By the time you read this it is already too late

The problem of the online lecture

Abstract

Performance is that which attempts to hold that within which it itself is held. This may take the form of an explicit theatricality, foregrounding and reflecting upon the conditions of being seen and being heard, of the speech and appearance of an actor – which can have both dramatic as well as political dimensions (Arendt [1958] 1998; Schmidt 2017). Or it may take the form of an intentional or habitual performativity, generating the conditions which it purports to describe (Butler 2015; Paavolainen 2018).

Performance-writing and performance-lectures are well-developed strategies for attempting this reflexive double-hold, in which the content reshapes the container of delivery such that it becomes an instance of that which it is also describing. Performance writing foregrounds ‘the transformative play of text as performance’ (Allsopp 1999, 79), emphasizing ‘writing as doing’ as much as ‘writing as meaning’ (Pollock [1995] 1998, 75), and treating the encounter with and through writing as ‘event’ in its own right (Heathfield 2006). Putting these approaches into practice, an artist like John Hall might use the dimensions and affordances of the printed page as a space to enact, not just describe, the encounters it produces (Hall 2004), or the lecture performances of Rabih Mroué simultaneously describe the effects of representation and participate generatively within their own representational dispositifs (Mroué and Martin 2012; Mroué and Saneh [2005] 2013).

How might these strategies be engaged in relation to the ‘problems’ of online teaching? That is to say, the problems of asynchronous engagement, distraction, remoteness and spatiotemporal lag? Rather than obstacles to the apprehension of the subject of performance, could these aspects of the online experience themselves by the subject of the performative act of ‘lecturing’, taking itself as an example to be explored for its pedagogical as well as eventual potential? This online performance-lecture is about these conditions of online gathering, even as it is itself held within them.