Extending a Hand/Lending an Ear

Abstract

This essay is a partial transcript of a public lecture by Rebecca Schneider, combined with a reflection on audition by a member of her audience, Paul Rae. Schneider's transcribed talk, ‘Extending a Hand,’ asks about the geologic time of climate change in relationship to the human time of racialization and other damaging by-products of the Capitalocene. If Schneider's talk performs a call, Rae's companion commentary performs a response that is, simultaneously, a reflection on the ways and means of academic labour on and as performance. In Schneider's talk, Paleolithic negative hand stencils are read beside contemporary protest acts and both are considered as ‘hails’, suggesting a reverberatory, ongoing, and even ‘live’ duration to gesture. Call and response is thus considered both in terms of geologic time and in terms of human time. ‘Extending a Hand’ was delivered as a keynote address to the 2016 Performance Studies international (PSi) conference in Melbourne, Australia, the theme of which was ‘climate change’. In order to recover and examine aspects of the ‘climate’ of its initial presentation and reception, the format overlays portions of the initial transcript of the talk with the interpolative interjections made by the speaker, as well as a series of thumbnails drawn from the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. In ‘Lending an Ear’, Rae offers a parallel commentary on where and how Schneider, as speaker, departed from the written text, and considers what this tells us about the oral qualities of academic presentation, and how these in turn inflect the issues raised by the paper.