Publishing, Practice and Performance:

editing Performance Research

Claire MacDonald

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I am speaking to you, as it were, from the 'other side'. This is not only because I am not physically present but because I am, for the first time, speaking not as a practitioner, but as someone who selects, edits and publishes other people's writing, principally for Performance Research, the journal I founded with Ric Allsopp and Richard Gough, in 1995.  Editing a journal is almost literally a question of moving to the 'other side', a place where, rather than writing myself, I am commenting on and editing the work of others, a place I had no prior knowledge of and could not have imagined before I began to edit PR.

Some people here will know this journal, will have written for it, read for it as peer reviewers, or submitted work to it. For those who don't know it, Performance Research is a roughly A4 format, black and white, academic journal. We publish work across the fields of performance, from the work of performance poets for the visual page, to writing, reviews and other documents about dance, music, performance art, theatre and cultural performance. Each issue is curatorially edited around a theme. Volume 6, 2001, has been concerned with ideas about migration, movement and travel. Volume 7, 2002 is a concerned with Textualities.  The journal is currently 148 pages per issue; that is about 55-65000 words, and is published by Routledge three times a year. From 2002, Volume 7, PR will be quarterly.  Now that the journal is securely established and building a market, it may be time to reflect on some of its aspirations to cross disciplines, to work with the page in new ways, and to connect creative and critical practice in the public sphere with academic scholarship and research.

Editing a journal is a project conducted in the public eye, yet it is an invisible and little discussed process. It is also a process that I have only recently found myself wanting to share, open up and reflect on, and that is really the purpose of today — to tell you what things look like from the other side and to discuss the implications of what I have found there. I don't want to do this from a position of editorial authority, but from a more complex and sometimes, more unsettled or even more troubled position. This sense of occupying a complex and sometimes troubled position has to do with the editorial role. As an editor one has access to and an intimate knowledge of, writing, both as process and as product. One has access to the way in which people write, as well as what they write, to their anxieties and fears, to the way in which they conduct their relationships with their work, as well as with their editors. There are all kinds of ways in which this process is different from editing books — and this is something I'll discuss in more detail — but in part it is simply a question of scale. The range and the breadth of submissions, from all over the world, from the well known and the not known at all, and in a variety of languages is one issue. The pressure to find good work, to meet deadlines and remain on top of schedules is enormous, as it is in any publications series or magazine. But publishing a journal rather than a magazine, that is a publication which has close links to the stakes of the academic world, where status, power, opportunity and money are linked to one’s publishing record makes one's role as editor very different. It puts one in a strange position, partly an invisible servicing role for the field and partly an authoritative, necessarily discriminating role.

Journal editing occupies therefore a complex position in the world of academic publishing, and a crucial one in the area we are here this weekend to discuss:  fashioning a discourse at the meeting point of creative and critical practice in which we recognize the intellectual contribution of practice to academic research. Some of the complexities — and indeed the contradictions — of the relationship between practice and research are writ large on the pages of Performance Research — as well as in the ways it deals with potential contributors. I want to talk about them today in terms of my experience as an editor, since I want to see these contradictions and complexities as part of a dynamic process of change leading to new kinds of writing and new kinds of informed practice.

The word 'dynamic' is significant. When we put together a new Editorial Statement last year I wrote that we aim: 'to promote a dynamic interchange between scholarship and practice in the expanding field of performance'.  That is the aim — but it is an aim tempered at all times by contingency. From the evidence, founding a journal is one thing, but building an identity and a market, and keeping a journal in print in today's publishing context is less easy. I think PR is the only UK print journal in the field of performance, started in the last ten years, that remains in continuous publication. In December we will have completed six publication years, eighteen issues, around three hundred essays and reviews and a hundred artists' pages. The first issue of next year's volume — interestingly enough called On Editing  — has gone to print. Since we are moving from three to four issues a year, the other three issues are in process, and we are now working on volumes 8 and 9 which will include issues on aspects of the body and performance, money and identity. Volume10, which will mark the end of our first decade, is already in the planning stage. The process of getting a 148 page publication into print three times a year might be described as turbulent rather than dynamic. It certainly moves relentlessly from deadline to deadline, with a fourteen-week turnover between the publication of one issue and the next.

