To swerve:

I completely agree with both Billy in that not all poets write for their
work to be 'sounded'. The idea that all poetry, indeed all writing, is
benfitted by or intended for reading out loud is as much of a tyrrany as we
might concoct. An 'oral' interpretation *might* or *might not* be
interesting.

Precisions in respect of oral interpretation provide constraints that can
be extremely interesting (I'm thinking of the instructions for performance
given by Jackson MacLow for one example and of his telling me years ago
with a twinkle in his eye that the welter of instructions for performing
The Marrying Maiden encouraged indeterminacy through overdetermination).
And there's no need for a spatialised text to be sounded by one voice in a
linearity at all - what of the polyphonic fields of sound?

Alison raises the fraught issue of losing useful points of differentiation
as far performance being a menaingful term is concerned. I share that wish
to retain its pertinence - its alertness. I've been writing on this subject
and for those interested append some stuff below. For those not interested,
press your delete button now.

love and love
cris

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                    'Performance', in particular within the emergent field
of 'performance studies', remains a contested term. [A contested term,
according to W.B. Gallie's 'Philosophy and the Historical Understanding'
(1964), involves:

'Recognition of a given concept as essentially contested implies
recognition of rival uses of it (such as oneself repudiates) as not only
logically possible and humanly 'likely', but as of permanent potential
critical value to one's own use or interpretation of the concept in
question.' [pp187-88)]

I find Richard Bauman's suggestion [in the International Encyclopedia of
Communications (Oxford University Press, 1989 ed. Ed Barnouw) (cited by
Marvin Carlson in his 'Performance: a critical introduction' (Routledge,
1996 pp 5)] useful, that:

'All performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the
actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a
potential, an ideal, or a remembered original model of that action . . .
the double consciousness, not the external observation, is what is most
central . . . Performance is always performance for someone, some audience
that recognizes and validates it as performance even when, as is
occasionally the case, that audience is the self.'

                    Erving Goffman defines the emergence of performance as
a process which 'transforms an individual into a stage performer, the
latter, in turn, being an object that can be looked at in the round and at
length without offense, and looked to for engaging behaviour, by persons in
an "audience" role'. (p124 Frame Analysis). I find the pejorative use of
being 'looked to for engaging behaviour' more revealing of a sense of
'value' that reeks of rewarding work and of time 'well' spent. But
Goffman's moment of individual transformation connects powerfully with
Bauman's 'consciousness of doubleness' to form a re-orientation of
performance, that brings it firmly into everyday life. Of course that's not
exactly new either. Since the 1960s, in particular, movements in
'performance art' have explored both the politics and the poetics of the
everyday. There has been a vigorous debate, conducted through practice, of
performance as process and performance as product.[* through what has often
been referred to as non-matrixed or 'task-based' performance] One result is
to particularise differing kinds of performance along Goffman's scale of
'purity' (see below), and let each be both discreet and be connected.
Process and product thus become moments of articulation, as already
suggested in the examples of photocopying and vocal utterance. Insistence
as word by word, phrase by phrase, note by note, frame by frame -
particularisable moment by particularisable moment.

                    Again, this is not a smokescreen to obscure the
differences between 'performances'. On the contrary it begins to allow us
to read the differences, by revealing their specificities. Once the idea of
'performances' plural, at differing points of engagement within processes
relating to production and processes relating to consumption of product -
a detailed dynamic range of arrivals and departures between process and
product, which can encourage one to unravel into the other and vice versa
- forms a basis for discussion, it is clear that old hierachies of
understanding that priveledge the 'live' virtuoso display are necessarily
challenged.

                    Goffman goes on to distinguish between performances on
the basis of what he terms their 'purity', meaning 'according to the
exclusiveness of the claim of the watchers on the activity they watch'.
(p125) At the formal end of his purity range he places performances for
which if there is no audience there is no performance (both within 'arts'
and 'sports' contexts). At the other end he places "work performances", in
which 'viewers openly watch persons at work who openly show no regard or
concern for the dramatic elements of their labor.' (p126) But it's also
possible within such a scheme, to understand product as becoming process
through the interpretative transformation, by a performer, of an existing
composition, at the 'formal' end of Goffman's scale; and by the reverse to
align process as being product through interpretive transformation of the
'witness' at the 'informal' end; vide people stopping on the street to
watch others who have gathered around a hole that has opened up in the
ground, and treating those they are watching as "performers", thus turning
an informal occurrence into a composition.

