The Vanishing, or Little Erasures without Significance?

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Notes

¹ Certain clear differences (which are largely time-based) can be observed once the materially-published is digitized and realized electronically: although reading might take exactly the same time, whether the medium is hardcopy or electronic, what is specific to electronic publishing is the possibility that what is ‘broadcast’ might at any moment be modified – even obliterated -at source. Any given printout is relative, in other words, to the time of access of a user.

² See, for instance, www.sfmelrose.u-net.com

³ See, for example, P. Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1996; J. Birringer, Theatre, Theory and Postmodernism, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991; P. Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1993; A. Read, Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1992; P. Auslander, From Acting to Performance, London and New York, 1997; M. Pearson and M. Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, London and New York: Routledge, 2001; R. Schechner, Performance Theory, London and New York: Routledge 1986; N. Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, London and New York: Routledge, 2000; J. McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 2001; R. Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance, London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

⁴ I have argued elsewhere that many (if not most) Performance Studies programmes, in the British university at least, are in fact Spectator Studies programmes, misrecognized as such (www.sfmelrose.u-net.com).

⁵ There can be no effective interdisciplinarity, as far as I have been able to observe, without a degree of disciplinary mastery in at least one of the practitioners involved; in some instances, effective interdisciplinary practices are wholly dependent upon disciplinary mastery in performers, in lighting and sound designers and certainly in spectating. Let's say so, since to fail to do so guarantees that the dominant practitioner, almost against her own theorization, can effortlessly seem thereby to deny the constitutively collaborative nature of performance and its dependence upon performance-making expertise.

⁶ In etymological terms, the theatrical and theatricalized are twicelooked at, or carefully looked at.

⁷ Epistemics refers to ‘knowledge-producing’ and ‘knowledgevalidating’ practices: my argument here is that the systematic exclusion from and/or negativization of ‘intuition’ in general, and ‘expert or professional intuition’ in particular, in the major texts of Performance Studies, produces knowledges, and validates knowledges, which exclude or diminish intuitive operations in that disciplinary domain.

⁸ The word ‘noetic’ comes from the ancient Greek nous, and I would argue that the noetic signals that which seems to some of us, as professionals, suddenly to ‘come to us’, as though from a nowhere of knowledge, but which is actually a key aspect of expertise in a problem-identifying and problem-solving context. To grasp the particulars of that context, on the other hand, does not seem to enable us to grasp the noetic in its terms – hence the tendency of the noetic to seem to emerge in peculiar places and at peculiar moments – in the bath, perhaps, or in the small hours. Widely identified, metaphorically, in terms of an ‘inner knowing’, or intuitive consciousness, we recognize ‘it’ when we seem to have a direct and immediate access to knowledge beyond what has emerged through reason.

⁹ I have spoken elsewhere of the abjection of many expert performance practitioners in the UK context; she is abject to the extent that she misjudges her own expertise and authority, which she might well declare to be ‘just intuitive’. See www.sfmelrose.u-net.com.

¹⁰ See, for example, the ‘critical-theoretical’ projects espoused in J. McKenzie (2001), P. Phelan (1993) and J. Dolan (The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1991), among numerous others.

¹¹ While we tend to find a table of contents, a set of footnotes or endnotes and a bibliography in the Ph.D. dissertation, what the latter lacks, notably, is an index.