Everyone here today knows that the journey from idea to print is a fraught one. Every writer — me included — fantasises about the kind of active support and positive feedback that can nurture the germ of a good idea to a great essay. Every one in this room who writes for publication  — including myself — has felt at some time that they are not an active participant in a dynamic process but a victim of editorial disdain and insensitivity. The process of actual selection and shaping an issue is of course rather different from simply measuring good quality work. It is always a question of balancing the kinds of writers and writing we take. It may come as no surprise that many of the people who publish most consistently are among the most culturally and materially privileged figures in the field. They are people who are not only excellent writers with something to say. They are also people who can project a proposal and know that they have the means to meet deadlines. That is, that they have the institutional and personal support, the time and training to write quickly, well and appropriately. They are also people who are confident that they are not only part of the agenda, but that they have also actively shaped it. For editors, these people represent an important writing constituency. They are known and reliable, so that an editor can have a sense of certainty in imaging what an issue will look like when their work comes in, and knows that they will attract readers. Their contribution is necessarily balanced against much more risk taking — and in editorial terms — time consuming work, the kind of 'deep editing' and support that is often needed to bring less experienced writing to publication.

A great deal of the work of fashioning a new discipline is done by people who write within a field, who come to occupy significant positions within it, and who go on to educate and influence subsequent generations. Journals, which have a relatively fast publishing turnover, are important sites for disciplines to shape themselves. But writers within institutionally privileged positions also have a commitment to a certain amount of conservatism within a field. It is very important for them and for the discipline that the boundaries of the discipline are politically tended, that new ideas and strategies emerge within known sites; that frames of reference are shared and validated constantly and that agendas are followed. Much of this work is very important and allows academically credible frameworks to be set up, but it can also work against rogue voices, or dissenting ideas. Disciplines are shaped not only by the progression of ideas but by contingency and chance, by being in the right place at the right time. No matter how deep the commitment to a politics of pluralism and new ways of thinking and writing, one of the biggest difficulties of editing a journal is nurturing and bringing to print voices from many cultural, artistic and institutional backgrounds. The difficulty is exacerbated by the need for peer review, also a two edged tool if you like. It is a very important tool of dialogue and exchange, a reference point for editors and a tactic that builds shared vocabularies and frameworks. It is also a very difficult and much less straightforward process for a journal that crosses boundaries between the public intellectual and artistic worlds and the academic. It is appropriate only to academic publishing, means very little to artists, and in a world in which everyone has enormous amounts of writing to read, it is actually difficult to get people to do these days — increasingly so. But it is a practice we must be stringently committed to.

The contradictions between the need for certainty and quality, and being able to take risks as an editor is rather great. One has to balance the known and the unknown. One has to conceive of strategies through which the voices of practitioners, and of less well-known and experienced writers can come to publication. In a sense this may be one of the most important parts of the role and the one that can feel exhilarating when it works, and frustratingly like a secretarial role when it doesn't. There are many writers who wish to enter the discourse of performance, for instance, whose own terms of reference are largely outside the framework of the English speaking Anglo-American world (itself heavily balanced towards the American) and who have no status — and no currency — within it. Finding that work, getting into dialogue with it, finding people to read it and then getting it into print can be a difficult process, and one that simply takes too long for the strict deadlines of PR.

In a sense I am merely commenting on what we all know to be true — that publishing is a high tension, high status activity. It seems quite extraordinary to me at times just how difficult it is for us to write clearly, stylishly, cogently and to deadlines and word lengths, but it is. I cannot reveal here the agonies I have seen very well known, experienced people go through over the smallest article, but if there is one thing I have learned very clearly it is that the most experienced writer feels as vulnerable as the least experienced about their work. Writing is very difficult. What we also know to be true is that very good writing does come in from people who are in marginal places within the academic and artistic contexts and who write extraordinarily well.  Both of these writing constituencies are wonderful to work with. But what may be more important and more useful and interesting for us to discuss is how a journal like Performance Research can generate strategies for other kinds of writers. I don't think I need to say that as editors we are all clearly committed to widening the plurality of voices, to generating new kinds of writing about contemporary work and to enlivening the discourse around performance.

