Working live. A sociological account of the entangled relations of liveness through festival work.

Abstract

The ‘liveness’ of live music performance is often understood as a sensibility or effect – a ‘magic’ or ‘energy’ – produced through a dynamic attachment between performer and audience. However, this popular meaning is elusive and offers a narrow account of the actors, dynamics and relationships involved in its production. Academic debates about ‘liveness’ have tended to reproduce and rely upon existing discursive frameworks of meaning pertaining to its dynamics and constitution that overlook other actors that are also crucial in producing liveness: the cultural and technical worker. This article develops a more sociological account of liveness that acknowledges a wider constituency of actors, objects and temporalities. By drawing on qualitative interviews with festival workers in Britain and the Netherlands, our sociological analysis of festival work demonstrates that liveness is an entangled set of relations that involves performers, audiences, technologies/objects and cultural and technical workers. We also show how the meaning of liveness should be temporally extended to include linear, cyclical and fluid modes. We argue that liveness is better understood as a type of human and technical achievement produced through a more complex set of experiences and participation of actors and objects. Through this examination of liveness, we also contribute to a better sociological understanding of the appeal of cultural work.