Lerman, Lior (2023) McLuhan's media poetics and performance studies : reorienting the debates surrounding media and performance towards a broader media landscape. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.

Abstract

In this practice led thesis, I problematise the concepts of media and communication by reconsidering the work of Marshall McLuhan in relation to performance studies. I argue that discussions of media and performance led by researchers such as Erika Fischer-Lichte, Sybille Kramer, and Lars Ellestrom possess a print-orientated technological bias hat leads to the dualist assumption that media are containers, and that communication is a process of transmission. This bias cannot be reconciled with the key assumptions that underpin contemporary performance research and, therefore, inevitably leads to several internal theoretical inconsistences, which can be resolved by adopting McLuhan's approach that understands media as environments and communication as transformation.
Through a mode of enquiry that combines McLuhan's framework for media poetics with media history, art history, art criticism and studio practice, I developed a new analytic approach, which this thesis then applies to performances by artists such as Marina Abramovic and Alan Kaprow, whose work has been the focus of existing debates regarding the specificity of performance. This analysis results in the identification of a proto-digital style of performance whose pattern of communication this thesis associates with the declarative speech act as it was defined by John Searle (i.e., acts that transform a given situation in the act of their enunciation). This style exists alongside the electric pattern McLuhan had already identified as associated with the form of the mosaic.
In drawing on McLuhan, the thesis contributes to contemporary debates surrounding media and performance by reframing the turn towards performance as a return towards an older mimetic structure of experience and in its conclusion that the declarative speech act is a ubiquitous pattern of communication in digital culture that fosters a bias towards logical, linear habits of sense-making on the one hand and in-depth user involvement on the other.