One of the things we have tried to do at Performance Research from the outset, is to privilege the visual and graphic page as much as we are able to; and to explore the possibilities of the page as a site for performance, and as a space for documentation. We try to find strategies to allow writers and artists access to open format pages within the journal, which can be used in any way they wish. I wrote an article about this last year called 'Committed to Paper' in which I tried to set out why I feel that this — not always successfully project — is so important. It identifies the page itself as a site of performance, and whether or not in any particular issue of PR the work 'works' the space is consistently available for occupation in a sense, by very different kinds of voices and traditions of mark making on the page. In fact, artists’ pages have been very successful. As a long term tactic they have kept us linked to two important communities of artists and writers for whom performance is a central concept. One is poetry, which has always had a strong relationship to both performance and the visual page, the other is fine art traditions of using the page as a site for mark making. We keep up to twenty pages in each issue 'free', that is they don't go through the copy-editing process but arrive at the print stage as camera ready copy, so that they can work to any design format.

There are other ways than working with visual artists for the page in which the page can be considered as a site for performance. For Performance Research, attending to the visual possibilities of the page has also enabled us to literally 'keep an eye on' the relationship of critical practice to performance, or to develop performative critical practice. The possibilities of creating discursive textual work, which also stages itself on the page, or uses the page performatively, are perhaps equally important to furthering the discourse around performance.

In the same way that we might see visual work using the site of the page, we might see certain critical works in the terms used by the visual historian of the book Johanna Drucker. In an essay on the visual performance of poetic texts, she talks about  '..the quality of enactment, of a staged and realised event in which the material means are an integral feature of the work. Performance in this sense includes all of the elements that make the work an instantiation of a text, make it specific, unique, and dramatic because of the visual character through which the work comes into being. The specific quality of presence in such a work depends upon visual means — typefaces, format, spatial distribution of the elements of the page or through the book, physical form, or space. These visual means perform the work' (Drucker 1998:131).

I think this is worthy of discussion  — especially since the notion of what critical performance might be has become a much more crucial, and a more open discussion of late. There are several essays in PR which address Johanna Drucker's precepts. I would cite the documentation of Need Company by Nick Kaye in Letters from Europe (2:1), the work of American playwrights and critics Caridad Svich and Lenora Champagne in Departures (6:1) amongst  others. The French critic Patrice Pavis, in Openings (5:1) created work for the page as critically informed images, as did Jean Baudrillard in On Silence (4:1). Outside PR I would particularly encourage people to look at the work of critic and poet Susan Howe, whose essays work with the visual elements of print and the page in theorising poetry, or at Johanna Drucker's extensive critical and artists' books, or to look at the writing and at the web sites of the critic Jerome McGann (both Drucker and McGann  write for the next issue, On Editing). To give this issue a material focus in terms of PR once again, I would draw attention to the practices of printed text publishing which actually disallow attention to the visual. It has been extremely difficult for us at PR to convince our editors and publishers at Routledge, Taylor & Francis that the visual has any other meaning than illustration. To try to extend writing into the visual arena as an integral part of meaning making is a complex task. The contingencies and exigencies of publishing mean that texts that attend to the visual page, to typography and to space as part of a critical work, are seen as either unpublishable or merely  'creative'. In other words they cannot cross into critical space, which is highly conventionalised textually. We have more recently begun to publish CD-Roms which combine the visual and textual successfully into what I would see as 'critical performance'. The CD-Rom in On Memory (5:2) by desperate optimists is an example, and one I would encourage people to look at. In looking at the possibilities of the page I have myself been informed by the discourse of contemporary poetry. Because the poetic text relates in multiple ways to performance — as score, documentation, instructions, maps etc., the level of attention to the resulting theoretical implications is very high.

