 book which has just come out and you have already at least one chapter of from the read you read the or version of that chapter not the real that's right and so without any further ado Philip Offslander don't forget to tip your server I have some business cards I just like to distribute I have these cards I never use them so so it's a great honor and privilege for me to be here with you today I think that if there are no particular objections the way I'd like to kind of organize this is I have about 45 minutes worth of stuff to say here okay with nothing on the screen just me and so I like to do that and then between that and lunch maybe we could focus our discussion around whatever I say here and then after lunch maybe we could focus the discussion more on the reading materials if you're a metal there's a lot of overlap between these two things so it's not these are not really discrete propositions but just as a general way of organizing things so I don't remember exactly when David approached me about doing this it seems like it was a long time ago but whenever it was I think it was I might have been him who suggested that this presentation be called liveness revisited and then I was here in April to give a couple of talks one for the theater department when we were at lunch after what David said to me well it doesn't seem like you've changed your mind about anything and so the idea of revisiting is a little bit of a hoax here because he's right basically fundamentally in terms of thank you so much in terms of the ideas especially about liveness that you know I published originally in 1999 and then again in 2008 in the revised second edition and on the other and one I'm happy to talk more about this later on if you're interested but one very specific thing that I just realized this morning because I actually I said this at dinner last night I don't remember the stuff that I write okay so I actually have to go back and reread it so I did I went back and reread the same portion of liveness that I asked you to read and I realized there I saw again there this section where I reject the idea of writing as a way of recording performances okay I don't believe that anymore and in fact in this new book there's a fairly long discussion of writing as a form of performance documentation and almost the kind of I don't know what the right word is but sort of reminder in a way that we become so obsessed I think in the context of performance documentation with the idea that documentation is an audio visual phenomenon that we've sort of forgotten that writing also is a way of capturing performances and one of the people I talked extensively about in the book Michael Kirby really found that to be the primary way of recording performances so okay so that's a very specific thing that I have changed my mind about but apart from that I really haven't changed my mind about anything fundamental I don't think and certainly for me liveness has become a sort of paradigmatic concept in my own work and as Thomas Kuhn suggests in the structure of scientific revolutions the work I've been doing through two editions of this book and other stuff constitutes what he calls normal science devoted to ironing out extending and refining the paradigm rather than to uncovering anomalies that might ultimately discredit it and you will see that running throughout this entire presentation is a lot of discussion of sort of mid-century mid-20th century intellectual figures like Kuhn, Goffman and Goddamer and for some reason I seem to have a very strong affinity for what was going on philosophically theoretically whatever during that that time so another thing that David mentioned to me over lunch in April was that is that you know deeply embedded in my approach to this paradigmatic concept of liveness is the deridian gesture of deconstruction of relentlessly questioning seeming binary oppositions with the purpose of revealing the terms to be interdependent in ways that reverse and undermine traditional hierarchies for example defining the differences between live and technologically mediated performance in terms of the traditional opposition becomes less tenable the more aspects of the question one considers speaking of attending the theater the playwright and actor Wallace Sean has said I will not attempt to do Wallace Sean although that would be kind of fun I've been spoiled like a lot of people by watching movies and television where you can see very well and you can hear what the actors are saying it's really really hard for me to sit in row HH and not be able to see the faces of the actors and to have to either strain to hear their voices or listen to projected voices which I know are grotesquely unnatural and which make it absolutely impossible for me to take the whole thing seriously the situation Sean describes is not at all unusual there's something anyone who attends a live event of any kind a theatrical performance a concert a sports event political rally and so on may encounter under these circumstances what becomes of the immediacy the chemistry the sense of direct personal context said to define the experience of live performance as Sean suggests this experience is not at all unmediated in the case he describes and by I use the words mediated and media ties they don't mean exactly the same thing mediators a much broader concept as you will buy you're about to see media ties refers much more specifically to media technologies as Sean suggests this experience is not at all unmediated in the case he describes it is mediated both by the physical characteristics of the performance space which can either unhand enhance or undo the potential for contact between performer and spectator and by his own experience as a film and television viewer so this is something that I have noticed is very important to me and almost everything that I write is the idea that the way we as audiences perceive performances is conditioned by the environment of media technology right and I further have believed since the writing of the first edition of liveness that this creates certain expectations as to the experience of spectatorship that we carry with us into all such situations which is exactly what Wallace Sean is talking about here right that his perception as an audience member is conditioned by watching television and film when he goes to the theater he still has those expectations in place he's perceiving what's happening in the live performance through those expectations so it also implies that the sense of intimacy and immediacy can actually be stronger when watching film or television than at the theater for the reasons that he mentions you can see the actors faces you can actually hear their voices etc in other words we cannot treat the qualities traditionally assigned to live performance that putatively differentiated from technologically mediated performance as inherent or ontological characteristics they are phenomenological as opposed to ontological in the sense that they are not characteristics of the performance itself but things experienced and felt by performers and spectators one cannot say for example that a performance in a small space is necessarily more intimate than a performance in a huge space it is only so if the participants experience it that way and there may be forms of mediation taking place uh-oh the pages have stuck together what could be on the next page forms of mediation taking place that either encourage or discourage participants from having the experience for example as Maria Navarro observed in an article in the New York Times on the subject of famous rock musicians who sometimes play concerts for relatively small audiences at high prices she says intimate is of course relative if the performer usually plays to audiences of 20,000 a concert for 2000 would be downright chummy the experience of intimacy in such a case is indeed relative it results as much from the participant's knowledge and experience of the artist's normal practice as from the circumstances of the performance I can also recount experience as a concert goer that I had myself many years ago when I mentioned the names of the artists you'll know how many years ago but sometime in the 1970s I went to see a concert by Jethro tell at Boston Garden the sports arena and the opening act was Ludingston Taylor James Taylor's brother also a musician actually all James Taylor siblings are musicians so first of all this was completely in Congress had this this basically you know folky singer-songwriter solo performer opening for Jethro tell one of the loudest rock bands in the world at the time and he was performing all by himself so he's in the middle of the Boston Garden with you know however many thousands of Jethro tell fans all around him in a spotlight in the middle right with him and his banjo and but the thing is it worked it was amazing I mean he somehow knew how to hold a crowd of that size under that those circumstances and I have been to other performances where the opening act was not so fortunate but he did it and he even though it was the enormous space and he was really far away from anybody right it's a tiny little figure down there he somehow managed to create a sense of intimacy with that audience so as another point that you know it's a very large point that certainly cuts through everything I do context is everything right everything is context-specific in the intellectual world I live in so in liveness the book I brought my deconstructive outlook to bear on the opposition between live and recorded or media ties or documented performances by suggesting that the live does not precede the recording it is generally supposed that a recording is a recording of something and that the something in question is a live event that existed prior to being captured by the recording in the book I suggest that the live did not exist as a conceptual or perceptual category before recording media came into being because the concept live is meaningful only in relation to its opposite there's no purpose in distinguishing an event as live when there is no other way it could be experienced this notion is encapsulating the sentence in the book that probably has provoked more strong reactions than any other single thing I've ever written which is the ancient Greek theater was not live because there was no way of recording it in this sense the live is produced by the recorded or the media ties it does not precede it I further argue that in our current cultural economy live events are frequently modeled on media ties ones or media ties versions of themselves rather than the other way around I've extended this challenge to question the privileging of a live event as the original the original relative to which a recording or mediation is understood to be a copy or some other kind of secondary iteration this argument is at the heart of my recent work on the question of performance art documentation the subject of my new book which I just showed you reactivations essays on performance and its documentation lovely Christmas gift there I argue that a live performance and a documented version of the same performance are equally iterations of what the philosopher David Davies calls an artistic content to this way of thinking the live event and the documented one need have no intrinsic relationship to one another though each has a connection to the same artistic ideas and vision that both express therefore the document is not best understood as a record or derivative of a live event but as a distinct site of performance in itself where an audience can experience the artistic content this position does not discount this is something I'm continually accused of yes but looking at a document is not the same thing is going to a live performance can I say it duh right and I've never ever actually said that it is right and yet somehow continually people think that I say that no so this position does not discount the experiential differences between attending a live event and watching video documentation for example it simply insists that these two experiential modes offer different encounters with the same content and that our purpose as audience for either a live event or document is to experience this content one way or another rather than seeing liveness as a stable ontological condition I have argued repeatedly that it should be understood as a concept that is defined and continually redefined historically a moving target whose definition and meaning change in relation to other historical changes particularly in the technologies that mediate live performance and the alterations of audience perception and expectations that result from consuming performance primarily in recorded or mediatized forms to which Wallace Shawn attests the development of such technologies over time has complicated both the idea of liveness and the experience of it largely by enabling live experiences