*

                    Whilst Goffman wrote such differences up in the 1950s
and 1960s, contemporary Performance Studies has foregrounded other
distinctions. The notion of the 'live' has become increasingly
problematicised. This occurs under another version of the totem of
'authenticity', that of ontological integrity. The 'aura' of 'liveness',
depicted as virtuous, is placed in opposition to the evil of mediatization.
In noting this Philip Auslander argues for a relation of mutual dependence
and imbrication. For him:

'The live is, in a sense, only a secondary effect of mediating
technologies. Prior to the advent of those technologies (e.g. photography,
telegraphy, phonography) there was no such thing as the "live", for that
category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility. Ancient
Greek theater, for example, was not live because there was no possibility
of recording it . . . the "live" has always been defined as that which can
be recorded.' (perfr * cult stud p 198)

Auslander is careful to make a distinction between 'live' representation,
such as the voices in Greek theater amplified by architectural means, and
'live' repetition, that which is reproduced through 'indirect testimony'.
His concern is with technological reproduction more than with technological
mediation. But he opens an important line of argument that:

'nonmatrixed representation provided a beachhead for mediatization within
artistic practices that resisted mediatization'. (p201)

Using Clint Eastwood's squint, filmed in close-up, as an example of
nonmatrixed representation, he alerts us to another change in perceptual
practices. Namely, that audiences have become used to looking for details
that might previously have passed unnoticed and reading them as
significant. The importance of this lies in what details an audience might
then concentrate on, in the context of a 'live' non-mediatized performance.
Also the extent to which such details either are or are not the express
intention of the performers. That is, audiences might see things that the
performers are not foregrounding in their performance and bring such
details to their reading of the performance.


*

                    Writing within a context of contemporary poetics,
Charles Bernstein points to Goffman's concept of the 'disattend track' as
of key significance.

[* goffman p 202: 'A significant feature of any strip of activity is the
capacity of its participants to "disattend" competing events - both in fact
and in appearance']

He suggests that 'focussing attention on a poem's content or form typically
involves putting the audiotext as well as the typography, the look and
sound of the poem, into the disattend track'. ('Close Listening: Poetry and
the Performed Word' p3 Oxford, May 1998 my emphasis). 'Focus' is an
omnipresent term in the visually obsessed late twentieth century. It is one
of those words which crosses boundaries between arts and sports and
sciences, between traditional approaches and those which interrogate
traditions. Lying in wait, behind the urge to 'focus', is the apprehension
that too much distraction, and distraction is itself culturally and
historically specific, can lead to a collapse of the performance 'frame'.

                    Many contemporary creative writing practitioners are
engaged with testing the 'frames' of 'performance'; as by including that
which might have been more conveniently edited out, foregrounding
extralexical and extrasemantic aspects of 'writing', as well as the
incidentals of orality (pauses, tonal inflections to pARTs of words,
stutters, tongue clicks, erms and ums, splutters and so forth [* the poet
critic Andrew Duncan wrote of the ugliness of such expressions. On the
contrary they might be read as generosities which render the work more
humane]. It is precisely those points on the boundaries, or on the frames,
at which distraction can be seen to be ideologically formed, and at which
the frame, constructed for absoption, might be induced to collapse, that
such writers are deliberately at work to reveal. There lies their
pedagogical intent. Those points at which the 'formal' and 'informal' along
Goffman's scale of purity become interchangeable for the purpose of casting
a provocative reflection. Those moments during a given performance at which
witnesses are unsure as to what is and what is not part of the performance.
Or at which their attention to details has become so challenged that their
experience is of too much happening, that they can no longer encompass the
breadth of events, they cannot tell what constitutes distraction, their
criteria are ruptured and and they are challenged to impose their own
limitation of interpretations. At such points are 'tastes' and personal
preferences constructed. Matrices are brought back into the play.


end




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