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Abstract
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 conversation with Walter Benjamin we reflect from a phenomenological position on presence 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.
Acknowledgement
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.
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 CitationOng 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 communication age, as well as our “wonder” about their significance “are themselves the product of the succession” (17).
2. Following CitationKrotz (“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 CitationDeleuze and Félix 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 assignment 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.
8. Husserl's famous statement is actually “[a]ll consciousness is consciousness of something” (qtd. in CitationSartre 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 CitationLyotard; 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 CitationArendt, 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.