that do not depend on the physical co-presence of performer and audience what I have come to call actually it's not me I borrowed this term from Nick Kaldry classic liveness and since I mentioned the Greek theater I should say I don't mean classic in the sense of Greek I mean classic more like classic coke kind of classic liveness was a relationship between performance and audience that entailed both temporal and spatial co-presence early in the 20th century broadcast technologies beginning with radio effectively eliminated the need for spatial co-presence since audiences are perfectly prepared to accept that a performance perceived through radio television or an internet stream is live as long as we are sure that is happening at the time we perceive it I call this relationship broadcast liveness as a result of the influence of broadcast technologies temporality rather than spatiality has emerged as the primary dimension of liveness the arrangement at the BMW Tate live performance room at Tate modern in London dramatizes the idea that temporality has become the primary dimension of liveness and one of your optional readings is something I wrote for a book that Tate published about this this thing they have and the thing is very distinctive about you and by the way I've been told that every time I write or say this you have to say the whole thing including the corporate logo right so it has to always be BMW Tate live performance room you can never say any part of that by itself so the arrangement at the BMW Tate live performance room at Tate modern in London I'm sorry the performances that occur there can be experienced only through online streaming even though the performances take place live in a room somewhere in the museum no audience shares the space with the performers the audience watches either a live stream of the performance or later an archive version of the same stream the key point is that what differentiates the live performance from the archive one is only that one can experience it in real time as it is happening recently I argue that this temporal relationship is the crucial dimension of liveness even in cases of classic liveness that do entail physical co-presence by building on Herbert Blau's observation that quote theater posits itself in distance and I was when I was rereading this chapter I noticed that I also had earlier quoted different passage from Blau where he talks about theater being founded on separation and of course it's that's these are very closely related concepts theater posits itself in distance by which he means the inevitable distance between performer and spectator whether that distinction is created quote by the stage edge pit or the space of consciousness itself end quote even in conventional theater the experience of liveness is the experience of sharing time with other people from whom one is held at a distance as Blau suggests this distance is not necessarily physical it can be distance it can be the distance created by the social differentiation between performers and spectators I have a tendency to spill things so I'm keeping my water apart from my pages this primacy of the temporal in our current experience of liveness has also challenged the ostensible connection between liveness and aliveness in that I believe we experience or can experience all manner of things as live even if they're not alive as long as we believe them to be unfolding or interacting with us in real time I've argued many times that we experience the playback of a recording of music for example as a performance happening for us in our own time a theme I reiterate in this new book when discussing how we experience performances from documentation one of the main purposes of this book is to arrive at a theory of how this occurs when we chat online with a customer service representative we experience the exchange as live even though there's a good chance that the entity on the other end of it is not a human being but a bot the bot may seem live and even alive simply because it provides feedback it responds to us in real time what I've said so far already shows that there has been a shift over time in my approach to the question of liveness that can be summarized in the rubric which I think is the title of the seminar today from ontology toward phenomenology and I really I was really struck again since I forget everything I write I read my own writing a sort of an outsider the good news is that I usually like it without wanting to seem too egotistical I can say that I've never actually picked up something I wrote a long time ago and read and gone oh my god did I write that I had came close to that recently I recently read a piece of my from 1983 that's never been published and it's never gonna be but I was really struck in liveness at how how you know this is sort of really energetic critique of this kind of ontological perspective that then stops and sort of falls short of proposing an alternative to that and so that's kind of what I've been trying to do more recently by moving from I mean it's it's there's certainly an irony here because my accusation of the general discourse especially around performance documentation is that it's obsessed with the ontology of documentation of course I am also I'm equally obsessed with the ontological understanding of liveness or or performance documentation it's just that I reject those things that doesn't mean I'm not obsessed with them right so I've been trying to move from that obsession toward an obsession with phenomenology I will also as a side note and just to be a little bit obnoxious I will observe that in my experience most performance scholars who claim to be engaged with phenomenology really mean that I'm not gonna mention any names although there are some in one of the pieces you may have read I will observe that in my experience most performance scholars who claim to be engaged with phenomenology really mean that they wish to speak of the audience's experience perspective or interpretation they're actually engaged with something no one ever talks about anymore called reader response theory something much more like that than actually with phenomenology in the philosophical sense my original research question was something like what does it mean that something is live I believe very strongly in research questions by the way this question branched out in two directions toward a consideration of the identity and properties of the experiences we understand to be live which as I've already said I concluded our historical and ever-changing rather than ontological and constant but also toward the question of the cultural value attributed to live experience my conclusion there was that classic liveness seemed to be diminishing in value in a cultural economy dominated by mediatization as evidence particularly by the many ways live performances seem to model themselves now on their own mediatized versions and this the same kind of list of examples I've used many times before such as the use of giant screens at sports stadiums and rock concerts to allow close-ups to become part of the vocabulary of a live event or the repurposing of films as Broadway shows or the Nashville Opera's use of an iPod based commentary track similar to that on a DVD during its 2006 production of Gunos Romeo and Juliet both the BMW tape modern live performance room and the various programs that currently broadcast productions of theater and opera online into theaters offer testimony to the idea that physical proximity is no longer essential to the live presentation of the performing arts that they can be native to the screen despite their being forms in which the presentness of spectators and performance performance to one another as long been considered a bedrock value when liveness was originally published in 1999 some rears apparently thought that I was furthering the cultural denigration of classic liveness by devaluing it myself and I did a little anecdote at the start of the preface to the second edition which is a true story about that I also say in that preface I was also accused of being pessimistic the first claim is not true one of the main reasons I wrote the book was to try to understand why something I valued traditional live performance seemed to be losing its value and identity in increasingly mediatized cultural contexts the second accusation was more accurate I did not paint a rosy picture of the future of live forms even though I regret that live performance of the kind for which I trained as a young actor appreciated as a theater and concert goer and so on seems not to have the same cultural presence and value as it once did I am not particularly nostalgic by nature and I believe in facing reality had on when possible the premise of my work on performance documentation for instance is that we all access performances and documented forms and that when we do we believe we have had an experience of the performance I would much rather examine the implications of this reality or what I take to be a reality then try to argue it away by following the standard narrative which claims that since documentation inevitably translates performance into another medium and thus betrays the performance documented performances in the documents are two separate things and that the live event always offers the richer and more authentic experience right my current organizing question is no longer what does it mean that something is live but something more like how do we experience things as live my nomination of real-time interaction as the core experience of liveness more or less regardless of what one is interacting with reflects this concern from this perspective liveness is not a characteristic of a performance but a characteristic of our experience and perception of it in fact the liveness in question may be the liveness of our perceptual experience as it unfolds in real time not that of the thing experienced this idea is central to my analysis of how we experience performances from documents I argue that performance documents do not carry us back in time to witness a performance in the past performance documents are not time machines in for short rather they enable us to bring that same performance into our present and to experience it as a media my approach to this reformulated research question is rooted in both the hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans Gehr or Gadamer and the interaction of sociology of Irving Goffman and one of my hobbies right now is to try to figure out how to reconcile these two figures because I do feel that there's a fair amount of common ground there but it's really hard to explain that although their respective intellectual traditions are very different one thing these two figures have in common they don't have in common Gadamer lived to be a hundred years old you all know that right you live the entirety of the 20th century which is fascinating in and of itself so that's one thing they do not have in common since Goffman actually died relatively young although their respective traditions are very different one thing these two figures have in common is the idea that the things we encounter in the world including other people make claims upon us and that our experience is constructed through cybernetic or hermeneutic processes in which we respond to those claims and the entities making them I'm sorry in which we respond to those claims and the entities making them respond to our responses and so on so another thing about that mid 20th century is cybernetics right which is also part of the large intellectual history mix here both also suggest that we must frequently assume a particular stance toward the entity making the claim in order to respond to it in what Gadamer calls acts of consciousness I was just referring to a version of this idea when I spoke a moment ago about bringing documented performances into our present and experiencing them as immediate so the key point if you're sort of working at this idea through hermeneutic phenomenology is that this does not just happen right it requires a particular kind of engagement with the document this idea is also connected with Goffman's concept of the as if a state of consciousness or information state to use his phrase into which we intentionally place ourselves in order to respond to the claims made upon us by an event and its framing so in the remainder of this presentation I will offer two different but related characterizations of liveness which are moving a different direction from the past at least to some extent liveness as a frame following Goffman and the hermeneutics of digital liveness which you have my reading on that I'm just going to recapitulate a bit of that at the end following Goddard and along the way I'm also as I said trying to figure out a way of talking about these two figures side by side so this is pretty heavy-duty stuff at one point I imagine