Trevor is AKMA’s co-Disseminarian. He’s talking about performance.

Performance requires focusing on a particular text.

It is a type of praxis

We pay attention to feedback: there are risks, and we’re always strengthening or weakening relationships.

All three of these (text, praxis, feedback) situate us in our individual body. But they also brings us together as a social body. (Trevor uses the Eucharist as the paradigm of performance.)

The question for today is: Does performance also situate itself in virtual bodies? Trevor has been reluctant to accept this: a televised mass? Television isn’t embodied. It’s not interactive. [Trevor is about to give some spoilers for the new Matrix, so a couple of us leave for a few minutes.]

There’s something “ontologically significant” about touch, as feminist thinkers have noticed, and there is no online equivalent to touch. (Someone says that we’ll have digigloves, etc. Trevor replies that digitally mediated touch can’t be the same thing as a real touch.)

We need to get better at giving a positive account of virtual embodiment. Here’s Trevor’s attempt: Blogs do allow us to become virtual bodies, to perform online in Trevor’s rich sense of performing as something that leads to understanding. Blogs are more oral than other types of writing. They are interactive. The connect to others. They’re hypertextual and form a web of social connections like the web when we take the Eucharist in that it creates a community. Identity sticks to blogs (a reference to AKMA‘s question).

Blogs are narratives. “If performance is the best way to understand who we are, then blogs are ways of extending these formative traditions and texts and genres. Blogs are stories.” Trevor goes back to the three characteristics of performance — text, praxis, feedback — and finds all three in blogs.

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