Notes

Introduction

Performance is seen as a something applied to business and industry, workers, as well as to art and culture. Everything can be seen as performance.

Specifically, begins looking at a cover of Forbes magazine whose caption is used for the title of this book. This represents a set of firings taken by corporate boards of directors against chief executives. The phenomenon is not limited, though, performance reviews crop up in all lines of business, at all levels, with vauge ominous threats “–or else” if performance is unsatisfactory. “Thus, the Forbes challenge and its hold upon throats around the world: Perform–or else: be fired, redeployed, institutionally marginalized.”

McKenzie proceeds to make his comparison more subtle and complicated: the threat of retribution for performance also echoes images of Vaudeville, popular theatric performance, and cultural performance. Cultural performance strikes a vein with performance art and other richly controversial topics, such as demonstrations, drag, etcetera. The goal of performance in these cases is a certain liminality and subversion. The threat for failure in this case is social normalization.

Alongside these is a subtle and often ignored dimension, which is that of technological performance. Technological performance is ascribed generally to electronic technologies, as well as to consumer products. Failure in this case tends toward being obsolete, defunded, and discarded.

Related to this is the understanding of knowledge and education. Postmodernism tends toward a significant rethinking of the role of knowledge.

One of the main points seems to be that performance is an emergent phenomenon in a system of power and knowledge. McKenzie makes a significant claim that performance will be seen as defining the current era, the 20th and 21st centuries, much like discipline defined the previous two centuries.

A term is introduced, “the lecture machine”, whose icon is the lectern, which seems to denote the system of performance where one is empowered to know and to speak, and separates the speaker from the audience. Lecture machines are systems that enable performances which separate knower from those who do not know. The metaphor can be extended to other boundaries, such as the television and the computer screen.

Chapter 3: Technological performance

McKenzie opens this chapter by looking at some very technical perspectives on performance. Technical articles don’t generally need to define performance as they are embedded within the discipline. McKenzie tries to relate performance of these varying engineering sciences together, and notes that there isn’t anything that seems to coherently tie them together. Specifically, there is a “lack of an explicit and general definition of technological performance.”

Turning again to a scientific paper, McKenzie finds that technological performance is “effectiveness in a given task”. At this point, the difference between performance of the technological variety does not seem too far from that of the business or cultural variety. The task for business is profit, and the task for culture is a certain cultural efficacy.

McKenzie follows to explain that the ideas of effectiveness at tasks is highly context dependent and contingent on external values imposed on the system. He turns to another definition, which poses performance as a “function of effectiveness, reliability, and cost”.

Technical performance might be defined as the rate of change of effectiveness with respect to cost as opposed to just effectiveness.

McKenzie looks at the social aspect of performance, which is about projects. … “projected technologies are more social than technological, more fantastic than objective”. These projects occupy a curious pre-performance state, in that they live in an imaginary dimension before they are built and realized.

Projects become relevant and developed via the affect of social influences. They are carried through by various stakeholders, and the process of development involves the project being born from an abstract world of concepts and ideas into a concrete world deprived of interpretation and ambituity.

Referenced here is Donald MacKenzie’s work “Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance”. This text looks at the idea of accuracy as being affected by social context, as well as affecting social context.

Again, is referenced the Military-Industrial-Academic complex. Again, the cold war has influenced and spurred academic growth and the development of science and technology. This paranoia both comes from culture and comes to affect culture in return.

McKenzie comes to reference Laurel and her understanding of computers as theatre– that designing computer interfaces is really the art of designing experience. (Experience which is created by performance of the software.) McKenzie raises the idea of extending other cultural performance models to apply to HCI, (instead of just Arisototelian poetics, as Laurel uses).

Also cited is Robert Crease, who has studied experimentation in science as a sort of performance, where the laboratory is a special stage for the enactment of material and learning of special knowledge. Science teeters between presentation (of experiments) and representation (where theory is applied to the world, or interpreted from data?).

Ultimately the goal here seem so be that the idea of technological performance (as effectiveness) are still rooted in models of cultural performance, especially as defined by stakeholders in evaluation of the technology.

Finally, the tripartite collective of performance, (studies, management, and technology), are united under the category of their emergence in cold-war America, and are collectively symbolized by feedback loops and the missile.

A question: What is McKenzie trying to do? And what are we supposed to get out of this?