myself doing empirical research into live as you realize I don't do any empirical reason but I had this fantasy of doing empirical research into liveness as a Goffmanian frame the hypothesis being that we experience things as live because they are framed that way okay this clearly is true for example I discovered that one of my favorite rock albums King Crimson Starless and Bible Black is a live recording from which any sonic information that would identify it as such has been removed in the absence of such information I had always assumed that it is a studio recording this by the way as an example what Goffman calls frame confusion since the people who made the album knew that it was a live recording but I their audience could not because they withheld that information from me since I believe that there are different styles of listening that we do not listen to live recordings in the same way we listen to studio albums for example it makes a difference whether I understand the recording to be live or studio production another example some years ago I'll attend a conference in Boston which is where I'm originally from I undertook to walk and if you know Boston Geography you understand what I'm talking about I undertook to walk from Northeastern University along Mass Ave to the public garden pretty long walk since I don't walk that well and actually I couldn't walk even less now that I could then by the time I act finally I didn't quite make it to the public garden and I had to take a taxi back along the way I passed by the Berkeley College of Music who are you all familiar with the Berkeley College of Music the place that educates primarily jazz musicians unique style of music that I call Berkeley fusion I paused by a picket fence with a gated it outside the college because I heard music by opening the gate and revealing a small amphitheater which a student group was performing I came to understand that the music was live absent a live performance frame I would no more have been able to hear that the music was live anymore then I was able to hear that Star Wars and Bible Black is not a studio album for years I understood that album to be a studio recording because it was framed that way by default and I would not have known what I was listening to on Mass Ave had not been framed for me as a live performance so basically you're on the street you hear music you have no idea you can't have no idea what the source of that music is is it someone playing a record in a dorm room somewhere with an open window is it actually a live band what is it right so without the frame to tell you what it is in effect or to tell you how to perceive it so in that sense liveness or live performance is a frame as much as anything else we experience things as lie at least in part because they're framed now our sense that if something is occurring live or not is therefore a premise not a conclusion this is actually obvious when you think about it but anyhow it's a premise not a conclusion something we believe to be true of performance at the outset rather than a characteristic revealed through the experience of it I mean the from the coffin point of view what can be revealed through the experience of it is what can happen through the experience of it is a discrediting of the idea that it was a lot of liveness is a frame in gothman sense of the term understanding of what is going on that allows me to define my relationship to it and participate appropriately with it it might seem that the sorts of theater and performance art events we habitually think of when we consider live performance are different from recorded music broadcasting or live feeds because these are arenas in which classic liveness still hold sway the performers and audience typically are physically present to one another this is true but even when we are physically there the potential for frame errors or frame confusion does not disappear we might discover for instance that Millie Vanilla are not really singing even though they're right there before us or that the people we think are the flesh and blood black eyed peas are in fact holographic projections or that veto a country was not actually under the ramp voicing his sexual fantasies during his performance of Seabed but it placed a tape recorder there that played back his voice two of these examples are real the third presumably is not though how could we know for sure I bring this up not so much to sow doubt and paranoia or to make an ethical argument presumably King Crimson's deceiving me into believing a live album is a studio product is what gothman would call a benign fabrication Millie Vanilla is arguably a less benign case as to suggest that the liveness even of events in which performers inspectors are physically present to one another is to some extent something we simply have to accept without verification just as it is in broadcasting or with the tape modern performance room in other words how do we know that those events are really happening live when they're being streamed from the tape modern performance room there's no way of verifying it in cases where verification is possible our belief that a performance is live may be discredited in light of information we uncover such as believe it really are not actually singing I made a related point in an essay titled jazz improvisation as a social arrangement just as the liveness of music or any other kind of performance cannot necessarily be determined by what we see and hear alone we cannot determine whether or not ostensibly improvised performance is truly improvised in the moment so to write this essay I undertook a pretty substantial what you call literature review of musical logical writings on improvisation something I do not recommend to anybody that is a thicket my friends so I am not going to get into how improvisation is defined what should count as true improvisation that's just that's a thorny question I am intentionally skirting but we accept that parts performances or parts of performances framed as improvisation are actually improvised without being able to verify that this is the case one of Goffman's most powerful concepts appears in his chapter the theatrical frame in the book frame analysis the concept of the as if of course goffman's not the only one to use this phrase never lost goffman argues that performances often require us as audience to act as if we don't know something that we do know or as if something is true when we know what not to be or as if something is happening when we can't know that it is got stage magic is the perfect example of the last goffman's chief example belongs to the first category remember what the first category was of course goffman's human memory goffman's chief example belongs to the first category he claims that in order to enjoy a performance of a play with which we are familiar we have to act as if we don't know the plot already as if we are experiencing it's unfolding for the first time so the alternative of course is you know you're at a performance of Hamlet and there's someone there going yeah they're all dead at the end except for Horatio and the technical term for that person that goffman theorists of play use is spoil sport but you don't want to be that guy you don't want to be that person I'll give you another example this is a real thing I experienced years and years ago once again back in Boston I saw what was actually really really excellent production of who's afraid of a junior wolf directed by Albie with Ben Gazzar and I think Colleen Dewhurst or something just an amazing thing I don't I don't know if it ever actually made it to Broadway or if it did it didn't last very long but it was really a remarkable production so I went on a Wednesday matinee I won't say what the cultural implications of that are and as the lights are going down this very loud whisper comes from the back there is no baby so the as if an example from the second category which I don't take from Goffman but from Christopher Smalls wonderful book music-ing and he says this is supposedly is of course true that he describes this to a justly famous country music performer without identifying the person when a musician says we're gonna be here all night but we all know this is not true we're not gonna be here all night we're gonna be here for a couple hours right but we act as if it is cheering stopping and whistling in response Goffman posits this as if specifically in the context of the theater though the phrase pops up elsewhere in his work but it pertains to all forms of performance and the tacit agreements that are binding on both performers and spectators every form of performance has its particular as ifs right so for example in jazz all we we behave as if all improvised solos are applause worthy right in reexamining my password recently I saw the concept of verifiability I just discussed in the context of liveness and improvisation runs through it in various ways particularly on my work on the relationships between the sonic and visual dimensions of musical performance philosopher Stan Gottlovich's book musical performance has had a significant impact on me because I find it's so much with which to agree and so much with which to disagree which to me is what I'm looking for one of Gottlovich's concerns is credit worthiness the conditions under which we can credit a performer for having done something he argues that recording for instance deprives us of the ability to grant credit to a musician because we have no way of knowing whether the musician is actually capable of performing the music or whether the performance was pieced together in the studio and therefore does not represent the musician's actual degree of skill much the same can be said of performance on film I recently watched I'm always a few years behind everything so I recently watched the film whiplash finally about a young jazz drummer and the shall we say demanding teacher he encounters at a music conservatory a film with very little bearing on reality I have to say and realize that it is impossible to discern and this I was sort of watching for this and I was watching the film because I had this in mind it's impossible to discern how much drumming the actor Myles Teller actually did he has experience as a drummer so there's no reason to suppose that his musicianship in the film is entirely illusory but it also seems unlikely that he developed the chops on display after working with a jazz drummer for a few months Galovitch's point is that we cannot know on this evidence how credit worthy Teller is for his musical performance and the same applies to his acting from Galovitch's perspective we can only ascertain credit worthiness through classically live performance in which we can witness the musician's ability at first hand and the same would be true for acting for example this question also comes up in the interesting concept of music made with new digital instruments some of you I wrote a piece about this and I was very interested to discover that there are sort of two camps of musicians who were written about this or kind of reflected out loud about it and the issue has to do with a concern about the audience's ability essentially to make cause and effect connections between what they see the performer doing and the sound that they hear right so the presumption is if you're using traditional instruments you see someone press a key you hear a sound you figure okay that sound was caused by the person pressing a key right but if you if you see someone doing something on a laptop or you know some other even more exotic kind of digital interface that produces sound essentially you know unless you're very very familiar with the technology and the way it's being used uh you you have no idea you have no idea what the relationship is between those two things and what I was interested to discover was that in terms of musicians who work this way there are two camps one for whom this is a problem and a concern because they you know they kind of want to preserve that traditional relationship with the audience while using you know digital interfaces and then a whole other group has said basically fuck them all right we don't care you know you can't you can't figure out what i'm doing up here and how to do the sound too bad so anyway so some of them are concerned um and for those who are uh creditworthiness has become an issue even in live performance since the visual information provided to the audience during concerts does not necessarily allow them to assess the musician's skill as it is thought to do with traditional instruments however it is clear that most audiences don't really know precisely how and I say precisely how sound is produced using traditional instruments either unless you play an instrument you cannot know everything that's involved in playing it the nuances of the musician's physical interaction with the instrument right