Ziel

The dissertation project is situated in the field of performance art, on the border of applied social studies and theater studies. It takes interest in the format 'lecture performance' and its shift from the referential to the performative dimension. The project’s contribution lies within a praxeological-empirical approach, which aims to contour and further develop the knowledge concept negotiated within lecture performances. The term 'negotiation' adheres to interrelations of acts of framing and acts of knowing - to their intrinsic correlations and the potential of transforming the epistemic through performance. The project asks How is knowing inscribed within the ‘lecture as performance’? How is knowing brought forth? Ensuing, how does the performative constitute social reality and order? Theoretically and methodically the project is based upon Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974), as Frame Analysis provides a framework that systematically examines the ongoing process of how given attributes turn into properties and how properties evoke attributes. In Goffman's terminology, a frame distinguishes itself as a generator of signification that, embedded in social and cultural practices, organizes everyday actions and reactions. Ensuing upon this systematic framework, the Goffmanian perspective is supplemented with a praxeological approach (Schatzki 2000/ Reckwitz 2004), which argues that cultural practices are based upon multilayered collective knowledge and give information about how ‘world’ can be comprehended sensuously. Thus, the project is centered around the hypothesis that knowledge inevitably presents itself as such. This implies that knowing is not based upon inherent properties, but rather emerges from acts of framing. In other words, the project adheres to the hypothesis that knowing is a perceptive process mode, which is strongly linked to prevailing frames and thoroughly challenged when negotiated within an interface of 'lecture' and 'performance'. With regard to this hypothesis, the project is centered around four case studies: an artistic lecture (John Cage: Lecture on Nothing), an artistic performance (Eszter Salamon: Dance for Nothing), an academic lecture (Michael Vollmer: An Introduction into Experimental Physics) and an academic performance (Klaus-Peter Möllmann/ Michael Vollmer: Making Research Experiential - Fascinating Phenomena Observed through High Speed Cameras). The analysis examines ‘the lecture as performance’ and draws upon the acknowledged working definition of Artistic Research (Borgdorff 2011) and Christopher Frayling’s (1993) differentiation between research for the arts, research on/into the arts and research in/through the arts. Presuming that research imparts knowledge, it suggests itself that Artistic Research practices convey 'know-how', 'know-what' and 'know-that' (Nelson 2013). However, the project does not merely inquire 'what knowledge is', but 'what knowledge does' - in-between the tacit, the embodied-cognitive as well as the performative.