 I also want to remind people listening to this paper that realizing practice as research in print, is not so much a question of adding research on or in, but of opening up the theoretical implications of research TO the page. That in itself may be a subject well worth discussing. I think there is a critical difference between seeing research as an add-on to practice, one that has a different set of methodologies and informing ideas imported from elsewhere, and work which is in itself the embodiment of theory, or work which I call 'critically informed practice'. As an editor I am more aware than I used to be of the kinds of critical frameworks and worlds of reference that new writers in the field of performance are using. At times they are very narrow indeed and driven by a citation practice which means that certain names occur and re-occur, without always a clear sense of why that is. Indeed there is sometimes a sense that showing clearly that a new writer can reference within the foundational texts of the field of performance studies validates their own critical ideas.

There is a burgeoning of book publishing currently — partly driven by the necessity to make it into print for anyone who works within a university context. While this creates a lively discourse at some levels, it can be very self-levelling and self-referential. I want to remind people of the work in critical performance writing of, for instance, Robert Wilson, whose practice of 'dispersed texts' has been written about by Bonnie Marranca in her book Ecologies of Theatre, and in a long essay on his archival practice  in On Illusion (1:3). Both essays substantiate the notion of his practice as extending theoretical and intellectual ideas about reading, writing and criticism. At this point the kind of work I would like us to be able to publish more often takes us to the very edges of public intellectual discourse, including not only cross-disciplinary approaches but cross-platform approaches if you like — the kinds of work that  allows the academic, the anecdotal and the artistic to  converse in the same space. In terms of young writers that we have been able to publish whose work contributes to this I would cite Eleanor Margolies, who is currently writing a PhD on objects on stage and whose work has appeared twice, in Letters from Europe (2:1) and in the recent Maps and Mapping (6:2); Lisa Lewis, who teaches at the University of Aberystwyth and whose work is in Openings (5:1);  and Shirley MacWilliam  from Nottingham Trent whose essay 'Acoustic Shadows' in On Silence (4:1) I find immensely scholarly, artistically informed and stylistically refreshing. Recently we have begun to publish work by scholars writing at the meeting point of textual studies and performance. Their work visibly performs on the page in ways that embody intellectual approaches to practice informed by research in reading, writing and meaning between the visual arts, performance and textual analysis. In the next issue, On Editing, I have short, critical/visual works for the page by critics Kari Kraus and Matt Kirschenbaum, as well as work on the staging of sound and the visual performance of dramatic texts. I am citing these published essay as potential points of discussion and because I think the work of PR, which now comprises an extensive archive can work as a jumping off point for discussion about the kinds of new writing now happening in the field.

Were I here, this paper might be rather different, since I could talk in more depth about specific instances and answer queries. But I want to finish by saying this. As a matter of ethics in a sense, I think it is important to stress our commitment to a very wide, global discourse about art and ideas. That discourse must encourage a plurality of voices. What may surprise people is that we have little feedback from readers. I know that people read the journal but they clearly do not feel that there is space to respond.  In general, people contact us in relation to a submission. There is very little feeling that we reach a wider network of groups and individuals who read journals and/or who are themselves supporting and generating writing practice in relation to performance. In other words the discourse itself is very highly dispersed. One of the things that it may be useful and important to discuss today is how to support and generate new critical writing in ways that do sit themselves sit within a wide, public, plural intellectually, and artistically wide ranging context.

Actually publishing the print copy, developing its market and keeping it going has been — for the past seven years — the most that we could do, and that I would be the first top admit the holes in the process, is I think, clear. Where we want to move now, apart from into book publishing, is into wider networks that can generate and support new critical writing practice. A publication like ours sits in a complex position. In many ways it is our own creative project. It has a clear aesthetic — which can be seen visually, in our terms of reference, our thematic and titling concept, and the way we edit the material. It is essential for us to have an identity within the market, and for us to have a sense of intellectual drive and ownership of our own project. At the same time, in the context in which we live and work, and in the light of our very international readership, we have a responsibility to wards generating and sustaining new work.

That meeting point of the personal project and the public context may be the point at which discussion can happen. I am sorry not to be able to be here, but I also look forward to the feedback which I am sure this conference will generate.

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