Living in the Moment

Abstract

This essay explores duration as the notion of time passing there and then in the life of the performer/spectator. It reprises the Bergsonian account of duration (as less a measure of time, and more a function of the feeling of time passing) to suggest that Bergson’s work has a fresh charge. The construction of time in digital culture – to do with simultaneity and synthesis, where an accumulating past is held within a continually reforming present – provides points of connection with Bergson’s interest in experience as a succession of moments lived in the present. The essay takes a longer historical view, looking at accounts of renaissance painting, nineteenth-century melodrama and contemporary performance art, along with works and ideas by Abramović, Barthes, Beckett, and Cage, to examine relations between (hetero)chronology, duration, spectatorship and experience. It argues that in many instances duration in artworks is formed of proliferated moments, whose effects are to emphasize aspects of actuality by putting us in the face of the lived experience of action and consequence, and our own awareness of this (and our own) particular lived experience. Performance itself has a further charge, for its (re)presentations are encountered chronologically, precisely in and through a passage of time inhabited by both the work and the spectator/participant. The essay argues that duration is nonetheless always cultural; and is expressed and experienced in relation to a particular historical moment. The value of duration varies, whether it is a particular length of time, a passage for endurance, a field for ethical contention or a commoditized span of engagement. In a contemporary performance economy that privileges encounter and experience, duration provides the substrate for extensive and realisable kinds of living in the moment.