{"title":"The Performance Complex","authors":"D. Stark","doi":"10.7916/D8-R70C-YT64","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7916/D8-R70C-YT64","url":null,"abstract":"Musicians, dancers, and actors perform. Politicians, doctors, and teachers do also. Millions perform their everyday selves on social media. And while some perform, others keep score. We live in a performance society, saturated with performances of many and various kinds, with a wide range of attendant capacities, techniques, and creativities—but also anxieties. This chapter introduces the book’s central focus; the assemblage of metrics, networks, and their attendant emotional pathologies referred to as the performance complex. It takes the reader through the general structure and elaborates on the broad themes of the book, outlining the important distinctions between competition and competitions, ratings and rankings, and performances and performance.","PeriodicalId":168077,"journal":{"name":"The Performance Complex","volume":"745 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134005876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Post-Liberal Competitions?","authors":"W. Davies","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198861669.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861669.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Competitions have a “liberal” quality, where the traits they measure or reward have some connection to broader moral virtues, beyond the frame of a contest, and where they have transparency surrounding their norms and metrics of evaluation. This allows competitions to serve as consensus-forming procedures, which establish differentials of value in a publicly agreeable fashion. However, competitions can also be organized for the benefit of the organizer, in order to acquire information about participants and accrue competitive advantage in some larger competition. In the age of the digital platform, competitive performance is constantly monitored, but in ways that don’t produce public results or consensus. As in randomized controlled trials, the “world” as encountered by the participant looks very different from the one seen by the observer. This produces a format of “post-liberal competition,” in which (in Goffman’s terms) the “front stage” and “back stage” are radically split from each other.","PeriodicalId":168077,"journal":{"name":"The Performance Complex","volume":"3 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129115734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Performing Numbers","authors":"R. Prey","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198861669.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861669.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and self-presentation. It does so through the figure of the contemporary musician. As performers on-stage and online, musicians are constantly assessed and evaluated by industry actors, peers, music fans, and themselves. The impact of powerful modes of quantification on personal experiences, understandings, and practices of artistic creation provides insight into the wider role that metrics play in shaping how we see ourselves and others; and how we present ourselves to others. Through in-depth interviews with emerging musicians, this chapter thus uses the artist as a lens through which to understand everyday life within the “performance complex.”","PeriodicalId":168077,"journal":{"name":"The Performance Complex","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129445441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}