Liveness as a Metaphor
May 25th, 2006 Fred McVittie
As Auslander has demonstrated, the ontology of liveness is not produced simply by the presence of a performer. Some performances which contain live presence are highly ‘mediatized’ (to use Auslander’s term) and therefore do not have an ontological live quality (and may not be experienced as ‘live’ in some other understandings of the term), and some works which are entirely technical in their production, and should therefore have none of the conventional descriptors of the live, nevertheless do have the ontology and effect of liveness.
One way of interpreting this anomaly is to consider liveness not as a property inherent in certain events and phenomena, definable by reference only to the objective properties of that event, but rather that liveness is a conceptual metaphor (after Lakoff) which we use to understand a range of different phenomena. The concept liveness clearly does not have a concrete structure of easily apprehensible form, and is therefore only capable of being understood via metaphor, in terms of more concrete concepts, ideally concepts which have a kinaesthetic and embodied experience to provide structure and scope for elaboration. The most obvious metaphor which can be applied to liveness in performance is the metaphor PERFORMANCE IS A LIVING BEING.
Peggy Phelan claims: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” (Phelan 1993, 146). Here Phelan comes very close to stating the metaphor outright. The fact that she does not, and, at least to an informed readership, does not need to, indicates how intuitive the idea that PERFORMANCE IS A LIVING BEING has become.
PERFORMANCE IS A LIVING BEING brings with it a wide range of possible elaborations and entailments; blood, breath, heart, sweat, death, etc. any or all of which might be metaphorically mapped onto the concept of a performance. We may say that a performance has heart, or teeth, or balls, or that it is a bit long in the tooth, or that it is dying on its feet. Also, since the term performance (and, after Austin and Butler, performativity) can be applied to any activity, not only theatrical performances, this allows for any activity so labelled to be understood in terms of the LIVING BEING metaphor.
The concept of liveness, then, is only historically and metaphorically related to the literal presence of a live human being at the heart of the art. The ontological distinction between ‘live’ art and ‘mediatized’ (or any other kind of) art, ultimately rests on the choice of metaphor used to structure the concept.
Posted in Auslander, Philip, Conference Abstract, Phelan, Peggy | No Comments »