so I mean we all know this at a very crude level right you blow into something a noise is produced but if you play a witness to me you know you're not just blowing into something all right there's a much much more complicated than that right in terms of embouchure in terms of you know breath control and you know there's a whole many many dimensions to producing the particular sound so our belief as a general audience that we can perceive cause and effect relationships when musicians play traditional instrument is revealed to be another as if just as we agree to act as if improvisation is taking place we act as if we understand the precise relationship between a musician's manipulation of an instrument and the resulting sound and are therefore in a position to assess the musician's creditworthiness and to be fair to Galovitch I should note that he places the ultimate assessment of musical skill in the hands of peer musicians not those of the general audience by talking in terms of frames and as ifs guffman makes it clear that there is no such thing as unmediated experience for guffman reality itself is a frame and no understanding or even cognition of experience as possible absent the mediation of a frame to provide an interpretive context the basic guffman question is what is it that is going on here and he spent his entire career trying to understand how we continually find answers to that question we do not answer it by uncovering the objective truth of what is happening but by actively constructing an interpretation of it through interaction an interpretation that is always mediated partial and open to revision guffman loved and this is one one of the things that guffman I don't know is often critiqued about I guess it's his the fact that most of the of his most famous work is not based on field work it's based on the collection of anecdotes essentially and he had apparently an incredible file of stuff that he found in newspapers and magazines or whatever that he would trot out to exemplify his points so he loved these kinds of little stories such as a story about a man who seeks to rescue a woman who is apparently being robbed only to discover that he has wandered on to a movie set and that the woman is an actress playing a woman who is being robbed right guffman's point is not that the man failed to perceive the truth in the first instance at the moment he thought the woman was really being robbed that was the truth his functional reality and he acted upon it when he learned otherwise a new functional reality replaced that one but it was not necessarily any true or any more grounded than the first one for example the man could have discovered subsequently that although the woman was an actress playing a woman being robbed in a movie at that moment she actually was being robbed truth and reality are what we take them to be on the basis of the information we have at particular points in time and the frames that allow us to interpret that information as such they are never objective and fixed but always subject to revision in one sense guffman's frames are similar to the community and scientific paradigms i mentioned at the start of this presentation one paradigm is not better than its predecessor because it is true or in an objective sense and one of the points that kuhn makes which i has stayed with me you know my entire life is that in order to be able to in order to be able to say you know this one is truer than that you have to be able to assume a position that's somehow outside the system and you can look at both of them you know a vantage point from which you can objectively assess both claims and the greater truth of one of them but of course there is no such position one paradigm is not better than its predecessor because it's true or in an objective sense but because it offers a more persuasive account of available information at the time in both kuhn's and guffman's respective worlds understandings that function as truths can never be proved false they can only be discredited at any point a new paradigm that offers a still better account could come along in both cases interpretation of reality is a potentially infinite process that can never arrive at a definitive objectively valid understanding although godamer and his hermeneutic phenomenology comes at these questions from a different angle many of his premises parallel guffman's for godamer asks for guffman understanding is not the uncovering of a truth or reality that is present within a thing or situation but is always an interpretation of the information before us which is understood to be partial possibly inconsistent and subject to revision in light of new information obtained from further encounters as godamer states more directly than guffman quote understanding is always interpretation and the discovery of the true meaning in the case he's talking about of a text is never finished end quote it is in fact an infinite process sorry that was part of the quote meaning godamer also sees experience as always mediated though the nature of this mediation is different for guffman than for godamer as a sociologist guffman was interested in how collectively created social frames shape our individual perceptions and understandings godamer agrees with guffman that we are social beings first and individual second but focuses largely on the question of history and how the past can be understood from the standpoint of the present questions that do not concern guffman but are crucially important certainly to my thinking about performance documentation the two dimensions that mediate of mediation that godamer emphasized our history and what he calls the horizon the frame of reference reflective of our place in historical time so the horizon is a frame in effect if you if you're trying to set these two guys side by side for godamer our place in history mediates our present experience quote we are always already affected by history it determines in advance both what seems to us worth inquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation end quote and one of the reasons this was important one of the specific places where this kind of thing it was important to me in terms of talking about performance documentation has to do with an idea that i mean i have a quotation from an art critic but it's a fairly widespread idea that it's having to particularly with reenactments of famous historical performances like canonical works of performance art and things like that the claim that this is a sort of a bankrupt idea because those performances can't have the same meaning now as they did then basically because this is now and that was then and what godamer is suggesting is or what he's really arguing against in that kind of context is this idea that there's some kind of rupture between past and present that can't be bridged right that somehow the fact this happened then makes it meaningless now right well we can't well i should i should spell this out a little bit more meaningless in the sense that we can't it can't mean the same thing as it once did and if it can't mean that then it's not worth doing all together right and so what godamer is saying when he says uh we are always already affected by history it determines in advance what seems to us worth inquiring he's saying essentially that we are products of history therefore the past is always contained within the present so there is no there is no unbridgeable chasm between the two right um it means a little more complicated than that but that's you know that's that's part of it um uh okay so while godamer insists that we can never understand the artifacts of the past on their own terms that is in relation to a past horizon we can perceive them only through the frame of our current horizon he also posits that since we are products of history the past is not alien to us but is embedded within our horizon for godamer is equally the case that we are products of the past of history and that the past is the product of our interpretation of it in this respect godamer's perception of history is quite different from q's whereas aspects of the past are always contained within the present horizon and function as shared premises that make communication between past and present possible for q new paradigms are incommensurable that is q's word incommensurable with their predecessors and constitutes such a radical shift of frame that they render conversation between past and present impossible rather than enable it and this is one reason why i took exception to richard shekner's talking about the transition of theater studies to performance studies as a paradigm shift because if it were performance studies and theater studies would be incommensurable and incapable of dialogue with one another which maybe they are but perhaps not for that reason to put it perhaps over simply q's understanding of historical i i love this but i'm just going to put it out there q's understanding of historical time and interpretation is linear and mostly unidirectional while godamers is circular not going to explain it in my essay digital eyewitness which you have and perhaps read i use godamers thoughts on how we engage with works of art from the past in truth and method as a basis for analyzing how we come to interact with certain digital artifacts as if they were live as if see i snuck that in there right godamr argues not only that the work of art makes a claim upon us but also that in order to find a work meaningful we must experience it as contemporaneous a term borrowed from kierkegaard that godamr construes as meaning quote that this particular thing that presents itself to us achieves full presence no however remote its origin may be contemporaneity in this sense is not a characteristic of the work itself it is a description of how we choose to engage with it the work of art must be quote experience and taken seriously as present and not as something in a distant past end quote godamr is speaking here quote of the temporality of the aesthetic end quote the way that works of art from historical context very distant from ours may still make claims upon us i appeal to godamr not to frame an argument about digital liveness in relation to historical time rather i am focusing on the aspect of godamr's schema that has to do with bridging a gap between self and other by rendering the other familiar a work of art from a past of which we have no direct experience becomes fully present to us when we grasp it as contemporaneous i suggest that in order to experience interactive technologies as live we similarly must be willing to experience and take seriously their claims to liveness and presence an entity we know like a bot for example an entity we know to be technological that makes a claim to being live becomes fully present to us when we grasp it as live in both cases we must respect the claim by the object for the effect to take place the crucial point is that the effect of full presence that godamr describes does not simply happen and is not caused by the artwork or in my analogy the technology quote contemporaneity is not a mode of giveness and consciousness but a task for consciousness and an achievement that is demanded of it end quote in other words liveness does not in here in a technological artifact or its operations any more than it inheres in the performances i discussed earlier it results from our engagement with and our willingness to bring it into full presence for ourselves we do not perceive interactive technologies as live because they respond to us in real time rather we perceive real-time response in some cases as a demand that concretizes a claim to liveness a claim that we the audience must accept as binding upon us in order for it to be fulfilled just as artworks from the past do not simply disclose themselves to us as contemporaneous but become so only as a conscious achievement on our part interactive technologies do not disclose them to us themselves to us as live but become so only as a conscious achievement on our part so in other words i'm trying you know this more recent phase i guess to really shift the discussion away from let me continue really to shift the discussion away from liveness as residing in the thing we are experiencing and to a position of wanting to argue that liveness resides in our relationship to that thing and that and that relationship you know sort of coming at this from both godomer and gothman is something we have to make happen it's not built into the performance or the situation it's not something that the thing we are witnessing forces us to do or a relationship that it imposes upon us but it's it's something that we bring into being through our participation of a certain time and sort of consciously or doesn't have to be consciously but at any rate chosen um god in godomer's turn this achievement in the case of an artwork quote consists in holding on to the thing in