What is Called Presence

Abstract

This essay rethinks what is called presence in a way that links important past and present ways of thinking in performance studies. Bringing Wallace Bacon's writing into conversation with Walter Benjamin we reflect from a phenomenological position on presence as an experience of “thisness.” Our aim is neither to defend presence as a simple, ontological fact nor to dismiss it altogether as an anachronism of a premedia age. Rather, we seek to affirm what is called presence as an historically situated mode of experience with a view toward clarifying and revaluing the stakes performance studies has therein.

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