reflexivity about the context in which it appears.” Schmidt quotes Della Pollock, who notes that
 
“Performative writing is thus no more or less formally intelligible than a road sign or a landmark: its styles may be numbered, taught, and reproduced, but its meanings are contextual. It takes its value from the context – map in which it is located and which it simultaneously marks, determines, transforms.” (Pollock [1995] 1998, 79)
 
Schmidt suggests that all writing could be performance-writing. “To describe a thing is to give it a context, and the context shapes the meaning; or, to put it another way, how we talk about the work is the work (Schmidt 2018).” Moreover, “discourse, description and performance, are not ontologically distinct from each other, but mutually constitutive”.
 
Whereas performance writing plays with the page as contextual frame, “the performance lecture takes not only the conditions of textuality but also those of the apparent liveness of speech, and the claims to authority of the lecture, as both its subject and its terms of interrogation.” He notes with Clio Unger (2021), that “the ways in which the lecture-performance both thematizes the politics of representation and also enacts those very politics make it a useful tool for marginalized voices to intervene within hierarchies of knowledge production.”
 
Schmidt further suggests that in a smilar way as “all writing might be considered performance-writing”, we could claim that “all lectures are lecture-performances” and every lecture “reproduces a performance of what a classroom is: what counts as knowledge, what learning looks like, and what forms of relationship and responsibility are demanded of those present.” And “the ‘problem’ of the online lecture might be a chance to think these qualities anew.”
 
Well, the relevance of context is a theme I never get past, it seems. But if context is so relevant and defining, it might be worthwhile to try to change context, too. The idea of the lecture performance, however, is not so familiar, although I have been interested in it for a while. Somehow I never come to really explore it, all lecture performances I plan tend to end up as video essays instead. But I guess much of what Schmidt notes about performance writing and performance lectures could be transposed to video essay as well.
 
 
Theron Schmidt “By the Time you rad this it is already too late. The problem of the online lecture.” Performance Philosophy Journal vol 9 no 1. (2024)
https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/435