such a way that it becomes contemporaneous end quote the expression of holding on is important here for the way it suggests both conscious activity and precariousness it is through a willed and fragile act of consciousness that we construe works of art from the past as contemporaneous or interactive technologies as live an act that must be actively sustained to maintain the engagement on those terms so the the part of my wanting to reconcile or parallel godomer and gothman that i haven't well i haven't sort of figured out yet i'm sure there's more than that but the thing that's on my mind has to do with this idea of a claim which is a word that but they both use uh the difference is that basically for godomer being a phenomenologist anything in the world can make a claim right and then the rest of it is how you respond to that um gothman of course was not concerned with anything in the world other than people so in his world it's only people making claims but the rest of it is pretty much the same i mean if you look at what he says in the presentation of self in everyday life uh it had you know the way you present your you through the way you present yourself you claim to be something that it's really up to your audience to accept or reject that claim or to engage with you on that basis or that which is not that different from what godomers say but the initial source of where those claims can come from is different in the two cases for gothman i don't know what gothman would have said um if you ask him could things other than human beings make claims um too late now to find out uh but it certainly is um you know a uh a difference and then for that reason and again i will try to explain this fully right now but for that reason um i think that the difference is between the might in a sense being encapsulated in an idea that the the exchange between you and another person for example in the case of self presentation in gothman um is cybernetics based on feedback okay um whereas in gothmer it's a question of dialogue not feedback i think there's a big difference between those two things that that's worth thinking through even though they both suggest continuous exchange between two different things uh gothmer's idea that that our engagement works of r takes the form of an achievement demanded of consciousness it's consistent with his characterization of the audience's position as necessarily active rather than passive to be part of an audience for gothmer means to participate rather than simply be there this parallels gothman's notion that a spectator is a that spectator is a socially defined role that one plays actively in relation to performance friends gothmer defines spectatorship in terms of quote devoting one's full attention to the matter at hand end quote something of which i remind my students regularly which he describes further as quote the spectator's own positive accomplishment end quote no one looks at gothmer as a performance theorist but there's a lot of stuff in there in his account in his account how we direct our attention is not queued or dictated by the characteristics of the object of our spectator rather it is a response to a claim advanced by the object of our attention and an accomplishment on our part it is our side of the interaction through which liveness or presence emerges when we are engaging with technologies or perhaps with anything he insists that as the audience's act of consciousness that allows it to experience the work of artist contemporaneous which i extended by analogy to the act of consciousness that allows the audience to experience the virtual as live okay so to summarize this argument some technological artifact a computer website network or virtual entity makes a claim on us its audience to be considered as live a claim that is concretized as a demand in some aspect of the way it presents itself to us by providing real-time response and interaction or ongoing connection to others for example in order for liveness to occur we the audience must accept the claim as binding upon us take it seriously and hold on to the object of our consciousness of it in such a way that it becomes live for us in this analysis liveness is neither a characteristic of the object nor an effect caused by some aspect of the object such as its medium ability to respond in real time or anthropomorphism rather liveness is an interaction produced through our engagement with the object and our willingness to accept its claim well i realize that i've covered a lot of ground here and i moved outward from the fairly concrete circumstances of live performance to more abstract ideas concerning understanding interpretation and the constitution of reality that's not enough for thursday morning uh i suppose my attraction to the ideas i have discussed and the reason why i find them congenial for coming to grips with the elusive phenomena of performance and liveness stems from the idea that they share that reality whether the reality of liveness or of a performance or anything else is not simply given but is constituted through interactions that are contextual in nature and hold out no promise of ever yielding a single definitive understanding thank you i actually i'm going to take a i want to ask you a first question whoa just check your privilege exactly did bring this to the context within we the performance context within which we are currently um so of course one one thing that is happening here as i become aware uh in particular is the camera moves towards me is that this event is being live streamed yes by howl around so if you could uh sort of bring your analysis to bear on the situation to help sort of clarify it some of the you know uh because i think this very moment uh brings a lot of the uh questions you're asking into a really sharp focus so the one i'm talking to you live there are all these micro expressions you have that giving me that reinforcement that you're hearing me and that we're in the same place everybody else in this room is experiencing that as they were watching you they were aware that anyone you could your eyes could move to them if they fell asleep then they might be insulting you not that anybody ever would or if they laughed at something or whatever it was you have that possible feedback now our friends who are watching this if there are any of you hello so i'm talking to them right now i have no idea if there's anybody out there uh if you are how are you experiencing me how did you experience philoslander which you believed was a live presentation so how would that experience be and then of course we're going to be you know how around archives this so right in the future there will be people watching this some of the you know how is that experience you know so the what versus a live broadcast you describe it the other is a record as a documentation right right um and uh some of the people watching it will actually be people in this room so you may watch yourself i may watch myself hello me david how are you doing um the people in this room may then oh let's let's review the the experience and then they'll actually experience it through the filter of having been there which in ironically might make it feel less live because they're contrasting the experience that they had when it really was live to something that is manifestly different or they might simply relive the experience reactivate it so if you could talk about sort of those different uh phenomenal experiences engaging with the same performance and how they're different how they're similar well sure i mean i i would guess that you know to take the last thing you said that goffman at least would argue that you know if i am watching our you know documentation so to say of myself and you i i'm totally guessing and i'm just sort of speculating but in terms of that sort of idea of the of the as if um i suspect he would say you have to suspend your recollection of the actual event in order to you know participate with the the documented version of it you have to be able to treat that somehow as as your first encounter with with this stuff means because otherwise i suppose you're you know how it ends you know you know it's coming up and so you're not really i mean it's interesting to sort of think about goddimer in that context as well i mean what is what is that thing he says about what's what spectators are supposed to do let me find it um devoting one's full attention to the matter at hand and i suppose the question would be can you do that if you are thinking oh you know i was there i wasn't that oh yeah i remember you know don't you're not devoting your attention to the matter at hand right which is the thing that you're watching so i think that at least as far as that goes in different ways both guffman and goddimer would suggest that we need to put out we'd have to put ourselves you know assume that sort of frame of consciousness uh that that brackets out the earlier experience we have had of this event in order to really attend to the matter at hand in watching the documented version of it um so that'll be one thing um i mean in terms of you know the audience that may or may not be watching the live stream or the audience of people who aren't here now who may or may not watch it online in in the future um on the one hand it doesn't seem to me that that situation is terribly different from the bmw take live performance around where in effect in terms of what you're actually seeing it's the same whether i watch this now i watch it later it's the same the only actual phenomenal difference is it's not it's not actually a phenomenal difference the only difference is that if i'm watching it now as a live stream i perceive it as a live stream right um and if i watch it later uh and know that it's archived then i perceive it differently and that goes back to what i was saying before this is something i do believe very strongly that you know if the example i was using is live recordings versus studio recordings but i don't think we listen to those in the same way i think they're different you know so to say modes of listening and so presumably the same thing is true here that there are different modes of watching or spectatorship even though the thing being watched is identical in the two situations and so then it really becomes a question of framing which is a lot of what i was talking about the first part of my article on the tape live performance thing uh you know precisely how the website on which they display these things or through which you can access the archive versions frames them right through the way they're presented through the text that surrounds them and so on so it really you know it does come down to that the there's nothing if you if you just happened upon you know the the feed of this absent any kind of information or frame you would have no idea essentially what you're looking at you wouldn't know if it was a live thing or if it was a archive thing or what right so you need the frame to tell you that one way or another and and then you need to bring to it the right state of consciousness as it were to participate with it meaningfully in the context of how it was framed so i think that's this situation in that respect is not particularly different than the tape live thing there's another thought that drift through i can't remember what it was i was was there another part of this i may have lost track in terms of the the many layers and dimensions exactly all right i think you and then that experience of us in this room is compared to any of that so because you would talk to the very beginning of your talk you said temporality is more important yes space yes seems to be but then you also brought in another really important concept which is interaction interaction so that you know because you can imagine a skype situation rather than that so if this was on skype you might be able to watch the remote audience all right and you know or even if they if we invited the viewers on howl around to submit questions afterwards which would then which the tail live thing does do so that reinforces yet or proves that it's live because they type a question and twitter or whatever right you respond to it right so uh so it would be those different yeah oh yeah so the other thing i wanted to say and this is a little and this is um in the in the the chapter of liveness that i asked you to read i i remember because i read it this morning that um there's a section i think it's talking about improv comedy in fact which is sort of talking about the superiority of the live event as opposed to watching on tv or whatever because having to do with basically the difference between your ability to you know be in the audience and to laugh and whatever right but the question and how you know i did talk about this in the book but i will i'll i'll say that it's still kind of an open question in my mind is um and again i'm not