Immediacy and Exchange: The Market Theory of Performance

Abstract: This article examines theories of media and mediation proposed by Erika Fischer-Lichte, José Esteban Muñoz, and Rebecca Schneider. It argues that these otherwise distinct theorists share a model of performance as an exceptional site that abolishes media and preserves exchanges of equivalents. In so doing they take part in what Anna Kornbluh has theorized as a general cultural logic of "immediacy." Performance's purported immediacy is then discussed as imagining a utopian market. Such a utopia merely reflects the concepts emergent from commodity exchange. This article thus advances an ideology critique of a significant tendency within performance theory.