Pleased to Exposition
Transcript
All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII).
Shakespeare said it first in 1600 and probably would have tweeted it if he could. He was a pithy kind of guy, and I think 140 characters would have worked for him.
In the 20th century, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler made a similar argument, only they used speech act theory and the concept of performativity to tell us that we are made up of our own performances, constituted by and through the language that we use.
But if you’re skeptical of poststructuralism, then let me introduce you to Paul Woodruff and his ideas about theater—because my aim in this performance cum presentation is to call attention to why we’re all here.
In The Necessity of Theater, Woodruff defines theater as “the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching, in a measured time and place.” This broad definition encompasses everything from football games, to weddings, to college lectures. And at the heart of this argument is a commitment to the ethics of both watching and being watched. For, as he argues, “One part of being human is the desire to be watched; another is the desire to share experiences with members of a community. We become close to each other when we watch the same things.”
We become close when we watch the current season of Mad Men and then talk or tweet together about how big a jerk Don has become. We become even closer when we get together in the same space to watch each other present our ideas.
And so, in being here, listening to me recite my lines, you are invited to be a part of this performance and thus a part of a community. But I also invite you to watch the performance in front of you, the human activity performed textually in the digital space. In watching me and/or our colleagues perform for each other, we continue to form and participate in a community.
For why are we here if not to build community? If not to watch together, and then converse and participate?
If conferences were simply an arena for workshopping ideas, how would they differ from a blog post or peer reviewed article? Publication cultivates a public in Michael Warner’s sense of textual circulation, but conferences allow for much more expansive interaction, bringing us closer together, physically and intellectually. We get to see each other and interact in real time.
Rather than participate in the stasis and safety of the written word, we come to conferences and perform for each other. We (hopefully) rehearse our lines. We don our professional costumes. We take our places under typically harsh lights and ask for our audience’s attention.
And in an economy of attention, Richard Lanham argues that the burden of attention ultimately comes down to style.
In The Economics of Attention, he explores the supply and demand problem of the digital age. While people often speak of the "information economy" of the current era, Lanham argues that this terminology is misleading, “information is not in short supply... We are drowning in it. What we lack is the human attention needed to make sense of it all" (xi).
For Lanham, style has supplanted substance in this attention economy. In the case of conference presentations, then, a savvy orator with a sleek PowerPoint would garner more attention than a nervous colleague reading from his hard copy—regardless of either speaker’s ideas. And this is perhaps more true than we’d sometimes care to admit.
But Lanham also argues that the “theatrical self-awareness” of an attention economy boosts productivity. He points out that “when we are observed in our work, we socialize it. We share it with the observer and by doing so it becomes more real… more interesting. And so you do better work.”
While we can’t escape the performance aspect of conference presentations, we can draw attention to our ideas by inviting audiences to participate. An invitation to live-tweet asks the audience to look beyond style and pay closer attention to content. It asks them to listen closely, to translate and transcribe. It serves as a participatory gesture that calls attention both to what we are saying and why we are here. But, as Lanham posits, for a participatory drama to have its persuasive and dramatic vitality, it must include a “vociferous opposition.”
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