ABSTRACT
The essays in these issues have approached the concepts of presence, pre-expressivity, sub- or underscore and the performative situations in which these occur, from a variety of perspectives. As always, the direction they take yields more in terms of the writer’s desired pattern of meaning than in terms of any ‘objective’ designation. All meaning is tendentious, or to put it less negatively, it is created in our experience as interaction with what we take to be external to us, but which to a large extent is nothing of the kind. Performance itself makes this even more clear since it is a moment-to-moment sequence created by bodies in space-time, whether those bodies are mainly transmitting or mainly receiving information. And investigation of phenomena or conditions as subtle as those dealt with in the essays here must necessarily depend upon the nature of the perceiving and comprehending entity doing the investigating, in other words on the range and quality of its experience.