going to say that these are the same thing but i do think that it's not entirely clear to me that you don't get some of that experience from seeing an audience responding to the thing right so to the extent that if you're watching improv comedy on tv let's say you can see the audience and and the improvisers and the interaction between them sure of course it's not the same thing as if you were sitting among them right and and you know could say you know talk back to the prompts that the improvisers give you but but i'm not sure it's completely different either and so that would be another thing that i think would be germane here that is anybody watching the stream whether live or archive would also you know have a sense of audience engagement assuming that the audience doesn't really look like the audience is being captured but if you were based on the camera angle but if you were then that would be that would be provides or in a sense further framing or a sense of the experience to the people watching that might not be completely divorced from the experience that you are actually having and of course that the bottom line for me would be very simply that all of this said the thing that i would object to the most personally is an insistence that this event right here is somehow of higher quality than what the people are seeing on the live stream that's somehow superior to it it's somehow more real more authentic more anything you want that's where you know i start to complain using the example of a milly winily and since then we've become probably as a culture less offended by right what they have done is there any do you see any any cause for either concern or excitement in the fact that we become less offended by the lip syncing and and well i i would resist generalization because at the time um what's the time i first wrote that which is a really long time ago now and i was researching so two things one uh i was back in the time when i still taught during the summer which i no longer do and i was teaching a freshman class and i basically asked them do you care that these people are not really singing and they said no we don't really care right um so there's that and then when i was investigating because you know in the wake of milly winily people tried to pass various kinds of truth and advertising laws with respect to concerts if you're going to have lip-syncing at your concert you have to say so on the poster but who was it who was advocating for these laws it wasn't the kids it wasn't milly winily's fans it was their parents right so this is a generational thing always um and in fact i one of the um one of the uh things that i cut out of the first edition of liveness when i moved to the second edition is the way that chapter i guess is chapter two ends uh because it doesn't end this way anymore but it ended the first time around on a very specifically generational note right and it had to do not with with this question of lip-syncing but it had to do with the question of uh maybe this is too old-fashioned even now for for this but it had to do with when you call someone do you hope to get the answering machine and uh and and there seemed to be some evidence that's skewed generationally also although i personally do hope to get but so i don't you know i don't think there is a we as a culture in this is what i'm saying i think you really have to pay attention to the particulars right and you know if there is evidence as i believe there is that even in the at the high point of the milly winily the scandal milly winily you know that or that fair that's what or that fair milly winily you know um even at the height of that their fans actually didn't care right um then you know it's not we as a culture right it and and why didn't they care they didn't care because they kind of know that you can't move like that you can't dance like that and also sing at the same time but they want to see both things yeah they want to hear the sound they want to see the bodies moving so if that requires some technological intervention so be it right but it's only old rockists like me you know who care about whether someone's really playing a guitar or not you know um so i think it is generational and in that sense yeah there is a shift over time but i don't think it's necessarily a large-scale cultural thing i think it might might might be better to think about it more and kind of loosely speaking kind of subcultural terms right because i mean certainly there are you know if you think about rockists as the subculture you know we're hanging on to liveness and authenticity and all that stuff desperately right meanwhile the milly and vanilla fans are blightly going off and saying none of that matters just um just following on from this idea that liveness is produced by kind of an active interaction with whatever it is a bot or this or that i'm kind of you know it made me think about um the kind of coercive element of that from the technological point of view coming towards us all the time and i wondered if alpha's idea of interpolation is perhaps you know part of this story too and i'm thinking about yeah you know that that you don't actually exist until you respond to something that calls your name and it may call your name in a way that doesn't really work for you but if you don't respond you kind of disappear and i'm just thinking about perhaps a darker side of the way that you're framing liveness which is you know the incredible sorts of money and time that have gone into making the interactivity of apps that are constantly tapping us on the shoulder and asking for our attention you know so that yes it's it's a sort of slightly darker view of something that isn't just a conscious active will you know to to move towards these things like the dialogue is very much built into the money-making framework of how these things come to us you know like with the example of the bot what why does it keep talking to us in a way that makes us think do you see what i'm trying to say yeah yeah i mean i would actually disappear in a certain respect without responding to these things that have been built to claim our attention i'm especially thinking of teenagers and facebook but those ways of performing the self where the implied threat is that the self disappears without giving these pre-programmed twitch type responses well first of all i will say that in the presentation of self in everyday life which is hot well the book that most the second version of that most people know it was published in 1959 Gotham already said you exist only in interaction with others so you know i can't remember the this is a wonderful line he has you know if you're something about if you're if you're alone in your room i can't remember the whole thing but you basically but basically i mean he already was independent of any kind of technological structure involved that that is the case that you know you you you exist only in the sense that you exist for other people or in the interaction with other people so i don't i don't think that's a particularly novel or new situation and i don't know that it is necessarily in itself intrinsically threatening the second thing i will say which is going to sound dismissive and i don't mean entirely that way is that i spent a lot of my time since i you know work in popular musicology and various other stuff talking about art that is also commodity and to me that is simply to give them i you know i don't i don't even i'd be very honestly i don't even care about commodity critique anymore it's like yeah that's right you know that that's correct that's the world we live in but to me that doesn't then shut down you know possibilities for thinking about how these things work how we relate to them etc so the more interesting response though i think would have to do with setting out to say on godomers side by side because i think that you know certainly in terms of of how they formulate things you know interpolation is not what godomers talking about godomers talking about dialogue right and godom there's a very very very strong ethical dimension to godomers which it which basically has to do with um you know there's a kind of responsibility to respond to the claim that something is making while but at the same time the responsibility is to enter into a dialogue if there is not a dialogue happening then that's not you know which is what altruzair is saying right so altruzair is not saying you know something and i think it's also interesting to think about the difference between hailing and making a claim right um and uh and so i think you know i i don't i don't i'm not i don't know exactly what to say about it i just think that um they they may in some ways be talking about the same thing but they're talking about it from very different perspectives and i guess the question to my mind would be uh you know sort of sort of try to put those two in dialogue would be kind of uh yeah all right so something hails you you know do you have to respond two things one of the words that i often use to teach these articles with intimacy and so i was following through the the new ways out of reading what you've written before and i was curious if and just you know have because that also followed in and to take that to i love this idea of of how of the claims of the requirement of attention to and so i'm thinking very much about animation and these animated figures i'm working with and particularly in japan when we had this phenomena of hikikomori what people just stay inside of the screen and so i was thinking of that have you thought about how actually intimacy maybe with this new reading of phenomenology and or attention also is needs to be tuned or or look further into not whether things are live or unlive right right yeah yeah honestly i haven't i haven't really focused in on that particular question but yeah you're right it is it's a good question because i you know as far as i had sort of gotten with it which you know i've already said it's kind of obvious is just to say that you know to argue against this kind of reflexive assumption that live performances are necessarily more intimate than recorded ones or whatever and certainly you know i would certainly say that you know ultimately intimacy would have would again be you know have to i think i did say it's better to really expand on would have to do with what we experience of the thing rather than the thing itself but yeah i think there's a lot more to be said about it and i haven't honestly i haven't really gone back to that particular dimension yeah i'm interested in stuff and things and one of the things that have things is the big screen in the living room or the little tiny screens and whether that screenness has entered into these claims that we're making on our attention or ways that sort of how that changes interactivity or yeah yeah i haven't talked a lot about that but i do talk about that someone in the tape modern piece i was talking about the difference between watching television and watching something on a computer and the sort of idea that at least some people have that um you you know the why i the thing i really like which is not not my formulation but i that i found when i was sort of poking around to write that piece is the the difference between uh i can't quote it exactly but you know the viewer who sits back to watch tv and the viewer who leans forward to use a computer right i mean to me there's something in that that's really interesting in terms of thinking about the differences of spectatorship but i mean of course mostly what it had to do with and certainly this is very relevant to the experience i mean of course it's what's what other people would call distraction right uh but this sort of idea that you know your path your your web searching your path whatever it is you're doing is this kind of thing that you construct uh you know the the live this is your live activity of selecting what to look at what links to follow you know how long to look at something before you go on to something else you know all that sort of thing and that certainly is very i mean of course got them or presumably would be in distress here because of of course maybe not it depends on how you define what the thing at hand is right the thing at hand may not be the performance you're watching it may be the internet um in which case you are attending to it very closely by navigating um but uh but it certainly is that that is certainly a a key difference and and you know in a sense if the people at the tate actually want you to watch these performances then there's a kind of risk involved right because i mean even they give you other links to follow right there right next to the little screen on the page where you're looking at the performance but uh but i do like the you know the sitting bag versus the leaning in uh as a as an interesting way of encapsulating a kind of difference