placing presence

You're Dead to Me...

Deadness emerges out of what is for us an unhelpful and overvalued schism between

presence and absence that undergirds much literature on performance. Deadness speaks to the distended temporalities and spatialities of all performance, much the way all ontologies are really hauntologies, spurred into being through the portended traces of too many histories to name and too many futures to subsume in a stable, locatable present. As we will argue below,

the topologies of deadness—those never-ending emplacements within concatenations of dis- placements—are patterned and repatterned through specific arrangements of co-labor, or the interpenetrating, distributed effectivities of all entities that have effects. (Pg 20)

Situations where “capturing” a live performance is the fundamental goal, there are always lags, leaks, and perforations that are indicative of intricate spatial and temporal enfoldings and defoldings. In the period leading up to, and immediately after (Page 22)

We might say that at the base of the entire history of audio-visual recording—indeed, at the fundament of all electronic communication—is a culture of synchronization. Sync culture—that leakage effect caused by the awareness of temporal disjointedness—develops

precisely at the moment when non-synchronization becomes a technical hurdle. (Pg 25) 

Our charge is to tease out the contingent patterns of collaboration within the inter-mundane: the apportionment of resources, the conscription of value, the deployment of technologies of co-presence, and the emergence of effective agencies, not to mention the uneven claims to ownership and refigurations of the corporal body within the durative soundscapes of intermundanity. Intermundane collaborations enrol, enlist, and manage deadness, not from the grave itself, but from another dead space: the recording studio. (Pg 27)

Being Makes it So?

Logocentrism is Derrida's term for a philosophy of presence, that is to say, a world-view which understands being in terms of presence: the unmediated presence to consciousness of  the world, and the self-presence of consciousness. Logocentrism is a form of 'onto-theology', or religion of being; in other words it subordinates all difference to the plentitude of presence resumed in the logos. (Pg 48)

The trace expresses the absence of full, present meaning: in so far as meaning is differential, a matter of constant referral onwards from term to term, each of which has meaning only from its necessary difference from other signifiers, it is constituted by a network of traces. (Pg 50)

There is no pure unmediated presence free from temporalization the trace is usually concealed in philosophical discourse which has been concerned rather with the problematic of the sign. The sign implies that it is a sign of something which precedes it; the trace, on the contrary, in Derrida's account, is not a secondary mark of a prior origin, it means rather that there was no origin before the trace. Derrida uses the terms archi trace and trace originaire to convey this destruction of a notion of origin in the knowledge that the terms are of course self-contradictory. (Pg 51)

The Responsive Co-Labors of Deadness

Deadness produces the resonances and revenances that condition all modes of sonic performance. We engage deadness not as displacement, but as emplacement in layered, rhizophonic sites of enfolded temporalities and spatialities. Within these sites, laborers are corpaural, bodies are always sonic bodies.

In the context of intermundane collaborations, liveness is enabled by the productive capacities of deadness, the distributed and noncontinuous temporalities effected by the body’s translation and proliferation through recording technology.27 

What is called liveness is nothing more than a transitive effect of deadness, and deadness is nothing more than the promise of recombinatorial and revertible labor. In the particular circulation of effectivity that characterizes intermundanity, the living register the effective co-presence of the dead even as they draw and  obdurate an impossible separation between mundanities. Collaboration is thus a sympathetic consonance structured in inequality, and skirmishes over rights inevitably arise. (Pg 32) 

Sources: 

Stanyek, Jason, and Benjamin Piekut. "Deadness: Technologies of the intermundane." TDR/The Drama Review 54.1 (2010): 14-38.

Howells, Christina. Derrida: Deconstruction from phenomenology to ethics. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.