The Afterlife of Performance

Abstract

The afterlife of performance is riddled with assumptions about life, death, and time. One major assumption is the possibility of distinction between liveness and something else—not so much death as the “afterlifeness” of various theorizations of media in the age of the zombie (Žižek, Parikka and Hertz, Sconce). Philip Auslander is particularly helpful on the subject of liveness when he identifies it as a historically contingent and relational concept “used to distinguish among cultural forms and experiences,” and then, on the matter of method, remarks that “the values attributed to live performance must be discussed from the perspective of particular cultural contexts” (63). While we agree with Auslander that any attempt to generalize assertions about a live performance are bound to be flawed, in this article we are not really interested in how particular instantiations of liveness or presence are produced (Gumbrecht, Production of Presence xiii–xvi). Rather, we are concerned with the particulars of how the afterlife of performance is produced, managed, and maintained by the application of various cultural techniques, in Bernhard Siegert’s sense. Cultural techniques incite “a more or less complex actor network that comprises technological objects as well as the operative chains they are part of and that configure and constitute them” (Siegert 11). In our case, The Afterlife of Performance