of posture of attitude of you know kind of engagement um that i don't think it's a degree of engagement i think it's kind of engagement well two different types of screens yeah i um have a bunch of questions but i just want to ask you a little bit about the as-is right there's something about it that's striking me as um as a narrow sort of focus because if i go to the theater right you're talking about japan in traditional japanese theater everybody knows the story so they don't go there there's no sort of spoiler about it it's the interaction that they're having with the performers most important right um and so the as-is seems a little problematic in that way or is it just a different as-is okay so then what would be the as-is then i don't know i don't know that kind of feeling um then the the other part of that then would be if if the person who's viewing the performance doesn't know the same sort of cultural constructs right so if i go to a jazz show i am i like jazz i don't really know that you know uh there's supposed to clap when people finish a solo um my participation in that clap may not be for the same reason okay so how does that then affect the idea that this is uh a construct that we're all participating in together if we're not necessarily okay well that's a really good question um and there it's a relatively complicated question in a sense because it has to do with um especially the last thing you said participating in it together if you're talking about gothman that's happening in a very particular sense because as i said in my presentation without explaining it for gothman frames are social in nature okay in other words you know as i say to my students all the time we don't get to decide what a course is what a class is what a class session looks like and how it operates then we have a certain degree of latitude right a certain degree to which we can define but but it's it's finite and we know what it is and it's not of our own choosing right but at the same time we need to have a common understanding of what is going on here or else nothing can happen right that's the part of gothman that people quickly forget they they choose to see what he's saying is restrictive but in fact it's enabling right if we do not share a common understanding of what is happening we can't function together all right so that's i think a very key point in terms of basically understanding gothman that you know the frames themselves are socially defined so they are actually external to us as individuals but at the same time they are the very things that allow us as individuals to interact with each other because they provide a common basis for interaction all right that said it is also true that gothman um partly i think by temperament and partly by virtue of being a sociologist uh is defining normative cases right so i like even the anecdote i gave you nothing is stopping you from you know whispering there is no baby before a performance of who's afraid of virginia well there is no gothman police officer with a pistol sitting next to you saying you can't do that right so these frames are not coercive oh maybe they are coercive actually they are coercive sorry i didn't mean that they're not determinate they don't determine your behavior but they provide parameters for your behavior right and you either and gothman was fully aware of this you either you know so to say adhere to those norms or you don't and if you don't in many cases there is a social price to be paid right and gothman the whole idea of frames understands allows us to understand how that works right okay and then in terms of you know sort of audience participation interaction in a performance i mean blithely i would say it doesn't matter if you why you applaud the jazz solos right what matters is that you applaud um that's sort of what i was saying in a way when i said you know that's the whole idea of the as if it doesn't matter why you do it what matters is what you do right so i mean um you know like i said in the little presentation you know we all behave as if every solo is worthy of applause and so we applaud it right now privately i may be thinking oh my god that was the worst solo i've ever heard and the person sitting next to me think yeah wow that was great right doesn't matter in terms of participation in the event what matters is that we applaud i'll give you another little anecdote right something i heard on npr years ago which i thought was very illuminating which was from the british comedian eddie isher and he was talking about an audience at a comedy show and the sort of hypothetical situation is comedian says something everyone's laughing and applauding one person turns to another what did he just say all right so the reason you're laughing and applauding is not necessarily because of what the comedian said it has to do with your participation in the social event around you and if everyone else is laughing right you know again it comes down to in a sense either you laugh or you don't laugh and then other people look at you aren't you laughing the guy's really funny right um so i think what bogothman is doing primarily really is giving us a vocabulary for talking about these things right um and so sort of you know understand that the you know frames are not determining but they are they provide definitions right normative definitions for what is supposed to be happening here and then the question of how individuals make choices within that socially determined frame that's wide open i mean one of the things that a lot of people also don't necessarily know or in a sense understand about goffman as opposed to other sociologists of the time there was another sort of branch of sociology which which actually still exist in a difference that's it's kind of taken a specific direction um who were interested in what are called social scripts and goffman was very insistent that human behavior is not scripted all right i mean to him interestingly enough human behavior was much more improvised within parameters much the way jazzy's um that you know if you know the frame you kind of know what you're supposed to do but that doesn't give you a script it doesn't give you a set of specific things you should do or say in a sequence in which to do or say you kind of feel that out as you're going through right that's why i said you know cybernetic and feedback because the other thing of course the reason why goffman calls the presentation of self impression management is because it's an ongoing process always so that i have you know his idea is that i have the desire for you to perceive me in a certain way right so i present myself to you in a way that i think is going to make you perceive me in that way but what if i get the sense that it's not working right through feedback through whatever it is i pick up whatever cues you know like i get from you right then i'm going to change i'm going to adjust i'm going to if i can i'm going to try to you know do something a little different or speak a little louder or whatever it might be to try to try to get back on track try to get back to a place where i feel that you are perceiving me the way i wish for you to perceive me right so so it's not at all scripted in that sense but but it is you know there are always according to goffman conventions for lack of a better term social conventions surrounding of which we with which we are all familiar right and obviously if you're not familiar with them to go back to you know sort of question of what if you're in a different cultural situation i mean you know then you're subject to ridicule in some case i'm sorry but it's true like the person who doesn't know when to clap at a classical music concert uh thank you very much this was really thought-provoking um and i i'd like to actually pull on this thread a little bit and talk about the politics of the frame um because uh uh the the phenomenological approach gives us this um what i think is an enhanced sense of agency and so uh especially to what you're saying here i'd like to push back a little bit on the fact that the choice that you make on these social frames is wide open uh where i disagree with that in the sense that there are consequences that go far beyond ridicule right in a social situation um and i was just wondering if you could talk about sort of the political nature of power structures that influence our choices uh and how that affects the encounter well i mean i think to me the most the most important and in a sense obvious issue i mean this is not something that goffman really talked about but well where you know the whole idea of framing intersects with power is in the choice and definition of frames you know i mean i mean i say this to my students all the time you know our classroom encounters framed in a certain way as a classroom encounter we all know what that means right it means that you are not free to come in here naked you know without consequences you're not free to hang from the ceiling and street like a bat all right that's not or that's not the way of participating in this frame you are also not free to redefine the frame to any extent but i am right i mean so i can say all right today put your chairs in a circle and you have to do it right so that to me is that's the real question of with respect to frames and power is who has the power to decide not so much how things are framed but what the definition of the frame is at any given point in time so for example it's important to understand that goffman does not argue their frames are static all right so one of the examples he gives which is sort of typically morbid example is you know capital capital punishment execution so you know what an execution look like in the day of a tale of two cities right 18th century what does it look like today very different you know today it's a private event that occurs at midnight it's witnessed by very few people you know as opposed to being the public square where people bring their lunch it's in the middle of the day you know but we so we still have a frame an event frame that's called execution right but what that means is completely different now than it used to be so the question is who gets to determine that meaning who gets to determine what that frame actually is and what the roles that are available in it are right that's where the power is in all this it seems to me and that's where you know because i mean frames in and of themselves i don't think are either malign or beneficent they are simply means i mean frankly if you accept what goffman says human cognition is impossible without them so therefore you know we have we have to have right otherwise the world is just you know buzzing in colors right so so that in and of itself is you know that's neither good nor bad just what it just is right so to me the question then really in terms of thinking about it in terms of power and power structures and so on has to do with you know again not particularly not maybe not necessarily how with well this may be a little bit too technical but you know how a situation is framed kind of initially because that's by social definition but then of course within that you know i could get another example i use with my students is you know i could say all right people i don't feel like teaching today but i brought you some pizza i brought you some party hats i brought you some stuff to drink we're gonna have a party i'm reframing this as it's no longer a classroom session it's now a party and i have the power to do that i do it too many times the administration might take notice and then they have the power to tell me that i don't have the power to do that right and so on and so on like that's to me where you know the choice where who gets to choose the frames and in instances where things where a frame can be chosen such as today it's party not class who gets to do that who has the power to do that and how do they exercise it all right and then the second point would be the definition of the frames all right who gets who how are how are the you know well i mean from historical standpoint and how did it come to pass that like executions that were once public events no longer are all right how did that happen how what what who was involved in that what set of decisions led to that all right how you know it's so that to me is where those kinds of questions those two places is where those kinds of questions really come come up and and again to me you know the the the vocabulary frames gives you a way of talking about i'm interested i love this idea of the of the way that the mediated experience of course phenomenologically can become live depending on how we perceive it and i'm thinking about when it's recorded so uh recorded media in which the technology of record like that piece is itself more clearly bound by it the morality so an example would be like a wax cylinder and how like listening to