Episode 541: How To Revise A Book

And throughout that entire time, of course, people kept saying that the fact that theater is a live form is sort of essential to it and what makes it important and so on. So at some point I just got interested in this and I started looking around for what people may have written about it, what people might have said about liveness and what it was and why it was so important, things like that.

And what I found out was that nobody in my area-- that is, theater and performance studies-- had written about it. I also discovered that people in media studies, particularly people who study broadcasting and television, had been writing about it. And in fact, liveness was a pretty important concept in that context. And the word liveness comes from media studies. It's not a word that I created and it's not a word that had previously had a presence in theater or performance studies.

So I often say that I sometimes write the books that I want to read, and this was absolutely such a case. Since there was no book looking at this from that perspective, from my perspective, I decided to start poking into it and see what I could do. CHARLIE BENNETT: And so this was, not literally but sort of pop culturally before the internet. Oh yes. Yeah, well like I said, I started doing this around-- I guess it's not literally before the internet because I started doing this in 1992.

That's when I first started thinking about it. And I guess the internet had actually been around. But it was certainly before I think most people and certainly myself were as enmeshed in the internet as we are today.

A kind of general discussion of the situation of live performance in a media-dominated culture. Then the second chapter focuses on music and the way these issues play out in the relationship between live and recorded music. But the third chapter is about law. And I, for other reasons, for other research I had been doing, I had gotten very interested in copyright law. Strictly speaking, you cannot copyright a live performance per se.

That's a statement that needs a lot of unpacking, but I will leave it at that. And so I started really investigating that closely. And in the process of doing so, I also found that courtroom procedure and particularly testimony is also a very interesting topic to discuss from the perspective of liveness, since courtroom testimony is a kind of live performance. So the chapter ends up being about both.

It looks at the question of liveness in relation to courtroom procedure and testimony, the kind of performances that take place in courtrooms. But then also in terms of looking at live performances as a kind of commodity and its relationship to intellectual property law.

When you're putting together a book like this one in particular or academic texts in general, do you think that you are finding the answers to your questions in the process of writing, or are you recording the process of finding the answer to your original question once you've answered it for yourself?

It's very much a process of investigation where I'm formulating questions and doing research to find the answers even as I'm writing the book.

I also got a lot of people who really liked what I was saying. But I think I can say that I did succeed in opening up a conversation around this idea. That's been going on ever since. Most of the arguments that people make to say that live and what I call mediatized performances are intrinsically different from one another are not credible arguments. So I spent a good deal of time in the book just kind of dismantling those arguments.

Not to say that live performance and media performances are the same thing, because obviously they're not and we experience them differently. But mostly to say that the ways that people have chosen to distinguish them don't really hold water. And along those lines, then I'm arguing that the distinction between live and media as performance is best understood as a historical distinction.

In other words, what we understand to be live performance changes continually in relation to many other kinds of change around it, but especially changes in media and technology. And so it's a moving target, and so in order to understand it, it's best to think of it as something that's continually defined and redefined as the context around it changes, rather than thinking of it as a kind of immutable characteristic of certain kinds of performance.

The third edition was actually not my idea; that was triggered by an editor at the publisher who told me that he had been looking over their lists and looking for books that might be ripe for a new edition. But the thing about it is a topic like liveness and its relationship to media technology and the mediatized cultural environment and all of this, these are things that are changing all the time.

So even just at the level of wanting to keep up the idea of doing further editions certainly makes sense. In the preface to the third edition I actually say that I like the idea of this as a permanently unfinished book that's always, just simply because of the subject matter, it's always going to be open to new ideas and new situations as things change. So you didn't feel any sort of resistance when the editor asked you if you wanted to revise it?

So I did need a little bit of time to think about that, look back over the first two editions and give some thought to where I might go in a third edition. And of course as part of the publishing process, I had to write a proposal. So that was a place where I attempted to crystallize some of these ideas about where this third edition might go. But I also want to say that for me a new edition of a book is not just I've added a new chapter or there's a new introduction.

