ABSTRACT
In 1977 Michel Benamou represented a gathering perspective when he wrote that performance was ‘the unifying mode of the postmodern’. He identified three basic ways in which various senses of performance characterise postmodernity: the dramatisation of life by the media, the theatrical playfulness of art, and a focus on performance in the sense of technological efficiency. In post-industrial culture at large, where services and information rather than material products dominate, performance in the sense of process prevails. And while some modernist artists took refuge in ancient myth and symbol to compensate for the death of god, the postmodern artist instead follows Nietzsche to find affirmation in the free play of the will. Criticism, too, recognises itself as a performance, and so also plays (Benamou 1977: 3-4).
