Unger, Clio (2023) Performing knowledge: contemporary lecture performances and the politics of knowledge in cognitive capitalism. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.

Abstract

Today the lecture performance has become a fixture in the by-programs of museums, galleries, theatres, and performance festivals, as well as in academic conferences and seminars: the lecture performance straddles the intersections between art and academia and combines academic analysis and performative intervention into traditional presentations of knowledge. This thesis investigates how the ubiquity of the form belies its complexity: Drawing on developments in theories of knowledge production - Jon McKenzie's focus on performance and managerial knowledge, Yann Moulier-Boutang's cognitive capitalism, as well as port-Fordist ideas of labour as performance - it argues that the hybrid-status of the lecture performance, positioned between lecturing and art practice, ideally situates it to study contemporary knowledge politics. By investigating the different ways in which lecture performances stage knowledge, I show how the form reproduces modes of knowledge marketisation and standardisation on the one hand, and how it acts as critique of these processes on the other. Part 1 focuses on lecture performances in the context of theatre and dance. Drawing on post-Fordist theories centring performance in current labour practices, I argue that the lecture performance is both agent and a consequence of cultural politics driven by economic rationalisation and the intersection of entrepreneurial logics into the artistic and academic field. Part 2 pivots to higher education to argue that the form's association with the more popular genre of the TED talk and other presentation formats geared towards generating a 'knowledge experience' is indicative of wider pedagogical shifts in the field. It analyses the TED talk as a model for popular pedagogies as well as a vector of identification for contemporary academics, before turning to examine Jon McKenzie and his digital pedagogies project, under which he broadly subsumes the practice of the lecture performance. Through analysing McKenzie's lecture performance as a pedagogical ideal, I show how his project nonetheless reproduces neoliberal knowledge politics. Part 3 turns two epistemological and methodological uses of the form that attempt to negotiate, critique, and, at times, interrupt the logics of the global knowledge economy. By revealing the theatrical construction of common knowledge presentations (such as in the archive or via forensic investigation) my primary contention is that the lecture performance unmasks the institutionalised repertoires of knowledge production and offers ways of complementing standardised research procedures by illuminating gaps in knowledge. Through these analyses the thesis makes two main contributions to knowledge. First, it extends existing debates concerned with contemporary lecture performances by connecting the form to a wider set of epistemological concerns that highlight the multifaceted and institutionally fluid ways in which performance is invested in the economics of knowledge production. Second, the thesis contributes to the field of knowledge politics and economy by attending to the performative aspects of these trends and developments that scholars of cognitive capitalism or the knowledge economy tend to gloss over or overlook.