For me, it's an occasion to really rethink the entire thing and be very concerned about what stays and what needs to be added, those kinds of things. It's very much not a cosmetic procedure. I really dig back into the whole thing and make decisions about what there is that still seems valid and what there is that doesn't. Or, also things that I don't agree with anymore. I am someone who is willing to admit that my ideas change over time.

And I have sometimes written pieces that are actually explicitly critiques of my own earlier work. So you need to see what all there was there and what kinds of things might be ripe for some kind of revision, or change, or whatever. So I did that, and I did come out of that process thinking, yeah, I think I think there's enough here that I'd be happy to get back into. And it seems to make sense to do a new edition, especially since it had been so long since the second edition.

But yeah, usually honestly when I read my own stuff, which I don't always do, but when I read my own stuff, even from way back in my career, I usually end up going, hey, yeah. That's pretty good. So I don't have that experience. I don't read my stuff and go, oh my God, I said that? But I'm very conscious, though, as I said before of my own rethinking of things. So there are things that I have said in the past that I no longer agree with.

But that doesn't make me cringe because that's just part of the process, right? As you go on, you keep thinking about things and maybe new ideas come up, or you change your mind about some things, or whatever. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And I don't think there's anything wrong with admitting it, either, and being willing to get back into it and change it, or suggest new ideas, or new approaches. And I'm always happy to do that when I see it.

So I guess for me, if I read something of mine and I go, oh, I don't really think that anymore, that doesn't make me cringe. But it does make me think, well, is this something I want to get back into, or are we just going to let it go and let it be what it is? What's the bar for letting it go versus getting back into it? PHILIP AUSLANDER: I think it's partly how significant it is to me and how much more I might have to say about it.

Because there are some things that I end up just not-- I can give you an example from this book. One of the things that provoked people the most, I guess in both the first and second editions, was that I was positing the idea, not a terribly original idea, that at any given time there's a dominant medium. And that people tend to experience other things in relation to that dominant medium or in relation to their experience of that dominant medium.

They bring expectations to other things that are created through their experience of the dominant medium. And so in the particular thing I was talking about in the book, it's not a very, it was never a very long part of the book, the use of digital media on stage in live performances. The examples I used were particularly of dance performances. Because the dance world actually has been considerably more engaged with digital technologies than other types of performance.

And this just rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It's either because they wanted to believe that the human body inevitably becomes the focus, regardless of what's around, which I don't believe. I think the human body can be absorbed into and effaced by all kinds of things around it. But that's one tactic. Or the other one being that they want just to see it as a more equal playing field where human bodies and other materials can interact together without one necessarily dominating the other.

So they didn't like that idea that I was saying that this domination seems to be inevitable. And so actually I went back and looked at the proposal, and in that proposal I said that I was going to revisit this question because it was something that had gotten so much response. But when I actually came to it, I decided, eh, I'm not really interested in this anymore, that particular thing. It just didn't seem that important.

I also think that I felt that way because I did review a bunch of stuff that's been written about that-- it's usually called intermedial performance or something like that. So I read a bunch of stuff that people have written over the years about that I just thought there's not much going on here from my perspective. I didn't find it that interesting. so I basically just kind of let it go.

Actually, what I really did was I very sneakily used quotations from other people in other contexts who also took that position. So the idea is still in the book, it's just not something that I'm saying. I put it in the mouths of other people but it just turned out not to be something that I find all that compelling anymore, and so it didn't really seem like it was worth it to me to really get back into that in a serious way.

It's still in the book and I actually do comment a little bit on it, but it didn't turn out to be the important issue that I at one point thought it might be.

I'd like to read a bit of the book to you now. (READING) "My discussion in chapter 2 of the relationship between theater and early television and the consequent displacement of live performance by television is an attempt to describe how this historical logic plays out in that instance. To put it bluntly, the general response of live performance to the oppression and economic superiority of mediatized forms has been to become as much like them as possible.

