The Art of Demonstration

a lecture performance by Sibylle Peters supported by Matthias Anton

Show and tell – that’s the logic of scientific demonstration.

Show and hide – that’s scenic logic.

The scenario of the academic lecture welds both, resulting in the ‘art of demonstration’. With The Art of Demonstration a magician and a cultural studies expert trace this production of evidence. They take the audience across the history of popular lecturing: the electric spark jumping from lecturer to audience, the voice of the dead, the magic of slides and the transitory nature of the black board, the event of understanding and the subtle evolving of thought while talking.

The Art of Demonstration – that’s evident – is neither pure method nor simple didactics but an art that remains hidden in the presentation of science: show and tell and show and hide.

Some more information about the Laboratory of the Lecture:

Since 2002 I do research concerning the academic lecture as performance: I argue that the academic lecture is not merely a report, where a given amount of information is carried forward from the speaker to the audience but a scene of research producing knowledge and insight. To acknowledge the self-referential quality of lecturing on the lecture, I founded the ‘laboratory of the lecture’. The laboratory claims, that the way academic research is presented has to be seen as an important part of the process of research itself, as it influences the ways of investigation and the kind of questions to be asked.

Nowadays the academic status or character of this kind of lecture-demonstrations seems to be at stake: From the viewpoint of the traditional historian the lecture-demonstration could be viewed as some kind of making up one’s own evidence: Instead of patiently dealing with given data the lecture-demonstration seems to display happenings, which were provoked by the lecturer himself/herself. Thus lecture-demonstrations appear to be closer to spectacle, fake and forgery than to scholarship. For me it is especially this kind of critique, that makes the lecture-demonstration an interesting new format, because though this critique might well be reasonable, it also sounds strangely familiar: It seems to repeat unintentionally the very same arguments which were raised by scholars of the 17th century in their struggle against the newly emerging culture of the scientific experiment, claiming that experiments can’t count as true examinations of nature, because they provoke their results and thereby create magic spectacles rather than academic achievements.

Within the spectator-oriented theatre-, performance- (or more generally speaking: art-) studies the style of academic demonstrations and argumentation usually seems to be ruled by two propositions:

- we don’t produce the performances we talk about (while talking about),

- we don’t talk (too much) about the performances produced by talking about performance.

These principles of demonstration and argumentation are not arbitrary ones, but are themselves rooted in historical constellations which tend to exclude a special way of demonstration from academic discourse: the demonstration of practical knowledge, knowledge of the “how to do”. Historically, this exclusion was accompanied by a turn from the perspective of production to the perspective of the reception of art.

In this respect, the situation in the natural/experimental sciences is significantly different: Here, the production of knowledge closely relates to the development of certain techniques and skills. And though this relation has also been denied or at least underestimated (leading to well known distinctions between abstract knowledge and mere technical problems), there hasn’t been the kind of split between academic observation/reflection on the one hand and production on the other hand that we face within the study of art.

In regard to recent debates within the so called ‘science studies’ my presentation therefore will deal with “the art of demonstration”, that inheres within the methods used to produce scientific evidence and to bring it to the public. As what is at stake here, is the intertwining of knowledge of the ‘how to’ with that kind of knowledge that is to be the methodological core of science. Yes, we would like to make artistic types of knowledge a part of the academic discourse, but we do so by exploring the practical/artistic types of knowledge that always already have been a part of academic presentations.

Dr. Sibylle Peters studied literature, theatre and philosophy in Hamburg/Germany;

works in a theatre for children;

MA with a thesis on the production of meaning in postdramatic theatre,

PhD with a thesis on tactical media and time;

worked as researcher and lecturer at the universities of Hamburg, Munich and Bâle, today research fellow at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, topic of research: the academic lecture as performance;

works as director and performer, several lecture-performances;

topics of publication and exploration: theatricality and knowledge, rhetorics and audiences, economies of the public, time and media, performative evidence.