My brain’s performance is a bit below par today as a result of performing a sustained effort to absorb what was a very stimulating conference organized by Goldsmiths on "performance". For me the sign of a good conference is that is gets you thinking – and it was an extremely useful warm up to starting some fieldwork on the social life of money. I have used performance for thinking about brands for a long time (more as an analogy than any theory) mainly to break away from the idea that the written account of the brand should be privileged within a company but it was useful to watch a performance of economic (and other) sociologists talking about the concept in many different ways. One area which I think could still to be addressed (and hence why I want to spend a year in the daily life of money in the UK) is to expand the analysis of performance beyond synchronic accounts (the ‘live’ account of being in the audience whether as actor/agent or actor/ethnographer etc) to more diachronic analysis of the creation of meaning through performance and specifically ritual (which was mainly alluded to in some papers in terms of habit/disposition). A thought which came (as they often do) after the event, was the recent minor controversy about Yorrick’s skull. A quote from the theatre that decided against honouring the will of a dead pianist highlighted an interesting element of how performance works as a social or cultural activity in the creation of meaning or experience:
"As a company, we all felt most privileged to be able to work the gravedigger scene with a real skull... However, collectively as a group we agreed that as the real power of theatre lies in the complicity of illusion between actor and audience, it would be inappropriate to use a real skull during the performances, in the same way that we would not be using real blood, etc. It is possible that some of us felt a certain primitive taboo about the skull, although the gravedigger, as I recall, was all for it!" Consumer confidence as the suspension of disbelief?
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