that first of all it's harder especially for us now to if you listen to one to imagine that this is live in the same way that's like a cd but at the same time the experience of listening to that gains its own liveness by its ephemerality and so the question of listening to the wax cylinder played on the sonograph versus the listening to a wax cylinder played through youtube and i was wondering so it could extend to this kind of well post-human place like through another frame if that makes hey you lost me in this okay um i lost me too of course the word remediation came immediately into my head yeah but i mean yeah basically so that the uh so another example would be like so the the howl around right so that people watching at home or people watching later on can then it becomes live for them even if it's later on because the interactivity of it but it gets one of these frames that we assign to liveness um and if i'm understanding right and maybe i'm not uh ephemerality could be one of those frames like interactivity yes but the idea that something feels that way feels well i'm not sure i would choose to say that ephemerality is a frame exactly but what do you mean by ephemerality in this context i mean the sense that what you're experiencing cannot be experienced in the way you're experiencing it for very long so um like before we started you know transferring wax cylinders to like other like material on them the listening to the wax cylinder as it starts the cylinder itself starts to crumble is that experience of listening a kind of a different kind of liveness that's like another step out from now you're listening to the cylinder itself perform and it's dying other people you should be asking um yeah i mean i'm not i'm still not exactly sure what the question is but certainly i would agree that and it does i guess in a sense it does become a certain question of framing like if someone says to me here listen to this and i listen to it i go okay and they say okay listen to this i'm going to play you a wax cylinder and this is probably the last time we can play this cylinder so you're never going to be able to hear this again of course i'm going to hear it differently right i can't you know just sitting here define or explain exactly what the differences are going to be you know what what that means ultimately in terms of how i'm going to listen to it differently but certainly i would and that and that is purely a matter of framing you know sort of how the experience of playing this thing is or is not framed right and certainly you know if uh if someone yeah if someone were to say to me you know this is even though this is a recording this is the only time that this recording can be played or something like that then yeah of course that would make a tremendous difference in how i would attend to it but again that's that's you know it's purely i mean in a way i sort of well yeah purely a matter of how the experience is framed and consequently what my understanding of what the experience is is yes thanks this is great i want before i ask my question uh i want to thank you for acknowledging the experience of looking back over past writings and saying wow i wrote this but who wrote this that's that's in my experience um i was wondering if we could talk a little bit more about uh the terms that you're using recently uh contemporaneity has been one today intimacy yeah okay yeah so both of those terms are about closing distance yes okay um and what i'm wondering about is where do we put into this thinking uh artists or works that really want us to be aware of the machinery of that closing uh and i'm thinking of for example brecht i'm thinking jack smith i'm thinking susan lori parks i'm also thinking of uh game before game and video game designers that really want us to experience a moment of sort of play of flow which is its own kind of intimate experience and then suddenly draws up against the machinery the ideology uh the stuff the media that that's enabling that so render romero is a fantastic game designer she has a game called train and it's a it's about getting pieces getting these little pieces onto a train car you're trying to do it as efficiently as possible and at some point during the game it's revealed to you that you're actually playing a holocaust game and the pieces are jews and these things are drinkers and so you're suddenly made aware of whoa i was having the kind of fun here in intimacy with the mechanics of the game with my fellow players and bang i'm in an historical space institutional space and so on so if you if i'm if this doesn't seem to operate rather obtuse um can you speak about where does where do we put uh or maybe is there a place for thinking about maybe in a more anxious or nervous way about that closing of distance where we're not valuing intimacy we're not valuing that experience of contemporaneity within with an older work or a work that's coming from a different space okay well i don't think you can conflate contemporaneity with intimacy because i don't think it's at all the same thing i'm not i'd want to do contemporaneity simply has to do with positioning something from the past so that it is meaningful to us now right and one of the um i mean first of all godom are believed that that is is necessary uh in order to have any kind of engagement with things from the past he also when you get a just one level down deeper into what he was saying he also does not believe necessarily that this is possible with every artifact from the past that there are simply things that no longer have any meaning to us all right um and i wish i could quote this directly because it's actually one of my favorite passages from him but he said something like you know only that part of the past which is not past is available to history all right um so it's only the part of the past that's still in the present um and so if you're talking about the kind well anything but the kinds of things that you're talking about in the context of contemporaneity then you are talking about for example things from the past right and godomers and our engagement with them um so for example brex might be an interesting case in this instance um and because again you know the other the other major kinds of all major phenomenological concept but certainly godomers is this idea of a horizon um and part of his point is that you know we can't we can't experience things from the past in the through the horizon under which they were created because that's gone the only the only way we can experience them is in relation to our own horizon right which means that the only meaning things have for us is the meaning that they have for us now right um so this is a sort of roundabout way i guess of asking well okay if we sort of think that through what happens to something on brex to what extent are the effects you're talking about uh specific to a particular horizon all right this effect works now will it necessarily not will it necessarily work for people looking back at it you know engaging with it by bridging that distance by making it contemporaneous but still only able to perceive it in terms of their own horizon you understand what i'm saying um because it seems to me that what you're talking about are kind of you know i mean i would say effects in a way and those effects may be somewhat specific to how people perceive under a particular horizon it's not quite what i'm thinking about i actually think i'm thinking more about works that have been built into them these right we might call them an alienation effect or talk about a modernist idea of burying the device these moments where or nikijivani has a poem her most famous nikirosa she spends the first part of the poem telling you in in really striking uh inviting ways about her childhood experience growing up poor and black and then right at the end she says and i hope no white person ever writes about this i'm a white person so i've been brought in and it's suddenly i'm told everything i just told you in fact this invitation into intimacy to use a term uh has is you're not there so it's it's i'm thinking about those kinds of things where it's part of the work itself maybe a horizon of expectations where we're not allowed to to to think about that contemporaneity it's and it's not it's not a question merely up rises but of the structure of the work honestly i don't think that the not allowed is a thing i mean not from not from phenomenological perspective i mean i mean it would only be again from and again i have to say it has to be if you really want to talk about in these terms it has to be our engagement with things from the past right how far back in the past i don't know but it has you know that's that's the point that that's what godimer is trying to talk about is how we can possibly you know some caveman somewhere made a painting right how can we now today possibly get anything from that right anything how can we possibly engage with and understand that how does that and not it doesn't happen but how does it happen when it happens right that's what he's trying to get to um and um and the other thing i would say is it's it's you know i was i was recently um uh rereading uh one of berth states's essays on uh i guess it's the actor phenomenology of acting or something which is this really weird essay where the first part is fairly straightforward kind of account of three different modes of acting and blah blah blah and then it sort of takes off into this fairly lengthy discussion of what i would call basically i don't think that's the word terminology uses but sort of conventions and how you know certain kinds of artistic gestures are are fresh and then become stale through reuse etc and so i kind of wonder about the sorts of things you are talking about i mean isn't that sort of stuff that we become kind of familiar with at a certain point and you go oh yeah okay i see what she's doing here so so and the reason i'm asking that is because if we're talking godimer we're talking historical time right and over historical time if enough artists have done this kind of gotcha gesture then it's by about the time it reaches us it's kind of like yeah yeah that's so 1980s you understand what i'm saying so i so i just you know so i don't i'm not i don't i'm not quite sure how this you know how to use this kind of framework for talking about what you seem to want to talk about so we're at about 1215 if somebody has a really burning question that you are dying ask right now live one more question whether you are gonna have three hours more discussing with with phil yeah okay so how much of this is connected like socially and this and this feeling of connectedness and i give you an example so um i would prefer to listen to the radio because i feel like it is it's live and i'm connected because other people are listening to it right then whereas it could be the same or at least you think they at least i think they right but it could be the same song on the radio that i can just stick a cd and and listen oh yeah yeah but that idea or a live telecast you know well i don't want to watch that tomorrow taped because everybody else is watching it tonight i yes like is that a frame is that you know am i making that frame that you know well it is oh yeah of course i mean if something is is uh yeah it goes for example to take modern thing i mean if something is framed as a live stream you know which we are sending out across or it's available and sending out is not the right term but the radio it is yeah that that's we're sending out what's available to lots of people um then that's how it's been framed for yes absolutely that's your understanding of what's going on and that enables you to have to participate in that one i will go you maybe one better or maybe it's just because i'm not especially with the parlous state of the radio industry today there is no guarantee that anyone else is listening um and also as someone who has been on the radio is actually really interesting from the other end because you're sitting behind a microphone talking and you have no idea if it's anyone out there listening it's a very from the performance side it's a very strange thing but um there are certain songs not not because i feel that other people listening but there are certain songs that i only want to hear on the radio yeah i don't i don't want i want to just sort of come upon them right um and and and experience them that way and whether i own recordings of them or not i don't want to listen to them i want to turn it up we'll burn it down by the four tops is one of these so i want to turn on the radio and there's Bernadette you know i i don't want to listen to Bernadette at home i don't know why but it's just something about that all right let me crush the frame of the lecture and we've gotten to the lunch frame i'm going to use that to keep going on the lunch or dinner let's come up here and hold