The Movement of Interpretation: Conceptualizing Performative Encounters with Multimediated Performance

Abstract

This essay participates in exploring alternative styles of performance criticism. It also seeks to address critics of performative writing practices by providing a conceptual and theoretical foundation for one such style of practice. It calls for a style of performative criticism modeled upon hypertextual theories of movement. It advocates that critics of mediated performance events adopt a performative critical pose that emphasizes the speed and intensity of the movement of critical encounter. The value of such a posture lies in its distortion of the dialectic between meaning and sense that tends to circulate in humanities scholarship. Through a turn to hypertextual theories as influenced by the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, the essay argues that the relations produced in and through hypertextual interaction provide a model for such a critical response.