Soft Wares and Hard Truths: Performance, Globalization, and Affective Networks

Jon McKenzie

�@Have we entered an age of global performance? If so, who are its players and producers? Since the end of WWII, "performance" has emerged as a crucial term in at least three different areas of social life: economics, technology, and art. Far from existing in disconnected spheres, these paradigms increasingly overlap and intersect: just as theater takes place in institutional contexts constrained and enriched by technological and economic imperatives, the theatrical model has come to inform organizational theory and web design. This talk explores the complex relation of resistant and normative performance from a global perspective.

�@Synthesizing research fro the arts and humanities, sciences, and professions, I theorize performance not only as transgressive cultural praxis but also as a global formation of power and knowledge, one that challenges us to perform - or else. Performance in this sense extends and displaces the disciplinary power analyzed by Michel Foucault. Its politics are post-colonial rather than colonial, its infrastructures electronic as well as industrial, its economies dominated by services more than manufacturing. Factory labor and the tradeoff commodities have obviously not disappeared; instead they have been overcoded by "soft wares," forms of immaterial production found in communications, finance, healthcare, and social work.

�@Performative power combines the rational calculation of tecncal systems wit the affective management of personal experience, socal interaction, and cultural exchange. The hard truth: difference, ephemeraity, and site specificity are becoming the hallmark not only of performative resistance but normativity as well. I will conclude by addressing the challenges this situation poses for progressive performance research and by considering recent work in the areas of network art, electronic activism, and utopian entrepreneurism.



Jon McKenzie is Assistant Professor of new media in the Department of English, Dartmouth College. He holds a BFA in painting, an MA in English, and a PhD in Performance Studies and has also worked as a consultant in the new media industry. His essays include "Laurie Anderson for Dummies," "Towards a Sociopoetics of Interface Design: etoy, eToys, TOYWAR," and "Genre Trouble: (The) Butler Did It." Jon is past recipient of the Gerald Kahan Scholar's Prize, given by the American Society for Theatre Research for best essay by a young scholar. He was also awarded the Monroe Lippman Memorial Prize for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation, awarded by New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. That dissertation served as the basis for Jon's book, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (Routledge 2001), which uses the Challenger disaster to trace the genealogy of cultural, organizational, and technological performance from the second world war to the new world order. The Association of Theatre in Higher Education has honored Perform or Else with a special roundtable session at its 2002 annual conference. Jon's current research focuses on performance, new media, and electronic civil disobedience.