From ballgames that incorporate instant-replay screens to rock concerts that recreate the images of music video, to live stage versions of television shows and movies, to dance and performance art's incorporation of video, evidence of the incursion of mediatization into the live event is available across the entire spectrum of performance genres."

But yeah, that said, I did enjoy doing this and it was interesting to sort of get back into this after many years, and also after many years that I had spent really writing and thinking about other things not completely unrelated but certainly focused in different ways. So it was kind of a return to something I hadn't really thought explicitly about in quite a while.

But it was difficult because there were certainly points at which I just was not sure what to do, or what-- It wasn't so much about what I wanted to get rid of, because that was pretty easy in a way to go through the previous edition and say, nah, nah, not this. No, no, no, and to identify the material that I wanted to keep.

Because the tricky thing about doing another edition of a book is that, as I said before, from my perspective, it needs to be substantively different from the previous edition, or else why do it? But it also still has to be the same book. It can't sort of morph into another book. So that's a tricky balance to maintain the identity of the original project while at the same time in some ways trying to move beyond the original project.

And so the process of elimination was not difficult, but the process of figuring out exactly what I needed to do or where I needed to go in terms of fresh material was probably the thing that caused me the most difficulty in a couple of instances at least,

That work has been cited a little bit in legal literature, so I think that I'm fairly confident that I'm not making a fool of myself by venturing into it.

This was something that fit quite well ultimately into the book because in that chapter there's a historical narrative about a not particularly well-known but fascinating episode in the history of American jurisprudence, which is that in the early 1970s there was a movement toward the idea of doing what was called the pre-recorded videotape trial, which was basically where you put everything that happens in a trial on tape and then let a live jury watch it and make their verdict.

And there were many, many different arguments for this but obviously, it never caught on, basically because it couldn't surmount that problem of confrontation. CHARLIE BENNETT: And the name of it sounds almost like a comedy sketch, like a Mr. Show sketch. PHILIP AUSLANDER: Well, the advocates for it in the early '70s were very gung ho about it and had all kinds of reasons why this was a great idea. I mean, this is actually a recurrent thing.

So that was 50 years ago and then it came back around in the context of the pandemic, and still we can't do it. We couldn't do it on videotape, we can't do it through video conference. So it fit. Since I was already talking about that, it fit quite nicely into that chapter. But then also was enough of a thing in itself that I could spin it off and publish it separately and, well obviously before the book since that's already come out and the book has not quite yet.

But that was another thing about the process of writing this particular book, or this particular edition, is that I believe, if I remember correctly, I first agreed to do it in 2019, sort of late 2019. And then boom, a few months later comes the pandemic. And I am at home writing about live performance at a time where there is essentially no live performance, or at least no live performance in the traditional sense. And so that was a very peculiar place to be.

And I felt ultimately that the book had to reflect that. I couldn't pretend that all this wasn't going on at the very moment that I was trying to formulate ideas about live performance. So at the same time, though, I very much did not want this to be the pandemic edition of Liveness, partly because I mean, time will tell, but I think we are in for a spate of what I am calling pandemic studies in the academic world.

And I'm just not sure what the shelf life of that kind of stuff is going to turn out to be. So I didn't want to make this my book about the pandemic, but I did want to-- I felt I actually had to-- acknowledge that this was part of the context. So what I ended up doing was writing two discrete sections in the book that dealt directly with it.

And as I say, in the context of the legal chapter worked quite well because I was already talking about an earlier parallel incident, or phenomenon that had come up. So this was, in a sense, a kind of updating of that. And the other section that I wrote comes at the end of the first long chapter. And it basically has to do with various ways in which producers attempted to recreate the experience of live performance on the internet when physical life performance was not possible.

I got to see Garrison Keillor bring his "Prairie Home Companion," and that was a real treat. And then later on I got to go to-- wait, wait, don't tell me--

I think it's got like something like 100 views on YouTube after 10 years.